9. "A (Non) Lack of Color"

Stayed up late last night adding some color to the illustration.

Quite happy with it so far. I think it's going to end up being this kinda monochromatic of browns. Working with flat colors first and then slowly building up layers of lighting and tone variations. I've still got a lot of layers to go before it's finished, especially on Bryan over there. He's more or less flat right now. I can't decide on how I want to do the background. Maybe a solid, flat brownish color to match everything else? I'm also thinking some kind of pattern, some kind of weeds or stalks that would match her hair. I dunno though.. That may take forever. But no rush, I want this to be as good as it can be.

8. Bryan and Leah Get Inked

I guess this should be a new post. Or should it be an edit? eehhhhh who gives. So, I am insanely pumped about the ink I did on this illustration. I scanned the sketch in to Photoshop at 600 dpi, which is ridiculously too high, but I'd rather it be bigger than small and grainy at any point (thats what sh--). Then I adjusted my photoshop brush to be smoother and with only 1 point spacing (something I read in some Photoshop tutorial back in the day). I was going to buy some actual brushes and a new bottle of ink, but I didn't feel like getting out yesterday. And I've inked on Photoshop before, and it's relatively as easy as on paper. Plus you can get some thin, thin lines when you zoom in and work close enough.

I have to say, I've finally achieved the kind of thick-to-thin line variation that I've been so envious of in other illustrators the past couple of months. Comparing this to my earlier attempt at Michael Cera and Clark Duke, these lines have so much more movement. I'm so happy with it. It's really rare I feel this satisfied with a work. It could use a lot more contrast here and there, so before I start adding colors, I'm gonna see what I can do with that. But so far, I'm liking it. The painstaking coloring stage comes next.

7. Bryan and Leah

Last night I did this sketch from a great photograph of my pals Bryan and Leah. I haven't been by Hobby Lobby to pick up brushes and there's a good Steve Zahn movie on Netflix (i say that like it's a channel), so I'm gonna stay in and just try inking this via Photoshop. I can still get the intended line variation I've been missing that way for now. I'm pretty stoked about this drawing. I'm gonna show the stages of its development, as it's the first one in a while I've wanted to as best as I can on. This is the first stage, just a sketch on some Bristol paper with a mechanical pencil at a Books-A-Million.

6. New Project

I've been inspired to draw a lot of things lately. I've been soaking up other illustrator's work, and I'm finally figuring out my "voice" and deciding to move forward with it.. start fine tuning it.

I've got a pen-name I was gonna use as a freelance design company once I finished school, but now that I'm doing similar stuff at work for my boss, no need to do much freelance anymore.

Instead, I think I'm gonna use the name, Flannel Animal, to start an umbrella company for some bookish projects I want to do in the future. The webspace has been purchased already, so I just gotta put it together when the time comes.

I can't seem to focus on The Fencer. I keep wanting to do illustrations, some monochromatic stuff mostly, from photographs I've saved on my computer over the years. I've got a folder full of photos of mopeds, people with jackets in poses that would make for a ton of beautiful line-work, nature scenes, etc. I just want to dive in and start drawing from these and enjoy this illustration itch. However, I don't like drawing without a purpose sometimes. So, to give myself one, I'm going to create a comic book sized collection of these experiments in illustration and put them together to be printed at the end of the month. I'm gonna try and call it "November in Drawings" or something. Think of it like a visual Sufjan Stevens album; a mix-mash of different subjects hopefully pulled together through color and layout.

Once it's finished, I'll get back to the Fencer with a better sense of ability.

BREAKING EDIT!

While I've been at Books-A-Million milking everything I can out of the $20 Membership card I got guilt-tripped into, I've been doing some sketching and browsing the internet for something I browse all the time with no results: the tools Matthew Woodson and other unbelievable illustrators use to get such great lines in their work. But alas, tonight I stumbled across it! An old tutorial from none other than Matthew Woodson that step-by-step spells out his inking process and exactly which pens and inks he uses. I knew it was some sort of brushes, because he mentions it in his blog from time to time. But now I know what to hunt for at Hobby Lobby next time I go. Too bad I just bought some more Micron pens today:(

This is a big day for me. I'm just glad I didn't ink these drawings I've been doing already. Whew.

5. Clark and Michael and a breath of fresh air

I hate that Teen Wolf drawing the more I look at it. It's just a mess of me trying too hard. Egh.. This weekend I got to look at this book 200 Best Illustrators in the World or something. I found two illustrators in Europe that seem to nail down exactly what I've been wanting to get to for a while now: Tanja Szekessy (left) and Jan Feindt (right)

Both illustrators just ooze incredible line variation. Feindt's linework is insane, but in his colorwork, he opts for a lot of shading and lighting. I'm leaning more towards the color palette of Szekessy, where she does beaaaautiful flat colors. I love the texture of her colors as well. Inspired by these two, I played around with this illustration of the great Clark Duke and Michael Cera. I see where I need to have a greater range in my line quality, but I'm very happy with my colors. I feel like I'm heading somewhere I really want to be now. More to come hopefully.

4. Teen Wolf Break

I'm moving into a new apartment because I'm getting married in April and want to have a place for me and the misses already set up. I've been wanting to kinda do some drawings/posters just for the enjoyment of it for a while, just to take a break from sequential art for a few days.

I've had an idea for a great, big Teen Wolf poster or painting to hang up in my new dining or living room, so I've been fooling around with this today. It's coming out a little flat and boring, it probably needs a lot more work later on. But so far I'm kind of excited about it.

3. Mo' pages, mo' peds, mo' problems...

I've fallen in love with flat colors and 1990s comics. The new coloring style has given me more energy to finish the first issue, though I haven't been working as hard as I should be each day. It's kind of tough finding the time to do a page a day like I need to outside of my actual job. But I've been able to get a few parts of a couple more pages recently. Instead of working straight through and penciling a full page before I move on to inks and colors is kind of hard. So most pages I have are done pieces at a time. It feels more like a digital collage sometimes, but it's also nice that way. A few pieces I've got so far I'm quite happy with and feel like showing here.

On another note, I've been looking at some old mopeds. I'm hoping to have one sometime soon in the future, but for now I just want to incorporate a 1980s model into The Fencer somehow. Maybe just in a background shot, or even better, maybe the main character uses one in future issues. Honestly, it would suffice enough just to do a large painting of this moped, maybe hang it above a couch or something. I just need to draw it, that's all, hah.

Having a job/career aside from this comic book endeavor (which, unfortunately at this point is just a hobby), and the pencil/ink/coloring all being a one-person attempt, it's impossible to make a month-to-month deadline. I gave myself certain deadlines because ideally, I would love for me and Scott to put out an issue every other month, just for ourselves and our friends. But I'm drastically past my deadline for this first issue, and it's taken so many months just to figure out how I wanted to illustrate it. But I have to remind myself it's just a fun thing right now, and I want it to be something beautiful when it's finished. So it's worth the months it takes.

However, we are expecting a little 8-page Series Preview we put together to be available in a week or so. It's just a little something to show ourselves that we've done good work so far, and to show others that we're definitely committed to following through on this project.

2. "It's a drawing. It's flat."

It's been 2 months (almost 3) that I've started trying to develop my drawing and illustration in order to get going on this series. I started off trying to knock out the first five pages of our first issue, trying to find out what the feel and look should be. Ask my fiance, she'll tell you how much I went back and forth just on these five pages alone. Every time I picked up a comic book, I'd say "it should be more like this". Very, very frustrating. I started out pencilling, inking, and then using heavy shading and tried a lot of "realistic"-looking lighting in the coloring stage. I see a lot of really, advanced coloring techniques in comic books these days that make every page look like a movie. I figured since it's all I ever see, that should be the goal. So I did the first five pages like this one on the left.

The feel was nice and all, it worked for the night time, but as soon as I got to a day scene, the "shiny plastic" shading and lighting didn't work at all. It just looked like it was trying too hard to be real. After playing with it for weeks and weeks, I could almost here one of my most influential college professors in my head. (He said this would happen when we graduated, hah) Mr. Mead, who I studied a year of figure drawing under, would ingrain in our heads about the masters of painting. So, as I struggled with these 5 pages, I could hear him reminding us that a drawing is first and foremost a drawing. It's not trying to trick the viewer into thinking it's an actual person or an actual chair, it's a two-dimensional representation of a person or a chair. So, inspired by Mr. Mead and a handful of early '90s Amazing Spider-man issues I got for a few bucks, I decided that The Fencer is a comic book. That's it. It's a series of pictures that are on flat pieces of paper. So I re-colored the pages without any fancy shading, this time freeing myself up to use cheesy '90s comic book colors and to appreciate my mistakes. I gotta say, I'm never turning back. It takes half the time, and it's a hell of a lot more fun.

1. On Guard!

Wait... I... I've been here before...

About a year or two ago, I was still in school trying to understand art and see if I enjoyed graphic design, when my writer pal Scott and I started trying to put life into a brief idea we had early on in college. I think I was reading Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and thought a masked vigilante on our college campus would be so exciting. Or at least, the idea of a masked vigilante on our college campus would be so exciting. I drew a first, very poor sketch of a figure in a fencing costume, called it "The Fencer" and kept it in a notebook forever.

Kudos (or a tasty treat) to Scott for giving it the breath of life a year later, when he wrote a pilot storyline for our new hero. He gave the character a set of friends, a motivation, an origin. All the great ingredients for a good story (which Scott knows all too well how to write).

So I got very excited and promised all these wonderful things to my friend Scott, about how we would have amazing characters and amazing stories and hundreds of issues to rival even Spider-man and the other Marvel legends. But then I realized... I hated how I drew, it would take forever just to do one issue, I had no idea which supplies I needed, and school was getting a bit tougher. And we both never talked about The Fencer again...

...until a few months ago, when I started picking back up on Ex Machina, a great comic book that, not only has an amazing story, but has art I could only dream of doing. I've graduated college, I'm working, and now I have no homework, and tons of free nights. So Scott and I started talking about our long lost idea again, and I started sketching out some improved renditions of our characters. I ended up finding a voice and style in illustration that I'm not always happy with, but is slowly starting to feel like my own.

I'm halfway through Issue #1 of The Fencer, and couldn't be more happy with the work. Scott's stories are pitch perfect, and I'm trying to draw from every source of illustration inspiration I can find among other comic books.

We had a blog before, in our first attempt at this, but I figure it's time to make a new one, one that will actually follow the completion of something. I can't wait to show what we're doing. It's really exciting:)