Time to Pass the Hat!

These sketches are fun, but they're not paying the bills...yet. That's where you come in (I hope, I hope, I hope).
If you'll look to the right, you'll notice that I've added a Paypal Donate button to the blog. I'm not looking for something for nothing, but I'd I would like to start earning a few of your hard-earned shekels. The process is simple: Donate at least $10 or more via Paypal, provide me a snail mail address, and I'll send you an original 7x10 sketch done to your specifications. You want a Supergirl? Send me 10 bucks and it's done. You want Spider-Man? Donate. Done. You want the entire cast of the 1932 Zegfield Follies ice dancing in Central Park as Glenn Miller's Orchestra plays "In the Mood" with the accompaniment of a troupe of harp seals on souzaphone and glockenspiel? Well, I may have some trouble with that, but donate anyway...you never know.
All sketches will be inked on bond paper, unless you particularly want one done in pencil. Larger sketches can be requested in return for a larger donation (say, $25 for 11 x 17, for example...but I'm negotiable).
Buy one for yourself, buy one for a friend...heck, buy one for all your friends. I'll draw Donald Duck or Daredevil all day long as you're willing to pay for it. Be imaginative, be daring, and most of all...be generous.
If you would like to buy a sketch, but don't use PayPal, please send me an email, and we can work out the details.

Moon Over Vegas...

Seeing this, I suddenly have a craving for McDonald's. No idea why. Go figure.

DLG Test Page

Finally, I got permission to post one of these. I've got others out there, but they haven't responded yet, so I'm assuming they're not keen on having me show off the work I did on their pages.
This is from a submission I did for a book titled "Daddy's Little Girl" (I'll post a link as soon as I find one). I didn't get this job, but apparently it was a close call. This was an interesting art style to work on; I wouldn't mind trying more like this.

Still Here...

No, I haven't been devoured by brain slugs, or captured by Nazi frogmen. I've been working on several color pieces as job applications, and haven't gotten permission yet to post them to the blog. I'm burning my creative fuel here, but it's going into the ether. I'll post something new as soon as I can.

Guest Artist Time!

Here's a piece by guest artist Raven Dominic. This is one of her first manga style drawings, and one of the first she's finished with Photoshop. Not bad, considering she's still 8. I think she's got a bright future....

Showin' Off...

I need to get a few more portfolio pieces up here. Bear with me while I let my colors fly for a bit...
Click on the smaller image to see a full-sized version, obviously.

First, here's my work on a Frank Cho Avengers piece. Frank's one of my favorite artists and I'd kill to be able to duplicate his linework. He's also one of the best artists to color because his work is so clear and his shapes so interesting.



Next up is a Captain America piece, taken from a piece of art by "chriss2d" at Deviantart. This guy is a hell of a colorist in his own right and it's worth checking out his gallery.



Finally for today, here's a repost of the piece I did for Digital Webbing last year. Inkthinker is another Deviantart artist who has some fantastic line work that is a joy to color. I haven't had this much fun with color since I got my first box of 64 Crayolas (with built in sharpener!).

Look! Up in the Sky!

Here's a tarted up version of the Supergirl sketch I posted a few days ago. The color was a bit rushed, so I'm not completely happy with the end product, but I had fun playing with the lighting effects and a few new brushes, so it's all good.

Wonder Woman! All the world is waiting for youuuu......

Here's a slightly more traditional Amazonian, insipired in no small part by Darwyn Cooke's "New Frontier". The color work on this one was enjoyable. Fun with Gimp plugins.

Super Women!

A trio of superheroines this time around, again from my workday sketches.



Supergirl is always a favorite. The iconic design of Superman with that curvy feminine shape makes for a great mixture.



Then there's Power Girl, a character who I've always thought was underused. I like the way Giffen wrote her in Justice League Europe, but didn't care for the costume design, even with Bart Sears art. The traditional white one-piece always worked better, in my opinion.



Finally, a dark Themiscyran. Just a rough character design from a story I'd like to write sometime. I know the "evil Amazon" story has been done in Wonder Woman before, but I think I could do something interesting with it, neverthelss.

Doodles Aplenty!

More stuff from the bottom of my filing cabinet...this time, some different considerations for my webcomic character Simon Pariah.
First off, here he is in the garb of a Roman foot soldier...



Here's Simon in a winterworld kind of scenario. I don't really have story to go with this one; just a scenario I imagined, loosely based on the Robert Altman/Paul Newman movie "Quintet". It's a strange, little known sci film from the late 70's that's worth a watch if you ever get a chance...



Finally, here's one that looks as little like Simon as possible. I have some ideas for doing a manga-style story, just to experiment with the art style. Shows like Hellsing and Vampire Hunter D have a nice visual approach that I'd like to play around with....

Random Stuff From the Top of My Head and the Tip of My Pen

Odds and ends once again....

Here'e Merv from The Dreaming in a rare moment of rest....



Stardancer...no relation to Silver Surfer or Spider Robinson.



Meanwhile, this jovial T-Rex about town is submitted as proof of why I shouldn't let my mind wander too far while sketching...

Back to the Drawing Board...

I started doing some housecleaning of my file cabinet a couple of months ago, and as usual got distracted by something shiny and didn't finish. Time to get some more of this stuff out of my way, so here we go....

First of all, here's a very old one...from sometime in the 1990, more precisely. It's very rough, and my sense of form still needed a lot of work here. Still, it was fun to do at the time. I'm working on a color version of this piece that I'll upload another time.



More on the same theme, and from about the same time. I was really getting off on Giffen and Maguire's take on Justice League at the time, and this piece shows it. Even now it remains one of the funniest comic books I've ever read.
Interestingly, this is also one of the first pieces where I realized that my left-handedness was causing me a perspective problem. Anything I drew with a vertical composition had a tendency to lean to the right as it went up. I shudder to think how many right-leaning drawings I inadvertently did prior to realizing this. I've since solved the problem by starting any drawing with ruled lines showing the visual and actual centers of the page or panel.



Here's a much more recent (within the last two years) take on the big three of the JLA. This one takes some inspiration from Alex Ross. One of the things that strikes me about Ross's work is that he's one of the few painters I've seen who's not afraid to paint with black. I was always told that true black shouldn't be used in a painting, but I suppose Ross's success shows that rules are made to be broken.
The trinity of DC icons holds a lot of intrigue for me, above their individual stories. I once wrote a paper for a literature course that theorized that characters like this have achieved a status as true modern myths, and I still hold to that idea. There's clearly archetypal ideas behind these characters that provide them a sort of immortality that transcends artistic interpretation or sales figures. Some artists, such as Ross, are better than others at capturing that quality.

Happy Hannukwanzcandlemas!

A Parting Glass

A few parting thoughts on NaNoWriMo, now that it's all over but the shouting (and cake...gotta get me some cake):
A 24 Hour Comic in October. A 30 day novel in November. It's like I'm dead set on proving the Law of Intention.
Actually, I'm dead set on doing away with all my excuses for not getting the creative work done. My usual rate of output for the past few years has been about 1 comic story per year and a short story in about the same. In the past two months, I've blown both of those limitations out of the water.
Surprisingly, I found I still had time for a generous amount of reading and the occasional game of Starcraft and Literati.
It seems to me that a creative endeavor is like going to the dentist...the worst part of it is the anticipation. With all the thinking and planning and "research" that goes into a project, you can talk yourself right out of doing it, or waste so much time in the preparation that you never get around to actually doing the job. That's why I find that quote from "Finding Forrester" so apt, and that's what this past month has taught me...the only way to get it done is to sit right down and do it. Worry about the details afterwards. It's easier to edit your work after you've written it than it is to "plan" it before you write it. That's what second drafts are for. And third drafts. And umpteenth drafts.
One thing I have noticed since I took on these projects is a jump in my general level of energy. Far from being caught in the typical dull routine of daily life, I've found that I'm eager to keep moving forward, and the things I found dull previously have only become waiting periods until I can get back to work on my projects. If nothing else, I guess NaNo is good for a mental boot in the ass that we all (especially us pretentious creative types) need from time to time.
I'm hoping that when I walk away from the effort of the last two months I'll be able to maintain a more realistic balance of creativity and productivity. I don't have any hot projects on my plate right now aside from editing the novel I've just written (and hoo boy, does it need it!), but I've got a ton of stuff that I've started and not finished, so maybe now's the time to get some of those things off my plate. I'm looking forward to the months ahead.

A few liner notes: The Daily News article ran on Thursday instead of Wednesday, and they didn't run my interview or my excerpt, so I guess I didn't get much publicity out of that one.
Thanks go out to Jaymee Goh, the Municipal Liaison for NaNo in Halifax. She organized the Sunday write-ins and the publicity, and introduced me to a great new cafe where I can hang out with the beret crowd and pretend I'm a grownup. All praise to she of the brilliant T-shirt and promises of cake yet to come. (And now I can say I know one of those people who use cute little anime characters for their avatar.)

Right now I plan to do this project again next year. Unless I make a gajillion dollars in the meantime and can finally build that underground bunker and begin training my horde of robot zombie ninjas to fulfill my plan of world domination. Whichever comes first.

Victory is Mine!!!!

Done like dinner! And with hardly an adjective to spare. Now comes the fun of editing this lump of radioactive rat droppings and trying to beat it into some kind of shape so I can begin to think about considering possibly sending it to a publisher and start collecting rejection letters.
This has been a great exercise, and if anyone has ever thought about writing, I heartily recommend it as a great way to get started. You never really know what you can do until you put your back into it like this.
Now go away...I've got work to do, and reading to catch up on.

Fit to Print

Looks like the Daily News's writeup of NaNoWriMo will be in tomorrow's edition. As far as I know right now, they plan to include an excerpt of my work in progress. To all my "peeps" outside Nova Scotia, I'll see if I can get permission to blog a scan of the article if they don't do an online edition. Otherwise, like the CBC interview, it will be available upon request only.





Technorati Tags: nanowrimo

Nearly There

Well, just about done. Less than 5k to go, and I don't see any reason why I won't make it.



For anyone who missed the CBC interview, I have an mp3; if you want it and have not received it already, email me and I'll send it to you.

Also, I was interviewed last Sunday, along with several other writers, for the Halifax Daily News. Looks like they'll be publishing an excerpt of the novel. More info as it becomes available....

Lost Weekend Ahead

I'm going to be offline for the weekend, but I WILL be writing. I just won't be doing it online, so I won't be able to check my wordcount until I get back sometime Sunday and do some typing. So if you don't see my wordcount go up for the next couple of days, don't think I've lost steam or abandoned the project. I'll just be somewhere out in the boonies safely hidden from my wife's Xmas Shopping Kickoff Weekend. Probably scouting good locations to build a yurt after the bankruptcy.

Halfway Home!

;

It's the midpoint of the month and the novel is ticking along just fine. It's no great work, but I think it's readable. I haven't heard from the peanut gallery yet, so either no one has any complaints, or no one wants to be the one to tell me it sucks. Either way, it's getting finished. I passed the 50% mark last night by a hair's breadth, and the story still has plenty of steam in it.

This past Sunday, I had the added pleasure of attending a "write-in" at PaperChase in Halifax. A small group of NaNo writers got together to write, exchange ideas and offer suggestions, and generally socialize as much as a group of distant semi-intellectuals can. It was an enjoyable session, and it's almost worth taking on the project just to get a chance to do things like that. Thanks go out to organizer Jamie for putting the thing together.

Once again, I'll point out that a copy of the work in progress is available at any time to anyone who wants to drop me an email. I'm glad to share it, and would enjoy hearing any comments you may have to make, good or bad. I'm also STILL in need of a title, and will consider anything at this point. Drop your suggestions in the box and take a complimentary mint on the way out.





Technorati Tags: nanowrimo, novel, writing

Enhancing Performancing

Not a spam post...just testing the latest build of Performancing for Firefox. Nothing to see here; move on.