Ben Grim

New drawings.

I might color them soon.

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.

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.

Picture Post!

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.

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:

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.

Transform and Roll Out!

Not to brag or anything... but I seem to rock the sharpies like a bad motha fucka.



Seriously, though. Everytime I make a rediculously large drawing (this one took up a whole sketchbook page) that pretty much requires I use a sharpie to ink it, it always turns out way better than if I use a tiny micron and get all the little itty bitty details. I have this Godzilla drawing I did for a T-shirt over the summer and since it was so big I used a sharpie. Well it turned out pretty awesome even though I still haven't made the T-shirt (I need to get some glow-in-the-dark screen ink) I still think it rocks better than any small drawing I could have done.

I'm gonna do a lot more with the whole sharpie thing but the down side is that I can't really make comics in sharpie. I mean they just don't make scanners big enough for that kind of thing and I'll be damned if I'm gonna stich pages that big all the time. I have learned an iportant lessong, though. Less small details and thicker lines make for a better picture, especially when reduced.