Turtle Soup 2

Some more background character work for Turtle Soup.

Since none of the background characters have any importance to the plot (not really, at least) and they exist purely for flavor, doing these sketches is basically just pouring my brain onto the paper. I'm not really thinking about much or looking at much reference (sometimes for uniforms and clothing), but it's more or less stream of conscious.

I am beginning to think that I am the true weirdo here.

Turtle Soup 1

I am working on a short comic for the second volume of The Anthology Project, along with a lot of really talented people. My story is called Turtle Soup and is about eating too much soup (sort of).

Here are some drawings of some guys that may or may not be in the story. I don't want to give away too much.


The story has two main characters and a lot of people in the periphery. The four-armed bigface you see on pages three, four, and five is one of the main characters, though those are all pretty wrong. I was working on a different story for awhile and that ate up a lot of my time and I drew a few designs (corpses and princes) for that story which were a shame to scrap. I'm trying to incorporate a few of my favorites into the background of this one. This thing will be done by the middle of November, so hold onto your butts because I'm going to try to keep you all updated on it as it goes. It's going to be a lot of fun to draw since I populated it entirely with weirdos and monsters and maniacs.

Here are some panel layouts. There are a few more pages to get tagged onto the end, and then I'm hoping to cull the story down to maybe 10-12 pages total. I have a couple more passes of thumbnails before I get into the real drawings.

I don't draw a lot of comics, but they're pretty fun.

Salamandurai

A small drawing I did for the dudes over at Drawforce. They do a monthly drawing topic and compile it all into a group blog. The topic for September was samurai. I've been thinking about salamanders recently. What is their deal.

I almost never do one-off character drawings anymore, but that is literally all I did for most of my adolescence. It feels weird to draw a character without an environment or context, but it's also an interesting challenge to try and pack as much narrative as possible into a design. Some different things become prioritized.

I took a character development class with Brian Ralph my junior year of college which really did a lot of good for my work and my sense of humor.

GIVEAWAY WINNERS!

Wow, amazing response, thanks everyone! I really appreciate all the nice comments and all the RTs on twitter as well. The winners, via random number generator are as follows:

1. Chris Colella!
2. Hannah Lee Stockdale!
3. Guy!
4. Mark Grambau!
5. David Huyck!
6. Katie Rose!
7. Pedro Paulo!

If your name is on that list, send me an email with your address and I'll get your print out as soon as possible! If you have a preference for what you get, let me know, but no guarantees, sorry. If you don't send me your info by Friday I'll choose another winner instead, so be quick about it. I'm going to try to send all of this stuff out next week.

A clarification: I WILL be making these prints, among others, available for sale sometime in the future, so if you didn't win one, you can still buy one from me. Just not until I can afford a large-format printer. I will even make it a contest. You can send me money and I will do use a random number generator (min: 1 max: 1) and then you will also be a winner.

Thanks again for the great turnout, and I hope some of you stick around for the next 200 posts.

GIVEAWAY

Hey everybody,

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who's followed my work here and on Picturebook Report. I just passed two hundred posts here, and to commemorate that I'm giving a few prints away:

This is the first time I've offered prints online and the first time these Hobbit prints have been available at all. This is also, I believe, the last time I will offer any prints until I buy a large-format printer (probably some time next year). All of the Hobbit prints are around 11x17", and the Transferring Risk prints are just tiny little guys.

All you've got to do to enter to win one of these is comment on this post. Anything you want. Liking this post on Google Reader nets you another chance to win, so there's an incentive to follow the blog! Tell your friends! I'll pick a few winners randomly in a week or so.

In other news, I am waist deep in Hobbit 6, and I hope to get it done sometime this week. I have been waylaid by unforeseen (and boring) work.

SPX was a great time, and everybody I met there was super great. So, if I met you there, you are super great. I hope to have a table next year.

Here is a bunch of the stuff Kali and I came home with:

edit: Since a lot of people asked, the Spider-Man print is by Joseph Lambert, who had a lot of amazing work at the show (Joe, we only met briefly! You talked mostly to my girlfriend Kali). The Captain America and Crossroads (blue) prints are from Michael Cho. We were only going to get one but couldn't decide and he was gracious enough to offer us a deal! I also bought a Cat Rackham print from Steve Wolfhard (top), who is hilarious. I picked up minicomics from a ton of awesome people, but the books Kali and I bought were Prison Pit #2 by Johnny Ryan, Indoor Voice by Jillian Tamaki, and The Venice Chronicles by Enrico Casarosa. They are, all of them, terrific.

Thanks for all the comments! The response is truly overwhelming. Contest is open until next week, so keep them coming!

Baryonyx

A small birthday gift for my little cousin, who likes dinosaurs. I also like dinosaurs.

This is Baryonyx. He eats fish and has giant thumbclaws. He's sort of like a doofy crocodile.

The end.

The Pitmen Painters

In the middle of that Naga Fireball job, I got a call from Jordan Awan at the New Yorker asking if I could turn something around really quickly for their upcoming issue. The assignment came in on Saturday afternoon with a Monday morning deadline, which was exactly when that Naga Fireball stuff was due! The time was cramped, but when I saw what the piece was about it was impossible to turn down.

The Pitmen Painters is an upcoming play focused on the true story of a group of miners who hire a professor to teach them Art Appreciation classes, and eventually painting classes.

Some sketches. The middle sketch was sort of a joke, but it's obvious what part of the art school life a regular blue-collar worker would appreciate the most.
The issue comes out this week.

Misc

A few miscellaneous pages from the sketchbook that I thought were kind of fun. The top are some sketches from the Naga Fireball assignment and the bottom are some severed heads surrounded by a few regular heads.

Eagles 2

Eagles are super hard to draw. I really like stretching them out and making them almost serpentine. Still have a lot of structural stuff to learn and there are a lot of crazy shapes under all those feathers.