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

Work In Progress… (Sort of)

September 14th, 2020

Here’s some in-progress art!

I started this piece a few months back but it got put on hold while I worked on Books Of Magic.

I need a new convention banner, so this started out with that in mind but I expanded the canvas dimensions so it could do double duty as a print for the next Kickstarter campaign or an eventual cover.

With conventions on hold, the urgency of finishing disappeared so the piece is also on hold for the moment. I’ll finish it eventually, but I’ve got other things I want to get done first.

I’m not ready to show anything from the short story I’m inking right now so, here’s something to look at in the meantime!

craigtaillefer.com

Down The Rabbit Hole…

September 9th, 2020

My “refreshing” of the portfolio section of the website sent me down the OCD rabbit hole again, and a week later I have tweaked almost every page and filled in holes and fleshed out skeletons of pages that have been sitting unfinished since I designed this site in 2007.

I’m getting close to being done, but one thing that is endlessly frustrating me is the alignment of the site.

The theme I based it off of was a fixed width theme, which I kept, but like Wahoo Morris DotCom it floated in the center of the browser.

For some strange reason I wanted this site to fix to the left of the browser, but I’ve wanted to change it to a center floating design for a long time.

The problem is, I took a deep dive into css back in 2007 when I designed the theme, but I haven’t done anything other than some basic HTML code if I’m not satisfied with the layout options in WordPress, and I have no clue how I did it or how to reverse it. I’ve been able to get the site to move to right side of the browser, but nothing I do will get it to float in the center.

It is maddening.

I’m going to have to give up until I can get some help, because when it comes down to it, it really isn’t that important and I have better things to do.

Like draw some comics.

***EDIT*** And… a friend was able to help and it is now centered! Hopefully the fix will play nice with all the other elements of the theme.

craigtaillefer.com

Under Construction….

September 1st, 2020

I’m back at the desk this week after a few weeks off.

As I have no work lined up, I guess it’s time to update the portfolio for the inevitable job hunt.

So… that is what I have been doing today.

I’ve recently seen multiple people saying a good portfolio should have only a few of your best and most recent pieces, and that it should be representative of the job you are going after. I’m not really sure what kind of job I’m going after other than “comic book work” at the moment, but my old portfolio was an overload dump of work going back over twenty years. I still think most of it is good, and fairly representative of what I can do, but I’m not above taking advice and paring it down to just the essentials!

So, I’ve basically started from scratch.

As I am no longer looking for work in the animation industry I’ve removed that category all together.

I’ve put together three galleries, one for inking samples, one for sequential samples, and one for covers and pin-ups, and I’ve only posted fairly recent work in each gallery.

So, the idea is to swap out samples as I do new ones, and to tailor each category for whatever job I’m hoping to land whatever that will be. I’m kind of hoping to land another inking gig for the immediate future, which is why Inks & Finishes has got top billing at the moment.

We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, check out the new portfolio page and let me know if I’m moving in the right direction.

craigtaillefer.com

A Life’s Work In (and out of) Comics

August 12th, 2020

I’ve been keeping a separate comp file of my published work since my first comic Elflord Vol. 1 #6 came out 34 years ago this month.

I apparently haven’t been very diligent about filing comps as there are a fair number of issues missing, and I forgot about the file after I “got out” of comics in 2000 (when I went in to animation) and the publications slowed down. It took a few minutes to cobble together this stack from various shelves, and I’m too lazy to go digging in the actual comic book collection longboxes for the missing singles, so this is what I’ve got!

There are probably close to a dozen single issues missing and most noticeably I don’t have copies of any of the collected editions of my Elfquest work, from the WaRP Graphics reader collections, the DC collections, or the most recent Dark Horse collections that have compiled about half my output for them at this time.

What is also missing are the two daily webcomics I did for a cumulative 14 months, and all of the unpublished pitches and complete projects that will never see print, or won’t see print for a long while.

But I digress…

For a long time I’ve been feeling sorry for myself that I haven’t been able to work in comics full time (and make a real living) in 20 years (until this past year) and I’ve been lamenting how little work I’ve produced in that time.

But I did a little bit of quick math, and I’ve produced a fair amount of pages since the summer of ’86 accounting for a conservative estimate of a cumulative 10 years of full time work.

I have inked a conservative 1154 pages of published work and pencilled and inked (and sometimes written & coloured) 994 pages since “going pro”. Not all of those full art pages have seen print, and some will never see print, but that is the nature of creative work.

I’ll never be able to get an accurate page count as so much of my work at Aircel was as an assistant, and I haven’t even considered the amount of time I’ve put in as a production designer and publisher. And I’m not going to go digging to pull up all of the abandoned tryouts and sampe pages I worked on in down times.

If you average it out, that’s 63 pages of comic art a year for the last 34 years. If I’d produced 120 pages a year, I’d consider that a decent career.

I can’t account for every moment of the rest of that time. I’ve spent a cumulative 15 years in animation. I spent 1 year as a “full time” musician at 22 (ie didn’t have another job even though I should have had) two and a half years cumulatively working service jobs and I’m sure another cumulative year staring at the ceiling thinking “what’s next?”. I could probably count writing out this post in that category. Oh, and I was still in High School for the first year of my “pro” career.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, but the goal is to draw comics full time from now until I retire/croak. If I could do 120 pages of full art a year for the rest of that time I would be a happy cartoonist.

I’ve currently got 20 pages of Wip stuff going and a script for a 28 pager I’m going to start soon enough, so only time will tell…

craigtaillefer.com

More New Comics!

November 27th, 2019

It’s New Comic Book Day again!

So the Books Of Magic gig is going well. I finished Issue 15 two weeks ago and I should be starting to work on issue 16 later this week.

In the mean time, issue 13 came out last month  (the final Vertigo comic) and issue 14 comes out today!

It’s the first issue under the DC/Black Label imprint (which changes nothing about the production or the book) and features John Constantine in his 3rd appearance since rejoining the Sandman Universe!

It was a lot of fun to work on.

Check it out here!

craigtaillefer.com