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!

Portraits of Mom

This is one of my school projects this quarter, a 6-pager done for my self publishing class with Chris Staros. It was a great class, I learned a lot about the comics industry and now I think I have a more pointed and professional way of approaching it. In addition to lectures we also had to do a 6 page short story and print it out into a mini-comic.

This comic I didn't do as well as I could have. I was going for a chunkier inking approach and in the end I went too far and sacrificed precise lines for more haphazard ones. I've gotten praise for the art and I got a good grade on them, but in the end I feel like this was a fun experiment in artistic styles that I'll take a ton away from, but the next work will probably be a hybrid ink style of this comic and my Calla of the Sea pages.

Story-wise it was fun to do something emotional again. I haven't really been able to tell a story like this since KCNO so it was fun to stretch the tear jerker muscles again. I think this is a fairly decent story with a responsible ending to the sadness of mourning. I'd like to do more of these shorts related to art, but we shall see. The summer is long, they could be drawn!

Zombie Digital Comic Pencils Part 2

Here is the rest of the proposed zombie comic. I'm currently coloring the screens so hopefully updates will come regularly.There's going to have to be a third part to this because Blogger has trouble laying out this many images and displaying them well.

I think what I like most about the digital format is how I can affect directly how the reader first sees the comic. When I imagine a sequence in my mind it's always in motion, so sometimes picking the right scene in a thumbnail for a page can be tricky, but digital comics allows me to use more of the motion and movement in my imagination in the storytelling. Eventually I'll work my way to doing Yusuke Murata level layouts where each press of the advance button feels like a new frame in a slow moving animation. While I don't think digital comics should be motion comics, I think some of the techniques Murata uses in the bullet time-esque moments of One-Punch Man are practically begging to be utilized in this format. I'll try to use more of that in the next digital comic I do.

Anyhow, back to the zombies.

Here's a link to the first half: http://www.jorgesantiagojr.com/2013/05/zombie-digital-comic-pencils-part-1.html

 

Zombie Digital Comic Pencils Part 1

These are the pencils for my second attempt at digital comics. This one is about a man named Connor who has to man up and rise to the occasion to provide for his wife and their soon to be born child in dire times. It's mainly a comedy so I hope you enjoy it.

As always I'm concerned with storytelling and clarity, although I've been trying to give myself challenging things to draw so I can start to work on my weaknesses.

This is the first 5 screens worth of pencils. I'll post the rest separately so it doesn't take too long to load.

Here's a link to the next set of screens after these: http://www.jorgesantiagojr.com/2013/05/zombie-digital-comic-pencils-part-2.html