Friendly Cove 2

Bug Bomb page 12

Sketchbook: new junk

I got a new sketch book and a Pentel refillable brush pen in the mail today so I wanted to play with it. Did this sketch while the kids were taking a bath.

page 11 pencils

Ok. Here's page 11. Moving on to page 12 tomorrow.

Bug Bomb Page 11 progress

Bug Bomb page10: pencils

Some rough spots here but I'll clean it up under the brush. Pretty happy with a lot of this,

New Project

Here's a page from a new project I may be working on.

sailors and such

some sketches sailors. I may be working on a new story with Matt Dembicki set in the early 19th Century. This is a first sketch to get a feel for the fashion of the time.

pages 8 9 pencils

page 7 pencils

Moving right along! Here are the pencils for page 7. Im really happy with this page but I absolutely can't wait to draw pages 8 and 9!

Page 6 pencils

Got some work done on page 6 tonight not a great scan but I think it's looking pretty good. Page 7 should be quick. Maybe tomorrow or Wednesday night.

page 5 pencils

still needs background but here's page 5 so far

Friday night

Wedding weekend! My son is the ring bearer in a wedding this weekend so we had the rehearsal dinner tonight. Lots of fun and plenty of beer. Got home and everyone fell asleep except me. So I poured some rum in a cup and did some drawing. Did the layout for page 5 and got started on the pencils. Happy and buzzed. Nighty night~

Baltimore Comic Con

Sunday I went up to the Baltimore Comic Convention and sat at Matt Dembicki's table for a couple hours with Evan Keeling. Here's Evan and I at the table:



It was my first time at that con and it was a lot of fun. There seemed to be a pretty good interest around the book and we sold 10 or 11 in the 2 hours I was sat there. Here's a sketch I did for Nan Roberts. (She was asking artists to draw either a cat, an owl or a hippo.)



I bummed Evan's brush pen to do the sketch. Really nice pen. (I believe it was a, "Pocket Brush Pen", by Pentel):

page 4 pencils

page 4 layout

pages

pencil progress for page 2-3. Coming along nice. Here's what it looks like.

Baltimore Comic Con

I'll be at the Baltimore Comic Con for a Trickster signing on Sunday (8/29th) at Matt Dembicki's table. If you are there, stop by and say "hi".

pp 2-3: layout

Pencils: Bug Bomb #1 pg1

Got a new script from Kevin and I'm jumping in. Lots of bugs bikes and brawls!! Can't wait to draw some of these pages! Just wish I could draw faster....ah well. Hopefully I will have a bunch of regular updates here over the next few months and more. Also I think I figured out a work around for my scanner so things are looking up! Anyway here is the first cut at page 1 pencils.

sketch: demon warrior and dogs

Ungetum Sketches

monstres2

Not really inspired tonight so I just played around with a black lagoon monster in watercolor.

Monsters

Working on some more drawings for a band my cousin works with. Here's an old monster drawing I did that I really liked. I think I will start in this direction and branch out from there.

some more ideas

barcode generator. cool idea i stole from my buddy matt's blog.

skull mask logo 2

did some quick sketches of a logo I'm working on while the kids are getting cleaned up:


Here's the same idea but a little more refined. I think is a pretty cool image.

here's a variation:

logo 1

lady warlord sketch

here's another design for the lady warlords

sketch: Warlords MC

Playing around with colored pencils today doing some more designs for the Warlords Motorcycle Club members. Reminds me of drawings I used to do in school. I've been going back and forth with the idea of giving the female bugs human female characteristics ("boobs" or "no-boobs"). Right now I am leaning toward "boobs", mainly because I think it looks cooler. Also, I think this design for the female roach racer is ok but the leathers are too modern for the gang. I'll be rolling the clock back for her in the next design.

sketch: Charlie

Another Card

Marker on bristol, 2.5" x 3.5 "

Trickster Cards

Tonight I worked on a couple trading cards for Trickster. I'll do a couple more tomorrow.

Interview City Paper

There's an interview with me from the City Paper Arts Desk.

Kitchen Race

The last paper I am trying out is the 500 Series Illustration board for Wet Media. It's nice and big, 15x22. and the drawing came out pretty nice. I put a lot of water on this and it held up great. I doubt I'll use it again because it is large and pretty stiff making it a pain to scan with my pathetic scanner.

Sketch: More Wasp Gang

Not my best drawing but it's ok and was fun to draw. These drawings im just trying to get a sense of what the different characters in Bug Bomb will look like. The Wasp gang is patterned after Capsule gang - the lads from Akira. I like the preppy look too.

The Wasp Gang

Working on some wasp characters for Bug Bomb. Here's a sketch:

Roach Rider

Doing some sketching since my kid's baseball game got rained out. I drew this on Strathmore 500 Series Bristol with a Vellum surface. Really nice. Not nearly as toothy as the watercolor paper I used in the last post. Plus this comes in 11 x 17 sheets. Pretty cool. i have one more paper to try out but it hasn't come in the mail yet.
The 500 series Bristol did warp a bit more than the watercolor paper but not as much as the 400 series bristol. So I like this one the best.

New paper - Strathmore 400 series cold press watercolor pad

I've been working 'wet' lately, doing ink washes with gobs of water and the bristol board I've used was getting all warped. So to combat this I am trying out some new paper. First is the Strathmore 400 series Cold press Watercolor paper. Really heavy duty, comes in a 12x17 spiral pad.



I did this sketch of some roach dudes with brushes, Rosemary and Co Series 33 size 2 for the lines and size 4 for the wash.



The paper held up great to the washes. It's pretty toothy and seemed to soak up a lot more water then the bristol so I had to mix more washes and dip my brush more. Pretty nice though and held up better for this type of work then the bristol.

Trickster Promotion

from the Trickster blog:

A bunch of contributing artists to Trickster: Native American Tales: A Graphic Collection will be at Big Planet Comics in Vienna, Va., this Sat., May 15, for a signing from 2-4 p.m. In attendance: Matt Dembicki, Andrew Cohen, Evan Keeling, Paul Zdepski, Chris Piers, Jacob Warrenfeltz, Mike Short, Jerry Carr, Rand Arrington and Scott White. We'll also be doing sketches and giving away artist trading cards featuring Trickster critters (see below)! I'll also give a very brief talk about the project. Come by and join the fun!

See you there!

Bug Bomb page 1

page 1 completed

BubBomb 4 tiers of panels...one more to go

Some more work on "Bug Bomb" page 1 tonight. I like these panels. you can also faintly see the layout of the final panel on the page. not sure if my scanner could suck worse though. Apologies for the crappy looking scan and weird blotchy areas. it's amazingly bad...the big gray bar in the middle of the bottom part of the page is mind blowing. not sure how that got there. really annoying.

Trickster Nominated for a "YALSA"

From the Trickster blog,

Trickster was recently nominated for the Young Adult Library Services Association's 2011 Great Graphic Novels for Teens.

I'm amazed and excited by some of the press and reception this book is getting.

Links

Some links Kevin snowed me today

Mars import comics and whatnot
League of Movable Type open source fonts

Reference: Presentation tools

I do a lot of presentations at work and found a couple cool little apps from the Duarte Design blog

The first one is a visualization app for streaming/showing live twitter feeds during a presentation - visible tweets
the second is a slick presentation tool called prezi. It makes really nice transitions and allows you to zoom in and out really easy. Here's one I did jsut to play with it. Took me about 30 minutes.

drawing process on Prezi

a little more page 1

working on a tier-a-night getting more comfortable with the washing technique. Right now I'm not happy with the backgrounds but I think everything will look ok when the word balloons are added in.

Two tiers

Bug Bomb top tier page 1

here's the first three panels of page 1 of "Bug Bomb" (written by Kevin Panetta). Kind of a bad scan - bluryness in the second panel. But overall I like how this is coming out.

roachy heads and whatnot