Curse of the Eel chapter 2 cover process

Sooo Curse of the Eel 2 has been done for a while, and originally I printed the chapter with chapter 1 because I thought it would make it easier to sell. Instead of selling 2 smaller books, you get one big fat book and I hoped to keep the price down by not having to print 2 covers and bind a second book when I could print them all in one. However, the printshop I was going thru was charging so much to print the book that it's just not feasible, plus the increased page count made the book so thick, it was hard to drive a staple thru. Ugh.

So I found a new printer! I'm getting test prints done now, so I'm hoping that this will make the book more affordable so i can sell them less, but splitting Eel 1 and 2 meant 2 needed its own cover. So I whipped this together yesterday! I say whipped because the thing I love about Eel is that I have a design scheme for the covers, so finding ways to make each cover interesting but following that same idea is super easy! I'll need these books because I'll be tabling at SPX next month! I'll post again when I know my table spot!

So here are the steps, pencils to inks to color for the 2nd chapter cover of Curse of the Eel!

Pixie Punk Finished

First off, I need to post here more often. I work non-stop on pages, but I never really know what's okay to drop into a post. I'm going to just start posting things, even if its just a page, so that this site doesn't lay dormant. And in the spirit of that:

Here is a comic I did for the Change themed issue of SEQAPunch. I'm not sure if it's been selected as of this post but I completed it and I'm pretty happy with it. This is only the first 5 pages, I'll post the rest later, but I hope its clear enough from the pages here. This comic was being made around the same time as a lot of shake ups in my life, like moving, money troubles, health worries (I'm less one tooth now) and just wondering if I'd get to stay in Georgia to finish up my masters. I ended up moving in with Max Currie and things appear to evening out for me.

This comic was about breaking down walls, I'm a pretty happy dude but I'm really paranoid, and this translates into my comics in horrible uncertainty. I never know if a brush stroke is perfect enough or if I'm really using the best layout. But this comic was about being PUNK, it was about a girl who go sick of having to be perfect and chose instead to be rough and pissed off and make music to let the world know she wasn't happy about it. This comic is pseudo personal in that I was telling my inner editor to bite me and I was going to do what I wanted and not be a stick in the mud when it came to the "rules of comics."

I think the color tone REALLY adds a lot to the comic, I was using it like you would a gray tone, to push items forward or pull items back, like in page five, I chose to illuminate the band and stage in white and let the audience fade into that black by being coated in the bands hot gnarly purple. I'm also really happy with my brush inking here, I really opened up and just let it all out, and I think I need to do that more or else my lines get stiff. Also, penciling wise, I was WAAAY less precious with these. For example:

I'm trying to pencil more loosely than before, where I would try to make every line I put down a pencil version of the line I was going to ink, but that's a waste of time to me if I'm going to ink it. I'll try to be more precious with them when I'm working with an inker, but for the moment I think this will work in just allowing me to pencil faster to get these comics out quicker.