Saturday, November 28, 2009

A few small things

Just a few small things. I know these are some bad pics as I struggle to get my camera back.

I found some new Kelley Jones work relatively in comparison to what I had been looking at. I liked a few experimental things he was doing since he was inking himself. Like using his fingerprints in the backgrounds here almost like Kirby crackle.



Something I will be trying in my current work.

Or here where just the barage of textures and intersecting lines made me think of that scene Todd Mcfarlane points out from Ninja scroll on the Animatrix Special Features, where there is a successive pop of black and white in the background just to give you a jarring effect - you may not even be consciously aware of as a reader/viewer.

I found these two dps’ in Marvel’s thor from 200-something and in the Elementals circa 1990. Almost two decades and a completely different publishing company and artists apart its interesting to see how they both interpreted the same mythological place differently - Asguard.



And last I found one of the artists in the Death of superman graphic novel doing this with small buildings in backgrounds for windows. Where he would ink a few parallel lines straight down and then cut across them with whiteout with a few parallel lines - forming small rectangles only a line width thick but none the less effective and faster and more consistent than just the straight black on white technique of drawing a separate line for each window.

Also my little bro broke his wrist playing with some friends but my family was able to make this sticker and attach it w/ SuperGlue so he could have something I made with him since I couldn’t draw on his cast. I posted the art on my DA page a few weeks ago and had made the image as a present for his birthday party.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Decisions comic - first look

So the website has posted some stuff about me and the book I'm working on for them, including character designs and a brief synopsis. Here's some links.

Synopsis
Skecthbook

News about me (copied and pasted since the page will change and soon be outdated. But right now it can be found here, or you can search the archives.)

Preliminary artwork by Zach Bassett for our forthcoming anthology series "Decisions". has recently been added to the Special Features section of the site and can be found - HERE. - 11.3.9

Zach Bassett is currently working on thumbnails for the first story in "Decisions". We were so impressed with his storytelling ability that we have offered him the second story as well. - 10.30.9

Artist Zach Bassett will be penciling and inking the first story in the "Decisions" anthology coming in 2010 from Cosmic Times. Look preview art coming soon. - 10.10.9

Also “somebody” I know will be lettering my pages for Decisions, and will have a short bio and pic up on the “team page” of the Cosmic Times website soon. As will I.
A similar bio will soon be found on the What The Flux “Staff page.” They also uploaded a small gallery of some of my black and white work (Capricious Alchemy cd cover, 2 Star Trek Defiant covers and the promo image for my Terra Novus serial radio drama.)
I’ve also been credited on all the promo material for “Outlaws” on the WTFM page as the inker.


The good news first and now for the “horrible, terrible, no good, [almost completely] very bad day” I got so busy inking that I neglected to clean my cats’ litter box, resulting in them using my comic box as a new litter box. When I discovered this I stopped immediatly to clean them, leaving my inking supplies out. The night got away from me and the next morning I woke up to a zebra striped room as my dog had managed to bite apart one of my brush pens and drag it across the apartment, leaving india ink everywhere. I found scraps of a plastic bag for my bottle of india ink, which I eventually found bitten up but not open under the bed, where he wasn’t able to complete his plan of total apartments destruction So the long and short of it is, its hard enough to keep my pets out of my professional things - let alone when I have kids. Like a page Ryan Ottely from Invincible posted on his DA page that took him 2 hrs. to ink and 6 in photoshop removing all the crayon from it, that his son thought he was just coloring it like a coloring book, when Ryan forgot to lock his office.

Super Heroes?


Shadow Hawk Holiday Sketch by ~xaqBazit on deviantART
You can check the DA page for info on the above sketch. Anyways, read this snippit from Elementals Vol. 2 #10 by Bill Willingham (not Wilmingham, as I have mistakenly refered to him in previous posts - my bad!) that basically states, contrary to popular belief that "Super Heroes are not Role Models" but rather self centered beings on a power "trip" for easy self gratification. Can see his point, what do you think? If super heroes are our generations form of Myths and legends to pass on morals - what exactly are we passing or teaching our young ones, per se?
(Hope people don't mind me posting a few of these every now and then, I think they are brilliant for conversation and some "different" opinions.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Questionable

So a lot of the work I've done recently has been for general entries competitions or submitting multiple designs to a single company, after which they pick one or none for you to complete for use on their product. I've thought about posting these images that were not used but I would like to show them around to some other companies and see if they would like to pick them up instead since most are not company specific. So here's the dilemma, how do I get them interested without showing the designs away at every shop and two weeks later seeing rip-offs from everyone who didn't mail me back and just had an in house artist do a cheaper version? Where are the submission guidelines for companies like t-shirt/clothing and sports gear like skate/snow/surf boards? Any ideas, suggestions?