Blast from the past

I'm pretty sure it was back in 2002 or 2003 when I created these pages. I happened to find them again back in 2005 to make a PDF. I can't get an exact date from when the art was originated, but that's not the focus here.

This mini comic was created for a site called void where artists pitted their character creations against each other in a comic art battle. What I want to show you is the extent of my photoshop skills back then. I overkilled the filters and effects to the point where it looked cheesy. Outer glow effects around the letters? Come on! that looks so horrible to me these days.

Anyway, there is still a lot of quality here, and many of you haven't seen it so here it is.

TAG-TEAMO!

Check out The Humedex and you'll see art made by my buddy Scott Hume, a fantastic character designer. He recently posted a piece coloured by a friend of his, such a good job was done to it, I was inspired to do one myself.

QUAKEFEST

I haven't posted anything for a while because everyone sucks, yeah that's right I said it, wanna fight about it? Nah just kidding. The truth is that I've been working on a project or two, the others ended up falling through thanks to my own pace but I've managed to get one out of the way.
This one is called Quakefest and it's an original idea produced as my final project for the Comic Design and Scripting program. Some say we were given a good amount of time (6 weeks) to start from scratch, some others disagree, as well as myself. A major project like this takes a lot of planning and honestly, I take a while to do any quality work, I despise rushing and eventually it came down to the wire and I rushed about 80% of this project.

This idea still needs tonnes of refinement too, I may stick with it, I may not, we'll just see. However,you can see for yourself the countless areas where I cut the corners but there are still a few quality moments.

It's a PDF you can download, by the way.

The HB Kid

HB as in pencil grade of course. This is a character I have designed for the Comic Design and Scripting program I am currently enrolled in. Captain Canuck won't be coming back next year so it's up to the students to create a new representative to appear on the brochures. The character is meant to go on a t-shirt so the requirement was no more than six colours to be used and I ended up using five, which includes white. I chose colours from the standard #2 pencil for now. I am waiting to hear what the faculty will say about it because there is so much more potential left with this character.

DANGER! EXPLOSIVE RAWK!

This is a logo for a project I've been working on. I took an image of a Fender Telecaster and placed it into the hazard symbol for we all know is Danger of Explosive Materials.

Bro It Up: The process

I drew a small comic last semester and the apparent lesson was boring dialogue. Despite the waste of time the assignment was, I drew it anyway. The penciled line art and dialogue had to be finished in an hour so I saved time by producing the lines on a 7" x 10" sheet rather than a full 11" x 17" sheet and used a simple cartoon style. Now if the class had time to sit and think of interesting things to say, we all could have produced something fantastic, unfortunately, for some reason, it had to be rushed like a bat out of Hell. I scribbled down a conversation much more bland than this the first time around.

This semester, the digital colouring instructor wanted us to hand in a fully finished comic. I rumaged through my stack of comic strips and I found this one burried at the bottom, totally forgotten. The cartooning style made it unique. If you know who the Gorillaz are, you could probably see the similarities. I was viewing some of their art at the time I drew this and gained some inspiration from their eyes and noses.

I slapped the sheet back on the table and put ink over top the penciled lines. I scanned the comic into Photoshop and produced the flat colours creating a vibrant colour palette. I began using multiple layerd for shadows, midtones and highlights but that first panel took far too long. I cut back to the basic tones for the rest of the comic, just using the lasso tool and nothing else. The colouring went by quickly after that and them came the time to add the ballons.

I opened the page in Illustrator, selected the elipse tool and set fill and stroke attributes before dropping circles in all the panels. The dialogue is inspired from a Derrick Comedy skit found on youtube called "Bro Rape: An Investigative Report". some hilarious stuff. The guy with the bag is definitely a bro and he's speaking to an emo kid. That third fugly guy is there for no reason.

After the text was dropped in, the ballons were adjusted accordingly and then added tails to each of them. The fonts were downloaded off the internet from BlamBot and I converted all the text to shapes because i knew printers rarely have a font called Evil Genius. The final layout, with both tiff and eps elements, was composed in Quark Express (I still say it's better than InDesign).

I gather the process, from pencils to pre press, took about six or eight hours.

Scenery

This was an assignment for landscapes. The criteria was a village with rolling hills and tall trees. This is what I came up with, the Shyre inspired village of Eden. I like this one, especially looking at the thumbnail because I didn't realize it would reduce so well.