craigtaillefer.comcraigtaillefer.comcraigtaillefer.comcraigtaillefer.comcraigtaillefer.comcraigtaillefer.comcraigtaillefer.comcraigtaillefer.com

craigtaillefer.comThe Official Blog of Craig A. Taillefer: News, Art, Comics, Music, Ramblings, and more!

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Unfinished Business: Part 2!

Tuesday, January 16th, 2024

I drew 3 original stories in ’93.

Story number 2 was a Gothic Vampire story (itself a redraw of an idea I developed and drew one page of 4 years earlier) that never made it past the layout loose pencil stage. I also stopped on page 13 without finishing the story and as I have no layouts or script in my files I imagine I was kind of making it up as I went along. I remember having fun doing it, but it was largely an exercise in doing single source lighting. Lots of extreme shadow and candle light!

I can only assume I moved on to “The Party” (story # 3 that I finished in December of this year) because I wanted samples to get work and figured a retro Gothic horror story wasn’t going to get me work at Marvel or DC, so on to the to the idea with super-hero action in it!

Anyway, I’ve pulled out “The Vampire Story” periodically with the intention of finishing it, most recently the intention was to draw it from scratch using the original as a springboard, but there were a handful of poses I still like even 30 years on. Having finished “The Party” and still not having anything definite to work on I decided to import the original pages into Clip Studio, quickly trace them off, then start moving, cutting and adding.

3 days later I have an expanded 18 page story roughed out, and surprisingly I’ve kept most of the original work though I had to move and resize a lot of it. Though, by the time I finish this will look like a new story even if the idea and some of the layouts/posing are 30 years old!

Next, I have to write a script and do rough lettering and solidifying of the layouts before diving into the full pencils.

More soon!

Sîan Inks Finished!

Thursday, December 7th, 2023

It took a ridiculously long time in between other projects, but I finished the inks to the new Sîan story this week.

All I need is to draw a cover and this story is ready for release.

New Sîan Art!

Friday, February 24th, 2023

Another year with no posts!

Sigh…

Anyway, since I last wrote I finished pencilling the new Sîan story, started inking it, did an alternate cover for an issue of Geek Girl, built a very large shed pretty much by myself, and started inking another series for DC Comics, Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives.

Inking on the Sîan story has slowed down, but I’m a little over halfway and continuing to work on it in between inking pages of Dead Boy Detectives.

Here is the first page in it’s unlettered state for your viewing pleasure.

there’s more to come soon!

And Done!

Thursday, January 20th, 2022

An overview shot of the complete 12 page page story!

It’s always satisfying to see a finished story laid out like this. I think I overworked it a little, but I’m calling it done.

This will be the lead story in a to-be-published someday soon-ish 48 page one-shot comic compiling some older short stories of a fantasy/sci-fi theme, some previously published, some unpublished. I’ve got to get back into the mindset of crowdfunding and publishing, but I haven’t felt much urgency of getting this out there as I’m not booked for any conventions yet, and obviously there haven’t been any in a while!

But other than compiling and design details, the main stories are all done. Unless I do something stupid like expand it yet again with something even newer (I do things like that!), I should be announcing it’s impending release in the spring.

A Block is Broken!

Thursday, January 13th, 2022

It doesn’t look like much, but I just finished breaking down the thumbnail layouts to a 24 page comic, a one-shot revival of my Sword & Sorcery thief character Sîan.

I wrote the script a long time ago and I’ve been carrying it around with me whenever I travel or have some time off for years, figuring I might get a chance to get some personal work done in my down time, but it never ends up happening.

I’ll admit that I’ve developed a bit of a mental block around comic book layouts, that I wasn’t going to be able to do it anymore. I’ve done a lot of finishing of comic art, from tightening up existing layouts and pencils to a lot of inking, but I haven’t thumbnailed a comic story from scratch in over a decade. Not since I started the unpublished Lemon Drop Kid in September of 2011. It’s a bit of a silly block as I spent that decade doing storyboards for TV animation, which is basically doing clean thumbnails day in day out without the fun of doing pretty finished art. Thumbnailing is the hardest part of comics for me, which probably explains why I came to hate storyboarding so much, and why I’ve feared trying comics layouts again after so long.

But I digress…

This comic has been the planned “next project” for awhile, so I decided to block out January through March to get the comic completely done: layouts, pencils, inks, letters and colours.

I sat down to work the first week of January, and it was a bit of a struggle, partially because I discovered that the script I had been carrying around for years was little more than a beat sheet with basic action descriptions and a handful of bits of the snarkier dialogue written. So I had to flesh out the script, which has been an ongoing process as I thumbnailed as I went. I also got a bit distracted playing with a script writing template and somehow ended up writing the outline to a new Wahoo Morris book including writing the first draft to the first chapter. More on the that later. The hardest part of the process was adjusting from my “for film” thumb nailing process and back into a “for comic book page” mentality. I had to cut a lot of what I first drew and get back into choosing the essential shots, but I slowly got there. It’s still pretty rough, and no one but me could possibly make sense of them, but they are done. One more mental block broken!

Next up is the rough layouts and pencils.