Illarys Ink Illustrations

 In preparation for the DVPit event where I pitched both Curse of the Eel and Illarys, I wanted to populate my pitch with illustrations so it wasn't just a wall of text in the story summary.

These were very inspired by Gary Gianni's illustrations for "The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," which is a series of short novels about a knight and his squire. I loved the book and the illustrations were amazing, so I wanted to try out this style of inking for Illarys, and here are the results!

Tools used were Deleter G-pen, Tachikawa Nihonji pen, Pilot drafting ink, on Stillman & Birn Epsilon paper.

This was the cover to the pitch, I still really love this image

Separation

Recovering

The Knight

The Cave

Panther

Curse of the Eel volume 2 cover!

Hello everyone! A lack of updates to this site means I've mainly been working on freelance works that I can't really share, but it's good to be busy! I've also been doing my best to keep up with all my original comics, and Curse of the Eel volume 2 is almost ready to go! Here is my process for this cover and some of my thoughts on it.

Curse of the Eel is my take on a modern day world where eldritch creatures and magic wind up in the hands of some odd peoples. Connie is a goth girl who is bullied at high school, and the only person she's able to trust/talk with, is the weird Cthulhu-ish Eel monster that she accidentally summoned. Unfortunately for Connie, Eel isn't the only weird eldritch abomination wandering the halls of her school and the woods of the surrounding area.

This comic was my thesis for my MFA and has been running for 5 years at this point, and I'm working on the 12th chapter as we speak! It's actually doing well on sites like Tapastic and Smackjeeves.

For this cover, I wanted to mirror the first volume cover but also showing that the earth and the Eel's realm are being smashed together, and the thin veneer keeping the worlds separate are cracking, hence the fun glass cracks!

As always, inked with my Raphael 8404 #3 brush with Yasutomo sumi ink on Stillman & Birn Beta Paper.

 

Spencer and Locke vol 2 complete!

Hey all, time sure flies! This is a quick look at some of the art from Spencer and Locke volume 2 which finished its 4 issue run a few weeks ago. The book is really well received, so thank you all for reading! Also, below in the pages, there will be spoilers, so maybe don't look until you read the issues!

Materials: Deleter G-pen, Sakura Sumi Ink, Pentel Color Brush
Paper: Stillman and Birn Alpha and Zeta paper

The snowmen of this issue were a blast to draw. Monsters are a lot of fun!

Issue 4 was a great end to this arc, but also a good way for us to really make some things pay off that we started in volume 1.

Spencer and Locke Volume 2 Going Strong!

Hello, welcome to the end of May! I thought I had posted something about S&L volume 2 but that apparently didn't happen, so here's a quick little art gallery of some of my favorite pages that are being shared of the book! These are just my inks, so you can see some of what I was sending to David Pepose, Jasen Smith, and Colin Bell which is our team on the book. I hope you enjoy the quick gallery!

Materials: Deleter G-pen, Sakura Sumi Ink, Pentel Color Brush
Paper: Stillman and Birn Alpha and Zeta paper

 

 

Spencer and Locke Vol 1 cover inks

This is one of my favorite images of the run, just showing the two mains and the oppressive city behind them. Thank you for reading! Pick up the first volume on Amazon HERE!

Tools: Raphael 8404 #3 brush and FW Ink, Pentel Hybrid Technica 04 and 03
Paper: Stillman and Birn beta paper

Spencer and Locke issue 2 preview inks

Here are the inks for the preview pages of Spencer and Locke 2. I like sharing the process of the art, I feel like it's too hard to find the inks for comics a lot of the time. There's a few weird references in these pages, one to TMNT, one to Batman Year One, and one of people playing Wii games. Can you find them?

Tools: Zebra and Kuretake disposable brush pens, Pentel Color Brush and the Hybrid Technica
Paper: Stillman and Birn Alpha Paper

The S&L team is David Pepose on words, Jasen Smith on colors, and Colin Bell on letters. I originally wrote this as if we were a band, but I dunno if it made sense.

  

Invader Zim Commissions

Here are 2 recent commissions that I finished this past weekend. They were both a lot of fun, and I got to crack open some new pens which was a nice change. I forget sometimes what it's like to draw with a fresh Zebra fine pen, cuz boy is it different from one that's pretty used. 

Tools: Zebra Fine Brush Pen, Pentel Color Brush and Copic Multiliners

Paper: Stillman and Birn beta paper

P is for Pilar

P is for Pilar, another character from a-NOTHER story I'm planning.

Pilar is a Hispanic woman who suffers an immense life changing tragedy. She joins a Muay Thai kickboxing gym in the hopes that it'll help her relieve stress and give her something to do, but she never anticipated how much she would fall in love with it. The story is about finding purpose in your life again after life cruelly rips purpose from you. It's going to be a lot of fun, I hope, filled with fights and drama and I hope, actual warm hearted stuff. I know I write a lot of tragedy and sad stuff but I do like seeing these characters happy. Sometimes.

Tools: Zebra brush pen
Paper: Stillman and Birn gamma sketchbook

Requiem Sonata Cover process

I recently finished the first chapter of Requiem Sonata after taking a short hiatus form it. Life has been lifelike but I'm ready to drop back into the regular groove of comics again. So here's my process materials for the cover!

Zhi is a troubled young pianist and often times what she says, what she does, and what her face telegraphs are contradictory. In order to get that across, I wanted to display on the cover the various facets of her personality. I then split the two in half to create this awkward cuts for the cover. Why use them if they're awkward? Because I want the reader to feel like something is wrong, get them feeling like something is false in her expression. I believe that there are "rules" to good illustrations, but I think breaking those rules can be just as effective. Yeah, I'm punk like that (not really).

To deal with the uneasy feeling of the actual art, I decided to go with simple text and one color to make it very easy to read. I think what could be damning for a cover like this where I'm trying to show unease is having something overly complicated that just makes the art look like I don't know what I'm doing. By making the cover this simple, with all this negative space and having one color, everything feels more deliberate. I hope so at least. I chose a duotone for the cover because honestly, I love it! I love black and white images and swapping out the black for a color changes so much about the image in infinite ways. In the original inks, she's just there, but with this desaturated red-brown, it conveys a lot more about the tone of the book than just a simple black and white image. I will do covers like this whenever possible, mainly because I prefer simple images to convoluted ones. I like a cover with fancy details and all that, but a cover that evokes the spirit of the book will always win out to me over something that is just a technically sound but emotionally hollow image. I wrestle with this a LOT in my comic covers, they're the hardest part for me, and sometimes I strike gold. But even if this is fools gold, I'm happy to be tricked by it.

Thank you for reading! I hope it was informative, I want to do more process posts like this so leave a comment if you liked it, share it too, and consider following me if you have a blogger account! Either way, thank you!

EDIT: I got some feedback from my friend Celin, and made some changes to the text on the back cover. I moved all of the social media stuff to the last past page of the book. Thank you for the advice!

Tools: Zebra Fine Brush Pens, Copic Multiliners, and the Pentel Color Brush.
Paper: Stillman and Birn Alpha sketchbook
Colors and Text: Photoshop CS5

Sketch of the Day - The Iron Bull from Dragon Age Inquisition

This was a really fun suggestion from Cauterization on Instagram!

Tools: Pentel Pocketbrush Pen
Paper: Stillman and Birn Gamma Sketchbook (my scanner didn't really take the Ivory color very well)

Inks also from my unnamed Horror comic

Inked in the span of 2 weeks, I finished 20 pages and got the approval for them last night. So now I want to share the first 6 of them. I used a Raphael #3 brush on these and while it took some getting used to the larger size (I usually use a 2) it was a lot of fun. Although these aren't my favorites of the pages I've done for it, this was still a fun experiment with inking that I'm sure I'll use again.

The story to this one is a goth girl named Connie is bullied, and she accidentally summons forth a creature not unlike the ones in the stories she's read. That's the hook, but the story itself is more than that and I can't wait to share more of it. I've been reading a lot of H. P. Lovecraft myself and I'm really taken with the worlds and lore he creates and then pretty much just drops the mic on. My favorite was the Shunned House, and the conclusion made me very sad that this was the only story, presumably, in that world with that horror. Here is my take on his type of horror, with some of my own ideas mixed in. Well, back to work.