The final cover/frontier

got to do a comission for my friend's girl friend. Charcoal, 18x24.


here's the original inks, used some quill, some tech pens and sharpie.

here's the inks with some textures from a few posts ago, and some more blacks digitally filled in (sorry still has the glow form the coloring layer on the candles.)

here's an alternate colored version, i wasn't satisfied with it (the real one) the night of but woke up the next morning and gave it another look and saw it was fine. it will be my final cover for pendant audio as i move on to even more ever more time consuming projects.
below is the final version.

Star Trek: Defiant, Ep. 39 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART
just finished my last page for the 8 pg pencil/ink project i found through digital webbing, some of my best work yet. cant say much till it gets published but i learned a lot doing them.
also just finished my cover for what the flux comics, still needs colors but it rocks already.

Defiant 37 and Aquajones

Here's my new cover for Pendant Audio's ongoing fan radiodrama. The drawing was hard actually, I've fallen kind of out of it but am working on getting back on top with a few other projects because I've been so busy, and it looks like I'll be moving yet again here in a few months. The inking was okay, using brushpens and tech pens again, and I got some cool fx by setting two similar photo textural layers (of the sunset through a dirty windshield) to "multiply" (grayscale) and the other to "color burn" overtop and under my line art. The streaks gave it a cool brushed painterly look at certain spots but overall the photo gave it an awesome color palette. The stars were the same texture page I made for the last cover but overlapped and used bigger to look like stars instead of snow.
You can listen to this and other episode at pendant audio's website.

Star Trek: Defiant, Ep. 37 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART
I've also been doing some promo-pack covers for a local band called Aquajones. 10 down 40 to go. And I might be doing t-shirt designs with a Denver based clothing company DVLP soon. No word yet on the skatboard designs, poo.

Definat 35

Defiant 35 was probably my least favourite cover I've done for pendant. But this time everything, including the script was better. I was even thinking of giving up doing covers from them because I just wasn't inspired anymore. It's hard to make Star Trek exciting and not make it look like a bunch of stuck up sci-fi geeks standing around in spandex, they don't have the muscles to make them look cool like super heroes so they just look like regular people in extra ordinary outfits. This last episode had the crew disguised as the Breen, which despite having a helmet directly swiped from Boush from Star Wars is pretty damn cool. I was looking at this book of fleer star wars trading cards I had lost as a kid and recently was given as a gift - anyway its got lots of pieces by lots of famous artists I now know, but didn't at the time and this one particularly caught my eye. I quickly saw it was Mignolla and was just blown away at how powerful his stuff always is despite being simple and he uses so many techniques that are his trademark.

Anyway, So I scanned it and swiped the colors and was really hooked on the yellows I think I was channeling Dune or something, but eventually I just wasn't sold on the whole "yellow snow"-thing, call me weird, or just a boy. So i eventually but a blue layer over the top and set the layer to hue. I had tried messing with the colors and adding more blue and sucking out the red to make it feel colder but it still didn't sell the idea of "cold" like blues and purples.


Another fun thing was that I knew I would need texture for the snow but it would also need to be coloured white so instead of drawing it out and then having to color the snow white in photoshop I just drew some scratchy textural things seperate in black, inverted them in photoshop and added them as a layer above the line art after i set the layer type to cut out all the black - the same process I used for the Kryton logo and any white on black text I do in comics. So anyway, it worked, it was fun, and it looks frign' sweet.

I did fight with the size of the Defiant cover, as I usually do. With the text on top (unlike comic books) and the title centered at the bottom) and the whole cover being closer to magazine format than comic book, by the time you get done you really are working with a safe area that is more of a horizontal rectangle than a verticle one, so i swiped and clone tooled my way out of it but as always it catches me off guard as I am used to working in comic book format. The composition was inspired by a splash page Tim Sale did of Batman in a riot outfit, in The Long Halloween.

Star Trek: Defiant, Ep. 36 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Defiant 34

Star Trek Defiant, Ep. 34 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART
This was more of an experiment in lighting and coloring than anything. And speaking of reference here is what this character is supposed to look like...

but I dont think i did a good job of transforming myself into him sine I was looking at my face and trying to age it. Anyway, I blew my chips on the battle scene that ends in this episode so the rest of it is slower and not as action packed and I didnt want to do two covers of space battles one after the other so I chose this. Either way you can check out the colored version on my DA page by clicking on it from here or listen to the episode and see it with the title and credit overlays on Pendant Audio's site here.
I suppose this cover is more a portrait of myself with all the work I'm doing rather than a fictional character on a radio drama.

Will Eisner and Defiant

i put two new videos up on my youtube page about my family.









this is for Will Eisner week. everyone in norris is doing one and were hanging them up.



this is my sketch and inks for the new Star Trek Defiant cover which you can listen to here, or see the color version here. i was really proud. im getting better at drybrush mixing with linework. cool camera placement too, kind of got the idea of the framing from my previous cover. i did fudge it a little i mean i was looking at the blueprints for the warbird infront of me when i drew it but some details are off but i had no reference for such a crazy angle, though i still think its recognizable. about a 1/2-hr pencils, about 30-min inks and about 2-hrs coloring -with a pen thank god i hate potato coloring. i do think its hard to make star trek look action packed and cool but i think i nailed it here. just goes to show if i can make this work i can should have no problem doing gigs like batman etc. where the cool factor is already inherent. im not saying star trek isnt cool im just saying that its not exactly synonymous with action and edge of your seat excitement like some titles are.

x-men, star trek phil's pages, rendering and stories

X-MEN: DEADLY GENESIS - ISSUE 5, PGS. 7-10
Here's the link to the final pages in case you didn't get here from my DA page.

10 hrs for four pages, from the tight rough stage, that's actually a lot for me. and I'm really proud of them. some pages i actually spent hours on certain panels, like the sentinel crash. i've kind of changed the way i work and the way i render a lot since doing the spider-man pages. Now i blow up my tight roughs using an artograph so i can resize stuff, like i always did but i trace it using a mechanical pencil, finish it using a mechanical pencil and x-in all my blacks, some side of pencil stuff but not much. also i was getting a lot of comments that my spider-man pages looked very dated, as far as rendering went, very 90's. that's not a bad thing, those techniques worked and they got the job done but there is certain connotations with a 90's mainstream artists that i did not want my work labeled with so i spent a lot of time looking at some new stuff and kind of found a new way to render. its something they don't really cover in school but has, i think, helped this project tremendously. i stared at this piece by Frank Cho

and this one by Bryan Hytch

Ultimates 2 - Inks sample by ~retardacon on deviantART
quite a long time to see it and then realized even some of my Favorite contemporary artists like Oliver Copiel and Shawn Cassiday use it as well. so from what i can decern its a kind of sketchiness with straight lines, moving different directions to describe a core shadow. it kind of helps to think of it in a planar way. its actually really fun. I think i pulled it off especially in shots like the close up of cyce's face. I also spent a lot of time on my metal textures and making the sentinels look metallic. I drew a lot of inspiration originally from Adam Kubert's run on some of the first issues of Ultimate X-men, (you can tell he works so fast). And I tried for some of the same aesthetic/simplistic and quick rendering he did, with sort of thick thing wiggly lines around the outside and towards the core of the form but it just didn't fly, so I went back and looked at some JR+JR and Niel Adams etc and saw the circles they would cut back out of the blacks, and after looking at, coincidentally, 90's stuff enough I think I got it. The actual artist for the page had good rendering skills but his storytelling was atrocious, and he played it so safe with all of his camera shots, no real angles, as i tried to push A LOT, he kept the figures far enough apart that he never had to do an up or a down shot. It was good reference for the costumes though. Here are the actual pages in case you actually wish to compare, only pages 8 and 9 are on there though of the pages I did.
See More X-Men: Deadly Genesis Various at IGN.com
See More X-Men: Deadly Genesis Various at IGN.com

STAR-TREK DEFIANT - EP. 32
On another note, my new star trek cover is out. You can see the colored version on my DA page, here. A completely different style altogether than the X-men pages but its still cool in its own way. Lots of dry brush and a kind of cool design. I've heard from a couple people at Pendant that they think I come up with some of the coolest covers, conceptually and I've heard the next few episodes should be a very different tone and shorter - less reading for me, more time for art - yay! Anyway this image is based off of a photograph and I inked it in my sketchbook, lol. I blurred things further away to give it the effect of depth of field, and because I didn't really draw anything back there, lol. And then layed a light texture over the Blood to make it look liquidy, and sadly yes it is potato-colored and it took forever for not even that great of an end effect. However the inks were really fun and I was very pleased with how they turned out.


PHIL'S STORY
I've also had a little while to work on Phil's book, and got a few pages done, or as done as I'll do them before inking, during which I'll add a lot.


STORIES
And I've also been writing some one-act plays for my "Writing for the Screen and Stage Class" that can also be viewed on my DA page here.

Qutluch assassin

i did the inks on the plane back from tx, here's a couple different versions i was messing w/. i dont know why i like lens flair i know its cheesy, anyway w/ my girl friend's help i came about the final version which you can view on my deviantart page here
i put a glow around the top side of the knife which was inspired by this poster i have in my room and i love how it was colored.




while i was in tx, i stumbled on a david mack gallery that was awesome and the best comic shop and biggest ive ever been in. they had an entire wall of discount graphic nocels all for like 1-8 bucks. that was awesome.

Friends

After making Drown with austin he got me in touch with the humboldt library and after talking over email i fiannly got to meet demi, who let me teach a class on video editing. she recently emailed me and made me think about a few of the special people in my life, past and present.


back from our big trip, to ny and colorado. vicky happened to be in ny so we went and saw her. we were so hot this was our only picture together and we were all so sweaty so i had to photoshop out all the nasty shine. and of course my fiance robin. were planning on getting married right around winter break 09/10. still think about all the things me and vicky did, even comic characters we had started working on. maybe someday - when we all have time, i might even be living back in colorado in the next few years. now she's married and so is jaimie, both i am very happy to have in my life.
i used to stand in a different place, everything and everyone has changed since then. i even lost my only dog i ever had (well we had boba for about a week). isha, i love you. "-now sit, sit."
now i have kitties, and fleas. but i love them too, not the fleas just the cats. heres my old teacher ms. mckaig, who taught graphic design 1+2 in highschool. big inspiration, made school fun - taught me everything i know in photoshop and allot of design stuff. probably i got such a big scholarship to scad.
here's me and mr. mchugh, ive since lost contact with him but he was a great guy. ran his car off of vegetable oil, showed me movies i never knew, taught me allot in just about every program but photoshop.
i also found this website through this video, amazing/real and not nearly as shallow as reality tv it really effected me. and also brought my attention to this thing i wish i had known about about a year or two ago called "the hopeline."

finally got my cover done for defiant - ill post in a few days when it goes up on the website. got my tablet working and used that for coloring it.

im also looking at doing some comics with james, something dark and fun to draw so were trying to come up with stories that would "draw" on both our strengths.

and i also got the director commentary up for Drown so check it out, "if your nerdy enough!"

easter eggs, art and everything else -finally

heres a wallpaper i did for my bubbie, she's so beautiful.
heres the roughs for 24 pages of y the last man, done on 1 and a half 8 1/2 x 11's

and heres the tight roughs - done 2 to a 8 1/2x11.



heres my "tight" roughs, lol - for the just in time script which i peciled in one night and did tights and blew them up the day before.

heres the 10 mins sketches we had to do to come up with an original astronaut, mine won when the class voted ,and then a spaceship to match, mine lost - big time even though i liked the ship more than the astronaut. they were for goto for an inclass storyboard assignment.


and here is the original sketches for noah, the 1st is more of a Charlton Heston thing going on - he's fun, not necessarily animatable but fun. then goto said to push him farther and i did, loved it, blew it up on the artograph and inked it.
figured now that im posting some stuff id add a few easter eggs as well for those of you interested enough to visit this page. so heres how i originally drew and inked the parts of the drawing. because i was in colorado i didn't have the size paper nor did i know the dimensions of the art or if he was going to want me to change anything so i did it in pieces.
next i assembled the pieces in photoshop using the multiply layer option.

and then made blocks of color under the ink layer so i could color each effect seperatly and on their own layer without messing with or effecting the rest of the art. this was an alternate idea i had for coloring based more off some old marvel silver surfer stuff that i was inspired by for the line art as well. you can find the final image with title and everything by followingthe link in the previous post or checking my deviant art http://xaqbazit.deviantart.com/

this is my drawing of kate that i tried for my lost animated characters, and the 1st sketch of ben that actually looked like him. i also dicovered men were much easier to characterize and make extreme and exagerated, women just got ugly really quick - however i felt this version of kate was too close to generic female and wasnt as close or iconic of a look as the others i did, which i will post on deviant and link soon.

i also posted a few more videos on my youtube account, have to get back to ga to split up drown and scan storyboards for it. http://youtube.com/user/xaqbazit

colorado

finally got word back from the guy at pendant audio and found out i had 2 days to do a cover and no scanner, so i inked different parts photographed them as best i could, assembled them in photoshop and colored them sampling colors from cam kenedy's dark empire. which was kind of my inspiration, along with allot of kirby fun space reference. i had allot of fun, though looking back on it i think i could have pushed it farther and used less muted colors, but it was quick and i learned allot, and ill be doing a monthly cover so that's fun. check my cover out and all the others here. http://www.pendantaudio.com/defiant.php
http://www.pendantaudio.com/defiantimages/Defiant_25_cover.jpg
also ill be posting the progress and final on deviant with the rest of my art.

i also posted one of the videos i made, this one i shot all before hand and taught a class with robin's help at the Humboldt public library in iowa, so the kids edited it together, it's got some simple effects and some music but it was fun and now its on the web so check it out here.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UM0djc3onLQ
the only other video i currently have up is another i made with austin and his family, we did as an fx test for light sabers i did in flash. you can see that one here
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1QK9uBtWMP0
i am really anxious about loading Drown, my 15 min movie - the most serious of my film and editing experiments. which took me about a week straight to film storyboard and script and another 2 days editing. but im really proud of it. so hopefully that will be up soon maybe ill even post the storyboards too.

speaking of i still have yurushi to deal with, i did the comic, rewrote it as a 60 pg script, even had scores and sound fx picked out and about half of it storyboarded but its been so long i dont know what to do with it. i was thinking of reformating the comic as a fold out verticle comic but im not even that proud of it anymore, the art is old, the script is bad admitidly, i even turned down a chance to autograph a copy because i didnt really like it that much anymore. if youd like to see it though i have posted the origional comic here
http://www.webcomicsnation.com/xaqbazit/yurushi/series.php?view=archive&chapter=22387

im also panning on posting my 24hr comic i and have been selling called square one - its kind of a weak title, i had fun challenging myself with the layouts but unfortunately everything i didnt have figured out ened up falling into routine and so its kind of a clone of torn, and has allot of similarities. everyone was calling it the "crossword comic" but the cover is kind of fun, ill have to post it with the rest of the comic whenever i get around to it.

im also reading the next two graphic novels of astonishing x-men, the one whedon was witting and im loving, i got the 1st one at the swap meet and am reading the second 2 from teh library. as well as osama tezuka's adolf which is amazing me how deep the themes are with such cartoony stylized art. but it helps me think i dont have to change my style, just draw like i do and do it as good as i can. you kinda accept the style and then get lost in it just like a normal story. almost like watching a film with dubs or subs.

well i have allot of stuff to look through from the library, my cousins just left after a week, kinda stressfull but i had fun havinga supersoaker game with our neighbor emma, aidan, me and colten. whoever had the hose, would hide a tennisball in the grass and the others would have to try to enter the yard and hold off the monster with the supersoakers, while looking for and recovering the ball from the hosemonster. anyway it was fun.

cant wait for new york, but i also am really excited about seeing dan again, talking about stories for senior project and finishing the scripts and starting to record novus terra. were going to be recording the voices just ourselves - sinking the fx and music and then rerecording the dialog track with the voice actors. hopefully ill be able to air an episode a week on a new scad radio show im calling scadrd (scattered) for scad radio dramas. i have a facebook group if anyone would like to help here
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=16437995460

i have so many projects i want to work on and scripts, art stories etc. my mind is so creative and my attention span is so short im constantly jumping from project to project. it will be nice to finally have something nice to show for all my work, i just am really going to be relying on a few peopel that will make or break the show so i hope they dont let me down, specifically adam - who seems to be buisyer than me and jagoda who seems to have more time than me. i havenet got anyone to help with the scripts like i wanted, but its almost done so i hope it isnt too bad, dan can help story edit for the last few episodes and im sure we'll make some changes when it comes time to record. but i hope the show does well because i could see allot of people doing weekly shows or one shot bits if it does. but ill just be doing kind of an etertainment block with 1 episode from multipule different shows each week so someone can tune in just to see what happens on their show, or maybe even listen to them all. im also interested in hearing something i saw ona road trip, a new company adapting books, graphic novels etc into audio drama format and calling it "graphic audio" - obviously a piggy back on eisner's phrase "graphic novel" however io persoanlly find it funny considering there is nothing "graphic" or visual about radio dramas, if it had that it would be tv. lol.

anyways, hopefully next time i post i will have my junk up on deviant art, hope i get allot of feedback - ive done allot of work this last semester and was one of only 3 to pass larriosn's pen and ink 1. when i get back im moving downtown so ill be buisy. ill also be inking james ww2 pages so i have some stuff in the works, and im scared about losing my drawing skills if i dont draw enough. but my work speaks for what i can do so im anxious to put it up.

some stuff will take time though, like storybaords for simpsons, that id like to sink to the audio like my noah storyboards and my simpson storyboards, but i think it will be worth it i just cant forget it.

i also overdrafted like mad so im barley still alive financially and now indebted to a few people for keeping me afloat, but a big thak you goes out to those who helped. ive never been so scared.

ive been trying to find a movie called "robot wars," it goes along with or is somehow connected with "robot jox" which is on youtube. ive also been craving to watch the made for tv-movies Generation-x, and Intensity. as well as the series, Roswell.

i also read up on the death of superman movie's on wikipedia, that were trying to be made in the 90's which was very interesting, along with summaries for mmpr series arcs.