All books on etsy!

It is done.

All of my books from this summer are now on etsy. Peruse with abandon if you wish.

Plus, I'm offering discounted pricing if you order all three books together. Here's the specific item for that offer: Adventure Underfoot, Sketchbook, Collected Works book trio
Buying the three books together this way costs $34 (29 + 5 shipping if you're in the US). Ordering each book separately would normally be $39 (32 + 7 shipping in the US). Five dollars off! You can use that $5 you save to go see a matinee!

New poster and Adventure Underfoot volume 1 on etsy!

I finished another poster for a show on November 1. It's creepy skull time!Thanks to Tom Smo for the color tips and time saving suggestion of doing the poster as a 1 color print.

Also, I'm going to be selling copies of Adventure Underfoot vol. 1 on etsy too. Behold!
I'm going to be posting the other books I made this summer for comic con. They should all be up by Saturday so stay tuned if book-things are your thing.

Adventure Underfoot 1+2 is finished and printed!

Holy bones, and just in time for comic con! Only 3 issues more to go but you people don't need to wait that long :D I printed a total of 120 copies in the first limited run. All of the covers have been screen printed by hand to boot.

I printed two cover versions, about 100 of the Skeletor Flavor and 20 of the Cringer flavor.

Here's all 120 drying on this basement table.

Page preview dump!






You can see more process photos from the cover printing here.

I'm going to be bringing about 50 or 60 to Comic Con next week, so if you're dying for a copy you can track me down there. I'm going to be wandering around a bunch so email me if you want my cell number to reach me. I'll be selling the screen printed ones afterwards too and I'm probably going to try to put the book up on Lulu too, so it should be pretty accessible.

Fallen Valkyrie in progress

Last edit: finished her up!
Edit: A work in progress I posted earlier today. This should be done by Sunday (Happy Mothers day).I'm working on lightening the background and adding more of what some call "contrast". Curious...
I keep getting distracted from my Daily Demons... I'll return soon!

Also, check out the Adventure Underfoot Page Count meter I added in the sidebar! I'm at 40 of 120 pages now. That brings me near the end of issue 2. My goal is to have the book finished before Comic Con and now that I'm unemployed (gasp!) it might really happen.

Stuff nobody never sees: my comics!

No political commentary today, only art! First things first with some photos of the comic I'm working on. The first issue is going to be done by January (out of 5) but I'm probably going to wait until they're collected and make one graphic novel out of them. They'll be online somewhere, so I'll post that.

Complete with floating heads of snails! I keep running up a deficit on pages with uninked lettering. Lettering cramps my wrist pretty quickly so I'm putting it off.

Doug and Ben at their finest. Seen here is Doug with his white shirt. I've gotten instruction on comics to add dark shapes to the backgrounds to advance the page's composition. But if you have a character that serves as a dark focal point you already have a repeating, common element among your layouts.

I changed Doug's shirt to black after reading Stephen Destephano's blog post about spotting blacks on your main character. It helped to finally hear it again and be in a place to try it.
Some sample underground inking. This is going to make issues 3, 4, and 5 really awesome since they take place mostly in a cave.

This morning I have page 11 half inked out of 24. Pardon they grey distorted photos, but scanning is intense at 7:15 am. I'm reserving self critique on this stuff for now since I've known from the start that page 1 is going to look like rubbish compared to page 120. If I keep trying to fix every mistake I'll never get the thing done. I'm trying to learn from it, so that should work.

So look back here around January for the complete first issue! It may be a while until the next one!

I see fireflies almost every night

Things are busy, but good! If I'm not mistaken, this is the first color image of any of the characters from my upcoming comic. It looks like Doug and Ben just ran off with some loot! Optimism tells me I'm going to start penciling pages in August, which means the story will be written by then. It's very close, but I need to run by some of my key ideas by some good friends of mine who are better versed in scriptwriting and pacing than I. I better get another VA form ready...

of things relating to bugs...

New stuff progress drawings for the bug comic! Check out Doug and Ben:

I'm starting to move away from just head/outfit studies and beginning to pose the characters. Here's Doug fighting his way up a rocky stream bed with an injury in his side.

I still need to keep a tight check on their proportions, especially once they start moving away from static poses. No real model sheets yet, but I'm building reference for them. I'm close!

Here's an ink test I did of Araxia on some nearly ok paper.

Again with the planning! I just started playing around mostly with a #2 brush and a liner brush. I was surprised at how much fine line detail you can get out of those long bristles (mostly on Araxia's facial features). I had a couple of overly thick spots and I didn't really plan out the pattern on her back at all (notice the stripes versus spots). I need to get some pictures of real wolf spiders...

Here's a side by side of one old drawing of Walter (1) and the two newer ones on the right (2 and 3). Look at the progression!

I didn't realize how far Walter had developed from when I had my first positive results. You can see he started out looking pretty young and beamish (what I'm going for with Doug and Ben). I'm slowly pressing him into becoming older and more wizened. His character is kind of a streetwise advisor and guide to the two young bugs, so I want him to look (dare I say it?) wizardish! You can see by my note that he's sort of dressed like a Jedi. I'll be fixing that! I just noticed that his shell has gotten bigger too...

And, probably the best bit of development lately, I've settled on a look for Graves.

I may make some small adjustments to his face but I've established some pretty simple intervals that make his look easy to replicate. This helps! It usually seems that if I can create a small series of alignments or rules on a characters face it's alot easier to make it more consistent over different expressions, stay on model, whatever you please.

I think I'm headed in a good direction. We'll see how it goes. Time to eat!

Meet Doug and Ben!

Aside from getting the screenprinting set up together lately I've been trying to stay on top of getting things together to make this bug comic. I have the main characters named (most of them are near sure), the beginnings of some dialogue written and I'm making myself put together some model sheets to have around. Three of the main characters have been worked around enough so that I feel like I should have some solid reference in front of me. So, please introduce youself to Doug and Benny! Doug is a June Beetle and Benny an Earthworm. Together they form a pretty ripping thieving team, but I can't divulge too much info on you. I was excited by these drawings (mostly because of how Doug came out, Benny has been near complete for a while now) and wanted to share. I hope you enjoy the wayward lines, since I don't erase much recently.

I've got a lot to take care of to get this thing together (and other projects in the meantime), but there should be more good stuff soon too! I still need to cement 4 other main characters (crap!) and I'll post as to their progress.

I've been posting more regularly lately on Literary Debacle, a group reading based sketchblog my friends and I participate in. Check it out if you haven't, we've been doing alot of drawings based off of Greek mythology and Robert E. Howard. I'm reading some Conan right now by Howard and it's awesome! Reading is fundamental.

The spider is delighted!

I've been having some good progress with the core characters lately, especially after a few evening / breakfast coffee shop sessions. Observe!



This is what came out of looking at some june bug photos. Before I was having a hard time with this character (the humanoid ones, in fact) because I was drawing them too closely to traditional comic book human proportions. I think I was trying to make a beetle guy that was about 6 heads tall and it looked weird! I shrunk the proportions some, so that now he's about 3.5 heads tall.

If you're unfamiliar with head height measuring, look at a character or draw one. You can measure their proportion's roughly by dividing their height by the height of their head (it's not an exact science, so just use your thumb or a pencil as a measurement reference if you want). I think in the 90s most superhero comics had an average heroic proportion of 6 to 7 heads tall. Another comic art book I saw sort of recently (I'm blanking on the title) I think called 7 heads the minimum height for a superhero, with some examples up to 8 or 9. Anyways, proportions like that work great for human characters, but it makes sense to have bugs with smaller proportions well... because they are small! Feel free to correct me on any of this.

Anyways, the beetle is moving along well and so are the spider and worm...


She just looks like she's up to mischief! One thing I use as a gauge to decide whether or not a character is coming along well is how easily I can get them moving or active. These characters are challenging, since most of them have at least 6 limbs (the spider 8) and I don't want to cheap out. If anything it seems like the extra limbs are going to lend themselves really well to body language (like the beetle sketch in the first image where he can shout with two hands and point with his other pair. That's just darn cool!) I'm hoping to get some good gestures out of them and the more used to a character I am typically the easier it gets.




What adventure story would be complete without a rockin lady worth rescuing? I still need to do some thinking on this one, but I'm feeling good so far. She started more or less looking human, and then like a human with anteannae. Not cool! Since the beetle doesn't have a nose I tried the girl without one too and made her head rounder. That brings us to here, the start of a cute bug girl.

I've been trying to steer clear of the bug suit thing I mentioned before and I don't want to pioneer the dark and lonely path of bug furries either (I know I wouldn't be the first! yikes...) Are things anthropomorphic enough without being creepy?

Ok, time to read! I'm almost done with The Colour Out of Space and I just had some tea. I'll probably pass out shortly regardless. Until then, party on!

Creepy Spider!

I'm just starting to work on a comic / graphic novel project. I've done short comics before (1 to 8 pages) but never anything larger. I'm hoping this will help me cut my teeth on writing and composing something longer, say, in the neighborhood of 60 to 100 pages.

The setting is going to be a adventure story with bugs. I've shared the story outline with some friends but I've barely started writing the script. Meanwhile I've begun putting together the characters. Here's a page from my sketchbook with a villanous spider from the story:


I started out with the more spider-faced sketches and moved towards the anthropomorphized ones. The spider (and all of the characters) have a way to go, but things are off to a fun start. I need to get some solid reference before I get too far into things. I did a few more pages of characters before the caffeine in my tea jittered my arm up something fierce... I'll save those for later perhaps.

You may notice a blurred seam along the center vertical of my scans. My sketchbook is too large for my scanner so I have to piece full pagers together in photoshop. A tabloid scanner would be darn fancy, but I'm getting along for now with my letter size..