Miscellany

Oops.

I don't really mean that.

I finally got a new computer, which is nice. It means I can work on large files without worrying that it's going to freeze and I'll lose all of my unsaved work. Really not fun.

Anyway, school's started up this week, so I'll have a steady stream of work to post in the coming months, both from my thesis (more on that next week) and from my Illustrated Book class (more on that later in this post), and from external projects (more on that right now).

I was asked to submit something to Image's Popgun Anthology, and I jumped at the chance. I jumped a little too far, though, and I've since had to scale back my original idea, which I will finish at some point.

My first story that I came up with is called The Magnificent Zhao. I roughed out mostly the whole thing, and it ended up being around ten pages of drawings with a light sprinkling of text. The script isn't really anything concrete, so I won't bother posting it. It's really a lot of sighing and then a bit about some other stuff and then a declaration. Here's the first page. I intend(ed?) to add some very light color in either digitally or with some washes of paint (after the thing is totally sealed).
It's done in Charcoal, watercolor, and graphite and is about fifteen inches high. Here's some more stuff from the same project. This is a little sketch I did in my watercolor notebook which, I think, kick-started the idea in my head, though the final story has nothing to do with any of this.
Here's the original rough character designs for Zhao (lil bro) and his unnamed death (big bro). There's younger Zhao towards the bottom.
After I decided to table TMZ for the time being, I went ahead and did what any sensible person would do. Wrote a funny little story with no outline and no forethought and decided that was just about what I wanted to do. After that, I guess I realized that comics have pictures and decided that I ought to fomulate some characters. Unfortunately the top of the page was cut off, which detailed my splendid little names for what characters I needed (guy one, guy two, guy three, king, werewolf). Here's some faces, none of which really work for me.
Something started to work on that second page, but it's not entirely figured out.

There's an upcoming show at the Read Street Tattoo parlor here that's monster related, so I've been thinking of things for that. I wanted to draw something upside down, so I drew this vampire. He's pretty silly. I'm getting pretty comfortable sketching right into photoshop. It's like painting, but without all of the mess or necessary technical skill.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm taking Illustrated Book with Alan Comport this semester, which is a neat little gem of a class where we spend the entire semester working on imagery for a single piece of text. I'm not 100% certain, but I think I'm going to be doing Shadows Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft, which is a nice little story about people marrying fish-frog monsters and their misadventures. Here's a little fish-frog doodle, again done in CS3.

I have my thesis presentation tomorrow morning where I have to talk about what I'm going to be doing for the whole semester before I decide to stop everything and scribble monsters in my notebook. I'll post the whole of my thesis essay next week, and maybe my sketches for week one.

Thanks for commenting, guys. I always love to hear what people are thinking and to see that people still come to this drafty old mine even throughout my absence. Way to pull through, champs.