Citizen Tang

2012: Year of the...

2012-01-01T12:17:00.001+11:00

Feel Good Hit of the Summer

...Conformist
This January I'll be starting a new part-time job as a "Storyboard Conformer". I'd rather be drawing storyboards than conforming them, but there is only so much animation work going on at any time and plenty of available storyboard artists around to snatch up the work.

The drawing on the right is my little way of finding a little creativity in what will be a rather menial job. It was originally drawn to become a t-shirt graphic (which can be purchased here) but it reminded me of something of my favourite music poster artists, Guy Burwell has done, so I made a little mockup 45rpm record sleeve.

...Developer
Maybe I'll get a storyboard to draw, maybe I won't, but I'm not really bothered because in 2012 I also plan on developing an iOS game, which will require a huge skill jump on my part. I've been trying to put myself through a crash course in game development, intending to soak up all I can. Luckily, it seems like we are in a renaissance of indie game development and there is a lot of information around.

...Fresh Start
I wanted to start the new year clear of all my old WIPs, so I sat down to finish them somehow. These drawings have been hanging around my hard drive for a few months. I don't know why I decided to take them further than the sketch stage. The 2nd drawing's noisy gradients were inspired by Robert Valley's work, especially the new storyboards he is posting on his blog.

The next picture goes back a year and a half. I knew that if I didn't finish it now, it would never be finished. I hate the background, but I like the goofy smile. I'm tired of doing boring artwork, I'm going to make an effort to make interesting drawings this year.

Rollin' up her sleeves for pie

Watching: George Harrison Living in the Material World by Martin Scorsese, Pearl Jam Twenty by Cameron Crowe
Reading: Needful Things by Stephen King
Listening to: The Minus 5 - Killingsworth, A Very She & Him Christmas, Ryan Adams - Ashes and Fire, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Darren Korb - Bastion OST
Playing: Left 4 Dead 2, Bastion, Cave Story+ and LIMBO

Albatross Now!

2011-11-08T15:36:00.000+11:00

I started this drawing as a quick escape from working on the image below. I ended up redrawing the feet a bunch of times and I'm still not completely happy with them, but oh well.

The guitar is one of my dream Telecaster designs. It is a double bound mish-mash of Thinline and 50's style Tele with a modified pick-guard that I've dubbed the Sofia-Caster.

I was considering doing more illustrations in the Polaroid series, but the idea kind of stalled.

Very late in the process I noticed that the guitar was way too large and it was a major PITA (because I work with tons of layers) to get it down to appropriate size.

That exercise in tedium got me to think about using layer masks in future illustrations.

Sofia-Caster>Klon>Fulltone 69>MXR chorus>Strymon El Capistan>Modifed Champ in an old Radio.

This is an oldie that I just gave up on. It was kind of inspired by a scene (just after the turbulent plane ride) in the film Almost Famous.

I tried a few different BG concepts, but I didn't like the character drawing enough to spend the time on a fancy background. Hopefully I will make use of those concepts one day.

I wished I had planned out the composition, instead of fumbling around over a period of months. The drawing of the girl started as a rough sketch in my sketchbook.

Lately I've been thinking about spending a little extra time at the sketch stage which will hopefully lead to spending less time working in Photoshop.

The photo on the wall is Robert Mitchum from The Night of the Hunter.

Watching: Westworld by Michael Crichton, Food Inc by Robert Kenner, I'm Still Here by Casey Affleck, The Town by Ben Affleck, Eureka Seven by Bones Studio, Redline by Takeshi Koike

Reading: Salem's Lot, Cell & Under the Dome by Stephen King, The Strain by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan
Listening to: Kaki King - Junior, The Autumn Defense - The Green Hour & Once Around, Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts, Wilco - The Whole Love, The Minus 5 - self titled (Gun), Stephen Malkmus - Mirror Traffic

Rick-a-billy

2011-08-17T21:10:00.002+10:00

I had a week off (unpaid of course, such is the freelance life) from storyboarding work, so I tried to finish some pics I had started a while back. I've only got 3 things left in the WIP folder. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

Rickenbacker 620 in Midnight Blue

Billy bookshelf from Ikea

Watching: Scarecrow by Jerry Schatzberg, The Ghost Writer by Roman Polanski

Reading: The Dark Tower series by Stephen King
Listening to: Liam Finn - FOMO, The Geraldine Fibbers - Butch, The Minus 5 - Down With Wilco

Merch!

2011-07-17T20:34:00.005+10:00

"The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized" from RedBubble

I now have merch available at two different places online: RedBubble (T-Shirts and Stickers) and MySoti (T-Shirts). I have previously mentioned that MySoti were experiencing issues (mainly atrocious shipping times) and they seem to have worked things out now. I've bought shirts from both sites so I'll do a little comparison.

"In/Out Umbrella" from MySoti, the others from RedBubble

1) RedBubble prints on American Apparel and MySoti prints on Gildan Softstyle and Ultra tees. The Gildan Softstyle is almost identical in cut and feel to the American Apparel tees. Gildan Ultra is a more traditional style of tee with thicker/heavier fabric.

"In/Out Umbrella's" colour is still vibrant after 6 months of wearing/washing

2) MySoti's colours are more vibrant than RedBubble's colours and has better edge definition (less bleed) on dark shirts but RedBubble has better ink coverage (solid blocks of ink) and better edge definition of light shirts.

"C-C-Cammy" and "Queen of Hearts" from RedBubble

3) RedBubble was a lot more affordable than MySoti but they recently changed their prices, so they are now very similar. However, RedBubble has free shipping when purchasing 4 or more shirts (they can be different designs by different designers). RedBubble ships from Australia, Britain, Canada and the US. MySoti ships out from Britain.

Stickers by Redbubble

I also have Stickers for sale through RedBubble. When ordering 6 or more, they become half price. They're made of a heavy vinyl with a matte finish. They're removable up to a point. I had to peel off the Spacemonkeys sticker above a couple of time to get it centred and straightened on the cover of my sketchbook.

Girly Bits & Pieces

2011-07-01T17:55:00.005+10:00

The picture on the left existed as a rough sketch for a few months but I didn't get to start work on it because I had a bit of freelance work come up. This was the first thing I worked on after that job wrapped up.

In hindsight I should have used clubs instead of hearts to match the shape of her hair.

This design is available as a T-Shirt at MySoti and RedBubble (also as a sticker).

This is a good example of how I take very simple concepts and make them unnecessarily complicated. I planned on this being only one colour (yellow) with thick black lines to look like it was drawn with a sharpie on a post-it. I should've stopped myself when I started drawing shadows.

On the flip side, I only had a vague idea about how this should look when I started and as a result, this took a lot of time to find a look.

These two pictures are blacked out because they might be too risque for this blog. You can click on the thumbnails to see the NSFW pictures.

I've been stuck on 3 or 4 drawings and I really wanted to just whip out a drawing so I whipped out a quick self portrait.

I've been using my DSLR to "scan" sketches and while taking a photo of this sketch I decided to also take a photo of the piece of cardboard I use under my laptop (because I've been using my bed as a desk for the last few months) to use as a background texture. I tried adding details and highlights, but I think it looks better without it.

Watching: Disney's Tangled, Scott Pilgrim vs the World by Edgar Wright, The Brothers Bloom by Rian Johnson

Reading: Bossypants by Tina Fey, Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Listening to: Whiskeytown - Pneumonia, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Let It Sway, Big Star - No.1 Record

Mindless-ness

2011-05-11T12:59:00.001+10:00

I think that girls with guitars are my go-to when I sketch mindlessly. The Jazzmaster looks a little thin but I can't really be bothered fixing it. I've been using very saturated colours lately, maybe because it's Autumn and the days are getting dreary.

Where's the Beef? I don't think that we have Wendy's burgers here in Australia.

This was just a goofy sketch and half way through colouring I realized that it resembled the girl in the Wendy's logo. I'd never make it as a graphic designer, looking through fonts is SO BORING!

This started as a mindless sketch. It was inked little by little over a few days in between other stuff and I never really intended to finish it. It's another case of me following the path of least resistance. I should have spent my time on something worthwhile.

I don't know why I used a super-contrasty shadow, but for some reason I like how the shadows look on the gloves/arm things. It doesn't look very good on skin though which is why I didn't really use it on the face.

This was in the WIP folder for months. This is a pretty severe crop of what was originally a portrait-style shot.

I made it monochrome and added some noise to make it look a bit like a frame of film.

I came up with a riff and just kept layering guitars over the top. I couldn't come up lyrics, but wanted to finish the track, so I used some lyrics from War written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. The track ended up being brighter than what I intended. I still want to write proper lyrics for it and add drums. Hopefully that will give it a darker feel.

War (demo) by Citizen Tang

Another attempt at building on a riff. Similar to how a person who just discovers Photoshop uses a ton of lens flares and other cheesy effects, I've been using too many guitar tracks and vocal lines lately, so I threw away the bass-line and kept the vocal to one track to keep it from getting too dense. If I used a little bit of forethought I would have written it in a key that was easier to sing.
Sober by Citizen Tang

Watching: Blow Up by Michelangelo Antonioni

Reading: Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie and Watership Down by Richard Adams
Listening to: The Kinks - Muswell Hillbillies

Chimpanzee Cosmonauts and Aristocratic Pachyderms

2011-04-22T14:43:00.001+10:00

This was done while listening to the pilot episode of the Spacemonkeys podcast by Tell 'em Steve-Dave broadcasters Bryan Johnson and Brian Quinn.

This was done pretty quickly, but only after I spent ages on a prior, more realistic version. I like working in just one colour, the simplicity is refreshing.

The "Peace Asshole!" is a quote from the podcast.

These two were intended to be logos that indicated that a t-shirt design was also available in small and large print. I'm going to go with a logo that is more graphic.

I've noticed that most people seem to like t-shirts with large designs. I'm definitely in the minority being more into small designs so I want to be able to cater to both types of people and provide both.

I don't know why I drew a pink elephant, but I know why I gave it a crown. It's because pink elephants just standing around are boring.

I pretty much gave up on this. I tried a bunch of different backgrounds, but nothing really suited it, which was a surprise to me because I thought that puffy nipples went well with everything.

Here's another demo I wrote. I had to sing very quietly into the microphone so as to not annoy the other people in my house, so the vocals are very breathy and sometimes out of tune. This one was also written very quickly; I find that if the ideas are to have any chance of developing they have to come out at speed.
WWJD (demo) by Citizen Tang

Watching: Season One of the Original Twilight Zone

Reading: Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Here, There and Everywhere by Geoff Emerick
Listening to: Dan Auerbach - Keep It Hid and She and Him - Volume One

Days of Pictures Past

2011-03-05T16:50:00.001+11:00

Three months into 2011 and I'm still clearing out 2010's WIP folder. I probably should not have taken this picture to completion, but I had reached the point of no return and finally did the background colours. This has a really weak composition and a more sterile background than I originally had in mind. Looking back, I should've squared the composition off and made it into a Polaroid-esque piece.

I think girl was actually drawn for the Paltroons Flyer, but it ended up unsuitable design-wise.

This is another one I had trouble with. I must have drawn and coloured Sofia Albatross 4 or 5 times over a period of months. Then after I drew the final version I struggled with the composition, which was originally in a portrait orientation. The moment I tried it in landscape everything clicked.

It's such a simple picture to get hung up on, but I like how it turned out even though it wan't what I envisioned. I dig Sofia's lips and Madeline's buck teeth.

Watching: Bobby by Emilio Estevez, Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog by Joss Whedon and Tetro by Francis Ford Coppola

Reading: The Next 100 Years by George Friedman
Listening to: Christina Rosenvinge - La Joven Dolores, John Cale - Paris 1919, Calexico - Carried To Dust

Extracurricular Activities

2011-02-10T13:11:00.003+11:00

I'm not sure what I've been doing with my time, but I haven't really produced much in the last few weeks. This is a design that I'm pretty happy with, although I probably could have done a better job with the umbrellas.

This was originally going to be more elaborate, with rain and more colour, but I found that stripping the image down to as few elements as possible produced a more readable and eye-pleasing image. I was hesitant about using shadows, but I found that it kept things from looking too flat without being too distracting.

This is an old one that I've tried to finish many different ways, to the extent that I drew a couple different bass players with the intention that this would be a landscape oriented band poster. I also drew a few people to fill in the little circular insert.

The fonts look pretty ghetto because I didn't want to dedicate any more time to this than I already had. I'm not happy with the picture, but at least it's done and it strikes off another WIP from my 2010 folder.

I've got t-shirts for sale through MySoti and Zazzle. The shirt designs are slightly different between the t-shirt services. The Zazzle Rock shirt has a white border around it and the Zazzle Umbrella shirt has text below the graphic (which is also smaller).

EDIT: I've decided that the issues MySoti is currently dealing with make them unsuitable for my needs. I'm currently re-evaluating different services for t-shirts and other merch.

I wrote and recorded a quick song demo. Listen if you want and comment if you feel inclined. Time was of the essence so the playing and recording quality wasn't the best, I just needed to get the rhythm down so I wouldn't forget it. I used the mics built into a Zoom H4N to record myself playing an unplugged Gretsch 5120 with my fingers.
Trying, Lying, Killing, Dying (demo) by Citizen Tang

Watching: Little Big Man by Arthur Penn

Re/Reading: Eric Clapton Audiobiography
Listening to: Mountain Man - Made the Harbour, Ryan Adams - Cardinals III/IV, First Aid Kit - The Big Black and The Blue

Bloom County

2011-01-24T19:25:00.000+11:00

Wish fulfillment? Yeah, probably.

I got a little bloom/flare-happy, but I think it works. I just coloured things normally then did the same type of colour correction I would do to a photo.

I was thinking about changing the mouth-shape to something more normal, but I kind of like the quirkiness.

The photo on the wall is the album art from Pearl Jam's Yield. I hope it looks like typical motel wall art.

The next two drawings were in the WIP folder forever. I mentioned my dispair with the stiffness of these drawings months ago. I think I got a bit too caught up with doing very content-rich backgrounds and got a bit too overwhelmed with the amount of work it took to complete a finished drawing.

The drawings may have inconsistent shadows, sparse and uninspired backgrounds and the light sources come from the same direction, but they're finished, dammit and that has to count for something (it doesn't).

I'm not quite sure why I drew another picture of a rockabilly girl with a White Falcon, I probably had aspirations to use it as a design for a t-shirt.

I've been investigating the various t-shirt printing services, so far I've tried CafePress and Zazzle and will probably try Redbubble and MySoti soon. The Zazzle shirts (dark fabric) were of higher print quality than the Cafepress shirts, but after a mishap with an extra strong laundry detergent Zazzle rushed out a replacement shirt to me which was of pretty shoddy quality. Redbubble and MySoti seem to have better print quality but both are more expensive, have longer wait times and in the case of Redbubble, will only print on American Apparel. I think I'll go with Zazzle for shirts I design for myself, but use MySoti and Redbubble if and when I decide to design shirts for selling.

My white falcon t-shirt may see the light of day yet.

Watching: Classic Albums: Queen - Night at the Opera

Reading: Moviemakers' Master Class by Laurent Tirad
Listening to: Justin Townes Earle - Harlem River Blues, The Flying Burrito Brothers - The Gilded Palace of Sin

This One Goes To Eleven

2011-01-17T14:20:00.002+11:00

2011 huh? I've had a bad start to the year. I've still got tons of stuff in the Work In Progress folder left over from last year and I haven't really been inspired to start anything new.

I don't remember if this was 100% Photoshop or if it started on paper, but it's a good example of things I've been doing wrong and hope to correct this year. There hasn't been any thought going into my work, just random drawing until I stumble onto a face or pose that I lock onto which consequentially means I have no idea what the background will be or how to compose the drawing which leads to lots of wasted time trying all sorts of things.

I've been playing Street Fighter 4 lately, so here is a quick fan-art of Cammy in her Alpha get-up. I'm not sure if I like the simplified eyes, but I'm going to make an effort to simplify things this year. Hopefully this will lead to me actually finishing more work and getting back to basics, focusing on pose and emotion, which I think is lacking in my work now.

The drawings below are just Photoshop sketches that cluttered my WIP folder for months.I tried a thicker line on the girl as an experiment, but I don't like it. It seems to make things chunkier than I want.

Watching: How To Train Your Dragon by Chris Sanders & Dean Deblois

Reading: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon
Listening to: The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Methodrone, The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds, Gram Parsons - Grievous Angel

My Name Is URL

2010-12-22T14:00:00.001+11:00

It's been a while since my last post; since then I worked on an animated TVC where among other duties I got to do clean-up on two scenes that were animated by Robert Valley. It was pretty cool, since I've been a fan of his work for a while. I also just finished working as a Flash monkey on TV show, just doing production grunt stuff. Both jobs had a very short time frame and extremely long hours so my hands haven't been in the best condition.

Yet another Girl ün Girl polaroid. I think I was trying to keep the picture loose, not framing the shot perfectly but I found out with this one that if I try to frame "off" it has to be off by a lot. I had to redo this picture a bit to remove some space from the red synth to Madeline and to give her more headroom.

I think the set dressing is a little lacking, but I like the lighting. I hate Christmas, but I love it when people use Christmas lights in interior decorating.

This was inspired by many girls I saw on the train on the way to work.One of the benefits of living in such sunny climes is the popularity of short shorts.

The book she's holding is Lolita by Vladamir Nabakov, which I have not read yet, but have included for obvious reasons.

I guess this is the first post I've made since getting a proper URL. It was one of the many things holding up progress on designing a business card.

This picture was for the back of the card. I hope the design of the card is light-hearted enough for people to overlook the rampant narcissism on display.

These next two redheads (I just noticed that all the girls I'm posting are redheads) have been in the backlog for quite a while, coloured, but not quite finished. I added word balloons with Wilco lyrics in them and declared them done. Both are just Photoshop doodles that I started while trying to avoid working on more complex drawings. Sometimes I just want to draw a cute girl with a goofy smile.

I've got quite a few pictures waiting for backgrounds or a little more finessing. I'm going to try to finish them before the year's end , but everything is dependent on the condition my hands are in. It doesn't help that I bought a ton of games during the Steam black friday sale.

Watching: Shutter Island by Martin Scorsese
Reading: Wilco: Learning How To Die by Greg Kot, The Mutt: How To Skateboard and Not Kill Yourself by Rodney Mullen, Scott Pilgrim Vol.6 by Bryan Lee O'Malley
Listening to: The Black Keys - Magic Potion, Uncle Tupelo - Still Feel Gone, Giant Drag - Hearts and Unicorns

The Many Faces Of

2010-09-27T16:49:00.003+10:00

I've been trying to come up with a new ID/Avatar picture for forums and such so here are some of the self portraits I've come up with.

The first one was done in a Charles Burns-ish style. I read fewer indy comics these days, I think the last one I read was Wilson by Daniel Clowes.

I find them less appealing as I get older, the art is often split between over-detailed/clean or child-like chicken scratch and the stories often seem detached, like the cartoonist is standing outside the story and laughing. Earnestness is more appealing to me these days.

I don't want to come down on indy comics though, there are some great ones, but the 90% rule applies to everything after all.

This one was done in a similar style but with a more idealized face. It's done as a business card, which I think looks okay as a mock-up, but in reality it would be pretty stupid for a professional sneak to advertise his face.

That was always something I hated about the James Bond films; why would a spy tell people his real name. It became so absurd that I came up the conceit that "James Bond" was a job title rather than a name, which would explain the different actors (I'm told this is now the case in the newer movies) but even then it would still be stupid. I guess I like my spies more Baer than Bond.

This one is a rather bland Stephen Silver-esque self portrait. I think the more "polished" I make my work, the more uninteresting and bland it becomes. I came to the realization that I want my work to still be amateurish, not in way that implies lack of ability, but in a way that maintains amateurish enthusiasm. I believe Francis Ford Coppola once said something similar to that effect.

It kind of works against me trying to work as a professional, and I find myself not polished enough to be "professional" and not loose/enthusiastic enough to pass as "artsy". Now I think of it, Coppola is also often put into the same boat.

Me in a couple years time? It's possible. Sometimes I just like to play with shapes when I sketch and I guess out of that comes something like this. I always though that if my life were made into a movie I would like Philip Seymour Hoffman to play me.

Watching: Strangers On A Train by Alfred Hitchcock
Reading: Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Listening to: V______ - The Wheels Of Progress

Jack's Back

2010-09-13T17:51:00.005+10:00

I'm bringing back Cactus Jack (cliche name I know), a character I came up with years ago while working on Bro Town in New Zealand.

My old flatmate Woric did some mockups for a 2D video game a while back that looked cool, so I decided to see what a Cactus Jack game would look like. I'm not a gamer anymore, but I used to LOVE side-scrollers. For me the zenith of 2d games are Metal Slug and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

This started out as just a character drawing and grew organically, but unfortunately the side effect of that type of growth is bad composition. I wish I had started out with a better pose for Jack; as it stands it's not clear who the protagonist is and the other guy with the sombrero confuses things. I could probably try to sweeten the picture more with all sorts of effects, but I don't think it's prudent to keep trying to polish a turd.

I've been watching a lot of demos recently about guitar effects pedals so this picture which also started out as a simple character drawing became a design for an overdrive pedal.

I'm not sure I even want an overdrive pedal, but sometimes I just want a little bit of grit without turning up the volume and overdriving my tube amp (which sounds better than any pedal) naturally.

Watching: Anvil! The Story of Anvil by Sacha Gervasi
Reading: See No Evil by Robert Baer
Listening to: REM - Automatic For The People

Bathroom Blues

2010-09-06T13:27:00.003+10:00

Yet another Girl ün Girl polaroid. I'm pretty happy with how the colours came out, I was trying to get a kind of indie-fashion photo look, with pushed blue shadows.

I'm finding these polaroid illustrations to be really fun, but extremely time consuming. I'll probably do more.

I was working on two non-polaroid Girl ün Girl drawings that felt really labourious to work on, I realized that the drawings were becoming rigid and stiff, which goes against what I've been trying to accomplish with my work lately. I'm trying hard to keep loose.

This was in the backlog for a few months; I drew it really fast, but had troubles trying to choose colours and designing a background. Things started to come together when I made the shadows darker than the linework which I hope gives it a Takeshi Koike-esque look. This is a look I'm eager to pursue, it'd be cool do an animated short in this style, but I'll have to see what it looks like with backgrounds.

Watching: JFK by Oliver Stone
Reading: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Listening To: David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Pictures in a Frame

2010-08-16T17:35:00.005+10:00

I had to give Madeline Prixu better treatment than last time, so here's a reuse of the image, now with a simple frame around it.

The limited palette of these pictures were based on the music video of My Terrible Friend's cover of Tom Waits' Diamonds and Gold. The polaroid idea came from Pat Sansone's photos from Wilco's Ashes of American Flags DVD. The backgrounds were painfully tedious because I didn't really have more than a concept for them and so there were many iterations.

I like the idea of bands recording in houses and capturing ambiance and imperfections as opposed to recording pristine sound in professional recording studios. Daniel Lanois has been known to keep a recording studio in a truck so he could move the gear to a house and set up quickly. As I get older I'm losing patience and am becoming more enamored with speed.

Watching: Zombieland by Ruben Fleischer
Reading: Lowside Of The Road by Barney Hoskyns
Listening To: Tom Waits - Mule Variations, Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism

Prixu

2010-07-24T01:01:00.002+10:00

I had some dental work done this week (bridgework on a front tooth) and now speak with a lisp, like some pimply pre-teen with his/her first braces. It's really messed up my singing, and I think I'm gonna have to give it up if the lisp is permanent, which might also result in my quiting playing guitar too since the two are so intertwined.

I drew the thumbnail of this while colouring the previous concert flyers. I'm pretty disappointed in the final product; I sketched it with a pencil, then inked it in Photoshop, but didn't fix all the problems. And although I did have a colour scheme planned, I didn't know what Sofia Albatross would be wearing, so it looks like some generic shirt. Now I think about it, I'm happy with Madeline Prixu, it's really just Sofia Albatross who looks janky.

It looks as if some 17 year old girl drew this. I've really got to work on doing better backgrounds, this looks pretty blah. It was done 100% in Photoshop, which I'm finding to be very comfortable, but also very slow.

I used to be an avid reader of X-Men comics and always considered Professor X a sanctimonious bastard. To me, the most believable (manipulative warts and all) depiction of the character was written by Mark Millar during his Ultimate X-men run. In my version he's a crabby, lecherous old man, sitting in the shadows, manipulating people from afar.

Watching: Youtube videos by Lauren O'Connell
Reading: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Listening To: The Who - Tommy

New Citizens

2010-07-13T22:12:00.001+10:00

New header! I've been putting this off for a while, I tried to draw all sorts of people and things to populate the foreground, but nothing looked right. I guess I can always add things later.

Oh, god! This picture has been in the backlog for ages, I didn't know how to colour it and tried many backgrounds, but nothing stuck. I guess I still like it.

I originally drew these pig-carrying socialists to populate the new blog header but it didn't look right, so here they are: HAPPY FREE PIG DAY!

I've but down on the number of podcasts I listen to now. Tell 'em Steve-Dave tops the list as my favourite new podcast, it's by Kevin Smith's New Jersey friends: Bryan Johnson, Walt Flanagan and Brian Quinn. I feel that it's funnier than SModcast, which in all honesty has gotten a bit stale.

Another View Askew-niverse podcast I've started to listen to is Highlands: A Peephole History which features the above-mentioned Kevin Smith, Bryan Johnson and Walt Flanagan talking about their history in Highlands, New Jersey.

Tweet Me Harder is a funny and at times surreal podcast by web-comic artists David Malki with Kris Staub.

Making the return cut:
No Agenda
This American Life (I finally finished going through the archives, all 411 episodes)
Planet Money
This Week In Tech
Engadget
Red Centre
The History of Rome
Hardcore History
Common Sense with Dan Carlin
Creative Screenwriting
American Society of Cinematography

Watching: Gran Torino by Clint Eastwood
Reading: The Botany of Desire by Micheal Pollan
Listening To: Sonic Youth - Sonic Nurse

Flyers!

2010-06-28T19:29:00.003+10:00

I spent a day last week doing a bunch of rough pencil sketches of people with guitars and after scanning them all I decided to make some band flyers. The drawings are pretty simple as always; although I am trying to get looser, but the really time consuming part is coming up with the names for the bands and venues and experimenting with fonts and placement. I really have no graphic design aspirations, so my typography is pretty bad.

The one above was the first I drew, but the last one that I finished. The guitar is a Fender Jazzmaster which is a guitar I've had my eye (and ears) on recently but will probably never buy. It's popular with surf bands but I associate it with Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Television, Dinosaur Jr and Nels Cline from Wilco.

Sofia Albatross was a name I came up years ago for a story I started to write, the story never got past a rough outline, but the name lives on. I plan to use it again some time soon...

This one is inspired by Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth. This was the first I completed and I like the looseness of the drawing and the hand drawn text. The guitar is a Gibson Thunderbird Bass (hence the name of the band).

I was kind of inspired by Meredith Gran's webcomic: Octopus Pie when I sketched this girl out. I was unsure if I would ever let the Paltroons headline a concert, but I think they're ready. I think this flyer has the worst colouring and typography, but the best copy; I think it reads very authentically. I love the names of all the bands on that bill, especially the Madeline Prixu Trio. There might be more of Madeline Prixu in the future...

The guitar is a Rickenbacker Model 4300 bass. I added some racing stripes because The Paltroons need the extra speed.

Watching: A Mighty Wind by Christopher Guest
Reading: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Listening To: Sonic Youth - Murray St, Rev. Gary Davies - Harlem Street Singer, The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

Forgotten Photos

2010-06-08T15:26:00.000+10:00

I don't know why I stopped posting photos on this blog, maybe it's because I've been uploading them to my Flickr page. The following are a few shots I've taken since last time. All photos were taken with my Canon 50D with 50mm f1.4 prime lens and have had some Photoshop curves adjustments added to them.

f/2.8, 1/640, ISO 100

I should have used a larger aperture, but lately I've been trying to stay above f2.8 because apparently if I go any wider with this lens it'll get a bit soft. I've found it'll stay sharp from f2 up, though.

f/7.1, 1/100, ISO 100

Wow, I can't believe I shot at f7.1 and the flower in the back is still out of focus.

f/2.5, 1/40, ISO 400

This is a view of one (of three) desks in my room through an out of focus mic stand and floor fan. I've run out of shelf space so I've got books lined up and stacked everywhere. There's a super 8 camera in that dusty black case. I should get the film inside developed, I wonder if it's still good?

f/2.2, 1/50, ISO 400

Can you feel the bokeh? I should have re-framed right a bit, but oh well. When I had finished editing this photo I noticed how bad 8bit jpegs look compared to the 12bit RAW.

f/2.8, 1/40, ISO 800

Where's Waldo? I've been meaning to take my camera out more and shoot people, but because of the focal length of the lens, I've got to get in kinda close and the practicalities of shooting come into conflict with my personal practice of staying out of peoples' way in the hope that they stay out of mine. Anti-social, I know.

f/1.4, 1/20, ISO 100

Close up of the lit-up keyboard on my Dell Studio 15 that I use to edit my photos. I usually keep those lights off, though.

f/1.4, 1/25, ISO 400

A view of another desk in my room and the contents that rest upon it. The Netgear box is elevating my Acer 19" monitor up a bit because the desk is too low. That coffee mug was and continues to be in need of cleaning. Behind it are a couple of miniUSB to USB cables and a Hohner harmonica in the key of A.

f/4, 1/800, ISO 100

One of my rare forays into the world during daylight hours, I added the little border because I rotated the picture a smidge and had to cover it up.

f/2, 1/1600, ISO 100

Same park, same day. I was wasting time while waiting for something in my brain to explode, I've been getting forehead pains/pressure which my doctor has since told me is a tension headache, but which I fear may be an aneurysm or some kind of tumor. Empty bench, autumn trees: feeling close to death, or maybe just a flat composition inspired by the films of Wes Anderson?

f/2.8, 1/40, ISO 100

My Gretsch on my bed alongside my Zoom H4N field recorder. The Gretsch has gone through quite a few modifications since then. It's a constant source of consternation. Maybe I should have gotten the Epiphone Casino after all.

During The Rapture There Will Be Devils

2010-06-07T12:53:00.003+10:00

I use a random word generator to brainstorm ideas for stories (like the Horse story), but this time around an image came to mind and here it is.

The word was actually ENRAPTURED (verb, somewhat uncommon), but I like to run these words through dictionary.com to find multiple meanings and discover the etymology behind the word.

That mp3 player is an albino version of my black Sony NWZ-B143F that replaced my older Sony player which I had used 10-12hrs a day, every day for two years before it died. Lots of good music went through that little gizmo and I guess the picture is about how I feel about music.

I had this one in the backlog for a few months, I was surprised how much I liked it at the time considering how quickly I sketched it. Now it's "finished" and I don't like it too much, maybe I'll redraw the legs.

Who's this dapper chap? I had a lot of fun drawing this. It was drawn pretty quickly, and I guess there are a few mistakes, but I still like it.

I drew this after being frustrated by another devil drawing I was working on. The only thing they have in common is the fur. I liked the rough pencil sketch but I think the clean/coloured version is a little bland.

This here's a devil inspired by Johnny Ramone. The pool cue was inspired by The Rolling Stones documentary: Gimmie Shelter, wherein the Stones hired the Hell's Angels as security for a free festival who promptly delivered quick "justice" upon the hippie crowd (and a musician) with pool cues.

Watching: Hot Fuzz by Edgar Wright and Jeff Tweedy: Sunken Treasure
Reading: And The Ass Saw The Angel by Nick Cave
Listening To: Television - Marquee Moon, The Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely

A Horse's Tale

2010-06-02T21:56:00.002+10:00

In days long past I walked the world barefoot, kicking up clods of dirt and grass with every step. Then the men came, they strapped leather to my back and hammered iron into my soles.

I served my new masters obediently and they rewarded me with the sting of their lash, gifted to me the bitter taste of their bridle. Over dirt roads and cobblestones, through summer's heat and winter's cold, I drew and carried, each trot and canter, endless steps one after another.

Then one autumn day, when my mane was well flecked with grey, I heard a low roar like that of incoming thunder. A gleaming beast of glass and iron emerged from a billowing cloud of dust and smoke. My nostrils flared with the smell of grease and oil. I stamped my hooves as the beast screamed past, its speed signaling the end of my days. Rearing back, I threw my master off from his majestic throne of leather, turned and stamped his head under, with the hooves he shod with nail and hammer.

To wilderness I did return, to the fields where I was born. No lash, no bridle, no harness or saddle will keep me from dying free.

Write Around the Corner

2010-05-27T13:41:00.001+10:00

I find that I have a tendency to write around a story rather than write stories. I spent two days last week trying to get in the heads of characters only to kind of lose all motivation to actually write the actual story. I think once I get into their heads, the action doesn't hold much appeal to me.

These are the characters in the story, it's in the "Cosy Catastrophe" genre, kind of influenced by The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Word War Z by Max Brooks and Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. I love how the real antagonists in good post-apocalyptic fiction aren't the zombies or whatever, but other people. They're about how humanity behaves when the structure of civilization is taken away.

I'm trying to loosen up the characters I draw, I want to get back to a more animated look.

Pretty uninspired drawing, but I like the sullen eyes. The cloud was done quickly with a Photoshop brush created by Charlie Bowater, it's a really good brush that I wouldn't even know how to use properly.
Just a digital sketch, I had this in the backlog for a month or two and I had to finish it or throw it in the "Never Gonna Finish" folder.

I drew this after I saw Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye staring Elliot Gould as Marlowe. It got me in the mood to watch more 70's crime films like Charley Varrick and Night Moves. Cigarette smoke and venetian blinds, it doesn't get any better than that.

More shadow sketches. I just realized that I tend to "finish" stuff that I draw directly in Photoshop, more than the stuff I start with a pencil. It's a double edged sword, because although I get more done, but I tend to accept more substandard work.

Watching: The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman
Reading: Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
Listening To: Wilco - Wilco, The White Stripes - Icky Thump, Jakob Dylan - Women+Country

Sympathy for the Devil

2010-04-20T16:14:00.000+10:00

I had pretty bad RSI pain for three weeks, which was probably exacerbated by playing a lengthy jam session during the first week. I drew the above picture just as my hands were starting to feel better, which was risky because it could have started it up again. I'm drawing almost exclusively with my Intuos 3 in PhotoshopCS2.

I found this sketch while clearing paper off my desk, it was done very roughly with a blunt 2B pencil. I scanned it and did a quick ink and colour in Photoshop. I've got a bunch more drawings 60-80% complete waiting to be finished, but it's hard to make progress due to my lack of colour sense.

I drew this while listening to episode 08 of the Tell 'em Steve-Dave Podcast where they discussed the urban myth of the Jersey Devil. My drawing doesn't match their description at all but I was captivated by their mention of the devil wearing a coat.

Watching: Le Petit Soldat by Jean-Luc Godard
Reading: 1968 by Joe Haldeman
Listening To: Rick Danko - Rick Danko, The Swell Season - Strict Joy

Love Is A Drug

2010-03-16T20:06:00.002+11:00

Well, this didn't go according to plan. I always envisioned this in a Tommy Lee Edwards 1985 brush style but that that wasn't a very realistic expectation. I dragged this page out far longer than I ever intended; it was a very start-stop affair, I started drawing this in mid February and completed five of the seven panels pretty quickly. Then I tried to draw the establishing shot, got frustrated and start working on something else. I would try to get back into it, but my attention would wane and I ended up drawing panel one and four weeks later directly in Photoshop with the Wacom tablet. I don't think this comic works very well but I'm not too disappointed, it was a throw-away idea anyway, I mean, how can I attempt to write about love if I've never experienced it? It's just shmaltz.

I laid the page out with the lettering planned, but during the process of digital inking and compositing, I moved stuff around a bit which resulted in the lettering ending up a little disorganized and it left no space for the title. I used Tekton Pro Bold for the lettering again, I should really try to find a new font or make one up for next time. I created the word balloons with a method I learned from Nate Simpson's blog, it's a simple and effective way of working.
(EDIT: I changed the font to Comic Sans. Yeah, THAT Comic Sans.)

I wanted to use solid black shadows, but chickened out again, it really is something I need to plan in the layout stage and carry out through the pencils and inks. I think I need to do another Mignola style comic.

Despite my dissatisfaction with how this page came out, it caused me to remember something very important (especially in 1-8 pagers) about page layout: every page needs a focus and it needs to show in the panel composition. The layout of this page is boring, everything is too even and the panel heights are too similar, this tells me that there is something wrong with the way I am telling this story.

Watching: McCabe and Mrs Miller by Robert Altman and It Might Get Loud by Davis Guggenheim
Reading: The Sundance Kids by James Mottram
Listening To: Swamp Dogg - Rat On

Street Fight Round Two

2010-03-04T16:23:00.003+11:00

I've been spending less time at the drawing board lately, I've just been drawing straight into Photoshop, or at the very most I'll do a quick scribble on paper and do the rest digitally.

I started thinking of Street Fighter as something akin to a tennis tournament, so this is pre-fight Cammy.

I had no intention of doing another Street Fighter drawing after the Cammy piece, but Man Factory just released Part Two of Three of their Street Fighter rock opera. You can listen and/or buy it HERE. I whipped this up in a couple of hours this morning. The arms are kind of janky, but I'm not going to spend any more time on it.

I've been avoiding finishing a comic for the last couple of weeks. I was going to draw the last two panels this week, but I went kayaking on the weekend and really messed up my hands.

So in lieu of drawing I'll try to write for a few hours, then feel antsy because it'd be late afternoon and I had nothing to show for the day. So I'll open Photoshop and mess around for the rest of the day. So in the end my hands don't actually heal and I've still got a comic to finish.

I've been meaning to do some drawings with Takeshi Koike style shadows, I played around with the Difference blending mode, but found the best method for me to be just changing the colour of the lineart.

Another quick one. I like girls and I like Gretsch guitars, so here's a rockabilly chick playing a Gretsch White Falcon. I find not bothering with linework when drawing to be substantially faster, I want to try a comic using this method. I'll add it to the list.

Watching: Halo Legends, Street Fighter IV by Studio 4C
Reading: Making Movies by Sidney Lumet
Listening To: Man Factory - Street Fight Round Two

Street Fight

2010-02-16T13:16:00.002+11:00

J-J-Jump!

These were all an exercise in digital inking. I sketched 4 of the 5 drawings very roughly (too roughly in some cases) in one brief sitting then spent the rest of the day inking and colouring. I've come to the conclusion that I can ink with the Wacom when the pencils aren't too loose, drawing in photoshop just seems too slow and uncomfortable to me; it feels like I'm pushing around lines as opposed to drawing shapes.

Kick!

It took me a while to come up with backgrounds for each drawing, at one point I was just going to stick them all on one page and be done with it. I've been checking out UDON's Street Fighter II Turbo comic drawn by Jeffery "Chumba" Cruz. I hadn't seen his work for a year or so, and it's gotten really good, it stands out from the usual UDON look.

When in doubt, use a Soviet Sunburst. Overused? Yes. Effective? HELL YES! Fonts by BlamBot.

I think that Capcom was at it's peak in terms of character design during the Alpha years. Even janky characters like Rolento and Bridie looked awesome. Skinny characters were lanky, strong characters were imposing and Cammy was Cammy.

Chun Li + cankles = Chunkles

This was the first of the Street Fighter set and the only one that was fully penciled and funnily enough it is the most boring of the lot.

Your spiky wrists
Your bogus hips
Your rapid kick
I'm lovin' it

-from Chun Li, I'm Lovin' It by Man Factory

This is more like it. Epic hips, skinny legs, over-sized shoes. I much prefer the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero Chun Li to the Street Fighter II-IV version. I had lots of trouble with the face; front-on faces just emphasizes the asymmetrical tendencies of my drawing, and the Wacom made things even more frustrating.

Watching: King of Marvin Gardens, Cool Hand Luke, Man In The Sand
Reading: Street Fighter II Turbo
Listening To: Elv1s 30 #1s - Elvis Presley

The Ocean - Teardown

2010-02-13T10:06:00.000+11:00

I wrote this little comic in 2005-2006, I don't know when exactly, it was my post-animation school period, and I think that is reflected in the story. Most of my "stories" in that period were very open-ended, barely stories, more like vignettes. I was influenced by the films of the French New Wave and Jim Jarmusch who rejected Hollywood storytelling conventions and didn't feel the need to explain everything.

I penciled the comic in November, I intended to use it as a warm up exercise for a period of prolific comic creation. It didn't turn out that way. I spent a lot of time doing layouts, some panels I planned years ago when I wrote it (like page 1 panel 2 and page 2 panel 1) but I mostly just tried different shots till I got something I was 70% satisfied with (compromises had to be made as always) .

The way I lay a page out is very influenced by Will Eisner, who liked to have a page be a complete scene or end on a significant turning point in the scene. I think I managed to end each page in interesting ways, each page had a different function although the main goal is to draw the reader deeper into the story.

It was such a struggle to get the facial expressions and body language to be even close to what I had in mind, the car didn't look convincing and I don't know how to draw water. I also should have done character designs because whenever I make something up on the page it turns out very generic. On top of all that, I found page 3 panel 2 to be impossible to draw in it's original layout and had to change it from a high angle shot (which creates a dread of the cliff edge and water) to a low angle shot, which is maybe too dynamic, it causes the eye to move too fast to the next panel and takes away from the suspense. At that point I was just despondent and just wanted to finish it. That lack of enthusiasm resulted in the the last three panels of page 3 being just rubbish. I ended up redrawing them completely in Photoshop. I was so disgusted with my drawing, I couldn't bring myself to clean up and finish the comic.

Fast forward two unproductive months, I started writing again and did the layout for a four page comic. But as always, I was too scared of starting and as a way of postponing the actual hard work of drawing, I started to digitally ink The Ocean. It took a day per page and to my surprise, it started to look a lot better. I sometimes draw different panel elements on different pages, so I can resize and move stuff around later, so the inking process allowed me to see the pages in their more or less final form.

I originally had plans to watercolour/ink wash the pages, but it was pretty clear that I had no idea how, so I decided to use halftones. I put in the shadows and water (which I am actually happy with!) using different grey values. Now when it came to turning the grey into halftones, I couldn't get the look I wanted, so I just scrapped them, I was happy with the greys, no point in ruining them with dots.

I lettered the comic using Tekton Pro, which is a bold font, I would have preferred to use the regular version, but alas, Adobe charges $25US for it. I am totally incompetent when it comes to lettering, but this was probably my best attempt so far. The main problem was that there would sometimes be a huge amount of text and I had up-sized some drawings during inking and had to rewrite bits so they would fit.

So after all is said and done, I think the comic is somewhat successful, the drawing could have been better and maybe I should have laid out the last 3 panels differently, but on the whole it communicates the mood and pacing I originally intended. Job Done.

The Ocean

2010-02-03T16:26:00.000+11:00

Finally finished. I'm exhausted, so I'll leave the tear-down till the next post.

That Yellow Bastard

2010-01-24T23:13:00.000+11:00

Photoshop CS2, Intuos3

Another self portrait. It's a response to the frustration I feel when it comes to drawing comics. I've got a major case of Page Fright; I wrote a little four page story a week ago (ITWSSOP) and I'm certain that my story beats have ruined what I intended this story to be. I spent a few days doing character designs; I'm happy with the designs, but my drawing has become atrocious, I don't have the discipline anymore.

I'll do anything to avoid drawing a comic, my most frequent excuse is that I'm not ready, that I don't have the ability yet to draw what is required to tell this story properly. I even came up with a premise for another short comic I could do to "work my way up" to drawing ITWSSOP which upon reflection will be harder to draw!

My Gretsch is also driving me insane. I think I now know how it feels to have a beautiful yet malicious girlfriend, it feels like I'm in an abusive relationship. There are things about it that drive me INSANE, but I can't bring myself to hate it. I guess I have to put back in its case because it is my number one distraction, the internet is a close number two.

Sigh, I've been nowhere as productive as I was during my first hermitage. Time to grow some balls.

Watching: Shut Up and Sing - The Dixie Chicks
Reading: Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett
Listening To: Sound clips of various TV Jones Pickups

Itwssop

2010-01-20T00:46:00.002+11:00

Photoshop CS2, Intuos 3

El-Gretsch-O-Matic!

2010-01-10T17:18:00.000+11:00

I've got blisters on my fingers! Well, finally bought a Gretsch G5120 Electromatic hollow-body guitar on Friday. It's been two days and I think the honeymoon is over.

50mm, F/2.5, 1/40, ISO 100, Curves Adjustment

Don't get me wrong, it's a great guitar and I have no regrets about buying it (where's the buyer's remorse?). It looks good, sounds good (and is almost as loud as an acoustic when unplugged), but it's really hard to play. That's partly my own fault because:

1: I'm not familiar with playing such a big guitar with such a tall bridge and tall pickups.

2:I decided to do the setup myself, which is not a big deal until you realize that I haven't so much as re-strung my old Stratocaster, it''s been two years and I'm using the same strings that came with it.

50mm, F/3.5, 1/15, ISO 100, Curves Adjustment

Most hollow-body guitars including this one have a floating bridge that's only kept in place by the string tension and the store doesn't set the intonation. This basically means that even though the open string is in tune, the other frets are off pitch. Intonation is simple, lengthen or shorten the length of the string between the 12th fret and bridge by moving the bridge up or down the body.

There are different methods to check the intonation, and I tried them all, 12th fret harmonic, 5th & 17th fretted, I think I got it close, but it's not perfect. It doesn't help that the low E string isn't tuning properly.

50mm, F/2.8, 1/20, ISO 100, Curves Adjustment

Another part of the setup is setting the action, which refers to the height of the strings over the fretboard. Low action is comfortable to play but causes fret buzz, and high action has a nicer tone but is harder to play quickly.

I'm almost strictly a rhythm guitarist, mostly strumming chords with minimal picking; okay, this means that I should set the action a little high. Now, how high is high? 5/64" what the fuck is that? The trick is to set the action high enough to not get a significant amount of fret buzz but low enough to play comfortably. I'm still figuring this out.

50mm, F/3.5, 1/15, ISO 100, Curves Adjustment

I might end up just getting a pro to put new strings in and do a proper setup, but I don't think the music stores around me have any experience with Gretsches.

The store I got it from apparently only carries one in stock at any time, so it's a display model, no box/case candy. I got a really cool looking strap but it's kind of flimsy and the strap-lock on Gretsches are known to break so I'm not exactly gonna be rocking out as hard as I would with my Strat.

I also bought a totally ugly, but strong and functional Ashton hard case, it was really cheap, 1/3 of the price of a Gretsch case which I would have had shipped to me, but damn it's ugly. Oh, there's the buyer's remorse.

Watching: Forever's Not So Long by Shawn Morrison
Reading: Second Variety by Philip K Dick
Listening To: Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures

Resolute and Ruin

2010-01-05T14:07:00.001+11:00

First drawing of 2010 done entirely in Photoshop CS2 with an Intuos3 in 2 hours. I did this on 01-01-10 while everyone else was nursing a hangover. I've mentioned it before, but it's a good time to remind myself to use more black, I've become too precious about lines.

It's high time I finally finish or scrap my WIPs. So here we go.

I planned for this to be a t-shirt design but had major problems drawing the arms and hands. I threw tattoos all over the arms to hide the janky-ness. It may yet be a shirt.

I LOVE dirndls. I prefer the traditional dirndls to the slutty modern dirndls we see every year at Oktoberfest. The dirndl above is more of a fantasy-influenced corset than a dirndl. DIRNDL!

50mm, F/3.5, 1/15, ISO 100, Curves Adjustment
I finally received my package of Prismacolor Col-Erase pencils and Niji Waterbrush from Dick Blick. I'd been looking for Prisma pencils for ages, they're unavailable in Australia and Amazon won't send them out of America. It took 8 working days, not including public holidays from Illinois to Sydney. I got 1 dud pencil out of the 100, not too shabby.

50mm, F/2.5, 1/20, ISO 100, Curves Adjustment
I got the Niji Waterbrush after reading about them years ago on Ronnie Del Carmen's blog. Now I have no excuse for not learning watercolors.

Watching: North by Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock
Reading: Maskerade by Terry Pratchett
Listening To: Lucky 7 - Reverend Horton Heat

I, Me, Mine

2009-12-30T15:48:00.001+11:00

More narcissism. I've been contemplating getting an Epiphone Casino, the guitar most commonly known as the guitar John Lennon and George Harrison used to play. McCartney also mentioned that if could only have one guitar it'd be this one. So here's me in my own Beatles-esque rooftop performance:

I don't think the guitar is available in this colour since I based it on John Lennon's Casino, which he sanded the paint off of.

I'm in the habit of sitting down to draw in the afternoon and colouring all through the night and it's easy (in the wee hours of the morn) to make the mistake of getting caught up in details and losing sight of the whole. The next morning (or noon) is usually spent correcting mistakes. I made the mistake of not cropping the page, and I ended up with a composition that isn't ideal. The biggest mistake was that I made a background for it at all since I think the picture looks better like this:

ACHTUNG! Guitar talk ahead:
Here we have the Casino head to head with the Gretsch Electromatic G5120 (I'd prefer it in White, which is a rare colour, but I wouldn't mind it in a classic-Gretsch Orange). It's an entry-level version of the Gretsch 6120 which is a Chet Atkins signature model. The Pros and Cons of the two guitars pretty much even themselves out:

The Casino has great P90 pickups, pinned bridge (easier to maintain) and is cheaper than the 5120, but has a front facing lead-jack and no Bigsby Vibrato.

The 5120 is loud even when unplugged, has a floating bridge(holds tone better during vibratos), a Bigsby Licensed Vibrato and is very popular for modifying, but has mediocre humbucker pickups (I prefer single coils).

Aesthetically I prefer the single cutaway style of the Gretsch and I'm uncertain if I prefer the technically superior Alnico P90 pickup sound of the Epiphone to the Gretsch-buckers (which I'd swap out for TV Jones Classics eventually). The P90s have a great chimey sound and fuzz up nicely, but Gretsches have a twangy bite to them. I'm not really a huge vibrato-person but I like the fact that's it's available on the Gretsch.

To continue on my Beatles jag, we've got a cute little Höfner Bass (albeit a right-handed version, sorry Paul) running through a Hartke amp head and Marshall stack. I really hated this drawing for a long time (from scan to character colour) because of the kind of janky forced perspective. I made the mistake of not pushing the perspective enough. That's kind of what characterizes my personal work I think, a mediocrity born of fear/laziness/ignorance. It's weird because I push the poses and designs of my commercial work pretty far. Is money the motivator? Na, I'm pretty sure it's just me not wanting to look like a hack in front of other artists.

Next up we have a Coles Phillips-style fade-away girl. I found this sketch in my junk folder and just tooled around with it for a little while. Unfortunately I didn't have a book title that could provide subtext to this drawing (because it's just a meaningless sketch or in other words: there is no text, therefore there is no subtext) so I just wrote in the name of the audio-book I was listening to at the time; Blue Beard by Kurt Vonnegut. Audio-books are awesome, especially while the hands are busy doing tedious things like doing clean-up or using Photoshop.

Last up is just a quick sketch I threw some quick colours and a vignette on. I read somewhere about a thing the kids do these days where they make little bizarro-tattoos by masking off an image on their skin and jumping in a tanning booth. This leaves an image/pattern of pale skin. I thought this was a pretty ingenious way of having a non-permanent reverse-tattoo. Those crazy kids, what'll they come up with next?

Watching: Inglorious Basterds by QT
Reading: Martian Time Slip by Philip K Dick
Listening To: Powderfinger - The Golden Rule, Bob Dylan - Christmas In The Heart, Blood, Sweat and Tears - Child Is Father To Man

I Feel... Meh

2009-12-15T21:19:00.000+11:00

I've been pretty aimless lately. I finished penciling a three page comic a couple of weeks ago, but the results weren't to my mind very satisfactory. I seem to have a problem drawing within a frame, which on the surface may seem ironic because I'm a storyboard artist, but in practice it isn't; I do my storyboards on separate pages and compile them in Photoshop. I drew the comic on an A4 page and the panels were too small. I'm gonna work bigger in the future.

Anyways, I thumb-nailed for three days before scrapping them and re-thumbing/writing them in a day.The drawing process was very slow, a page took me two days. I don't feel like finishing it yet, it'll take me a day per page to clean up and a couple days to tone/colour in Photoshop (I wrote the story in '04, so there isn't exactly any rush to finish).

This bad experience has lead me to abandon my plans to draw the stories that I have backlogged and I'm trying to come up with new ideas. I've been trying to write, but I procrastinated a lot and haven't written anything usable. I had to put my guitar away because it was too distracting and it was messing up my hands; unfortunately I took out my Ukulele and have been playing that instead.

One of the more interesting procrastinations was a site called We Feel Fine. It's an interactive site that scans random blogs for the phrase "I feel" and it takes that sentence and a photo if available and groups them according to various criteria, emotion, age, location etc... The site has a really nice UI and while clicking around I constructed a theory that maybe random thoughts or feelings, no matter how cliche or banal can seem profound as long as they are constrained inside a single sentence. Maybe this explains the appeal of Twitter and Facebook?

The picture above is pretty much how I spent my Monday, after eight hours of zero productivity I decided to just sketch for an hour and came up with this. That's how I use my laptop, lying down on my bed, with an ethernet cable sticking out of the side. I put cardboard underneath the computer to stop the mattress from blocking the vents.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I throw down sketches without much thought and discard so much paper. This sketch was done on a side of a page I was gonna throw away. I sometimes will try to fill a page, this was just filler. I threw textures all over it because I can't colour for shit.

Random sketch with Prismacolor Vermilion pencil. I had a poke around on Facebook and was amazed at how good some people are at taking photos of themselves, the framing can be pretty good. Now they just need to turn off the flash...

Watching: I Hired A Contract Killer - Aki Kaurismäki
Reading: Bouguereau by Fronia E Wissman
Listening to: Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy, Brian Setzer Orchestra - Songs from Lonely Ave

Oh, Darling!

2009-12-09T13:12:00.000+11:00

More photos, this time taken at or coming back from Darling Harbour, Sydney (although I'm not showing the actual harbour shots, I find taking landscape photos boring). I didn't have to crop as much this time 'round. I still find the DOF preview button awkward to press, especially snapping on the fly, so I still haven't used it much.

I also confirmed my suspicion that White Balance doesn't really matter in RAW because the picture is captured flat and WB is added (but not baked in). I still try to set my WB, 'cause it's quick and you get a better representation when reviewing the photo after you've just taken it. I also set the picture style to Faithful from the custom preset I had been using before (same as faithful w/+1 sharpness).

All these photos were taken at ISO 400, I think it's still pretty flexible, I'm happy with that amount of noise. Most of the good looking high ISO stuff I've found online are landscape shots, they don't show how the noise affects skin tone.

F/3.5, 1/40, ISO 400, Curves Adjustment
I'm getting faster at focusing, DOF was probably an accident though, just moving the dials quickly to get decent exposure, if I thought about composing it I would have went f/1.4, which undoubtedly would have resulted in an out of focus face.

F/1.4, 1/30, ISO 400, Curves Adjustment
Slightly out of focus, but I like the bokeh and the facial expression. This was taken in the Blackbird Cafe, which had horrible lighting inside, but we were given another table outside which had good lighting, but a really small table and cramped seating and I only have the 50mm so I didn't bother taking any shots.

F/1.4, 1/40, ISO 400, Curves Adjustment
Taken on a walk back to Wynyard Station (which I found out later was closed), I couldn't really get into the angle/position I wanted to, maybe I'm still too self conscious. I think I'm probably overdoing the blue look.

F/2, 1/20, ISO 400, Curves Adjustment
Slow shutter, I was surprised how steady I held the camera. This is another example of a weird f/stop and shutter combo. If I set this shot up instead of taking it on the fly I would've gone f/1.4 with a 1/40 for less camera shake.

F/2, 1/60, ISO 400, Curves Adjustment
I'm sure there is something in focus here...

F/2, 1/40, ISO 400, Curves Adjustment
Kind of boring, but its an example of how I've gotten into the habit of using the focus zoom assist to grab focus quickly. I think it's the reason I have a higher ratio of good:usable:junk.

F/1.8, 1/60, ISO 400, Curves Adjustment
I found myself still getting too close to my subjects before remembering the FOV of my 50mm and backing off a bit. I think this was taken after I found Wynyard Station closed and was trying to hoof it to Town Hall Station. Still trying to figure out how exposed is well exposed...

Watching: Pearl Jam: Single Video Theory
Reading: Galactic Pot Healer by Philip K Dick
Listening to: Paul McCartney - Chaos and Creation in the Backyard

Night School

2009-11-23T14:14:00.001+11:00

F/3.5, 1/50, ISO 1600, Curves Adjustment, Crop, Post Blur

I've only been out twice at night with my Canon 50D and have been somewhat disappointed with my images. The fault is entirely mine because I shoot people as they are going about their business and therefore there is little to no time to consciously adjust exposure settings or to get framing perfect (bad framing is usually because I'm used to a much wider field of view). Hopefully with practice I can adjust my exposure unconsciously, almost like muscle memory.

What I've Learned So Far About Shooting At Night (interiors, candid)
Specifically applicable to my Canon 50D with Canon 50mm f/1.4 USM
DISCLAIMER: This is all based on my limited experiences. Further experiences may prove me entirely wrong about everything.

Keep ISO as low as possible. 640 is acceptable. 800 is pushing it. 1600 looks like your phone took the photo.

Keep Shutter over 25. Any slower hand-held WILL result in camera shake. 50+ is preferable.

Aperture can go wide, but focus is super tricky.

Group shots need a smaller aperture (f/4+) to get everyone's eyes in focus. 90% of the time I want to focus on the eyes, shooting open (f/1.4) results in focus so shallow that often only one eye is in focus.

Use zoom assist for focusing. I gotta learn to switch it on and off fast.

Watch highlights, expose for skin. Blowing out specular highlights is okay; blowing out skin tones is not.

Fire off 3-5 shots with each burst (in quick burst mode) . Flash Memory is expendable, the shot is not.

Watch framing in portrait shots. Choose what side of the camera is to be the top and bottom (holding the camera 90'CCW makes focusing difficult, but holding it 90'CW makes the camera shake during shutter release) .

Back off. Go wide and crop in post. I'm used to wide lenses, so the 50mm (80mm on an APS-C sensor) seems very long to me.

Find light. Candles, lamps, cigarettes. Direct, spilled or bounced. NEED IT.

Wrapping up, I think that my procedure for exposing should be adjusting:

Aperture first because focusing is something I can theoretically control.
Shutter second because I can only hold my hands steady to a point and I don't mind a bit of motion blur in the already moving subject (I'm used to the 1/50 shutter look from film and video).
ISO lastly because I shouldn't have to adjust it much unless the lighting situation is really varied. If I'm in the same area I will probably set and forget it. If I can't get a decent exposure with the aperture and shutter I'll change the ISO.

It's a lot for me to learn and remember and this just for getting a decent exposure, I haven't started thinking about the artistic choices yet.

Watching: Classic Albums - The Who - Who's Next
Reading: Coraline: The Visual Companion
Listening to: The Brian Setzer Orchestra - Wolfgang's Big Night Out

Electro-matic!

2009-11-18T23:19:00.000+11:00

I've been going through some old scripts and stories I've written over the last 5 years or so, there's a lot of stuff I don't remember at all, and funnily (or disturbingly) enough the "best" stuff were things I wrote in a spare moment without much thought (which is why I had forgotten their existence/s). Most of the stuff is kind of bland, pretentious and/or corny, but there are a couple of ideas that I still find interesting. Maybe this means I'll stop procrastinating and actually draw a comic...

One of my biggest (and the most physically damaging) procrastination is playing guitar. I jammed with a couple of friends this weekend and it pretty much guarantees my hands will hurt a lot for a week or so. My hands will get better if I rest them for a few days, but I find it pretty hard to keep my hands off my guitar after jamming, especially since I keep my guitar right next to my drawing board.

Ah, the Gretsch 5120 Electro-matic hollowbody, you will be mine someday...
But not today. Although it's very reasonably priced, I'm not going to buy one anytime soon. I currently play a bottom-of-the-line Fender Squier Stratocaster, it sounds thin and is two frets shorter than a regular Strat, but it's probably the right guitar for me right now, a Gretsch would be wasted on me, I don't have the skill to make proper use of it.

These ladies were drawn with a Prismacolor Col-Erase Vermilion pencil given to me by After Effects artist: Colin Bigelow. I scoured the KAPOW! studio on a search for Prismacolor pencils, but alas, I only found one Blue pencil behind a drawing board. Colin took pity on me and now I'm a happy camper. I previously used Carmine red, but I think I'm converted to Vermilion now, it shows up a little less vibrant on a scan but it looks great on the page.

I've been trying to order some Prismacolor pencils, but they seem to be unavailable in Australia and Amazon won't ship them here. I've found one supplier that will ship to Oz but when I tried to order some, they didn't have enough in stock (which is fair enough; I did want to order a LOT).

I think I've posted some designs of this character before. It's a character for a One page comic I've been meaning to do for ages. I've had problems trying to get him to look right, either he looks okay, but kind of generic; or his look suits the story but the design is plain.

Watching: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Reading: The Ikea Catalog
Listening To: The Stooges - Raw Power, The Smiths - Strangeways, Here We Come

Something Old, Something New

2009-11-10T07:04:00.000+11:00

It is now Week 03 of my Hiatus/Unemployment. I gave myself one week of inactivity, which I unintentionally enforced by messing up my hand playing guitar and Assassins Creed; so I couldn't do anything even if I had wanted to. My takeaway from that week: Doing nothing is really boring.

Week 02 was pretty much about relearning how to draw. I just sat at my desk and sketched, mostly the same old crap. This week I hope to get something done, a t-shirt design, a short story, a comic (not likey).

This first pic was something I drew recently. I hate drawing backgrounds, so I just used the straight line tool in Photoshop and just whipped up a simple Ikea-like room.

This one was an old train sketch that I had coloured a while ago, but I wasn't sure what to do about the BG.

An old sketch of a character for a one page comic I plan on doing sometime.

These last two were sketches I did last week, trying to get back into the habit of drawing people again.

Watching: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garica
Listening To: Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf
Reading: Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman

My F1rSt dSLr!

2009-11-08T20:33:00.000+11:00

Finally! I recently bought my first DSLR camera, a Canon 50D which I stuck a Canon 50mm f/1.4 on the front of. I was considering waiting for the 60D which is probably gonna come out March '10 but man, life's too short and I've got a lot of free time on my hands now that I'm unemployed. The series I was working on for the last 20 months is finally wrapped and will probably air in about a month. Finally!

I'd been playing with my 50D for about two weeks before I took it out on the town. I shoot fully manual, manual focus, aperture, shutter, iso; so some, who am I kidding, all of these shots are a little (or a lot) out of focus. All but the last shot was taken on the fly while walking, I haven't yet grown the cajones to stand around, pointing my camera in people's faces.

F6.3, 1/100, ISO 400, Light curves adjustment in CS4
This first shot was taken outside Central station, I wish I could've panned a little left and gotten that guy on the left in the shot fully and focused more accurately. The DOF is so shallow on the 50mm and makes critical focus very difficult. I'm used to adjusting the aperture and shutter (although not below 1/25) on my HV30 but ISO is something I never really thought about before now.

F5.6, 1/100, ISO 400, Light curves adjustment in CS4
Not Impressed! The couple in the middle are giving me the evil eye, but I don't care, I'm really happy with the composition and the poses. I added a slightly blue curves adjustment in the first two shots with CS4, which I kind of regret.

F2.8, 1/100, ISO 200, cropped
Waiting around for another friend outside of Ivy on George St - $20 all you can eat sushi? Hell yeah! Totally out of focus, this shot and the next were taken so fast I'm surprised they aren't motion blurred to hell. Even after analyzing this shot, I still don't know where I was focusing.

F2.8, 1/60, ISO 200, cropped
An even quicker shot. I'm like Quick-Draw McGraw, point, focus, shoot, BANG! Missed??? Oh well, close enough....

F20, 6 sec, ISO 200, Aperture +0.7 in ACR5
My first (successful) long shutter photo. Taken on a Joby Gorillapod, it took around eight photos before I got the right combination of Aperture, Shutter and ISO (the Gorillapod was slipping in the first few too). Like I mentioned before, I'm used to operating a video camera, so my shutter is pretty much stuck on 1/50 and higher. My hands are pretty shaky too, so shooting at 1/15 and slower results in slightly blurry shots.

I'm still trying to figure out how to not have blown highlights at night, is it possible? Feasible? Preserve highlights and lift shadows in post? I still don't know, but I was taking faster shutter/higher aperture photos and the highlights were destroyed. I think the only highlights blown in this shot was the window in the far background on the left.

Art In The Time Of Tendonisis

2009-08-15T19:35:00.006+10:00

More narcissistic pictures. I think I keep drawing these because they're so easy to do. I've been spending hours on drawings I can't (or won't) finish and sometimes after ripping the pages off of my drawing board and throwing them to the floor, I'll slap down a quick sketch of something easy.

The first picture was supposed to be very graphic/cubist but I didn't know how to shape the colour.

And here's the chiaroscuro version. I'm really starting to like the line-less look. My travellin' buddy Woric has been doing something like this for a while. I want to draw a short comic using this look.

I did this sketch a long time ago, but couldn't find a colour scheme. Finally, I decided on greyscale and one colour.

This was a drawing I did after a period of tendonisis. It's been flaring on and off for the last few weeks. I think I might have a rough week coming up...

Monochrome

2009-06-14T19:44:00.005+10:00

I've just about given up on colour. I just can't figure out how to use it. I've been meaning to do more black and white and greyscale work anyway...

I finished storyboarding my last episode, so I hope this gives me more "hand time" to draw my own stuff.

This is how I felt after having to use FLASH CS4 for the first time at work. Give me back my pencil! (I'm not a total luddite though, I just installed CS4 in my Windows 7 virtual machine).

This came out very different from the original sketch. The sketch had more attitude, the hips and shoulders were more opposing. I lost more attitude when I removed the lines, the mouth and eyes were more intense. Oh well, it's a fair trade-off as like the Coles Phillips' fade-away girl look.

Coloured Girlies

2009-04-25T20:20:00.003+10:00

Just some coloured sketches. I hope to do some drawing tomorrow.

Photo-cheating

2009-04-15T22:44:00.003+10:00

Just a sketch I coloured. I couldn't come up with a background so I just used a photo I took with my Nokia 6300.

It's a photo of my local train station and I took it one night after work when I was struck by how blue the night sky was and how beautiful the night looked juxtaposed with the yellow artifical lights. It reminded me of the nighttime Paris scenes in The Conformist (by Bernardo Bertolucci and shot by Vittorio Storaro) where the night is really blue and the lights are orangy-yellow. The photos (of which this is but one) are all noisy and dull, I should really buy a DSLR, so I applied a curves adjustment layer and boosted the blacks.

I coloured the sketch before deciding on the photo so the lighting doesn't match but I think it looks alright anyway.

Faking It

2009-04-10T21:52:00.006+10:00

I was going to use this as a t-shirt design, but I couldn't get it to look good enough. The rough sketch had a lot of promise (as well as it's fair share of bad proportions) but the clean up process defeated me yet again. I gave up and threw a gradient and some circles in the background.

It's been so long since I drew from life and it clearly shows in the hokey anatomy. I've been faking it for too long and I think I'm going to take some life drawing classes once work is over. It's been ages since I actually sat down at my drawing board at home (as opposed to on a train) and actually drew something not work related. I've been finding time after work and on weekends to just get used to drawing again. Drawing is really something you (meaning I) have to do everyday to not regress.

Sketches From A Moving Train Part 10

2009-03-08T15:15:00.000+11:00

I started this sketchbook last August, just a week before my hands started to conk out. I stopped for a few months until December when my hands started to feel better. I filled this sketchbook out around the start of February, and have spent the last few weeks just finishing some of the sketches off.

My hands felt great in January and I think I got too cocky; I started to sketch on the train everyday and play guitar after work. In mid February the pain came back. I think, if the damage is the same as last time, that I'm at the beginning of the "pain cycle". It took five months for my hands to heal themselves last time, and I'm assuming it'll be at least the same this time, if I haven't fucked my hands up permanently.

I've stopped sketching regularly, but I'm gonna try and do a drawing a week and post those regularly instead of having sporadically posting every few months.

Snookered

2009-01-10T21:57:00.007+11:00

Here are some pics I snapped last year with my Nokia 6300 at a local RSL club. I had to be pretty quick because they were actually playing and would often move during the shot. The fluro lights screwed up the skin colour so I decided to see what they look like in black and white.

They kind of remind me of the look Micheal Chapman created for Raging Bull (in reality, they probably don't look alike at all) which was kind of funny because I thought they looked like the end of Taxi Driver (another film Chapman shot) when they were in colour.

Snap! Snap!

2008-12-21T17:56:00.006+11:00

I'm getting kinda snap happy. The first half of these photos were taken with my phone, a Nokia 6300 on Auto. God, I wish I could get at least one manual setting, oh well, it's small and I always carry it around in my pocket. Most of these shots were taken on my way to and from work.

The second half of photos were taken with my Canon HV30 video camera with a Raynox 6600 wide angle lens converter. I don't use this camera enough, and when I do, it's usually taking photos instead of video. They're in 16x9 ratio because I shoot in video mode, that way I'm learning how to compose, expose and focus for when I eventually get around to make a short film. These shots were taken at home, in my bedroom and backyard.

I have a tendency of taking dark photos, usually towards light, a big No-No especially with a wide angle becasue it flares, HARD. It's another thing to learn I guess.

Sketches From A Moving Train Part 9

2008-12-03T21:35:00.000+11:00

Whoops! I forgot that I had yet to post the second half of this sketchbook. Well, here it is.

Concerning my crippled hands, I went to see a rhumatologist, and apparently my intense muscle/tendon/nerve pain baffled him. So the doctors have no idea what's wrong and the show I'm working on will probably be over in a few months leaving me unemployed and my hand pain will probably prevent me from getting another job. Yay!

Weird thing though, I recently stopped wearing my wrist splint and my hands hurt, well maybe not less, but less sharply than before. I also discovered that typing and using computers is worse than drawing for my hands. I also learned that playing guitar still hurts plenty.

Anyone know a cure for creative block? 'Cause I need it. Big time. I recently tidied up a bit and was going through my old sketchbooks (I've been keeping them since around 2003) and I was surprised to find tons of notes, story ideas and storyboards. Why can't I come up with ideas anymore? When did I stop imagining? Have I gotten disillusioned because I know I will never be a great artist? Is it because I no longer care?

Year of the Podcast

2008-11-30T13:53:00.005+11:00

I work in a studio, drawing all day, no answering phones or interacting with people. Good. This means I have a solid eight hours of listening time. In previous years this meant music, interspersed with the odd podcast. This year, things have changed. I listen to so many podcasts and audio books that I almost have no time for music (I listen to music on my commute). I recently got people at my studio listening to This American Life. So in the spirit of sharing here is a list of some of the podcasts I listen to:

This American Life
Smodcast
This Week in Tech
Net @ Night
MacBreak Weekly
Windows Weekly
Common Sense with Dan Carlin
Hardcore History
No Agenda
The History of Rome
Binge Thinking History
This Week in Photography
Penny Arcade Podcast
Webcomics Weekly
Animation Podcast

Splinecast
Creative Screen writing Magazine
American Cinematography
The Moth
Le Show
Wordballoon
SideBar
Engadget
GDGT

Sketches From A Moving Train Part 8

2008-11-05T21:29:00.006+11:00

I filled up this sketchbook around mid-August. More of the same. I started a new sketchbook and got a couple of pages/days in when I noticed that my hands were really hurting.

It turns out I have RSI. I originally thought it was Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but apparently it's something else, tendonitis or something. I think it's hard to diagnose what it is exactly because drawing uses so many muscles in the hand and wrist so the pain is in multiple places, whereas in RSI from say, typing or using a mouse the pain usually only occurs in a few spots. Not so in my case, no that would be to normal and easy to deal with, I have acute pain in both hands, in multiple places at once and separately.

Now wait a minute. In both hands? That's strange, don't I only use one hand to draw? Well, when my right hand started to hurt a lot, I started to draw with my left hand. The knowledge of how to draw was there, the big struggle was co-ordination. Well, now both hands are screwed. I don't think it was just from drawing. My daily routine used to be: wake up, draw on train (1 1/2 hrs), draw at work (8-9hrs), draw on train (1 1/2hrs), play guitar (1-2hrs), use computer (3hrs), sleep and repeat. Now I pretty much can't do anything with my hands without causing pain.

It's weird not being able to draw my own stuff (I still work, which might give me permanent damage if I push things too hard) or play guitar. Weird and frustrating. I've been trying to spend my time writing (not going well) and playing with my video camera (Canon HV30). I'll post some video tests when I get around to doing them.

Anyways, this is the first batch from this sketchbook. The bottom image contains character designs for a one page comic I was planning on doing.

Sketches From A Moving Train Part 7

2008-06-17T01:15:00.004+10:00

Second batch of sketches.

I went to Supanova Pop Culture Expo (back in the day, they were called comic conventions) on Saturday. It was okay, although I don't think it's really my scene anymore, well, maybe just not as a visitor. Being in Artist Alley is pretty cool. Speaking of which, like an idiot, I only discovered last week that the convention was in June. Last year it was held in October and I assumed it would be held in October this year. So I missed out on getting a table (I haven't made a new book, so it's okay). I'll probably go to Smash! in August, but I most likely will only be going as a patron.

I'm trying to get back in the habit of making comics again. I started the 24hr comic thing a couple of weeks ago, but only lasted 4hrs. I'll talk about that in a later post, but the "writing" process kind of exhilarated me; that is, until the realization about the amount of work it would take to draw the whole thing and the fear of failure got to me and I stopped when I should of pressed on. Maybe the fear is what keeps me from finishing anything and why all I ever post are sketches. Or maybe I'm just plain lazy. Either way, I've got to buck up and get over it if I ever want to do anything worthwhile.

Sketches From A Moving Train Part 6

2008-06-17T01:00:00.005+10:00

Here are some more drawings from my sketchbook. This batch contains 16 "pages" so I think I'll split them over two posts. I usually have a lot of unfinished drawings after I fill up a sketchbook, but this time around I spent a week or so on the train, "finishing" most of the sketches. It was mostly just drawing clothes, adding feet etc...

I'm happier with this batch of sketches than the last few, I think I'm getting better at drawing hands and feet. There are a lot of things I want to improve on (I listed them on the first page of my new sketchbook), such as clothing, hair, facial expressions and poses. I'm also going to be drawing more shadows. I think I'm currently only drawing shadow patterns instead of actually figuring out where the shadows fall on the figure, strength and direction of light source, cast shadows etc...

Resignation In The Face Of Adversity

2008-04-27T15:05:00.000+10:00

More from the BackLog. I don't even like the first image, I don't know why I "cleaned" it up and scanned it. I think I was in a period (post Supanova) where I was just scanning everything. I think the drawing was pretty bad, but I had done the shadow layer a few months back, and with my current "method" of colouring, that's half the job done. So today, instead of finishing my storyboards for work like I should have, because I'm a week behind schedule, I decided to throw some colours on some old junk.

The second image is one I drew last November. At the time I was convinced that it was my best drawing up to that point. It may have been true, and that's pretty sad because it's an underwhelming drawing. I think, like with all my work, that the rough blue sketch is a lot better, my clean up process kills my drawings. I had the belief/ambition that I would not draw people, just standing around in front of a gradient background anymore, and that everything I draw will have backgrounds, acting and a back story. That didn't work out. I gave up on colouring this, I have no idea how to even begin colouring "scenes". The lighting I had in mind is beyond my ability to actualize. I'm such a quitter.

Caffiene and Nicotine

2008-04-26T20:03:00.000+10:00

Finally! I've had this sitting around on my computer for ages, I think I drew this last November or December. I've tried to colour this many, many times. I probably should have been doing "Work" work today, but I'm pretty disillusioned with it and decided to try clearing out the 'log. I was so unhappy with the colours that I just decided to stick a solid colour over it. I still don't "get" colour theory, I don't know how to pick harmonious colours. Maybe I should commit myself to doing stark black and white work instead? I should give it a try...after I finish clearing out the backlog.

Sketches From A Moving Train Part4

2008-04-26T14:00:00.001+10:00

These sketches come from the first half of my current sketchbook (17 March 08). I was sick for a few weeks and worked from home, so I haven't been sketching much. I haven't been drawing at all much, come to think of it. I don't consider storyboarding for work as drawing, it's just work to me. I colourized these sketches because plain gray looked boring.

I'm growing very dissatisfied with how I draw, I wrote a list of things to focus on in the first page of this sketchbook. The list included: No more shitty poses, Learn to draw hair and cloth, Draw more dudes, Observe people around me and Use different expressions. I haven't been doing much or any of these things. I guess I'm just adverse to learning, or maybe just plain lazy. It's easy to just hunch over a sketchbook and draw the same old crap I always draw.

I think a pro AND con of the internet is that there is so much stuff. My bookmarked links to Artists websites is huge and when I find time to look at them, my inner pack-rat takes over and I just right click the images without really studying them. There's a lot of art on my computer that I haven't really looked at. I don't really get inspired anymore, not by artists, films, novels or music. I think I'm getting old and calloused. I don't feel the passions I used to feel in my early 20's. I think I'm kind of a passion parasite; I feed on the enthusiasm of those around me. When I live in Australia, I hang out with friends who aren't artists, so I don't really get inspired. When I'm in New Zealand, pretty much everyone I know are artists (there are a few particularly inspiring people there).

I've been watching some pretty good movies recently, 3 Days of the Condor by Sydney Pollack, A Streetcar Named Desire by Elia Kazan, Half Nelson by Ryan Fleck, The Lookout by Scott Frank. Four years ago I would have been jumping up and down, looking to find out what lenses and lights the cinematographer used, studying the thematic spines of the stories, memorizing compositions. Nowadays, when I finally make time to watch movies (I have a stack of dvds that I have to watch) I only really watch them as a passive viewer, which was something that I hoped I would never become (one of the reasons I hate and don't watch T.V).

Flash! Flash!

2008-04-05T22:51:00.000+11:00

Every once and a while I troll through some message boards looking around to see who's doing what and trying to find the best forum to participate in. I remember back in the good ol' days of the ozcomics.com boards in 2001 where a lot of really good work was being shown and where a really varied community interacted and got into arguments and discussed stuff. Lots of art groups and projects flying about.

Then, if I remember correctly, the site shut down for a month or so and the community dispersed into a lot of smaller boards. (These boards existed before, but they weren't as important for ME). Sijun, penciljack, protodepto, sequence protocol, ledheavy and sketchbook sessions, which I think was associated with Shane Glines.

Anyways, I was trawling the sketchbook sessions forum a few days ago and saw an open thread in the "girls" section entitled Flasher - Open Thread - Lots more drawing - Lots more nudity that I thought was kind of cute in a Gil Elvgren kinda way and I decided to draw something in the same vein, and maybe start posting in forums again (being involved in forums takes way too much time that I probably won't do it).

So here are some sketches I did, I still suck at colouring and I just don't know what to do about that, I should probably get in touch with my old flatmate Woric and get some pointers.

WARNING: The first image contains nudity(although you can't see anything really) and is not Work Safe.

Finally, More Things I Was Too Attached To for No Good Reason

2008-03-24T18:19:00.000+11:00

Arrrghhh! I'm so goddamned tired of these drawings, I drew them last year and I just didn't know how to colour them. They're not really very good drawings, but for some reason, I couldn't stick 'em in my "Junk" folder. I've probably started to become too sentimental. So here they are, coloured very badly. I'm really disappointed in my lack of enthusiasm and progress in colouring and backgrounds. I started making headway in the right direction last July-August when I had just gotten back from New Zealand and instead of keeping it up and doing more, I just stopped. It's even worse now that I have my current job and have internet access at home, because I don't even draw at home these days (or watch movies, I have a stack of dvds to watch).

It's the Easter weekend and I've pretty much spent it in front of my computer, not doing anything, just listening to podcasts (www.twit.tv) and reading blogs. I should have drawn a comic or written a short story or something else productive. What a waste of four days. These two days of holidays are putting me behind schedule at work as well, so I'll probably be working long hours on that instead of doing my own stuff.

Anyways, boo-hoo for me. I should be getting some Ektachrome64t film for my Super8 camera this week, so that's one good thing to look forward to. Wow, this blog is starting read like a blog.

Sketches From A Moving Train Part3

2008-03-15T19:01:00.001+11:00

I was commuting to work a couple of weeks ago when a weird-looking guy puts his hand on my thigh and sits down next to me. As I look up he smiles and says "Very nice". I remove my earphones and say to the guy "Don't fucking touch me" not loud, but loud enough that people around me hear it. The guy apologises and I slowly put my earphones back in and resume sketching. A minute goes by and something in my brain finally kicks in. He put his hand on my thigh by accident while trying to sit down as the train jolted to a start. And when he said "Very nice", it was referring to the drawings on my sketchbook. True story.

Anyways, these are the final pages of my first train sketchbook. At the end I was really tired of drawing the same types of girls wearing the same types of clothes. I realised that one of my many artistic weaknesses is that I don't really know how to draw cloth or hair, so those are things to tackle in the next book. I also miss drawing weird looking girls with crooked noses and buck teeth with braces. I'm also gonna try drawing more guys, I think I might have forgotten how.

Sketches From A Moving Train Part2

2008-03-15T18:57:00.001+11:00

Here are more sketches I did while on my commute to work everyday. I just filled this current book up on Friday and am starting a new one tomorrow. Hopefully it has more varied sketches, this one seems to be the same 3-4 poses repeated. My compulsive sketching has gotten to the point where I don't put my stuff away while I change trains, I just carry my sketchbook, pencil and eraser around the station, drawing all the while. Lottsa fun.

Clearing out the 'Log

2008-02-24T13:33:00.000+11:00

These are some old drawings that I finally got around to colour. I'm slowly going through my backlog that dates back to last November. It kinda sucks because I'm sure I can draw better now, but I don't want to add to the backlog without finishing the older stuff first. I've also got to start doing backgrounds again. Work is pretty brutal, but I'm gonna try to leave work at work and do more of my own stuff.

Sketches From A Moving Train

2008-02-02T11:25:00.000+11:00

I started a new job a few weeks ago; it’s a fair commute across Sydney on the train which gives me around 3 hours a day to draw in my sketchbook. I know most people can’t draw on moving trains but I think I found the trick; I sit on the bottom level which sways less and I don’t fight the swaying, but go with it.

This sketchbook is a week old; I just filled my last, monster-sized one and decided to go back to using thinner coil bound books because they’re more convenient to draw in than the fat, bound types.

The drawings have pretty much been “cute girls” and I wanna draw other things, but Sydney girls are so cute and being surrounded with them on the train kinda leans me towards that direction drawing-wise.

One afternoon a really pretty girl sat a couple of seats away, facing me and I couldn’t resist drawing her. I think she knew I was drawing her (or maybe just sneaking glances at her because the chair in front of me blocked her view of my sketchbook) and I was determined to finish the sketch quickly and hold the book up for her to see the picture (I think I like to create awkward situations). I was just finishing shading the hair and looked up and saw her leaving. It was bittersweet. Bitter, because I’d never get to show her the picture and sweet because her leaving gave me the opportunity to check out her ass. Anyways, that sketch is on the bottom left of the second image.

Sketchdump 3

2008-02-02T11:19:00.001+11:00

Sketchdump 2

2007-11-04T13:19:00.000+11:00

Here are more sketches. I've been really into the work of Adam Hughes in the last month or so. I hadn't been to his website in ages and I was shocked when I saw the design for the Mary Jane statue, Holy Crap! He's probably the best artist working in American comics ever. That's right, EVER. I'm not sure what he's working on now, I hope it's interior pages because he has the best acting skills and I want more of his work than just a couple of covers a month.
Well anyway, here are the sketches.
NOT WORK SAFE

Sketchdump 1

2007-11-01T14:22:00.000+11:00

These are just a bunch of sketches I did this year, mostly in Auckland hunched over my animation disc on the floor of my empty apartment. A lot of this stuff is from the time I started to change the way I constructed my drawings. I stopped using basic shapes such as a sphere for a head in favor of constructing with anatomy; bones and muscles. Some of this stuff is pretty stiff, I think I overcame that eventually when I remembered the importance of gesture.
NOTE: NOT WORK SAFE (well maybe, I dunno, but just to be safe...)

Supanova

2007-10-15T17:02:00.000+10:00

Man, Supanova was tiring. It was my first time behind a table at a con, pretty much what I expected. Didn't sell that many books but at least I know what I did wrong sales-wise so things should be better next time.

Thank you to all those people who bought my book, I had some great conversations with some of you guys. It seems that the only people that bought my book or who were even interested were other artists. I don't know if I sold a single copy to someone who wasn't. "Not many people listened to them, but those that did all started bands" I think someone once said something like that about the Pixies.

Sketchy Sketchy

2007-09-26T13:18:00.000+10:00

I live in a little suburb in Sydney that has a library with a suprisingly good selection of comics for it's size. I don't really buy comics anymore, at least in the floppy singles format. I was in Borders the other day and saw that an issue of x-men was $11! I've been reading some of Brian K Vaughn's run on Ultimate X-men and it's pretty good (not anywhere as good as Vaughn's Y: the Last Man though), especially when drawn by Stuart Immonen whose work I dug previously in Superman: Secret Identity, written by Kurt Busiek.

I'll be at the Supanova convention in Sydney on the 13th-14th of October, sharing a table with Nautilus Illustrations. I'll be doing sketches and have a minicomic to sell.

These pics were done as warm up sketches.

Recent Abuses of the Lens Flare Filter

2007-09-10T13:51:00.000+10:00

Enough old stuff! What have I been doing lately? Well, these. I’ve started to get a lot more interested in using colour, especially after living with my old fat mate Warwick. I got a whole bunch of jpegs from his computer, art by Tadahiro Uesugi, Craig Mullins, Jason Chan, Bengal etc. I’d used my colour blindness as an excuse for too long (I found out I was colour blind in 2000) and it looks like my career might be moving away from animation (because there’s no work) and into the direction of illustration.

Hellboy, Tom Waits and the Life Aquatic

2007-09-10T13:48:00.000+10:00

Here are some sketches I drew and coloured while over in Auckland. God, I wish Mike Mignola would quit working on movies and stuff and get back to drawing Hellboy, don’t you? The last Mignola-drawn trade paperback, Strange Places, had a cool vibe, but lacked the tightness of visual storytelling found in the previous Hellboy books.

Hey, who doesn’t love Tom Waits? I bought his first album, Closing Time a while back and to my surprise, he had such a sweet voice before he purposefully degraded it with alcohol and cigarettes to get his now trademarked sound. I wonder if he can still sing the way he did on that first album? The same thing with Bob Dylan, his voice has gone through a few changes since he stared, even in the beginning (or technically, the end of the first Act of his career) on Nashville Skyline where his voice is almost unrecognizable.

“Not if I don’t see you first, sonny”. The Life Aquatic is peppered with great lines like this, delivered in such great performances. Wes Anderson seemed to get a lot of flack from some critics and I’m not sure why. Wes Anderson is film’s J.D Salinger; he creates such great self contained worlds for his characters to live in. They’re not REALISTIC, but they’re BELIEVABLE, which is more important. I hate the way most people in film and comics use the term realistic as some great goal to aspire to. The name of the game is DRAMATIC NARRATIVE, heightening the dramatic and emotional sensations found in real life in the form of an entertaining story.

I drew this dude the day a friend of mine, Munro left the studio we worked in to do a film course. Munro has this afro you could see over the top of his drawing board, so I drew this fella here. Not to be confused with that piece of crap Afro Samurai (especially after waiting four years for it, I don’t want to get into the specifics of why it was so bad because I could go on for days about it) which had early designs and a rumoured pilot by Takeshi Koike whose “look” I kind of stole here.

Super 8 and Supergirl

2007-09-10T13:37:00.000+10:00

When I was over in Auckland, my buddy Craig knowing that I was into film-making, gave me a Super 8 camera. It’s a Hanimex Loadmatic MPF830. The only problem was that they don’t sell Super 8 film in New Zealand! So in frustration I drew these pictures, which I finally got to colour, albeit with the aid of photos that I filtered into what I think Super 8 footage looks like. Now I’m back in Sydney, Australia but I’m so poor, I can’t afford to buy film which is $50 for stock and processing for 8 minutes worth. AND I probably need to process the footage down during development so I need to do two rolls at a time which comes to $100 and there’s a chance of the camera not working, so I would have wasted all that time and money for nothing (story of my life, really).

Anyways, I drew these Supergirl drawings back in Auckland one morning while listening to the Wordballoon Podcast. I coloured them on my then-flat mate’s computer.

Backlog

2007-09-10T13:20:00.000+10:00

It’s been a while since I last posted properly. I’d been living in Auckland, New Zealand working on an animated TV show (no need to get into what that show was, it’s best forgotten). I was living in a little two room apartment with no furniture, so most of these were drawn sitting on the floor. Internet cafés seem to get a kick out of disabling their USB ports, so consequentially I haven’t been able to upload anything. Anyways, I’m back in Sydney, for the while at least. Where am I going with this? Well, now that I’m back I’ve had a chance to colour all those drawings I did when I was in Auckland.

A lot, if not all of these drawings look better (to me at least) in their rough, sketchy form. I draw with blue pencil and go over it with a HB mechanical pencil; I scan it in colour and filter out the blue in Photoshop.

SketchBlog No More

2007-06-26T15:40:00.001+10:00

What's the point of me having two blogs if i don't update on either?
I've taken down my sketchblog and dumped some of the posts and pictures here. I'll try to update properly soon.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Unfinished Business
Hey, Welcome to my sketchblog.This is where I'm gonna dump my sketches, animated gifs and all sorts of other unfinished stuff.To start off, here are some OpenCanvas sketches, the top one is newish, the bottom two are pretty old.

Nu Gurls

New stuff. Both scrawled on bits of throwaway photocopy paper and coloured in Photoshop 7. The tall one was done today while scanning some animation. I wanted to make a bookmark for my new sketchbook (hence the word Sketch at the bottom).

EasyToon Here is another sketch coloured with Photoshop 7 and two animated gifs created with EasyToon. The gifs were improvised, I was just playing around with my Wacom tablet. Easytoon is a pretty neat little program, sometimes when I come up with an idea for an animation, I test it out quickly with EasyToon, but the flip side is that once I've done the test, I lose interest in animating it properly. (click on bottom 2 pics to see them in motion)

Gestures, a Girl and Ferdinand the Gambler

The key to good figure drawing is the pose or getsure. I wish I remembered that more often. I believe that you can tell if your drawing has the potential to be good or bad based on the rough pose which can take 5-30 seconds to draw. This is from one of my old sketchbooks, maybe done a year ago.

The sketch below was based on a girl I saw in a bar in Sydney earlier this year. I keep a little pencil stub in my wallet and drew her quickly on an old ticket my friend had in his pocket.

Sometimes I just play around with a fat Sharpie Marker and get something I like, in fact, it used to be an integral stage in my drawing process. It went: Sharpie sketch> Pencil Sketch-refine structure and pose> Clean up.This chappie was drawn a while ago when I was watching The Last Waltz by Martin Scorsese and it's based on Rick Danko, the bass player for The Band.

Toon Girls

I think these all come from an old sketchbook. I was watching Brad Bird's The Incredibles and The Iron Giant a lot and decided to give drawing "cartoony" a go. Despite my training for three years as a Classical Animator, I don't draw cartoony at all. Because of the internet and the host of animaton blogs and resources, I've become more familiar with specific animators that I like, ie: Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Tony Fucile.As always, they were done with a HB mechanical pencil and Photoshop 7.

Punx, Mermaids and Caitlin Fisher

2006-12-03T15:21:00.000+11:00

I drew this picture one weekend a couple months ago, as a kind break from animation (I used to work at an animation studio 7 days a week). This pose is kind of typical of what I was drawing back then. I'm kind of influenced by animators Takeshi Koike and Peter Chung who push their poses and do interesting things with perspective. I coloured it last week with Photoshop 7.

The next two drawings were done like the Julia, Sandra and Babe Rawlins pics I posted a few days ago, sketched sporadicaly over a week, then cleaned up in a day and coloured recently (Ariel and Caitlin were coloured today) here in Melbourne.
I guess I drew The Little Mermaid because the Special Edition DVD came out recently. Unfortunately, the commentary focuses on the music and there isn't a seperate animator's commentary like the Aladdin DVD.

Ah, sweet Caitlin Fisher, I wonder where she is now?
Actually, she doesn't exist, the name just popped into my head and I liked it. I was trying to colour it with two grades of shadow and two lights; a soft key light and a hard rim light. It looked like crap so I took away the dark shadows. Now it looks like all the rest (sigh).

Animation Showreel

2006-11-30T11:42:00.001+11:00

This is some animation I have done over the last two(?) years. Most of this stuff is ancient and I'm not really happy with it. They're pretty much experiments, because I wanted to know how to do certain things and try some different things out.

I planned to do some more animation after I wrapped up work on the animated show, BroTown, but I've gotten sidetracked, this was compounded by the fact that I now live in backpackers in Melbourne. The only new stuff are the first two animations, the first one is the first lip synch I've done in a while and the second was really unfocused and not planned out..... well anyways, I wanna do some more lip synch scenes, something that shows the characters acting. It's weird, when I was working on BroTown with a tight deadline, my personal little animation tests were really dynamic, but with time on my hands, my work isn't as good. I guess i work better under pressure.

(EDIT: I took the video down, I'm not quite sure why, maybe because it's so old that it's embarrassing, maybe because it was encoded so poorly and had audio sync issues, maybe because it's almost 1:30AM and I'm not thinking clearly)

Julia, Sandra and Babe Rawlins

2006-11-25T19:30:00.000+11:00

These are just a few drawings I coloured in Photoshop. I'm getting tired of this type of colouring, the whole three tone, single light source thing. I'm really into film and study the work of cinematographers such as Vittorio Storaro, Gordon Willis and Vilmos Zsigmond so I should try to be more creative with light.

I sketched these drawings on bits of scrap paper over the course of a week and then cleaned them (and more) up in one day, the day I took a train from Melbourne to Sydney. I coloured them at a friend's house.

Autobio comics

2006-03-24T22:18:00.000+11:00

Retrospective. Another kinda old one, I've been trying to get back into animation mode, so I haven't been spending much time doing any illustration, storyboards or comics. This was for the January monthy challenge at the PulpFaction.net forums. The specs were that it be 1 page in length, contain a shell or shells (it's in panel 5) and the subject was autobiography.
I drew this in blue pencil and went over it with a 0.5 hb. I photoshopped the blacks in as usual. The panels in the mid section were kinda disappointing, the thumbnails looked pretty good, but the figures ended up too stiff in the final and some of the panel compositions are a little off. It was pretty fun to draw though.

ITW page 08

2006-03-22T21:45:00.000+11:00

Retrospective. The last page. I had problems laying out this page and I think it shows. It's too horizontal, too even, not enough variation in the pacing. The worst thing about this page is that I put so much black in the middle, and as a result, I didn't get the contrast I wanted between the first panel and the bottom row.
The first panel looked really good in roughs, but it came out the worst after clean up, maybe I rushed it. Panel ten was really hard to draw, I redrew that guy a few times and I still don't think I got it right, gotta do more lifedrawing/anatomy studies.
Oh well, I think I learnt some important lessons from doing this comic, so hopefully the next one will be a lot better.

ITW page 07

2006-03-19T22:25:00.000+11:00

Retrospective. I burned through the figures really fast, they were pretty easy to draw. Panel 8 was not in my original thumbnail and in the final version, the "camera" is a little too close because I was worried that they wouldn't be visible if I drew them smaller.
I didn't spot my blacks, so they're really sporadic on this page, after a few pages with lots of darkness, I couldn't wrap my head around daylight. The line work is a little too fine as well. And when cleaning up the page, I developed a "cleanup callous" and my hand fused into a "cleanup claw", they hurt, but they're like battle scars, wear them with pride.

ITW page 06

2006-03-14T21:48:00.000+11:00

Retrospective. This was pretty easy to draw and to clean up because there is so much black, so the lines don't need tapering. I think the page is a little unclear because of the lack of backgrounds. I don't like the poses in the last four panels, they're a little too clumsy.
Those heads were kind of difficult to draw, I haven't had much experience drawing anything like that, I just ended up scribbling designs in my sketchbook, then cleaning it up and resizing and fudging in Photoshop.

ITW page 05

2006-03-13T21:32:00.000+11:00

Retrospective. Man, this was a nightmare to draw, the designs are really crappy, I really should have used some reference of sculpture and gotten a little wilder with the design. I think my linework is too thin and as a result, it's a little bit confusing and some panels look really wrong.
The idea for the page kind of changed when I was pencilling it, so it seems kinda corny. Suprisingly, I like it better than page 04. (and yeah, that is me "paying homage" to Hellboy: Wake the Devil.)

ITW page04

2006-03-12T22:20:00.000+11:00

Retrospective. This page was really fun to draw, but it didn't come out that well. The figures in panels 01, 03 and 04 are smaller than I intented.
I think it flows okay and the swimming poses are pretty good especially since I've never drawn anyone swimming before.

ITW page 03

2006-03-08T21:45:00.000+11:00

Retrospective. I kinda drew myself into a corner. I drew all the panels with the girl including that ghost-thing's shadow, before I had "designed" the thing (the ghost-thing in panel one is ver 2.0, it originally looked like it does in panel 04, I hate this version too) and was stuck with the shape, and the problem of drawing a non-solid....thing added to the overall crappiness.

I'm actually really disappointed with how the first panel came out, my blue pencil drawing of the panel looks okay, and even the cleaned up version looked all right until I added the blacks in photoshop. Panel 1 was also the only panel I did in layers, and the framing had to be fudged a bit in pshop.

I kinda like panel 02, I think it was the first panel I did and it was really fun to draw. The other panels are kinda awkward, I wanted some weird pacing, I don't think it worked that well though. Still figuring that out.

ITW page 02

2006-02-26T22:29:00.000+11:00

Retrospective. This page was a pain to do, I drew each panel on a seperate page, so it doesn't seem cohesive. I hate the 2nd and 3rd tiers, the blacks are inconsistant. I forgot to indicate a background for panel 7, the fireplace was supposed to be on the right, which would suggest that she has turned away, which was why I broke "screen direction". Not much else to say about this page. I redrew the bottom tier multiple times, I'm kinda satisfied with it. Kinda.

ITW page 01

2006-02-25T22:13:00.000+11:00

Retrospective. I did this page.....October? It was the weekend of the Supanova convention in Sydney. I didn't go.
I'm really into Mignola's Hellboy work, the way he gently maneuvers the reader from panel to panel, the way he leads the eye around the page, how he speeds sequences up, then brings it to a screeching halt. At first sight, Mignola looks like he breaks the principles of good sequential art, but his juxtiposition of vertical and horizontal panels read flawlessly. Anyway, I wanted to study the way he does this, so this page was the first experiment. A failed experiment.
First up, I love the way Mignola will do a full shot in a vertical panel and then, underneath, a close up in a short horizontal panel. The eye travels from top to bottom, even though a horizontal panel should lead the eye across. In Mignola's case, it leads down because both panels read as a cohesive column. I tried it here, and it failed to read vertically. I analysed the page and I figured out that it only works on the right side of the page!
I redrew the 2nd column multiple times, with different angles, and none of them worked. On the top panel my intention was to have he girl walking up an incline in the foreground plane and the background would be looked down upon by the viewer. As you can tell, I suck at drawing backgrounds and I should have used different lighting to seperate the foreground and background planes (the lighting is all over the place on this page). The next panel was supposed to be a "deliverance" style stalker shot of the girl walking up a little incline. It didn't work because 1) the girl's shadow is too big and attracts the eye too much to notice the silhouetted bushes in the foreground.
Well that's it for this page. It's a failed experiment, but I learned a thing or two from it.

In the Woods...

2006-02-22T22:12:00.000+11:00

A hoy-hoy, my name is Tang Lee and I started this blog to keep track of the various projects (comics/film/animation) I work on and to comment on different aspects of the creation process.

First up is the title page to a comic I'm currently working on. In the Woods is a project I started because I was stuck for ideas for a short comic (I have lots of comics and scripts written, but I'm not going to start on those until I improve my drawing abilities). I decided to just write and draw it one page at a time, with a loose structure guide (pg1 intro, pg2 complication, pg3 overcome etc..) it may seem a little "paint by numbers", but it frees me of structural problems, so i can just focus on telling the story and experimenting.

I consider story and art to be the same thing in comics, being a visual medium, stories are told by pictures, pacing, characterization etc... are defined by images. Another reason for me doing this comic was to experiment with different visual storytelling techniques. Some of these experiments failed, but I'm learning from the mistakes.