Friday, October 29, 2010

Happy Halloween All- I have a few changes and some new info to announce

It's been officially one week since I started this blog and I've gotten very good feedback from everyone. This shows that I'm heading in the right direction, creatively. I'm really excited to see how this experiment turns out. The story, originally titled, City Girls is already changing as the days go on. Although I never wrote down the original synopsis it was supposed to be a weekly strip in the vain of Karl Steven's Whatever strip. Now, I've always liked to play around with everyday events and explore the behaviors of normal people in my comics. It's interesting to see how much can be said with a glance or simple body language. We, as humans, are very visceral beings, constantly contemplating and communicating. Our experiences make us who we are and sometimes who we are determines the quality of our experiences. I wanted City Girls to address topics based on these core ideas.

Of course...that is not what I am working on at the moment. I have a new project stemming from City Girls with a working title called 99 Dreams in the works.

What I can tell you about 99 Dreams is that it will be a series with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  • It will take me a long time to draw and write.
  • I love the idea so far.
  • It involves a girl named Vivian who seems to have recurring dreams featuring a mysterious man.
  • And yes, there will be masks!
I plan on keeping you in the loop every step of the way as I develop this story. My approach will be to produce a finished page before I start the next page. Usually I work in an assembly line manner, in which I pencil all of the pages and then ink all of the pencils once they are done. I want to try this different approach of finishing each page as they come (pencils then inks, colors, lettering) like a weekly strip. We'll see how it goes. For now, please enjoy my refined pencils for the first page so far (I still have plenty of work to do).

Here is a light box that I got about two years ago. It allows me to draw on top of my rough sketches on a new piece of paper to get a more refined look. I picked up this technique from taking a screen printing class at SSC in which I had to do a lot of transfers. It's not a new process, and in fact many comic artists use this process including Leinil Francis Yu and Scott Hampton. I remember even seeing my drawing professor, Haig Demarjian use this technique when inking so that he could preserve his initial pencils. I used this process for my adaptation of Sonny's Blues in which I inked over my pencils on a fresh piece of paper. I have almost all of the original pencils preserved from that project.
What you see above is a tiled print of my original rough illustration. I blew up the initial drawing, which was just 6 inches high, in photoshop, to a full-size print so that I could draw on top of it (See below). Then I printed it out in Adobe Illustrator. In Illustrator there is a function called "tile printing". It's helpful when you don't have a photocopier handy and you don't want to drive to FedEx Office. As long as you like putting together puzzles you can tile print to just about any size. 

 This is the initial drawing that I posted earlier in the week blown up to a 6"x10" format. I then put a fresh sheet of Canson Comic book art board on top of it and started to draw. I sometimes need to have a "skeleton" to work on top of so that I get my bearings
Here is the result so far. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I have much more work to do for the setting and tweaks to the figure. As usual, there is more to come! Check in next week and have a great Halloween!
We have creatures living in our basement!


Monday, October 25, 2010

City Girls- Life Is Too Short

 Okay, this is going to be the first page of the first edition of City Girls. I plan on showing you the entire process as it unravels. 
This came first but I wanted to show you the result as it's much more refined.

 As you can see here I have included the original reference photo for my sketch. I even went a little further here and demonstrated how I could further manipulate the photo. I could have done this retouching and then printed the photo (I don't draw in front of the computer) and used it as reference. I think that you'll agree that my illustration would have been drastically different.
 This is a test. This is a test. THIS IS A TEST. thIs Is A tEst. test a is this. .tset a si siht Tihs is a tset.
This coincides with the original "City Girls" poem that I posted up on the 22nd. I'm posting this to show you how an idea can truly influence another years down the line. Yes, this is a shirt that I used to wear back in my hipster days at SSC. I bought it at my first real concert back in 2005. Oh, those were the days...

Saturday, October 23, 2010

City Girls Day 2


I am prepping myself for the initial story arc. I will have some thumbnails up very soon. For now please enjoy these two sketches.

-Josh