Le-Crunch duex!

So work is underway on Hardcoreasaurus 2. Just figuring out the plot for now and doing a few character sketches here and there. I figure now is the best time to do it while I don't have any professional work going on. Also because it's full of inside jokes and I want to get it done before all the people involved with the first one move away or grow up too much. Not only that, but it's been 5 months since I finished the first. If this one also takes me a few months, then I'd say that's pretty good timing for a comic book sequal.

I also have some exciting news (for me at least) but I'm gonna stay hushed up about it for at least this weekend if not all this upcoming week.

Ben Grim

New drawings.

I might color them soon.

Stumptown Report

First of all I just want to say that no matter what, I need a booth next year. But more on my next year plans after the report.

The first day was pretty horrible. Not the con (fest?) itself, just my experience of it. I didn't sell any Hardcoreasaurus books (I did trade a few, though) and I was really nervous the whole time. It was hard talking to people to make any contacts. I brought $40 in singles to use as change for people buying the book. I ended up spending it all on comics and taco bell. I'm glad I did spend so much in the long run because I got some awesome stuff, but since my brother gave it to me and I was supposed to pay him back... yeah. I did meet a couple of cool people, but mostly I just felt like an ass most of the time and I felt annoying when I tried hanging out at the RCC table. I mean I know I was kicked out and all but I'm still friends with the guys... I thought.

[drama]

Okay I think this needs addressing since it was a pretty big issue for the con. Now... I want to be proffessional and mature about this, so I don't want to say anything out of anger. BUT I am pretty ticked about the whole situation. As much as I understand that it's my own fault I got kicked out since I didn't finish the creature feature, I do have a couple of things to say in my defense.

I was trying to finish the creature feature the day before it was due while I was at my brothers chemo therapy. I realized that while I'm at my brothers chemo therapy, comics should NOT be my biggest concern. I realized that the two page comic was causing much more stress than I needed at that point so I simply decided not to finish it. I HAD been working on it for what it's worth.

Also, I met the requirements of an original member. I had something published by stumptown.

I really feel like BT is hurting the group by kicking me out. I was really dedicated to the group while I was in it. I always participated as much as I could. Just look through the recent Jam comics and you'll see my name pop up pretty often. I feel like my presence at the meetings was never really appreciated actually.

All in all I'm glad I was kicked out. I know in the long run it's going to be a better situation and if BT offered to let me back in the group I would-- without hesitation-- refuse. The only thing that really bothers me now is that he kicked me out a week and a half before stumptown leaving me without a booth to sell a comic I had ordered to be printed a month ago and had been planning long in advance to sell at the RCC booth. If I would have known he was going to do THAT I would have figured something out, gotten the money together and paid for my own table. Other than that I really do understand the need to kick some people out. I mean, I saw how full the table was and that was even with a free extra table so it was pretty damn full.

[/drama]

Oh and the Dr. Sketchy's anti-art school figure drawing was pretty cool and I'm gonna start going on wednesdays to the one at Dante's.

The after party was pretty fun. I had a beer since I could tell the place was gonna fill up and it helped with the whole fear of crowds thing. Unfortunately the only person I even hung around or talked to was BT. And once he left (after the awards I think) I just sorta stood around by myself. I really just didn't know what to say to anyone. The comic battle was pretty fun to watch, though. Next year I'll volunteer.

The second day was better. Mainly because this time I didn't expect to sell anything. My dad gave me 20 singles and a 20 dollar bill to bribe either BT or Noir from Sacramento to let me have a foot of table space to sell my stuff and set up my button making machine. After I saw how full the already-set-up tables were, though... Yeah I knew it wasn't gonna happen and didn't even bother to ask. Although I will say I could tell Noir was considering it when I brought it up in conversation and that's pretty cool of him.

So this time my plan was just to find out about some cool lookin comics and grab bussiness cards and post cards. I did buy a few really cool things that I seriously couldn't pass up, but mostly I just had some cool conversations with local artists. I made some more trades and I went to some more workshops and panels. I even talked to someone from the sequential art gallery who really liked my comics and even bought the first and only PURCHASED copy of hardcoreasaurus. I gave her Self-Aware since I just printed that on the laserjet and I think eventually it might pay off. That'd be pretty cool since I really like that gallery. That's where I first saw Painkillers. The guy who makes that one is actually pretty cool by the way and a genious at getting people to go to his booth (live digital art on a huge LCD screen). I walked by just to see what he was drawing.

Eventually I got bored so bad that I went home an hour early.

Okay well this entry is pretty long so I'll save my next year plans for later on.

But yeah, basically this years stumptown started out pretty crummy for me but at least ended pretty good. I felt a lot better yesterday than I did on Saturday. Hopefully next year is better.

Stumptown Stuff Update

I finished the messenger bag! And I finally got Hardcoreasaurus!

Stumptown is tomorrow and as such there are some things I need to do TODAY. Here they are:

Bussiness cards
Website
Money Envelope
Bind Self-Aware pages
Buy binder clear sheets from walgreens or clark bookstore
Envelopes for Robot Manual
CDs for Robot Manual

more or less in order of importance.

I have to get ready for school but I'll probably post a bit more later on.

Projects Update

Mystic Slide for Positive Brand:

Um... I declined due to too much to do what with school and surgery and family stuff and all.

PopGun letters:

The dude is a good artist but his cominication skills, man... jus' kidding. It fell through because of lost e-mails and busy schedules on both ends.

Lincoln Hates Werewolves:

Not exactly sure? But probably not doing it. I'm too unreliable. :/

Robopocalypse Creature Feature:

Didn't finish. Got kicked out of the club. Kinda pissed.

The Hardcoreasaurus:

SHIPPED! Yay! Finally some good news. Should be here in a couple of days. So now I have three things pending publishing. Self-Aware in the PNCA anthology, My 6 pages of JHZ and Hardcoreasaurus. That fortune cookie the other night was right. My hard work really IS paying off.

Lincoln Lincoln I been thinkin'

So this week is going to be a busy week. On monday I need to turn in concept sketches for a book I may or may not end up doing for positive brand. I'm still undecided about it. My main concern is how much time I'll have for it with school and surgery and eventually a job coming up pretty soon. Not to mention everything I still have to do for Stumptown.

Also Stephen is having me work on a new project. It's Lincoln as a werewolf hunter. He hasn't written it yet so that could be a month or two off right now but I'll still be doing some concept stuff for that (which I'm going to post some of at the bottom of this entry).

And I have my creature feature to do. That's going slow.

And I have 20 pages to letter for a popgun comic.

And I once again have access to my website... so I have to completely redo that. yay.

Busy.

Anyways, here is the Abe stuff I have so far.




I'm pretty excited about it.

Jesus on Zombie Action!

Jesus Hates Zombies is finally off to the printer and the writer/editor is taking pre-orders through indie horizon now.

http://www.indiehorizon.com/jhz/index.html

They are only $17 for over 140 pages of zombie bashing action! Hurry before this run sells out.

Picture Post!

Printing Woes

So things aren't exactly going as smoothly as planned. I'm having trouble with Hardcoreasaurus and Self-Aware.

Hardcoreasaurus:
So first off, I need a site to host the 50+ MB files. Even if I still had access to my own website, I'm only allowed 100 MB on it. So basically, unless I send them a CD which make the process even longer, I'm screwed. Jenni might be able to help me out with this part though. She has a comcast website thing she never uses.
The other problem is that they only let you pay with PayPal. And my paypal acount is linked to a non existant bank acount as I no longer have ANY bank acount. Besides, it takes 3-4 days to transfer funds and I'm down to like... 19 dollars. Which is actually more than I thought I had. My brother and Jenni both have paypal acounts ready to go but it still takes time to transfer the funds. So WTF. I'm gonna go see how much Kinkos would cost and if they even have the means.

Self-Aware:
So I was going to print this one on the laser (and then make photocopies) along with my creature feature and Jesus Hates Zombies and make like a minis book to give out at stumptown. I was also going to make some Self-Aware books individually. The problem is that I deleted the freaking high res files. So now the only person who has anything even printable is PNCA. And thank god for that. I e-mailed the person who I last gave the files to. Hopefully she can help me. But it still means, since they are just tiffs and not psd files, that I won't be making any edits. oi. Maybe I oughta just redo the whole thing anyways. It was kind of a peice of crap except for like the first page. I dunnoh.

Needless to say, I'm not having the best of luck lately. Don't even get me started on my horrible Monday. You don't want to know.

Preparing for Stumptown

Now that I'm done with the comic, I need to get ready for Stumptown Comics Fest in a month. I always have trouble with written checklists so made myself this:


I know nobody is going to understand all of that but it's what I need for the con. or uh fest. I wonder why they don't call this a convention.

Anyways, I have hardcoreasaurus buttons made already. I'm going to sell them for 2 dollars a peice. Here are those:






Also, here are the buttons for Robopocalypse, the comics colelctive I've recently joined.






I still have a lot to do but I think I can do it all in time.

Toning is like an onion.

Here's an example of some of the steps I have to take when I make these things. I'm going start with a completed panel (actually 2 thirds of a panel) and go down from there.


This is the completed panel.


First I take away the lettering above the art.


Now the lettering that's integrated with the art is gone. Things like shirt logos, poster text, etc.


This one's subtle on this panel, but I've taken away the glow on the Zombies' eyes. On other pages the glow effect is used a lot more.


Next the highlights and shines are taken away.


Now the shadow layer.


Now the shade. Notice how flat it all looks now.


Now the blood is gone.


Sometimes there are complex patterns that will screw up the rest of the base tone if I don't do on a different layer such as the first zombies plaid shirt.


Here is the lineart. No tones, no lettering, no shadows. This is what I start with.


Here's what it looks like when I'm working on the shadow, shade and highlight layers. It's easier to do them on green instead of the base tones or even grey.

There's a lot more that goes into it but I thought I'd give everyone (the two people who read this thing) an idea of what I do when I tone these crazy things.

Finished!

After over four months I've finally finished my 6 grueling pages of Jesus Hates Zombies. If Stephen is fine with it, I'll be posting the pages soon. Otherwise it'll just be a tiny preview. It's been a stressfull four months but I'm just as sad to see this one go as I was when I wrapped on Hardcoreasaurus. Which, by the way I still have to fix typos on and make the fanart page for. And I'll be addressing that pretty soon since I'd like to get it printed for Stumptown. I'm also printing Self-Aware and the Manual for Robots. I still have so much to do to get ready for the con but I still have a bit of time. Next up on my agenda for comics is my creature feature, then either Hardcoreasaurus 2 or Punk is UnDead.

INKS

So for the past couple of days I've made like a squid and inked. I finally today finished the last of the inks. Now I just have to tone the pages and Letter them. I'm hoping to have it all done by the 25th. I'd keep my fingers crossed but I kind of need them uncrossed to finish up the comic.

Defeat

So it's taken me way too long to get these 6 pages done. I know that. Infact I'm considering getting a "normal" job and quitting school at this point. That's mostly because I need to move out. And ironically one of the reasons I need to move out is because I never get any time to work on my comics while I'm here. It's hard for me to work with other people in the room and since this is also my mom's craft room and the family computer room, I hardly get any time in here by myself. Top that off with the fact that nearly every day my brother needs rides which take up a good chunk of my day and the fact that I have other responsibilities by living here makes it really hard to get anything done on comics. Sooner or later I'm going to have to get a normal job anyways and if I'm still going to school than I really don't know what I'm gonna do.

The Learning Continues

First, a progress report:

Page 1 - Done
Page 2 - Inked (save for one panel)
Page 3 - Done
Page 4 - Nearly done. Needs letters and cleaned up tones.
Page 5 - Um... still panels.
Page 6 - Yeah, same deal here.

So, yesterday I went to a meeting for a comics collective that some of my PNCA buddies have started. It was actually pretty cool. We made a Jam comic and I worked on Page 4 inks while we shot the shit about nothing in particular. It was nice to hang out with people I could talk comics to. Really nice.

Stumptown is coming up. I'm a little freaked out. I was hoping by stumptown 2007 I'd have Frogra issues 1-3 finished and I'd have enough money to get a table and tons of cool stuff for the table. Maybe it'll have to wait for the next spokane comics show. Here's a list of what I want to have for this years Stumptown:

Portfolio
-JHZ pages
-Hardcoreasaurus Pages
-Various Illustrations

About 10 copies of Hardcoreasaurus

About 20 copies of Self-Aware

About 10 copies of the whole JHZ anthology or 20 copies of my 6 pages

50 bussiness cards

10 copies of the manual for robots

30 buttons

Some Stickers

A sweet handmade bag to carry it all in.


Maybe I'll get a table if I can come up with around $150-$200 dollars by the middle of August. We'll see. First thing's first, though. I need to get my pages done for Jesus Hates Zombies.

Nevermind

I'm not as worried now.

Just to give anyone reading this an update:
Page 1 - Done
Page 2 - Half Pencils
Page 3 - Pencils
Pages 4-6 - Panels

On a somewhat unrelated note: I had a layout that needed three equal panels horizontal. I was trying to figure out what 9.5 inches devided by 3 was in fractions, when I realized that blue line already marks thirds for you. That makes things easier on a couple of these pages.

Frustration

I wish I had the time to treat comics like a full-time job. Unfortunately I still have four years of school left and I don't get paid for comics.

I've been way too slow with this Jesus comic and I'm afraid that I'm gonna be replaced. Stephen hasn't come right out and said that, but I know I'm the slowest artist of all of them and he posted something about needing a new artist to pull the comic through the finish line. Unless someone actually bailed, I'm pretty sure I'm the one who's slowing the project down.

This really sucks... Maybe he took that last little comic too seriously.

EYE JAY!

Well maybe it's not exactly finished... But the inks are done and that's what's important... for now. Here's a rough idea of what the tones will look like:

Jesus Hates Zombies

So after some internal debate about what to do for my next project I ended up stumbling across it on comicspace. It's a comic called Jesus Hates Zombies and it's written by Stephen Lindsay and Michael Bartolotta. It's about Jesus... fighting zombies. That's right. So basically they broke the story down into like 17 smaller stories and for each one, there's a different artist. I'm actually working on the first 5 pages of the book. I'm really stoked. I'm really flexing my comics muscles on this one too. I actually have to DRAW THE BACKGROUNDS!!! DUNDUNDUN! Luckily if I have a ruler handy and some good reference I'm not half bad at it. And quite frankly I'd rather do it this way then the pixelated route. Those backgrounds kicked my ass both technically and compositionally.
So far all I have is a couple of roughs. I mean I have the dummy dummy pages finished so I know where everything is gonna go but since I'm not flying this one solo I'm polishing the dummy pages a lot more. I'm practically doing full pencils on them but it helps give the writer a really good idea of the direction I'm going. And that way if something isn't quite working, I can fix it.
Anyways, I'll keep updates here. I know I'm basically talking to myself but one of these days there will people who read this. I'm finally making some good progress on this comics goal of mine.

IT'S DONE!

The Comic will be unvieled on Tuesday.
I'm posting it on myspace, live journal, blogger, deviantart, and comicspace. check it out at any of those.

Anyways, this is pretty big for me. I printed out the cover last night on some slightly glossy cardstock and it was such a surreal experience finally seeing it as something tangible. It's going to be really awesome when I get it printed as a book.

Anyways come back tomorrow and you can see it here!

So tonight I watched that movie Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger and there's this scene where he's blowing the fuck out of this port with these big ass rails guns and then James Kaan gets on this shipping crate and is all "drop the guns" or whatever and I kept wishing Arnold would look up at him with a big grin and say "Holy shit, dude, you gotta try these fuckin things"

And this has to do with comics because... uh.. maybe I'll write something like that into a comic. I dunnoh.

Oh but okay well how 'bout this: I have pages 1 through 7 of the Hardcoreasaurus comic colored. I have page 1 lettered too soo hot damn I'm gettin this shit done.

And also, I went to the comic store today and finally got the conclusion of the five part DMZ arc that's been going on and I got POCI 5. So that was cool.

INK PARTY!

You know what this is?

It's all freakin 11 pages, 2 covers and one ilmeasured pages of Hardcoreasaurus in INK! I'm done! Well, with this part. Here's what the next part looks like:


I have to sit down with that glowing rectangle and color each page. THEN I have to make the backgrounds in a pixel art program, put those in and finally after I'm satisfied with all of that I get to do my favorite thing to do in comics: Lettering.

I don't know why I like it so much... Maybe because most newbies don't know how to letter with adobe illustrator and I happen to avoid a lot of the mistakes most newcomers make so my letters tend to look better than expected. Also I guess I just like it because when the letters go on the whole thing really comes together. I remember how amazed I was at how the first page of Self-Awareness really didn't look professional until I had the letters finished. I finally felt like I was making a real comic.

I'm a little frustrated. I get absolutely no comments on this blog...

Oh well... I'll just have to start cross posting.

Okay so in my first bit of news I just want to say that I've been coming up with a lot of short comic ideas. I have two that I really want to get going on, one that I started with my brother who's writing it aswell as adding some art here and there, and one that I've done a ton of work on that is based on a story my friend Layne wrote. More on that last one in a minute. Basically, though my comics spirit has new vigor. And it's exciting!

Okay secondly check this out:









That's a sweet Chinese brush and ink set that my girlfriend got me from Cost Plus World Market. Now I know this blog is supposed to be about comics but I figure since comics are inked, this falls in an acceptable range of comics related subject matter. Of course, I'm never going to use this ink set because I want it to stay really nice but it's still really awesome and needs to be shared.

So this:



is the real reason I'm making this post. I've got my desk all organized(ish) and in working order. See that? I actually have comics there. Comics that I'm making. So what is all this stuff you ask? Well the comics pages on the wall are the digital pencils from the Hardcoreasaurus comic starring Jessie and based off of a story by Layne. I printed them all out and posted them up there because I have to start over with for reals pencils. So far I have pages cover and 1 penciled. That's what's chillin on the desk there in front of the rubber duckies, the turtle tots and Godzilla. And theres some tools sittin around being useful. I finally learned how to use a T-Square the right way and these panel things that used to be difficult are a breeze! It's awesome.

That Cork-EZ thing is some work I did for a package design for a product that will probably never see the light of day. Under that is an assignment from illustration class. I like that drawling. It's all in sharpie. I have that up to remind me that PNCA wasn't a complete waste of time like I always seem to make it out to be. That basket ball hoop at the top is where I throw a little foam basketball when I get bored. It helps when I get burnt out from drawing or just get creative block. The walls in here are really yellow. It's kind of gross. Because they used to be white.

Anyways it feels good to actually be making comics at my desk. It's about damn time frankly. And I really have to give it up to Layne and Ms. Dole for inspiring the comic plastered up on the wall. And a big extra special thanks to Jenni for getting me that super awesome ink set.