New Pin-up finished.

I used some direct figure reference for this one which is something I don’t usually do.

I wanted one more new pin-up for the upcoming anthology and was drawing a blank for ideas or inspiration. I went to twitter and scrolled the Fantasy Art Pose reference feed and found a few poses I liked and incorporated two into a scene. The seated figure I drew from scratch.

I feel a little weird about using photo reference this blatantly. It wouldn’t be hard to find the source photos if you went looking for them.

In the handful of instances I’ve used direct reference in a published piece, I’ve either shot it myself, or transformed it dramatically from the source. I feel no guilt about grabbing a photo of a gun or guitar or car and dropping it into a page for a quick trace-off, but usually I’m looking at photos of environments, props, or people to figure out “how they work and look” and not copying them directly.

I had originally sketched out a background behind the figures, column with drapery etc., but decided to leave it here as this took a ridiculously long time as it is and don’t want to add another days work to something I feel vaguely like it’s plagiarism!
It was still a fun experiment in inking, lighting, shading and modelling with brush line work, more so than I usually do.

I’d be curious to hear how other artists use reference if the reference is what sparked the composition in the first place.

Work is progressing on the Sîan story. It’s going a little slower than I’d like, but as I’ve said before, I haven’t done a full comic from scratch in a long time.

But, I’ve taken the thumbnails and fleshed them out onto the “full size” art “pages” and done a first pass of the pencils. Some pages are pretty rough, but the final pages are starting to take shape including a first pass of the lettering, which includes fleshing out the dialogue as my script was borderline “Marvel Method” with limited dialogue written out. I also ended up expanding a few pages that were feeling a little cramped. I think I wasn’t thinking as visually as I needed to when writing an action script instead of my usual talking heads stuff. In the end I expanded from 24 pages to a 28 page story. At a later date I will possibly do a post showing that transformation.

I also had a bit of a crisis of confidence last week, feeling the work was sub par. I think part of the problem is that I’m doing something (a Sword & Sorcery story) where I’m comparing myself to other artists of the genre. As an example, I’m not influenced by anything in particular when drawing something like Wahoo Morris or comparing myself to other “slice of life” artists, so there isn’t as much of a “this doesn’t measure up to” feeling with it. Drawing a S&S action story, I have John Buscema inked by Alfredo Alcala in my head and it’s hard not to feel like I’m coming up short!

But, after a few days of procrastination I sat down Monday morning and started working on doing tight pencils of the first page… and it’s starting to look okay. Of all of my talk of mental blocks over the last few years, taking rough pencils and turning them into finished pages is the stage I know I can do!

More soon!

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.

It’s hard to show my process, as I tend to build pages in stages, starting inking figures before all the elements have been drawn.

I took a snapshot of my progress every few hours, and I thought it would be fun to create a gallery of the steps so you could see a page build from my layouts to finished page.

In general, once the layout is tight enough, I ink the panel borders and do a first draft of the lettering before I start inking.

In the case of this page, I inked the main figures before starting to build the backgrounds, so pencils tighten up halfway through, and the first inset panel didn’t get tightened up in pencil until the rest of the page was inked and toned. If you look closely, you’ll see the size of the ship get scaled up about halfway through!

I’ve been working on this short story off and on since getting back to work after finishing up my run inking the Books Of Magic for DC/Black Label and it’s slowly starting to take shape.

It’s another older piece of sorts. 

Back in 2007 I was nominated for a Harvey Award for my work on The Chelation Kid (with Robert Tinnell) and made a last minute decision to attend the Baltimore Comic Con for the Awards ceremony. At the time I was inking the daily Mighty Motor Sapiens and producing a page a week of Wahoo Morris. I was looking for more comics work and wanted something a little more mainstream for my portfolio so I came up with this idea, did a bunch of rough thumbnail concept sketches, then managed to rough out three pages tightening up one before deadlines got to me.

The story sat without anymore work until many years later after I had switched to working digitally. At some point in time I scanned in the 3 pages and the thumbnails and cut them up into a 7 page Manga Studio file. 

It again sat untouched until 2018 when I finished up Wahoo Morris and started finishing up old pin-ups and then the 4 page Lady Of The Lake story. I imported the file into Clip Studio, then re-cut the sketches into a 12 page file, then had to drop it again as I started another year long run storyboarding.

I did pick away at tightening up the pencils on a few pages while whiling away time at conventions, and was intending to dive back into it when the storyboarding gig ended, but the the Books Of Magic inking gig fell into my lap and it got put on hold again. I did manage to solidify the layouts and letter the story (which also involved finally writing a script) during brief downtime this spring and summer. 

Anyway, I’m back to mostly working full time on my own comics for the time being, and I should be finishing this up in the next week or two. It’s taking a ridiculously long time, but I blame the penciller (Me) for leaving so much work for the inker to do.

Once it is done it will be the lead story in an expanded (48 pages) print version of my sci-fi anthology Vistas Unknown.

Here’s an overview of the work in progress.