9/22/2012 Living In Seattle

I have finally arrived in Seattle, and my job has now begun.  At the moment I'm staying with my sister as I look for a place to call my own.  

Because my sister lives in downtown Seattle I've been able to see a bit of the city, but because I work in Bellevue, a chunk of my day's been spent at work and commuting.  It's finally the weekend, and I'm about to do a bit of exploring.  Seattle's going to take a bit of getting used to, but so far it seems like a cool city.  

These paintings were done on my iPad using the Inspire Pro app.  Couldn't keep still, and thought I'd play around with iPad paintings!

9/13/2012 update

I really wish I had the chance to post some more progress shots of the comic before the move, but things got hectic real fast.  They've packed all my art supplies now, so i'll have to put the comic on hold for a few days.  I was hoping I'd have the prologue done before the move, but I fell 1 page short :-(  No worries, though.  I'll be done very soon, and I hope to have people read it as soon as possible!

In just a couple of days, I'll be in Seattle!  Wahoo!

9/1/2012 Update

 Holding slow and steady on the comic front.  Progress is by no means fast, but I'm at a comfortable pace.  I thought I'd update a bit of my work progress, so enjoy!

8/24/2012 Update

Slowly making progress!  I didn't want to keep everyone out of the loop, so I thought I'd post. 

I've been spending too much time working on not being unemployed, that progress has been much slower than I had hoped.  But no more!  I'm going to concentrate more on making this comic become a reality!

Some Fantasy Flavor

 So, I know I don't do much fantasy art, so I thought I'd give it a try.  It was quite fun!  I haven't made an image with so many layers in a long time.  It's good that I had been practicing painting without using layer types, because I found that I could manipulate paintings much faster, and with greater ease when I do use them.  Who knows, Maybe I'll do more fantasy paintings in the future!

Some WIP shots after the page break!

8/13/2012 Stuff and Happenings

Hello friends!  Sorry I've been absent for so long once again, but I promise it was for good reason!  The whole finding-a-job situation has been distracting me a lot.  Though I have more time, I seem to spend most of that time looking for leads, or stressing out about not already having a job.  I've had some good news trickle in recently, so hopefully that's a sign of things lookin' up in the future.

But!  That's not all I've been spending my time on.  Take a look see, my friends, here's a little preview of what I'll be working on.

It only took me 4 tries, but I've finally completed the first page of my comic (pictured left) !!! 

Summer Girl 2.0

Done!  It was fun revisiting the Summer Girl theme!

7/31/2012 WIP

Summer continues.  It's quite hot.

7/28/2012 WIP and Updates

It's been a while!  First off, I'd like to apologize for the long absence.  I'm really coming into realization that looking for a job, is a full time job.  There's been some good progress, but I'm still unemployed.  I've been pretty distracted from painting, and my comic, but I'm going to get back to concentrating on the things I love to do.

I've been trying to make a sequel to my Summer Girl painting I did last year.  With all the heat, and a long tradition of lack of proper air conditioning, I've had more than enough motivation.  Stay out of the heat, people!

Cars and Stuff

 First off, sorry for the long absence!  I like to post here as often as I can, but I've been working on storyboards for the last couple weeks.  Well, I just got done with that a few days ago, so now I'm moving on to doing some concepts.  Took me a couple days, but I finally decided on a shape for the car that I want to be in my comic.  Couldn't really think up a good name for it, so for now it's simply called the R.  

NSFW speed paint

Woke up in a painting frenzy for some reason.  I should have been working on my storyboards, but I decided on doing a painting instead.  Still got lots of time until the day is over, so I guess I'll be getting to those storyboards!

Hit the jump to see the painting.  Warning! NSFW

Inks and Screen Tone

Slowly getting the hang of this.  Basically the problem with the last batch of screen tones was that the resolution was too low.  When I photographed this ink painting, I split it up into 9 sections and then auto-aligned them in photoshop.  With more pixels to play with, I was able to keep the dot matrices small enough to not compete with the line work. 

6/23/2012 Speed Paint

I've been concentrating on my comic these days, so I haven't had a chance to do paintings.  I thought I'd kill 2 birds with 1 stone by practicing some painting, and doing a color study of one of my characters at the same time.

Some More Findings

First, photoshop is proving itself not be to be the best for screen toning.  The Images I brought into Photoshop were already high resolution, but the dot matrices were too large even at the smallest settings.  and I'm not really sure how to create new patterns.  Also, the process is quite slow.

On the more Analog side, I need to draw with thicker lines.  Must not forget that all these will be shrunk down, and lines that are too thin are hard to read.

Even though manga style drawings are far more lighter with the inking, the darker colors still need more blacks.

More Inking

 The inking continues!

I'm getting a bit more familiar with what I can get away free hand and what i need to use a ruler for.  Basically any line that's shorter than my index finger, I can get done with just free handing, but any line longer than that, I need a ruler to keep my hand steady.  The problem is if I have to reposition my elbow mid stroke, the line becomes wobbly, and the line weight becomes inconsistent.

I'm thinking it's time I try screen-toning.

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Been watching a lot of car shows as inspiration.  Top Gear, and Fifth Gear being the major TV shows I've been watching, with a healthy dose of Initial D and Wangan Midnight.  They're super fun shows, especially if you're into cars. 

At first I was looking for good car chase movies on netflix, but there's not a lot there to choose from...  Ronin definitely has my favorite car chase scenes, but other than that, I can't think of anything good.  Any suggestions?