Outcast Angels WIP - round 2

Here's thumbnails and some of the works in progress for my most rescent illustartions for the Outcast Angels book promotions that you can read more on at outcastangels.com or on my deviantart at xaqbazit.deviantart.com

Outcast Angels and WIP

Well I’ve been away a long time. I’ve been writing up a storm and drawing a bit. The blog was turning into a hyperlink for my Deviantart and I didn’t want that to keep happening. I’ve been feeling less public as I’ve kind of felt the double edged sword of having so much online, had some art stolen/copied and spread around. Which is really kind of disheartening. The sketchblog I was a part of fell off the face of the earth. I needed to rediscover loving drawing and it turns out I love laying stuff out, it’s my favorite stage. Anyway, I thought these pieces were ok, and I’ve been having a lot of fun doing splash page illustrations for Outcast Angels. heres some of the rough thumbnails. The ship (not for lack of trying) ended up having to be 4 layers, background, light rays (which I painted black and inverted in photoshop) and ship and splatter texture. This afforded me the luxury to invert the ship layer (making the lines white) and shift the black ones (infront of the white lines) just over to the right and down – making it look like every line had a highlight and stand away from the background. This other one was just drawn in two parts and composited (much less confusing) – but the black placement worked so easily. you can find the final versions on my deviantart page here. Below are some of my designs for atypicalcomic’s Takedown which I did a while back. I liked the motorcycle which I tried to give a batman ’89-eske jet engine. And a very nerf inspired gun. I was just on the TMNT podcast as part of the Incompetent Comic Cabal Cast (IC3). Which you can listen to, here (summarizing the first 4 tbp’s of the idw series in about 45 mins). i also got mentioned on episode 145 of Uncanny X-cast for doing a piece of art for one of the hosts and drawing the hosts into issue 2 of decisions for cosmic times comics. I had fun at Denver comicon and got very fast with drawing portraits, which was fun and I was surprisingly accurate for about a 1-2 min sketch. I’ve also been trying to cobble together Terra Novus a podcast radio-drama I had written and recorded with a full cast of students back in 08/09. I have a new audio engineer who is doing sound effect and levels but outside of the first few eps the actors were all recorded separately so putting all the lines in order has been somewhat painstaking. My hope, as we approach October is that I will be able to post episode 1 by the end of the year, I have the dialog put together for all of them but that’s only half the battle. I’ve been plotting & writing a bunch of comics issues to get ready to draw and pitch. The thing is I’ve been working on all of them simultaneously which has been slow to have something to show but at the same time I’m able to work on problems/plotlines subconsciously while I write one’s I’ve figured out. Then when I get it, I switch to that script – in about month binges/segments or so per series. Keeps each fresh and I think that will show in the writing.