After Graduation

Today was editor's day - yay! I got to talk to Joan Hilty from Vertigo and Nate Cosby from Marvel. Both went incredibly well and complimented me on my storytelling, camera angles and style. The only criticisms were: 1) that i need to pick a style and stick with it - as far as rendering and cartooniness. And 2) keep better consistency with anatomy and faces.
These are both things that I am struggling with and as they said and i knew, will come with time. I just need to draw more pages and I will settle in. My major influences range from guys like the cartoony and angular Bruce Timm and soft edged Chris Bachello - to in the middle of the road guys like JRJR and Tim Sale and Jim Cheung - to realistic/semi-realistic guys like Essad Ribbic, John Cassaday, Lee Weeks and Oliver Copiel. So they're all kind of fighting for and finding a place in my style which will make it quite a diverse style.
Also the angles I'm choosing are not the kind you can fake but they told me I was pulling them off rather confidently. But drawing the face at those extreme angles is really unforgiving especially on women's faces and it has and will continue to be a challenge.
My inks were not up to par before this class - so that may stay as a side job, there have been plenty of guys who pencil a book and ink someone else's book in the same month. But I plan to keep working diligently after school and not stop drawing! despite all the chaos that will ensue immediately after like moving, getting married and probably moving another 2 times in the next year or two. The good news is I'm working enough to pay rent and get my pages done so once school is out I will have loans to pay back but I hope to find a job fairly quickly.
A friend of mine passed my contact info along to a skateboard company in Florida that pays very well and we might be working on a series of boards for them. that would give me enough money to keep working the hours I am now and put the time i was in school into my pages, to secure a comics job.
I made sure to drop off a leave-behind in almost all the editors boxes and try to make them specific to the publishers. Dark Horse is coming next week, though Ill be out of town and Oni will be here the week after, so I'm excited about that as I hear the hire many young budding artists and accept a very wide range of styles.
Various projects like the Radio Drama, Terra Novus, Phil's prequel comic, Vicky's Unnaturals and various idea's I've had will be used to flesh out the next year's worth of material if I don't get picked up by anyone.
I think some of the issues in the pages were purely due to the amount of time I had to put into the page, so being out of school should give me the time to really nail every detail. The reviews relit the flame of inspiration for me that was quickly getting burned out by stress and semester after semester. I'm sure not having teachers to set my deadlines will come with its own problems but the advantages seem enough to get me headed in the right direction.

Oportunity knocking on my door - and I'm ready

ive been looking for some odd jobs etc to help out with money and found a few, some without even looking, and I thought I might tell you all the exciting news.

One guy is opening a straight-edge tattoo shop and wants me to do a mural on one of the walls- he will pay for supplies, food let me hang my art for sale and give me 50% tattoos (which i will take him up on for sure).

Also Tom Lyle, my super-hero mentor, at scad got asked to suggest an artist for Faber Castell (the main supplier of inking supplies like the "pit-pens" that I normally use and the tech-pens most sequential artists use) who was looking at someone to do an original comic page for them for a new "super-hero drawing kit" they are releasing later this year. Lyle suggested me, saying I was one of "the most dynamic main-stream super-hero artist that he's got" as far as camera angles etc. So I have the break (2 1/2 weeks to do a single page comic with an original super-hero that I have to pencil, ink and color it with their stuff and document it at every stage as an instructional guide. They may use the image in other things as well and I will be additionally compensated each time. Did I mention it paid and I also get a $100 faber castell gift certificate. Wow, I'm honored and blown away! My art is going to be seen by up and coming youngsters getting into comics and people in hobby/art stores around the country <--- awesome!

Also, I did some pages for Tom's class that are my best yet and I believe professional quality, AT LAST! So I will be sending out submission packets to Marvel and DC over break so they have my name in mind, for when they come in may for Editor's Day. Here are my breakdowns etc. for those pages. another thing, I actually did the same pages tom did for his submission packet about a year ago (sensational spider-man 34), so with his permission I'll post/link his pages with mine so you all can compare. But overall I think I've finally done some pages that really show my best that I have to offer in every way and I was super ambitious with some of the camera choices and spent about (20-30hrs) = 3 times as much time on them as I have for the last 2 projects. But this quarter, in general, I've spent more time on my pages progressively so I think this has been a long time coming/in the making.



so this is the sketch i gave myself, full page, to layout the splash and then did the following page, the actual tight rough, on the back.


this is pages 3+4

pgs 1+2

this was a in-class assignment, we used lyle's cars to draw the hulk holding one, as dynamic as we could. I did a thumb and liked it so much i took it down to the projector and blew it up and got the one on the left. I liked it.

this was some other sketches i did for panels 1+2 on pg.1 and panel 5 on page 3 when i thought about shooting it over the railing of the second story. and a sketch of myself while working on the pages and taking a break, i know i look tired but i was just cold.

You can see the final pages at my DA page here.

Sen. Spider-man Sample Pages by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

editor's day

mike o'sullivan from devil's due reviewed my portfolio, i showed him my pages from the 2000 ad script and the justin time projects from larrison. i had the pages on the right and then scans with word balloons on the left. it went really well, he said i had "phenomenal energy" and that they just needed to be tightened up, which i could agree with since i did each of the projects in a night. but he really like the composition of the 1st just in time page and said i also need to work on anatomy a bit, some more life drawing. especially my hands, which kind of hurt because i was in hudson's hands class but they have gotten kinda wonky. anyways gave my second appt to james, with someone from alternative comics. im sick now and had to cover for someone at work the same night of editor's day, after i asked for it off. sliced my arm at work and am just so out of it today - fever etc. not to much hw so ill probably rest. when i get the stuff up on deviantart ill post a link.