page 12 - gettin started again

Shook the rust off with some sketches yesterday so tonight I tried to do some work on page 12 - -still rusty. Trying to get the perspective of the city street and nate on his bike so I created a little scene in sketchup...here are two layouts I like.



Now i just read some battle angel so I am jazzed about the way Kishiro draws speed. Not sure If I am going to try this in here but I played with it a little bit on Nate's legs and the wheels as he pedals fast down the street...



looks a little hairy but could look cool.

sketch

Liquid Revolver

Liquid Revolver is a comic I worked on with a handfull of other folks is being published by Matt Dembibki at Three Crows Press. I only did a handful of pages but I am really excited! Go check it out and buy a copy!!!!

Life Drawing

Note to self:
Don't forget.

Bernier At Comic Tools

Matt Bernier over at comic tools hits the nail on the head:

I feel good about the work I'm doing, but I'm not working this hard because I want to, I'm doing it because I have to. The way I stay balanced is by making sure that nothing leaves my table that I'm ashamed of. But it's SO hard not to get lazy. It's so hard, when you're ready to move on to the next page, and you see that a panel could be re-shot from another angle to be a little better. It's so hard not to say "It's good enough, no one will care," and move on to an earlier bedtime.

But what I know is, when I buckle down and do it, I'm always proud and I sleep soundly, and when I don't do it I sleep with a thief's conscience. When I do it, people look at those panels and compliment me, and the memory of that praise obliterates the memory of the labor, but when I don't do it, I know what I did and the work feels wasted and pointless.

So true.

inking tools

Inking. I have no idea what tools to use so one month I am dedicated to pens and nibs, the next month I go nuts on markers and brush pens, then the brush. Over the past year or two, I have settled on using markers and brush pens for sketches and using nib-pens and brushes for more formal/finished work.

What I like so far is the nib pens and brushes mostly becuase the ink itself just looks so much better on the page then the ink in markers. However the markers and brush pens are easier to use and have a lot less mess. Also everything is scanned in and the quality of the black is lost in that process anyway for the most part so maybe that doesn't matter (?).

So over the last week I was looking at some comics and decided to try and figure out what tools the artists are using.

The two artists I started with are Yukito Kishiro and Sean Phillips.

Over at Sean Phillip's blog he posts some examples of his work

So his work is great of course and he has a real loose style which I love. from reading the comments people ask him what tools he uses and he mentioned Copic markers for "pencils"; Staedtler pigment liners and Pentel brush pens for inks.

Kishiro does my favorite manga - Battle Angel Alita. The story is ok but his designs and drawings are great. His website "yukitopia" has a section that shows his studio. In there he has a picture of some of his tools.

In his pens tray he has 6 nib-pens. 2 crowquills, an 801 Hiro Leonardt, and 3 tachikawa "G" pens.





More later...