round up or something

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Its October. I was trying to post once a month but I am easily distracted and busy with work and school. This one is a roundup of cool stuff I have been reading, etc. Nothing new from me, I really need to get around to scanning some more artwork. I have been working on the outline/script for Strange Weather because I have pretty much had to redraw the whole thing so far due to rewrites. That is time consuming. I’ve come up with a name for one of the others (The Substance) which I was inking the prelude to last week. The witch house/ fairy story is still nameless as is the 70s scifi pastiche. I am lame.

I watched the Avengers cartoon that came out last year and its wonderful. Its similar to the Bruce Timm Batman series in that it modifies the source material stylistically while retaining the things essential to it. Keeping the heart and soul if you will. One of the ways this was achieved was by keeping the stories straight up kirby. A healthy dose of  the theatrical  releases and ultimates are thrown in to make things a bit more contmeporary. It’s what I remember Marvel being. It also has an incredibly shitty theme song, something so ubiquitous I would describe it as a trend. Its on netflix streaming or whatever that service is called these days.

I got a bunch of cool indy comics shit in the mail.

Wolves by Becky Cloonan

Bunch of Cool Stuff From Becky Cloonan

Wolves mini comic, buttons, bc, bookmark, and postcards

 

 

quasi horror comic originally written for a japanese compilation. The story is pretty awesome but i cant really say anything about it without spoiling it really. The comic it self is beautifully printed. There is a lot of really cool design going on here as well. her business card says “comics rules everything around me”. somewhere in that pile it says “life aint nothing but comics and money”. fuck, yeah.

I also got:

more stuff

Dead Winter Vol. 1, Death Day prologue & book 1, Capacity, and Jan's Atomic Heart.

 

Dave Shabet’s Dead Winter Vol 1 and buttons, Sam Hiti’s Death day and the prologue, Capacity by theo Ellsworth, and  jan’s atomic heart by Simon Roy.

These are comics that are interesting, well written and nice to look at. They are also doing on their own, so despite my empty wallet, I feel it is my duty to support them. Read and buy their books.

More internet comic book awesome ness:

she died in terrebone  is a noirish detective story. It’s written byKevin Church and drawn by TJ Kirsch. sex drugs booze more sex murder some more booze. fucking read it already.

Rice Boy by Evan Dahm. all of it is good. and its all interconnected. Tolkein by way of Bodie. Read it: Order of tales, Rice boy and Vattu ( current).

Freakangels has ended and left a freakangel sized hole in my Fridays.

Studio is  coherent but still a fucking mess. I started a painting, started being the key word here. no idea where to go with it. I have a stack of drawings i need to scan, my computer sit is still a disaster. I think I am switching to mint. we will see.

I wish I could write reviews for all this shit but frankly I am pressed for time. always. and I think my girlfriend wants to go out. so, good night and go fuck yourself san diego.

BIRTH. SCHOOL. WORK. DEATH.

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Holy shit I’ve been busy. I took two classes this summer and started a new job simultaneously. This corresponded nicely with: my birthday, my dad’s birthday (6oth), the fourth of july, and about nine other birthdays. I get to bed around 3ish. i get up around 7ish. my studio is still uninhabitable. I am tired.

On the upside I will be done with classes next week. I will then post my drawings from that once i have reclaimed my attic kingdom. cus i dont have a scanner down here. Lame.

I have discovered that the RISD library has a ton of comics, and probably a bunch of other undiscovered gems. That and I got a couple of really cool comics in the mail. All these things and more will be the subjects of future posts.

till then:character design

Dead Winter episode 400

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So this guy Dave Shabet does this web-comic called Dead Winter which is something special. It’s a story about a zombie apocalypse which in itself is kind of played but like most stories revolving around that premise, it’s emotional core is the survivors. It’s pretty gruesome at parts and actually kind of cute at others and very charming. I think he draws it all on the computer, something I’m normally a little wary of, but it is done to great effect here. Like a lot of webcomics you get to see his progression as an artist but the thing that makes it special is his exploration of the unique possibilities of webcomics versus print comics. The result is this wonderful mix of print and animation that is specific and very purposeful as opposed to those shitty “motion comics” where something static is made into a half assed cartoon. It’s primarily a black and white comic with red color cues that dissolves into a color book every 20 pages or so (when dealing with a dreamscape) There were flirtations with adding animated elements early on which were startling and well awesome and well why hadn’t someone else done it before? They are small and interesting like an animated gif, but add a wonderful dimension to the comic. Every 100 pages or so, he does a full animated page that plays out in a sequence and then shows a static version of the page. It’s up to page 400 and is updated fairly regularly.

Anyway. Its awesome. Its innovative. It’s creator owned. Support it.

Stupid Ducks

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I’ve been doing a lot of drawing lately. Which is awesome. I can do it guilt free for the next week as well having finished my class with an A until next Tuesday when I start the next class. On top of that I have a fair amount of pro bono design work to complete by the end of the month. Busy busy, but better than not busy and you cant wait to do things or you will never do them. A friend told me “You will never have your ducks in a row” which got me thinking about the actual logistical nightmare of trying to get live ducks to line up in a row.

Interim Post

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I am disorganized and attempting to fix that.
I will have drawings up by the end of the week in the meantime Here are links to the Moebius tumblr and the Otomo tumblr one being inspired by the other. Very cool shit.
I am actually putting more than just drawings up Friday its the beginning of a some comics projects I’ve been working on. I’m trying to take a next step.

here are some other links to cool shit:
http://marceloleary.blogspot.com/
http://samhiti.com/
http://orcstain.wordpress.com

Sick

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For the [past month I have been sick. I cam down with Lofgrens Syndrome, a mild form of sarcoidosis, I have been out of work and laid up. As a result I have been reading lots of comics. Probably the amount of comics i would read if i wasnt interrupted by pesky disturbances like well work. It beats being on the internets all day, which leaves me feeling drained and useless, or watching tv, which does as well. I’ve read a bunch of old favorites, like the sand man and some new wonderfull books like Brandon Grahams King City and James Stokoes Orc Stain. I have been trying to veiw these books with a more critical eye, trying to glean what I can from their construction and hopefully start to convey that in the stuff I am doing.

One thing I have been trying to channel is some of the emotional turmoil being sick has caused me. I am unaccustomed to being unable to move myself of feeling trapped in my body. I am also extremely dissatisfied with what i am doing right now and the thought that returning to health means returning to that stuck me is some pretty dark places. I did manage to focus that dark place into an actual start to a story I had been trying to put down on paper for years. Whether or not it is going to just die there remains to be seen but it is a start. I have a bout 6-7 pages drawn and inked, they are for three different stories and they still need to be laid out and lettered. I have a good number thumb-nailed and it feels like i am actually starting to gain some momentum. Focusing is really hard for me and I’m pretty sure comics will never pay my rent but maybe someday they might pay my grocery bill which is very high as anyone who has ever seen me or my girlfriend eat will attest. I think the trick is finding something that will take care of the rest and not cause me to feel like ever moment is wasted.

Looking at my poor journal here I have determined that I need to put more art up here and get more people to look at it and tear it apart. I am lazy and for an art blog there sure are a lot of words. I may need to lay down the law for myself and make it so I post what I did every friday night and make a rule that i get no beer or booze until I put whatever i’ve done in the week up,regardless of quality.

Time is so slippery. Each second that passes represents a a smaller and smaller fraction of your life. Rapidly accelerating to a blur. It becomes hard to find room for everything. I wise teenager once said on his day off “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Cool new ish about my website

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No drawings at the moment but I upgraded the software which is pretty cool. to me anyway. there is a “post” button for me right on the site . I added a favicon, which makes me happy. It’s a little skull wearing a crown. I also poked around the codec and found a share this thingy. which means I can share posts to facebook fairly easy. not that it was hard before, its just more convenient now, and as an american I demand that all things are easy.

I had a good idea for a comic that I started a number of years ago about the tiny evil monkies that live in my head. I think its gonna be about my add and my journey back to medication. I think that could encapsulate all of the monkey related hijinks and how I have come to terms with it. I have a couple of pages already drawn up and then stopped as it wasnt going anywhere at all. keep an eye out.

Taking classes at RISD currently and it’s going fairly well. Finished an anatomy class that really helped my figure drawing, just started a design class and I think I may be doing well.

Redraw

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Hmm. Been Busy. Yesterday was the last day of my anatomy class at risd. The class met six times, it was pretty short, but the teacher was wonderful and there was a lot of information that was immediately usable. I also met a few people and got the info on some figure drawing sessions around town.

I am registered for spring as well. I originally wanted to take a design class and a comics class but it turns out they’re on the same night at the same time. I had some worries about whether or not that would effect my financial aid award but it turns out not to be the case.

I did the ou line of a tattoo on a  friend. I do not have a picture and that might be for the best. I have discovered there is a lot more about tattooing that I am unaware that i am unaware of.  I would need to figure out a lot of the things that I don’t know, before I could even start to figure out how to do them, much less do them well and there is more to learn than I can from just doing.

Simply put: I need a teacher.

Here is an old drawing I redrew today. I was going to color it in photoshop but I forgot the specific steps.

crap forgot his tonsure

a noticeable lack of posting

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ugh. I don’t have photoshop on the laptop. I haven’t gotten the hang of gimp. My mac is to slow to do ANYTHING. I’ve been stupid busy with school and snow and the beginning of the semester at work. I have lots of drawings to put up, lots of things to write about and link to and shit, but i have no time. I am going to redesign the site with prtty pictures and such and ways to hire  me and rates and the like. so tired.

What I’ve done last couple of days

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Here are some drawings from this week and some others from the past that figure in with the new ones. The drawing on the  left is a study from a sketch book. The one on the right is from a comic about a girl who becomes the host for a symbiotic sentient alien algae. There is the requisite running from the government and falling in love with a robot. She eventually discovers another person also colonized by space algae but a red variety.  Together they find out they are basically algae royalty on opposite sides of a bloody war. Well as much as space algae has blood I guess. Sort of Romeo and Juliet in the future with space algae. I wrote the concept and some story at a time I was mildly obsessed with a blue haired girl.