sunstone comic! (being born)

In case you didn't know, Sunstone is doing an issue for Mormon Comic Artists. (Woot!)

The deadline is coming up and I am getting serious with the pages allotted to me.

So, after months of drawing around the images/concepts, playing with style, taking them off into all sorts of random directions, I am now bringing it all together; taking all the loose ends and trying to coax them together (sometimes with gentleness, sometime with bailing wire), filling in the gaps that I've neglected up until now, ironing out the awkward transitions, etc.

For your entertainment, here's my written synopses (complete with links to the various images/ideas/concepts that haves been my studies for the past year. Warning, a good number of the images are fairly graphic.)

What I'm working on in particular:

~making the shocking imagery more subtle, finding the fine line between challenging and outright offensive and off-putting.

~balancing the gender aspect of it.

~finding the gaps that leave the reader/viewer confused.

~making it sequential (I am better at single panels but need sequence to tell this story)

~ etc

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Anyhow, feedback, thoughts, (constructive) criticisms are suggestions are welcome :)

#draw365 (now 65 days in)

I am now 65 days into my #draw365 experiment.

A couple of items of interest:

~I discovered a vibrant and active community of other #draw365-ers on Twitter and that creative interchange has been extraordinarily stimulating.

~Right around day 52 I really started to feel like I was making some break throughs in my method and process.

~The past couple of days, I have spent quite a bit of time polishing and cleaning up and editing the 'sketches' (digital illustrations, really.)

~I miss charcoal and paint and fast sketching. I mean, I am really liking the drawings I am doing right now, but when I look at some of the pieces being produced by other #draw365-ers, it makes me want to pull back a bit from photoshop, and take a detour back into some hands-getting-messy materials.

~I think I need to set a time limit. A friend recommended this and it really resonated. One obvious plug for a time limit is that I'm busy with lots of other things on my plate... but that's not the real reason. I am remembering exercises we did in an illustration class where we had 30 min to quick-draw out some concept and discovering that I did really good work when I couldn't afford to over-work/over-think it.

So there you go.
I have another 300 drawings to go.
We'll see where this takes us.

dirty sex

[Warning, this post contains disturbing content.
View at your discretion.]
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So, Nancy Elliott recently went off
on a graphic and explicit rant about
gay sex.
Makes me wonder
what her thoughts are about
lesbian sex.

365 sketches

If nothing else, I am hoping to accomplish at least that this year. A drawing a day. A sketch rather, usually done quite quickly, then scanned in and clean up in Ps. I've been doing them at the end of the day and while I usually have an idea what the sketch will be, I find that most times it takes on it's own life and mind as I move the pen across the page.

I'm also finding that I do not have that knack for knowing when to stop: I frequently over-work the sketch.

Also, I am discovering a tendency for disturbing imagery to emerge. I have a sketch for every day, but several of them I have on private simply because they are fairly graphic. (I blame it on that whole "mind of it's own" thing. It's not me. Really.)

There's a lot of other goals I have for this year as well (things like brushing up on my digital art skills, getting some computer programing knowledge, launching my web-comic, doing a painting a week, doing more with my etsy account, etc.) But we're already a month into 2010 and so far, I'm doing good to just put out a sketch a day.
(Interesting note: it was only last spring that I started drawing again. I had been on artistic sabbatical for quite a while before that. So, at least it's something.)

published

Bloody Eve is in print.
Well, one copy anyways, self-published.
To hand over to my instructor so I can get a final grade on the course I signed up for last year.
It has A LOT of mistakes: In the writing, in the style, in the flow, in the medium, in the editing, processing, formatting (etc etc etc). But they were good mistakes, the 'learning-from-them' kind, and since this is my first time, I'm okay with them (well, I can tolerate them, for now, at least. As long as next time is better. Yah.)

But here you go, if you want to see a preview of what it looks like in book form (it doesn't show the last few pages, but those are only a collection of sketches and paintings anyways; a sort of last minute add-on appendices I used to pad the page count)

Here's the final images:

Starting with the cover, front and back

Then the inside pages:Then there's this other two page spread that I ended up taking out of the story line, adding it at the end as part of the appendices (with the some of the other Eve vs the Angel images):

So there you go.
Be gentle, I'm new at this.

pgs 9 - 12

So, it took me months and months to do the first 6 pgs, but now in less than a week I have started burning through the last 6 with a good deal of ease and excitment. Yay for the holidays being over!! (Yes, I blame it all on xmas.) And also, Yay for neighbors who watch my son in the afternoons so I can get a few more hours up to my elbows in paint. (And too, I should credit the decision to remove almost ALL of the text/diologue. That has really helped me out. Words are so not my thing.)
(These are not finished, by any means, and two pages are on another panel that I neglected to photograph, but I thought I'd throw this up here anyways.)

Note to self:

don't quit your day job.
(or.... um, find a day job.)