October Warm-Ups

Hello, friends. Just figured I'd post something, just to let y'all know that I'm not dead. Here's a color-blocking sketch for a piece I'm working on, sorta on-and-off-again. It's gonna be about witches. Bayou-dwelling witches. In other words: the very best kind.

Meanwhile, I am squidinking pages for thesis, drinking actual gallons of tea and watching old episodes of Ranma on Hulu. The latter two comprise my keen strategy for trying to get over this big honkin' headcold I've got. Because frankly, I think I was over it the moment I came down with it.

The Ward

The first short from my thesis project, a collection of vignettes set in a high fantasy world. (This one is also the pitch for my hot new sitcom: Two and A Half Bandits.)

It's ALIVE

Man, it is getting so fuckin' lovely and crispy-cool outside, as autumn steps forward here in Baltymore, at last. Also, harooooooooo!

Only three weeks in, and thesis is already devouring every ounce of my time. I've set myself a fairly rigorous schedule which basically leaves me cranking out pages all the livelong day. I'm psyched...it's the most concentrated comicking I've been able to do since I got here, and it feels really right. I can feel myself learning a lot as I go. My brush is also not a fickle little inkbeast anymore...we've reached some semblance of understanding, it and I.

Above is a sneak preview of the first vignette in my collection of fantasy short stories. Hopefully I'll have these first three pages scanned and posted by the week's end! Much, much more to come.

For now, back to squidinking.

Pangolin No Go

I have a pan-goliiiiin...we play go all night loooong...it makes me waaant to kill myself...

This illustration is from way back in the beginning of the summer! I totally spaced on posting it until now, though I'm pretty sure I immediately sent it tumblr-weedin' about. Hmm. (I've always been someone who's had enough trouble paying attention to stuff as simple as my phone, so social media gets tough to keep track of.) 

For my faithful few: thanks for still reading, dudes. I'll probably be tossing up a bunch of sketches and character portraits from my upcoming collection of comics for my projected thesis...I made sure to finish penciling the first few pages before going to SPX, so I could go guilt-free. (More about that later...I'll probably make a second post after I scare up some dinner.)

Dogerpillar

Well, this happened.

The Most Important Meal

You know you're a cartoonist wheeeeeeennnn....all of the above.

Snacks and Squidinking Still

Man, this feels nice. I made a short comic last year, that I hadn't finished filling in solid blacks on, so I'm squidinking the pages before I head off for my closing shift tonight. (Firmly putting that out of my mind now.) Listening to The Breeders while I work seals the deal, as does rendering the Triple Ginger Snaps (just offscreen) an endangered species.

True Stories, All

Comics! Quick, poorly scanned ones from my sketchbook, about yours truly and the glamorous life I lead. 

 Usually, I'm pretty relaxed about co-habitating with beetles, spiders, and other little critters: bugs generally don't scare me. But dang. Thousand-leggers, man. (Or house centipedes...whichever you call them depends on where you're from, I guess.) Seriously, though. Those guys are fuckin' fast. Even if I know they're benevolent, and only want to snack on other housebugs...I just can't deal with all those legs.

The Girl With Hair Like THIS

Oh man, dudes. I could draw the inimitable Bryan Lee O'Malley's Ramona Flowers all day. There's plenty of terrific fan-art of this character out there, but it seems most of the ones I've seen depict her just kinda...standing around, wearing nice clothes? I decided to remedy this.

(I also just love the idea of her regularly using her subspace bag as a sidecar for Scott whenever she's impatient to get someplace at rollerblade speed.)

Crowbar Couture

A sloppy, ten-minute ink warmup that was super inspired by zis man. His ink work is absolutely gorgeous. Mine...not so much, hahaha. But it was really liberating to get back to traditional inking. I feel like I have trouble drawing fashionable ladies without making them menacing.

(I don't think it's a problem, though.)

Run, Don't Walk

Woah, hey! I made a thing! A thing for a Clamp fanzine that some friends of mine are putting together. In the wild days of my misspent youth, I ended up reading a ton of this kind of manga, but I can't say I have a single regret. If you have no idea what Clamp is, then damn...you should get yourself a shojou education. 

The group is super-prolific, and out of all the works they've made, I decided to make a tribute to one of their more unabashedly absurd titles, Duklyon: Clamp School Defenders, which is a zany parody of the metal hero genre. My favorite part is near the end, when an antagonist turns the heros' dog Inuko-San into a dangerous kaiju monster simply by making her really huge. The resolution is splendidly silly.

But yeah! Everybody worked real hard on the zine, and it came together nicely. Check it out, if you can!

Creepin'

Creeeeeeeeeeeepin'.

Finally managed a lineup of the characters that my friends and I made...they're for the campaign we're currently playing in. From right to left: Ben's character Gronningor, our resident grizzly tank; Helgora, Jabari's duty-bound, portal-slinging messenger; Eule, Jon's owlish bard/healer; and Gren, my scheming contortionist art thief. 

Maybe if I have some time, I'll add a couple NPCs.

Etch-A-Sketch

Just some quick character designs I'm revisiting for a future story idea. Got to do a lot of awesome research on traditional Nepalese costumes for this...studying history and anthropology while hunting for reference pictures is one of my absolute favorite parts of being an illustrator. (If there were a position akin to a visual art dramaturg, man, that would be the job for me, hahaha.) 

More to come soon...updates featuring zine submissions, comic strips and probably some party art for a few campaigns I've played in. Hang on to those hats, hapless readers!

Little Annie Oakley

A warm-up that's basically amounted to me playing with brooshes in Photoshoop. Broosha-broosh!  St. Vincent's knack for contained chaos has always blown me away: she wields that guitar like it's a goddamn weapon. 

More to come, soon. More stuff that's blended with traditional mediums...I promise that I'm not just going to use this blog to document my wince-worthily inept forays into wrapping my head around digital illustration, haha.

Sociopathic Space Gnomes

Quite possibly the best drawing I will ever make, in my entire life? Yes. These are the characters I and my friend Rez made, respectively, for my roommate Jabari's fantasy/space-opera/metaphysical mindfuck of a homebrew, called Lucid. Quiblyn and her little brother, Mongrel are both Jovys, which are basically space gnomes in the world of the game...except where Joyvs are usually cautious arcane tinkers, Quiblyn and Mongrel are like two loose cannons. She's a maverick weapons engineer, whereas he's the muscle who tests her heretical creations in the field. (She's currently working on smithing a sort've proto-tommy gun in a world where any firearms technology hasn't really surpassed flintlock pistols yet.) They're less than four feet high, but they're kind've unabashedly a pair of sociopaths. With cockney accents.

Pretzel-Rogues

Some loosey-goosey sketches of the character I made for a tabletop RPG my friends and I are playing in. (It's my friend Rez's homebrew, Creep, which is ten kinds of rad.)

Gren is a professional art thief, bent on taking full advantage of the war-torn age our campaign is set in. (He met up with the rest of the party after looting a manor abandoned by its aristocratic inhabitants before their town was lain siege to.) He's also a contortionist, which helps him get out of some pretty tight spots while thieving, or running away from adversaries. I was excited for the challenge of  making a character who was definitely not proficient on a battlefield--my last Creep character was a brawler.

Street Portraits

So I saw this guy hanging around a few doors down from the cafe I was headed towards, so I decided to make a quick drawing. He was all slouchy and languid, and looked sort've like Mugen from Samurai Champloo. (Not really.) 

In other news, Baltimore is melting. Thought y'all ought to know.

Slow Progress

Comickiiiiiiiiing! So hey, dudes. This is what I've been working on....more to come rather soon, once it's officially finished. I wish I could work on it and all the stuff bouncing around in my frizzled headspace all the time....some day, my friends. Some day.

Barnburner

Yeah, I think she won that one. A warm-up sketch from last week which essentially amounted to me super-wishing that I was boxing again.

In other news, school's out for the summer! (My last student-summer: what a strange realization.) This being said, I'm gonna make the most of it by rolling up my sleeves and getting busy making all kinds of crazy stuff. More updates to come...see ya when I see ya, dudes.

Bean Nighe

My junior independent, or mini-thesis. I've always loved the spirits and monsters that inhabit celtic/gaelic folklore, so I decided to write a story about a Scottish banshee, or bean nighe. Also called 'the little washerwoman,' a bean nighe was a portent of death, and could be seen scrubbing the bloodstained clothes of those who were soon to breath their last. Not too much is known about where the washerwomen come from, though there's a range of speculation: some traditional legends suggest that these ghoulish harbingers were once human women who died in childbirth, cursed to carry out this role for the duration of what would have been their 'full' lifespan. This story offers my own take.

Primordial Seedling

This one was for a pretty rad project. My teacher drew from a science book featuring a series of questions compiled by children about the world we live in, and the answers were each written by experts in a corresponding field. The specific prompt I got was "Where did the first seed come from?" and the answer, by a botanist, was fascinating. She discussed how some of the most primordial plants (such as ferns) reproduce by spores instead, and then when early plant life later began developing true seeds, they were similarly hardy. Most grew a tough, waterproof outer-casing: so durable that they could actually make long journeys over sea. (Think of how coconuts travel!) Pretty unbelievable.

My piece featured a gouache painting, and that graphic purple seed was done digitally, then printed on a transparency layer that went over the traditional painting, and revealed parts underneath. This presentation was inspired by a children's book about animals published by Nobrow. A gif seemed to be the only way to translate the work for online viewing, hahaha.

The Standoff...

Hey, all! I've got some nonsense to unload on you good folk over the next few days...mostly stuff that got done over my semester. (Second to last, and it's already almost in the past tense. Life is pretty good!)

This one was for an editorial assignment...I was given an article about the first amendment, and how people have been trying to bend the law to censor rap music. I like to think this judge is doing so because he's a metal-head....that is no wig, my friends.

More to come soon!

Rink Rash Abound...

Dang. I can't stop drawing roller derby girls...it's the most splendid compulsion. They're just so goddamned fierce! Like if Amazons knew about toe stops. I have so much admiration...playing in a bout is my secret life ambition. There might have to be a future comic featuring a derby team.

Anywho! More to come in the future...I still have buttloads of comic pages that just need to be cleaned up and scanned from before the holidays. (Gah! So lazy!) Stay tuned, y'all...