Requiem Sonata Ch.2 pencils 11-15

Here's another batch of pages for Requiem Sonata. I'm going to take a brief break from it, although I'm sure I'll still draw it from time to time since I can't really escape it. I have a short story I'm going to try to draw and print up for Heroes Con this. Wish me luck!

Pencils as always in my Stillman and Birn Alpha sketchbook!

Requiem Sonata Ch.2 Pencils 1-10

Here are pencils for the first 10 pages of Requiem Sonata chapter 2. I'm still drawing them in my Stillman and Birn Alpha sketchbook, which is 9x12 inches and is considerably smaller than my usual working size of 11x17. Still, I find this really comfortable. The panels don't seem to be stopping me from doing dynamic work, so I'm grateful for that, and in fact, working smaller allows me to be more flexible with work anywhere. I haven't been super productive lately due to work woes and life woes, but when I can scribble a few panels I feel a ton better.

My pencils now are a lot messier because I like to have room to play in my inks. Instead of refining the lines down to the final one, I keep them loose and let inker Jorge decide which line is best, or if needed, redo the area. This adds a lot to my speed because I'm not sitting and dwelling over problems, the me of tomorrow is a better artist than the me of right now, so leaving things up to his more skilled eye is a great confidence boost. Anyhow, here are the pages!

Curse of the Eel chapter 3 pencils

So this one took me a while to get to. While I've been planning it out and and working on it when possible since June, but I think I needed a break from drawing this large so I could recharge. I ended up spending so much time from it that returning to 11x17 pages was a treat and a joy. I haven't done many touch ups on the older pages, partially out of laziness but more out of wanting to let my inks do the fixing.

I can't wait to ink these, I'm going to use a tandem of brush and Zebra brush pens. I look forward to the challenge.

24 Hour Comics: Clementine and Oh What a Dream

 Hello! This is the first part of my 24 hour comic challenge. I wanted to adapt a Johnny Cash song into comic form, and I was inspired to try my hand with this one, Clementine. It's a lovely song, if not a little depressing. Here's a link to the late great Johnny Cash's song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYoVLVKi7fM I hope I did it justice, and I hope I adapted it reasonably interestingly. Next is Oh What a Dream.

Here's this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fRBXPF6byY This one I like a bit more than the first section. The whole 24 hour comic event was really interesting for me; I penciled this faster than probably I've ever penciled anything. I spent like 7-8 hours to thumbnail and pencil the entire 24 pages, but where I sorta fell apart was in the inking. I was working at a smaller size and thought "oh, well the pocketbrush will do for this!" In the end, I don't think synthetic brushes are for me, but it made things more complicated, and Clementine suffers because of it. For Oh What a Dream, I inked with my friend Brian Prince's Kuretake pens, and they were a ton of fun to use. I'm going to have to get some, they offer a flexibility I would need at least 6 microns to cover.

Overall I don't think this is a bad set of comics, considering this is my first 24 page comic that I actually finished it's probably okay. I feel like I have some missteps but I feel like I have more insight into where I need to streamline my process (inking) and where I'm making decent headway (pencils). But yes, I love these songs, and I hope that they do the work of Johnny Cash justice!