Vulcan Nerve Pinch

So yeah, as I've been saying I really wanted to do a close up of some characters and here ya go. I sketched it, and waited about a week until classes started, then discovered the joy of digital inking, went with that - for the 1st time. was really excited with the results, colored the blues, then the yellows, then the skin tones, then faded them all together so it looked like the light was affecting the local colors. i was pretty pleased and had a lot of fun drawing it, its based off about the only pic that comes up when you google "vulcan nerve pinch" and looks a little too much like Spock but i think the lighting and inking sets this piece well apart from its reference.





Here is a link to the final.

In other news we had our 1st recording session for the radio drama today and it was great, were shooting for next friday to have all the temp lines for episode 2 done. After that we will probably record 2 episodes at a time for final versions.

I've also been sketching a lot, scanned a few - here's a link.

At the last minute I was asked to put together a poster for a theater company in colorado I've done some work for. The play is called Sleuth, here's the poster for the original movie from which the play is based. They wanted me to send them an idea like it.

So I came up with this using random images from google.

But after I got the pictures back that they took of the actors they told me "were thinking of going in a new direction." I was a little peeved but in teh end it turned out for the better, and it was hard to tell that they were two different people in mine anyway.

so here is my rough designs and a link to the final.









Here is a link to the final.

I guess I was channeling the Heist, Kill bill and the Italian Job marketing but it was fairly unconscious, plus once the words were in there it was really about making that work and which designs worked with the text not just as pretty pictures, and as anyone knows playbills have allot of text, you don't just cram everything into illegibly tiny font and stick it into a conveniently sized rectangle at the bottom.

Roughs and Colors

these are some pages i colored for julie's computer coloring class. they said i needed more solid colors to define whats in light/shaddow. but it took me all morning and yesterday just to do the lat piece w/ the rabbit because i couldnt get a pen for the screens. i am seriously considering getting one.



these are my second versions of the pages from me and james' script. here's my script for the pages.

Pg 1:
Panel 1: interior hospital room. Jack, the doctor hands Karen a tissue as she sobs, looking back at Howard, her husband, who is in a comma and in the bed.
Jack: It’s okay. Here, wipe your eyes.
Karen: Oh… thank you.
Jack: Why don’t you tell me how the… how this all happened.

Panel 2: we flashback to the day howard was hit. Karen checks her watch in front of a crowd of people waiting to cross the street. Over her shoulder we can see Howard, wading through the crowd, trying to get her attention.
Karen (caption): (Sob) You mean how he ended up here, in the hospital?
Jack (caption): Yes.
Karen (caption): It was a car, a hit and run accident.
Karen (Caption): I was downtown. Apparently Howard was trying to get a hold of me, he was fallowing me. I didn't see him, the sidewalks were packed that day.

Panel 2: Karen looks up at the light, it is red. The crosswalk signal shows a hand.
Karen (caption): I didn’t know why everyone had stopped in front of me, so I made my way through. even though the crosswalk was telling us to stop, the light was still red.

Panel 3: she runs across the intersection while the light is red, howard gets closer to the curb.
Karen (caption): So I went for it.

Pg 2:
Panel 1: over howard’s shoulder we can see him reaching for her as she crosses.
Karen (caption): I ran across the intersection while the light was still red, I was going to be late for work if I didn’t and... (sob)

pane 2: howard stumbles out of the crowd towards her.
Karen (caption): howard must have just been trying to follow me,

panel 3: he looks foreword squinting as a bright light shines on the side of his face.
Karen (caption): not knowing where he was going,

panel 4: he looks towards the light, shocked by the source of the off camera light.
Karen (caption): and by the time he caught up... (sob)

Pg 3-4: double page spread.
Panel 1:back in the hospital room Karen is so intense telling the story, crying as if she was there, reliving the moment with the audience.
Karen: the light was green again!

Panel 2: double page spread of the car slamming into Howard.
Karen (caption): the car stopped for a minute, afterwards, then peeled out when he realized he had just hit a person.
Karen (Caption): I didn’t get a license plate number, I couldn’t even tell you what type or color car it was, I was so shook up.

Panel 3: back in the hospital room Karen flies into Doctor Jack’s muscular chest and balls her eyes out. He is surprised.
Karen: I rolled him over, as if I naively thought he would be alright. Thought he would look like the Howard I knew. But… (sob)

Panel 4: jack looks over at Howard, half expecting him to get jealous that he is holding her, scared that it is unprofessional.
Jack: But he didn’t.
Karen: yes! It’s all my fault.
Jack: Hey. No, no, no.. It’s not your fault.

Panel 5:
Karen: If I had only turned around, he wouldn’t have chased me out into the street like that. Wouldn’t have gotten hit.
Jack: Hey, you didn’t know he was behind you. And if you would have seen him and stopped to talk to him, it might have been you that got hit crossing that intersection.

Panel 6: Jack grabs her by the shoulders pulling her away from him.
Karen: I wish it had been. It should have been.
Jack: Hey, calm down.

Panel 7: Jack turns, putting his hand on her shoulder and facing her towards the door. Howard in the background.
Jack: Why don’t you go get air, you know? Walk down to the gift shop and get a drink, clear your head a bit. There’s really nothing you can do here. He’s just going to have to heal and maybe he’ll pull out of this,

Panel 8: Zoom up on howard in the hospital bed.
Jack (tail of balloon trailing off screen): but you’re just making yourself miserable by staying here.
Karen: tail of balloon trailing off screen): Alright already. Okay, okay. I’ll go.


in critique i was told that they liked them alot. but while the crash was more cinematic this way it didnt have the impact deserved for a double page spread, many mentioned combining the sliver panels below the car and pushing the hospital scene to its own page. it used to be its own page before i had to condense 17 pgs down to 12. so me and james could each have 12 this issue. lyle pulled me aside and said he gave me a b on teh 1st set and said i jumped the 180 on the 2nd to last panel on pg 4 and i could have pushed some things, but that i got an a on these pages and that they were some of the coolest storytelling he's seen while at scad, that i'm being really ambitious and that he loved the pages. wow, i mean i always hear nice stuff from tom, but this was really something ive never heard from a prof. and it really made me feel secure if i kept it up that i could get a job and have a career in comics which is really awesome and a boost to my constantly self-defeating self image.
anyway, they also thought we could take the shot of her saying anything at the top of that page out and just have her dialogue. they didnt like the layout for page one though they did find it ambitious how much i changed the shots, (solution: just line up the bottom tear on a separate level so your eye can get from panel 4 to 5. everyone liked the pyramid design of pg 2, and said i should combine that with the original layout for pages 3/4. james mentioned jacking the back of the car up like it really hit him which i think will really add to the impact. some just digitally took the boarders out of their original layouts and drew in the extra. anyway, i think they turned out good, however ive drawn these pages so much now i have no interest in doing the final pencils. ive also taken on doing a poster for john hand theater company's rendition of "sleuth," and hey it pays! wahoo.

ps i think i will digitally ink the star trek cover.

Character Designs and Star Trek Sketch

alright so first here is my skecth for a classy looking star trek cover for next week. i still have to ink and color it, hoping for an adam hughes vibe for inking with a thick outline and thin hatching inside, cant find my inking brushges though now that ive moved.

this was my origional and still my favourite sketch for teh cast of terra novus, it has my notes on it, but it was just to keep them straight in my head. now its almost all i have to design from.


there were my new designs trying to make them retro and fun and homage-like but they ended up just looking phony and stupid. its hard to make things like tights and a wrestling belt look cool when you add in the word sci-fi. but me and a few other guys are working on it, i did like aurora's new look though with the pancho and cloak, and then the short rogue gloves and high boots. heavily inspired by some designs i used to have in my star wars concept art book. the idea here being that it should be baggy enough and indistinct enough that others dont notice she is pregnant.

here's my layout thumbs for the covers i described on the group page.


these are some sketches for a metal band that commissioned me to do a cover for them called capricious alchemy, we have been trying to brainstorm on ideas for the subject and he had mentioned that most their songs revolve around anti-materialism and anti-narcissism me and my other friend had been talking about how greedy alchemists turn metal into gold for personal gain. in these images i was trying to have a similar alchemist doing something like that and then have a hero/knights break in to stop him. the second one looks more fun now where he would be covered in jewelery like xerxes and be coveting the book, this way we'd get a look at his now-lavish pad, maybe even some gold diggers or prostitutes running from the shaddowed hero who has come to put an end to his treachery.

Long time, no post -sorry

So we finished leon in class and talked about bleed pages, I mentioned I liked charest but lyle hates him – says he is just pinups. But he is the best, an awesome illustrator we all agreed but his storytelling and layout is confusing – says lyle.
We got done early and all the student met about the scripts, I waited till last and did my in class assignment that was going to be homework. I brought it to him, he also mentioned that we will have t oink a few pages, and he said “when did you do this, during the movie? I said id been sitting there for 20 mins, he said “holly crap you laid out 4 pages in 20 mins. Glanced over them and said, your storytelling has really improved, you are making some really quick really good decisions, he looked at my layout and pointed out a few minor things but said he liked the look of the pages and that they were very nice, he’s going to help me with some of the more difficult perspective shots, but that I should use more angles. And I know, it was like once the summer came and I started doing layouts for 3 issues of comics all I wanted to do was move the camera side to side and up or down but never tilt up or down. My brain wasn’t in it. All summer I had procrastinated doing work, guilty about it though. I did a lot of personal art which I liked allot, very introspective though usually sad but it cheered me up and it kept me drawing. So letting that go was hard, I do have a project in art history that could tie back into that though so – yay! but i cant post or show most of it because i don't want any one to think different of me, or how i view them - its personal but like i said it kept me drawing and it kept me from getting too depressed, it came out of my pencil instead of my mouth and that is good. Over the summer I was writing and doing a lot of james work for him but I am freakishly fast, for a student, less than average for a pro but im getting better. I had seen mike manely site and that he had done 2-3 pages a day for quasar and was inking alpha fight at the same time, now I don’t know if I could do that consecutively but I have done 5 pages in about 12 hours and did it multiple times in larrison’s class, including lettering. Now if I did that during the day I could probably go even faster not being so dragged out and tired.

Here’s a layout for a dps sketch I did of spiderman I really liked, kind of has the live action tv 60’s eyes, like cassiday did on giant size astonishing x-men, though seeing his black and whites he does leave a lot of backgrounds out or even insert photocopies for backgrounds sometimes of large city shots. But his characters look great and there is some awesome layout stuff in latter issues of that series, im only missing issue 24 now before I go and read it. Anyway, wanted it to be a kind of tour de force of inking techniques and I figured it would be big enough I could ease into brush stuff, there’s a cool video on using a razor to add texture on manely’s site → drawman.blogspot.com

Also here is my “tight” roughs for the 1st 4 pages (non bleed format) of issue 2 of me and james’ story.

Elementals

here's just a couple cool scenes i've found after reading the 1st 8 issues of elementals and a few special issues. when i started reading them i had gotten the writer/creator/artist Bill Willingham mixed up with Al Williamson - who is in my opinion one of the greatest artists that ever lived. I used to get the Star-Wars daily comic book strips that eventually got colored and reprinted by darkhorse in comic book form in the early 90's. Al did do the inks for Powerline saga, Bill isn't great but he gets the job done, he is a great writer, has some very opinionated views on some things but after reading the letters columns you start to understand where he's coming from, and he's a far cry from some of the pencilers he got to replace him on later issues. Even mike mignolla filled in a few guest pages here and there, remember this thing was written in the mid eighties.
I was thinking of books/heroes I always liked as a kid and would like to work on: The phantom, Darkhawk, Moon Knight, The Inhumans, wildcats etc etc.
Anyway back to Elementals, its been great to look forward to these issues, I've also read the 1st two issues of Moon Knight with Finch doing the art, man that guy is such a bad ass, defiantly the Jim lee for the new millennium, so much better than that guy they have on Batman R.I.P. and oh god I just saw the artist they have on spider-man and i guess have had for some time Angel Medina - well now its the Venom Dark Origin storyline but the guy is bad, he looks like Todd Mcfarlane when he was on Spider-man. Okay whatever just check out the pics below, this is some of the type of material you can expect from the Elementals.









I'm ready to start penciling both Jame's comic which it looks like I'll be able to work on issue 2 in Lyle's class this coming semester, and Phil's comic prelude for his film. I have so many people interested in the Terra Novus radio drama that I'm going to have to hold auditions, I also have many people ready to help with art and much else - all of which I was dying for 6 months ago, luckily I finally pulled a trick I had planned a while ago and had forgotten to put into action.

Oh also: Just watched the other Boleyn Girl, wow. Disturbing, amazing, stressful and beautiful. One of the hardest parts to watch happens when Natalie portman's character miscarriages while trying to give a male heir to the king for the second time and tries to convince her brother to bed her so it will be as if it never happened, both their lives depend on it. When they are seen trying they are turned in and even though they couldn't go through with it, both of them physically shaking they are so sad and pressured - they are beheaded. Tough stuff to watch, Natalie Portman is such a good actress.
pss: I also finished the sound fx bible for Terra Novus and my 3rd cover for Star Trek.

Short update

I finished the Star Trek cover I'd had for a while. I wish I could bring myself to do more unrelated/graphic design covers as apposed to the sort of splash-page covers I have been doing. man I wish I could do the covers for the superman/batman/catwoman/supergirl shows etc. But I guess I'm holding down the fort for the more boring covers, I could draw superheroes all day long - do, lol - but it's hard to make something as calm as star trek visually appealing, I guess maybe I should appreciate it - maybe I'm learning more this way - rather than doing something I already know I'm good at or capable of. I'll post more on that when it officially comes out so I can talk about it, I finished my redo of pg 18 rough for James' and I's comic. I also did character sketched for Phil's comic and talked with him a bit. I finally have 2 days off coming up and I intend to use them, I got the final sound fx scripts done for episodes 1-8/11, so I need to finish that up, and should probably make it priority. I also found out about an amazing band called, August Burns Red - which will influence my drumming dramatically. Apparently the video of our 2nd practice did not turn out but we might get recording room this next time so that we have it down. I couldn't get to sleep till 4:30 am last night after working for 11hrs, good thing I don't have to work until later today. I've also been listening to allot of Massive Attack which is really good in a different way. Also here's that cover from the last blog when I was talking about the FF issue.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good:

I had a great second practice with Phil and Carlos, we arranged the songs in the order we will play them for shows and played them in that order. What's even cooler is we got the set on tape, we'll have to see how the recording quality is though. If nothing else they're going to make it a cd for me to practice by.

I got all the breakdowns done with James of the 1st issue of our comic. He wants to ink his own stuff so it could be quite a while till this first issue is done considering he has about 17 of the 22 pages to do. The next issue is more me though so it should go faster.

The Bad:
I dont know what type of paper to use because mine is not good for inking, its the crap blue line pro stuff and James had a tablet of 14X11 bristol paper and just started drawing (like i warned him not to) and inking, I explained that it was not proportional to 11x17 not to mention the image area was suposed to be 10x15. He was shocked, and eventually we settled on that he would do his pages 9-1/3x14 to stay proportional to the 10x15 of a normal comic. Well he's got a few weeks in Florida to work on it so hopefully he gets a lot done. He's so easily distracted and it's very frustrating to try to help him, show him, do it for him and then come back the next day and either he's forgot the stuff we worked on, lost it or is distracted again. I have too many things to do and like my old friend Ben, he is usually 2-3 hours later than he says he will be, so I've had to go to his place just to stick him with some times.

I've been procrastinating the Star Trek cover because my waccom tablet has stopped running on my computer so coloring is going to be a bi**h.

No one has replied to my email about needing help for Terra Novus, I think I just need to record the voice tracks with me, Robin and maybe a few other friends that will help. It's no wonder I have not had too many collaborations - someone else always falls through and nothing ever gets finished. I guess it did take me about 6 months to write the scripts though. I still need to do promo's for the show - meaning posters etc. Posters for needing voice actors, auditions etc and get them approved and around scad. Most importantly I need to finish the "sound fx bible" and "music que bible" for the guys so they can get started, my vague and quick emails have not been enough for them to start anything so I'm hoping a specific list with details and descriptions should get them pointed in the right direction.

The Ugly:
My computer crashed, again, it was working so well and then it just quit in the middle of me doing something. Every few restarts I'd get it for a few minutes but then it would die again, till it got to the point that it would just load the windows start up progress bar and stop - a few minutes later say "can't find hard drive." I took it apart, cleaned it, vacuumed and found a wire that wasn't plugged in (not sure if it happened when I moved or when I opened it) but when I closed it back up it worked again. So now I'm copying all my stuff to my external drive.
Now I need to start the process I tried to forget and reinstall everything, AGAIN! I'm pretty sure it was the driver for my old parallel scanner that has messed it up both times so I will make sure to leave that one out this time, it also has a problem with removing itself. I still hadn't sorted out and mixed all my old i-tunes and old files with my new ones, I'm not sure what's the same and what is new between the hard drive and my new computer. I think there is a way to sinc them together though so one is the same as the other, however that could slow my computer and if there was a problem they would both have it.
I'm going crazy working so much, my girlfriend wont be working much less during the school year, she tried getting a job at a bakery, she has other options and we'll just have to see how things work out. I think I'm going to have to turn down a manager position so I can say no to working so many hours during the school year. The projects I'm doing I don't know if I would be able to do at any other time in my life with the people I'm doing them with so I think it sounds like oportunity knocking at the door and I'd rather take that than the money. It's idealistic but I got a raise anyway, so if I could do it before I know I can do it now.
We tried drinking green tea again after about a year and 3/4 w/ no cafine, she says it helps her I think it puts me more on edge.