Ringo Award Nominated Comic Artist creating Comics and Art with stupid amounts of passion!
Hello everyone, I wanted to post this before but my end of the year has been hectic, but Curse of the Eel has hit a really cool milestone! My comic has 1 million views on Tapas, which is amazing! I'm really lucky to have made a story that can be enjoyed by people, and I hope everyone will continue to enjoy Eel as the story enters its final acts!
https://tapas.io/series/Eel/info
Here is an illustration I made for the occasion! Thank you for reading!
Hello everyone! So this is a really cool story so let me start off with that:
I've been really digging fantasy stuff in the last few years; after the pandemic, fantasy has been my number one genre and I've been working on more fantasy stuff like Illarys, but also making fan art for my favorite characters. I've been drawing a bunch of fan art for the Brimstone Angels Saga, a D&D series about twin Tiefling girls, which is written by the awesome and kind Erin M. Evans! She's shared a bunch of my drawings on social media (which is really cool when you get seen by the creator!) and I learned very quickly that she had a new original fantasy story coming out: Empire of Exiles! She was nice enough to send me an Advanced Reader Copy, so I could get a jump start on the fan arts, and she decided to commission me to create an illustration for this new book!
I'll include my progress stages here, including a TikTok I made of my inking process on this illustration, which was used as a pre-order bonus as a bookmark and a device wallpaper! I'm really excited to have gotten this opportunity and to have my first fantasy illustration be for Erin, who is both kind and amazingly talented. I read Empire of Exiles in like 2 weeks, and I loved it! Below is my interpretation of the inciting incident, as this is a fantasy murder mystery and not all is as it seems!
You can pick up Empire of Exiles from all major booksellers, it's published through Orbit Books, so you can find it at Barnes and Noble or your local bookstores (and if they don't have it, you can ask them to order it for you)! It's also available as an e-book and an audiobook! At the end, I'll include the book description that is listed on Erin's website.
And here are the colors!
"Magic, mystery, and revolution collide in this fantasy epic where an unlikely team of mages, scribes, and archivists must band together to unearth a conspiracy that might topple their empire.
Twenty-seven years ago, a Duke with a grudge led a ruthless coup against the empire of Semilla, killing thousands. He failed. The Duke was executed, a terrifyingly powerful sorcerer was imprisoned, and an unwilling princess disappeared.
The empire moved on.
Now, when Quill, an apprentice scribe, arrives in the capital city, he believes he’s on a simple errand for another pompous noble: fetch ancient artifacts from the magical Imperial Archives. He’s always found his apprenticeship to a lawman to be dull work. But these aren’t just any artifacts — these are the instruments of revolution, the banners under which the Duke lead his coup.
Just as the artifacts are unearthed, the city is shaken by a brutal murder that seems to have been caused by a weapon not seen since the days of rebellion. With Quill being the main witness to the murder, and no one in power believing his story, he must join the Archivists — a young mage, a seasoned archivist, and a disillusioned detective — to solve the truth of the attack. And what they uncover will be the key to saving the empire – or destroying it again."
Check out Empire of Exiles, I'm already awaiting book 2!
Hello everyone, it's almost been a year since my last post! I've been updating parts of the blog, but I've been so busy with art I can't share that this page has gotten dusty. Here's hoping I can be better about updating it, even if I'm still super busy with stuff I have to be careful about sharing.
What I can share, is Final Gamble issue 2's cover, which was announced on Band of Bards' Twitter! I'll include the final image here, and my process on it! I draw and color the Final Gamble covers, which is why they're a different color approach from the interiors, where Harry Saxon is doing an amazing job!
You can also add Final Gamble to your orders at your local comic shop! We're in Previews, so please ask you comic stores to order you copies of the book!
Okay, here's a look at the process for the cover:
This was drawn and inked on Stillman & Birn Zeta paper, with colors done in Photoshop, and the icons on the slot machine walls done in Illustrator. This is continuing the motif from issue 1, where our leads, Jasmeet and Danny, are being thrown into a gambling machine but are threatened to being crushed by the system.
Hey everyone, it's been a busy month and just as one Kickstarter I worked on has finished, another one is coming up in a few days! This KS is for a black and white comics anthology inspired by Shonen manga magazines like Shonen Jump, called Jump Tales! The Kickstarter is coming up, and you can pledge to receive 3 issues of this magazine, with 4 ongoing stories and a single one shot per issue. My one shot will be in issue 3, and it's called Illarys! I'll be joining a group of very talented comic artists and writers, so I hope you'll support the Kickstarter!
Illarys is my first real attempt at a high fantasy story! I've been neck deep in fantasy novels, Dungeons and Dragons, Elder Scrolls, the Witcher, and more since the pandemic, and I'm excited to share my own fantasy world that should be fun for people who are fans of the aforementioned properties!
Illarys is a young half-elven girl in a cold land with an even colder regime. Her father attempts to flee their home nation to reunite with his elven wife, but their trip does not go as planned. It is up to Illarys to safely escort her younger brother across the lands as they are pursued by bounty hunters and other magical dangers!
Here is the promo image for Illarys, both in color and in black and white!
Hey everyone! So this has been under my hat for a bit, but there's a book that I'm working that is available for pre-order on Kickstarter! It's called the Final Gamble, and it's about 2 people trying to gamble their way out of a terrifying situation. If you'd like to see the pitch and video and maybe donate to receive your copy, here's the link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bandofbards/final-gamble-issue-1
TEAM:
Writer: Bobby Singer
Pencils & Inks: Me
Colors: Harry Saxon
Lettering: George Gant
Publisher: Band of Bards
I'll also include the process work for my cover of the first issue. So this one was tricky, so to make it easier on me, I created two separate pages for this cover: one was the characters and all of the money and pokerchips, and the other was just the slot machine background. After I inked them, I combined them in Photoshop and colored them.
The campaign starts today and goes for a month, so hopefully we'll meet our goal!
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| This is the final version that you'll get if you preorder the book. |
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| Without the type |
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| Pencils where you can see the overlap of the two images. |
Hey everyone! I'm really bad about sharing my freelance work on here but I want to share the cool projects I get to work on! Nick Ulanowski is a journalist and poet and he's approached me to do covers and book design for his short stories and poetry books a few times before, and now I'm working on his newest book, American Bug! It's on Kickstarter now, here's a link so you can read about it and back it to secure your copy!
This was a really fun illustration! I penciled, inked, colored, and designed the type for it, putting that Graphic Design BFA to use. I hope you enjoy it!
Super late on taking advantage of this when it was online, but last year I worked David Pepose and Jim Campbell on a short story for Project Big Hype, a comic anthology on Kickstarter! The funding was successful and I hope everyone enjoyed the comic! These pages were shared on Twitter and other places, so I'm sharing the first 4 of our story here! This is a different kind of book than I usually do, but it was a fun change of pace! I've never really drawn superheroes comics before, so this was fun!
These pages were drawn on Deleter B4 manga paper, which I haven't used in years! I used mostly G-pens and the Nihonji pen and used Photoshop to create the digital halftones. I'll include some pencils down below the inks!
Story & Script: David Pepose https://twitter.com/Peposed
Lettering: Jim Campbell https://twitter.com/CampbellLetters
