Garnet: Steven Universe

Hello all! I just finished watching the first season of Steven Universe, and I totally get all the hype. It's a great show, so now i have excuse to draw the characters cuz I love their designs. It's also a really progressive show, which I think is important right now to teach kids to be tolerant of everyone and judge people by their character, not what they are.

This Garnet was done all in one go, took me about 4 hours to paint, an hour to sketch. The drawing is about 5 or 6 total paints, all on my usual Stillman and Birn paper. The tricky part was using the carmine, a new paint in my palette but with gouache to smooth things out, it turned out well, I think.

Requiem Sonata Chapter 2 Inks 1-5

Here are some pages I've inked of Requiem Sonata chapter 2. I hope to have it finished and ready to print for SPX this September! I'd also love to have Curse of the Eel 4 and Rare Drops 2 out by then too.

2015-06-24 Sketchbook update

Hello, I went to hang out with my friend Emma yesterday and I made some drawings in my various sketchbooks. Hope you enjoy them!

Everyone, let's love each other. Life is precious, and it's far too short to be spending it seething with hate.

Summer and Autumn

So I've been motivated to paint more and to focus on illustrations instead of just my usual ventures, so I decided to take a leaf from Alphonse Mucha's book. I loved Mucha's work a lot in undergrad, and at a friend's place recently I saw large prints of his Seasons, and I decided to try my hand at it. Here are my Summer and Autumn.

Tools: Watercolor, gouache, and water soluble pencils
Paper: Stillman and Birn Delta sketchbook

Requiem Sonata ch2 pencils 16-20

Here's an update with more pages of pencils for chapter 2. I hope you enjoy them!

Life Drawings - eyedrum session

Here are a few of the good drawings from today's 2 hour session at the eyedrum in Atlanta. It's a really fun and interesting space to draw in, and everyone there is 11 varieties of inspiring. Seriously, I saw some awesome acrylic and oil painted works in the 2 hours which make me feel like I need to push myself even more. I think the most important aspect of any artist is that sense of pushing yourself and your art past your current limits. The moment you think you've learned all you need or that you settle on just one media or tool, how can you continue to grow? With that in mind, I hope you enjoy my attempts at getting better at drawing the human form and using watercolors and a sanguine colored pencil.

Tools: Watercolor and Caran d'Ache sanguine colored pencil
Paper: Stillman and Birn Delta and Gamma sketchbooks respectively

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

O is for Oscar

O is for Oscar, another story I've yet to draw but want to get to eventually.

Oscar is a sheltered Hispanic boy who lives at home with his very protective and close knit family. Since he was small, he's always dreamed of being a fine artist, his favorite field trips were to art museums and he's read every book on fine art in the library. However, his parents don't want him to be an artist, at least not professionally. They would rather he get a normal job and just do art as a hobby. This stifling environment starts to eat away at Oscar, so he signs up for a life drawing class as an act of rebellion. This class will change his life, and also he's never been in the same room with a nude woman before.

While this isn't how my life as an artist started, I know that this is a pretty common story for young artists. The feeling that your family or friends are trying to reality check your dreams is a real one, and I wanted to explore that in cultural sense as well. I hope it'll be a fun book!

Tools: Pentel pocketbrush pen and Copic multiliners
Paper: Stillman and Birn gamma 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!

M is for Marie

M is for Marie, a character from KCNO. The entire book is available online to read here: KCNO

Marie is not a character who was very popular, in fact for most of the book, people tended to dislike her because she had ideas that ran against the other characters of the comic. I think characters like Marie are ESSENTIAL to storytelling. To create characters the audience can disagree with, that is important to creating a world that feels real. Too often I'll read a comic, or watch a movie, or see a tv show where characters are all in agreement, or it's a character who is so unlikable that you hate them, but either of those can be boring. Like, SUPER boring! Character's should feel like people, not motivations, or cut outs or NPCs in a video game. A good character, whether you agree with them or not, is a character you want to see become better, no matter what they do or who they hurt, and Marie does hurt some people in KCNO. But I find that most people, after they read the book, like Marie a lot because she does become a better person. She's one of the more dynamic characters in the story in that she makes amends for being a jerk and she ends up happy. I don't think I knew what I was doing when I created her, but I think now I understand why a character like her is so important to good drama.

Tools: Pentel pocket brush pen
Paper: Stillman and Birn gamma sketchbook

K is for Kal

K is for Kal, the A-Z character thingy goes on. I'm still having fun so that's good.

Kalypso is a Dominican woman who has led a hard life. She found herself learning Muay Thai to defend herself, but soon became enamored with the art. After leaving her home and her troubles behind, she and her lover started their own Muay Thai gym where she teaches others, men and women, how to defend themselves and to push themselves further than before. Kal is a tough woman and is a fighter who has earned the tiger stripe tattoos on her back and arms.

These drawings of characters who haven't been drawn in comics yet are so much fun. I haven't yet started the drawings for this story, so a lot of the character designs are sort of floating around in my head. Drawing them like this makes them more solid and I can now better imagine her in the story. I hope you'll enjoy it when I draw it!

Tools: Pentel pocket brush and Permapaque marker
Paper: Stillman and Birn gamma sketchbook

I is for Irene - A to Z Character Challenge

I is for Irene! I've been excited to revisit Irene, she's one of my favorite characters if not my favorite.

Irene is young mechanic and pilot whose dream since childhood has been soar in the skies. She both makes and flies these machines called Aerodynes which are sorta like speeder bikes but they can go to much higher altitudes than a few feet above the ground. However, the regent of her nation has declared that Irene is not eligible to get her pilot's license because of her family past. She challenges this decree and is given the chance to earn her license...if she can beat 5 of the Academy's top pilots in her age group in aerial paintball combat. If you'd like to read that first book, click HERE! I still have a couple of copies in my store, so if you'd like to snag a copy, do so soon. I maybe have 2 copies left and am unsure when I can print more.

Tools: FW Acrylic Ink (Rowney Blue) and a Raphael #3 8404 brush
Paper: Stillman and Birn gamma sketchbook

G is for Grimm - A to Z Character Challenge

G is for Grimm, Lady Grimm. She's a character from my magical woman comic, Good Night Mrs Goose that I worked on from about 2009 to 2011.

Grimm is a young witch who finds life to be boring. She yearns for the times of old, when magic had more presence in our life. So she and a group of other witches begin to bring storybook creatures into the real world, hoping to slowly saturate it and bring magic back to its rightful place of glory. Only Mother Goose stands in their way, but I never really got around to drawing most of that! I took a hiatus from it while I was working on my Master's degree, and never picked it back up. Mainly because my art style changed pretty dramatically. Here's a sample of Grimm from 2011.

I'd like to return to Goose one day, I still really like the premise and I think it's almost even a better fit to come out now than it was for the time. But alas, for now it must remain in my cache of ideas to one day get to.

Tools: Pentel pocket brush
Paper: Stillman and Birn gamma sketchbook

D is for Delilah - A to Z Challenge

D is for Delilah! She is off the chain, mainly because she's strong enough to break it and beat people up.

She's an old character from my first series of graphic novels, the Wolves of Sariel. The Wolves were a sect of religious vampires who tried to only hunt people that were criminals or up to shenanigans. They saw themselves as the wolves who protect the sheep, rather than hunting them like others would. Delilah was a vampire who often clashed with her elders because she didn't believe in living a life where you monkishly give up everything for the sake of some religious clarity. Delilah was a child during the Japanese Internment in WW2, so she doesn't want to feel like a prisoner or a nun. She wants to live and eat and have fun and bring the pain to people who cross her. Unfortunately she was in a part of the book I didn't get to draw, but should I ever revamp Wolves, she would definitely be in it.

Tools: Pentel pocket brush and color brush
Paper: Stillman and Birn gamma sketchbook

Sketch of the Day - Saya from Deadly Class

I need to use this blog more! Here is today's sketch of the day, Saya from Deadly Class! Seriously one of the best comic books I've ever read, Rick Remender, Wes Craig and Lee Loughridge have created a masterclass in the art of making comics. Check it out!

Tools: Pentel Pocket Brush and Color Brush, Copic multiliners for the tattoos
Paper: Stillman and Birn Gamma sketchbook paper
Color: Daniel Smith Shadow Violet and Winsor Newton Brown Madder.

Thank you for checking out my blog!!