More Old Folks

This batch is a little bit better; I feel like I'm getting more comfortable with the Wacom tablet and picked up a few more stylistic ideas. I'm especially fond of that second one, but tend to lean away from that style for anything sequential related--stuff like that tends to get really busy and hard to read if not done really carefully.

Gonna have to wrap up the sketching sometime soon and actually get my hands dirty (hopefully this weekend). I've been brainstorming for Pretzelberger strips and have at least one idea that I'm pretty excited about. Also, I think I'm going to be brush inking and hand lettering all of the Pretzelberger strips I do over the summer, so hopefully the quality is a little bit better. I have to say, I'm a little worried about the lettering, especially since it'll be so different visually from all of the older strips... but we'll see how it goes.

Old Ladies

In an effort to keep myself from slipping too far into my typically hedonistic summer lifestyle of drug-crazed orgies and riot instigation, I'm making an effort to keep myself distracted by drawing pictures of elderly women.

I'm trying to keep myself on a regimen of one per day, at the moment. All of these were drawn (with photo reference courtesy of our friend google images--feel free to look up any combination of the words "old" "elderly" "lady" and "woman" if you'd like to see how poorly I draw) in Painter 9 (which I'm currently trying to learn) using this nutty thing I've had since like 1996 that passes for a Wacom tablet.

The elderly ladies are practice for a short story I plan on drawing this summer for SCAD's next anthology, which prominantly features a woman of age. This year's theme is going to be Pantomime (which apparently means they're looking for "silent" comics). Though it's not entirely fleshed out yet, I've got a concept that I feel good about at the moment--it's working in my head, anyway, so hopefully I can cram it from there into the maximum 8 pages that SCAD's allowing (which has become an annual struggle for me, apparently).

As I've got the whole summer to finish this one and polish it up, I'm going to make a real effort to get it looking as nice as I possibly can. My previous two efforts for these anthologies have been far more rushed than I'm comfortable with, and the artwork was mostly a disappointment on both. Hopefully, things will be different this go around.

Being An Account Most Unprecedented in Nature

I doubt I can even begin to describe how much fun this project was. Believe it or not, the original assignment was to pencil and ink 4 pages from a "Ghost Rider" Marvel-style comic plot--as you can see, I took it upon myself to take certain, er, liberties with that basic idea. I finally got around to digitally coloring the pages this quarter, and, for the most part, I am well pleased with the results. It would have been nice to have some more time to spend touching things up, but after a while the cost : benefit ratio on stuff like that just starts to skyrocket and one just has to decide when enough is enough.

My only big concern with the coloring is that page two isn't well-enough unified with one and three. The bump up on saturation in the fourth one is intentional and (i think) turned out the way I wanted it to; my main concern is that the saturation in the second one competes with it and might lessen its overall impact. I wanted to use color to make the difference in environment real obvious between the last panel and the previous ones, which worked--but I think the page's overall unity was compromised. This is fairly minor, but it taught me that I'm going to need to pay more attention not only to the overall harmony between the panels of each individual page, but also between the pages of each project.

Originally, the characters were far more foul-mouthed than they are in this version--I still think "burn, you bastards" and "get out of the road, rim jobber" are infinitely more amusing, but one of my professors asked if he could submit the black and white linework of this piece for use in the Sequential Art section of SCAD's next catalogue, so I figured it would be wise to tone things down a bit.

Oh, and Dopey McHurtsalot in the top right quarter of page 4 is undoubtably the best thing I've ever drawn in my life.