With monstrous deadlines looming over me, I find it easy to stay cooped up in the studio all day, neglecting to eat, exercise, or interact with the rest of the human race. Alex calls once in a while to remind me to take a walk outside, to get some Vitamin-D in my eyes from the sun. It would seem like much less effort to just walk upstairs to the kitchen and get the same vitamins from a glass of milk, but Alex is probably onto something here. So when it isn’t raining, I try to follow her advice by going out and walking in the sunlight… that is, on the milky side of the street.
Here are a couple sketches from my out-of-studio breaks.
You’ve probably seen these posted on my webcomic, but just in case you haven’t, my brother Dave shot and edited a couple videos featuring my stuff.
This first one is me working on a page of the comic, throughout the various stages - roughs, pencils, inking, and some digital coloring. It is beautifully filmed, and as I’ve quipped before, uncannily makes me look like I know what I’m doing.
The second one is an animation made up entirely of stuff from my sketchbooks over the past four years. Very fun to watch. It also features the music of my other brother, Henry. I believe this is the first time all three of us have worked on a creative project together… at least since our childhood days, doing activity books and parody-style magazines (that were actually pretty funny, even now).
Another background test for my story. Was able to traditionally paint this and some other backgrounds rather quickly — faster than it would be for me to paint digitally — but the scans came out terribly. I’m picking up way too much paper texture, and when I blast it out in the levels adjustment I eliminate all the subtle lighter values as well. So I end up having to do a lot of Photoshop retouching on top of the digital finishes I already have to do… not an efficient way to work!
Hey everybody, I’ve been gearing up to write a full length graphic novel and thought it’d be fun to show some of the early sketches. Obviously, I can’t give away the story or the really fun visual stuff, but these should at least give you an idea of what kind of story it might be and who the main characters are.
The Three Main Characters.Color Sample. Going for a 2D animated feature look, with cell characters on top of rendered backgrounds.
Sample background. Still playing with approaches. It needs to be fast since I’ll be doing so many of them, but also look relatively finished (without overpowering the story or characters).
I’m very excited about the story since it combines a lot of ideas I’ve been toying around with for a couple years but didn’t have the know-how on putting it all together. I’ll try to update the progress whenever possible!
Color Sample. Going for a 2D animated feature look, with cell characters on top of rendered backgrounds.
Sample background. Still playing with approaches. It needs to be fast since I’ll be doing so many of them, but also look relatively finished (without overpowering the story or characters).
