My Comic Book - Page 24 - Finishes Part 1

Yep. Still procrastinating!

The more I stress out about finishing my pages the more I'm freezing up. I'm placing a lot of pressure on myself to finish these last few pages, and frankly it hasn't been fun. So much in fact, that I'm subconsciously trying to find other things to do to avoid working on the pages. Or just getting hit by a nap attack (yeah, yeah, Garfield reference, so sue me).

I need to ease up on myself. Luckily, I'm 'working' for myself on this. So, I can afford to cut me some slack (or fire myself, but that would just be weird)! This week has been busier than I thought it should be, I've had many things to do and people to see, it hasn't really been quite the 'free' week I've wanted. Or a vacation either for that matter. So, I'm changing that.

I think I'm starting to accept that I'm not going to be able to finish 2 pages before the end of this year. True, I've missed the schedule that I set for myself in the beginning of the year, but it's not so bad. I think I'll enjoy the rest of my break and finish up these pages at my own pace. I'm stressing out about finishing this book so much, that I'm forgetting I'm supposed to be having fun while doing it!

Anyways, this doesn't mean that I'll be throwing out my comic book schedule completely out the window. It's still the same deal, a book a year. But for this last week? I'm actually going to enjoy my vacation! Maybe I'm just trying to justify my slow speed but, I think I'll be okay as long as I make sure to keep chipping away at these pages in small but frequent intervals. In due time I think I can catch up to the schedule.

And while I'm recuperating from beating myself up from slacking, there's some great news! Today was comic book day, and I picked up my friend Shanth Enjeti's book "Starship Troopers: Damaged Justice" issue one! Awesome inspiration that definitely puts me to shame! This guy has a wife, twins and two teaching jobs to run and he still finishes a book in a quarter of the time it took me to do mine! I should be ashamed! But right now I'm too excited that I actually have a copy of his book in my hands! Visit his blog for some peeks under the comic books hood! Go Shanth man!

And that's it for tonight! Good night and God bless!

My Comic Book - Page 24 - Roughs

I am still procrastinating like crazy.

For most of the day I was really doing anything but drawing this page. Let's see... I had to change my checking account because I found out I lost my check book. I had to photocopy page 24 so that I could transfer the layouts over. I had to clean up my workspace so I could draw. I had to watch the outtakes of "The Office" season 2. I had to play Guitar Hero 2. I had to watch the deleted scenes from "The Office" season 1. And I had to play guitar Hero 2. Again.

I couldn't work very well during the day. For some odd reason I could not concentrate during the day. I kept forcing myself to draw, but I'd always find some thing to pull myself away from my desk. Towards the end of the day, maybe through pressure or guilt, I found myself getting into the page a little and managed to get it to this stage. It's very sparse though, so a lot of the real drawing will have to be done tomorrow. I'm gonna go crash now. God Bless and good night!

Argh.

"Ranting, raving about the struggles and the general messy process of creating"

That's what the little blurb below my Blog's title says in really-hard-to-read-white-colored-font (just squint, you'll see it). It's definitely been pretty messy today. Today, was the first official day I start working full days on my comic book again. Unfortunately, the creative wall I had hit in my previous wall is still kinda up. I did absolutely nothing today. And I pretty much was tearing myself up over it. By sleeping in.

I have a lot of excuses, and maybe some even that come close to being legitimate, but I really just choked and was very unproductive today. Tomorrow, I'm going to try a whole lot harder to get into gear. On one hand, my mind wants me to relax and veg out like a slob. On the other hand I just want to get my final 2 pages done and wrap up my comic book!

Luckily, productive-me did a layout awhile ago so lazy-me doesn't have to be a total loser today. I'm posting up a rough layout page that I had done a while back for my comic's page 24. I'm hoping to get to Kinko's tomorrow and blow it up to actual size. Then, I can transfer the composition over to bristol paper. This way I can kick start myself somehow even if my creative juices aren't really flowing.

I hope.

I've just got to force myself to be creative and be productive. I just need to suck it up, and fight to realize my childhood dreams! To be all that I can be! To be a true creative individual!

That and I also ran out of "The Office (America version)" DVDs to watch. Will I actually get my act together and have a page roughed in tomorrow?! Tune in for the next 'exciting' post! A belated Merry Christmas and God Bless!

Getting back on track

I have hit a wall.

After my last comic book page last September, aside from some stray posts, I have come to a creative grinding halt. Big mistake. That creative momentum has always been hard for me to try to generate, but once I get going, it becomes easier for me to crank out some comic book pages. Kinda like exercise. It's hard to drag yourself to gym, but once you feel how awesome it is, you have an easier time going back. But right now I'm rolling around in my artistic spare tires.

Fortunately, Christmas break is coming soon, and at my company we close down from Christmas until New Year. So a free week of vacation! What to do, what to do! Why, finish up my comic book of course! My initial plan was for my comic book to be penciled, lettered and colored by the end of this year.

Not gonna happen.

But it's okay! I'll just have to catch up next year with the letters and colors. I have a new schedule though: pencils finished by this year. It shouldn't be too tough, I only have 2 more pages until the end. It's quite disappointing that I couldn't maintain the steam, but thankfully I have this very, very end of the year time to tie up this loose end!

So to get myself warmed up. I drew this picture just to get myself motivated! So next week, expect some pages to be flyin' (gulp!)! Over and out and God Bless!

For Mr. Lau

Here's the scenario: My two friends Alan and Corrine are getting hitched reeeeal soon (Alan and Corrine are both part of the super-talented Ghostbot studios). But...! Before all that can go down, there was a bachelor party to be attended, arranged in Alan's honor (of course). And before that could go down, the people invited to the party were given a secret mission: to create a picture of mr. Lau's precious Erin (she of the e-surance fame) in whatever way we want (scary!), as a surprise send-off gift (curse?) to the bachelor-not-to-be.

So! Since the bachelor party festivities are now done, I may now divulge the drawing I did for Alan! We'll follow the warts-and-all format of this blog, as I really do love posting all the wrong things I do for the world to see! Here's everything from the very, very sparse thumbnails until the initial color pass. I had to work really quick, so all of the prep work was pretty much cut down to thinking up poses and looking at references. I didn't have the time to design what she or the bad guys looked like until I hit the page.


Then here's the finished piece. Choosing the background color was very hard for me, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which one I wanted. I showed it to my friend Rocky who was as equally stumped as I was. So then he showed it to his wife who immediately, upon looking at them, went with her gut and picked the red. It was actually quite nice of her to make such a quick decision because Rock and I were in color limbo (and I was just sick of looking at it!). While the yellow had a nice kind of clarity in it (Rock had mentioned Erin's hair pops out nicely in it), the red was simply punchier and just screamed action! So red it was!


So this goes out to Alan! A belated happy, uh, bachelor-party-day-thing to Mr. Alan Lau! Kiss your bachelorhood goodbye! The wedding's next week! Dun dun duuuun!

For the Shanth Man

It's been quite sparse in the land of posting lately (more like non-existent, really), and I have no excuse. After I finished those two weeks of pure comic book page-making bliss, in my last few posts, I absolutely screeched to a halt. Anyway, for this post, it won't be a comic book page, but perhaps it's what kick starts me back...

A week ago a friend of mine, Shanth Enjeti, had to go to the hospital for an emergency operation. It was quite a shocker really, my friend Roque had given me a call and told me about it over the phone. Apparently his appendix was giving him problems, and actually burst as he was waiting in agony for hours at the hospital for someone to operate. Always the trooper, when I talked to him on the phone about it, Shanth pretty much downplayed what must've been a pretty horrible situation. And just like Shanth, a few minutes into our phone conversation and we're back talking comic book talk again!

Shanth's been working hard on pumping out a book he's been penciling called Starship Troopers: Damaged Justice from Markosia and not even a bursting appendix could slow him down! The quality and rate that he's pumping this book out is incredible and definitely an inspiration to get my butt back in gear! (The work he put into the triple gatefold cover alone, puts me to shame... that's right, there a triple gatefold cover planned for it!)

Anyhow, I wanted to draw Shanth a pin-up of one of his characters and one of mine, to wish him a speedy recovery. I was planning to have something for him while he was in the hospital.

...uh...

Well... he's kinda been recovering already for a week or so, because alas, I am not too fast in the drawing department! But better late than never! I had a tough time picking some choice, appropriate and sensitive words to convey my message to him, but I think I got it! So here we go:

This one's for you Shanth man! More power (measurable in Metachlorians) to ya!

My Comic Book - Day 12 - Page 22

Well. This is it. Sniff. Sniff. My final day of the 13 day PTO that my company had given me is over! 13 days of just keeping 8 hour days to work on my comic book. 1 day had to be spent on my car ol' Betsy, of course, but generally I kept to it.

What a day this was too! With only one panel to solve, I was able to have a good final day of vacation. I played some video games, bought some comic books, ate lunch with friends, bought a video game, and oh yeah, I saw a baby on the first day it was born! How's that for a day?! So tomorrow I go back to work. Unfortunately that means my posts will have to slow down too. But that won't mean I'll stop working on my book! I added 2 more pages to this first issue, so maybe I'll post those up as I progress.

But that's the future, for now, onto the finish of page 22!

My friend Roque had made 2 suggestions before I put this page to it's finished form. One was to add a background to panels 4 and 5, giving the reader a visual 'constant' that lets the reader 'animate' the robot's tilt backward when reading the panels. The second suggestion was to create a more dynamic angle for panel 6. The old one from the layout pages was a little boring, and didn't seem very exciting at all.

I think what happens to me most of the time is that my brain gets so heavy into trying to solve the problem of storytelling that the 'fun' factor goes away. I end up being able to tell the story, but it can mean ending up with stale compositions (If I remember, I'll post up a splash page I did early on in the book, where I have a ton of stale compositions just because I wanted to page to be done already! Luckily, I had my other friend Shanth give me some constructive feedback). I usually have to step back from the drawing for awhile to be snapped out of boring compositions. I have to remember "Hey! Comic books are fun! Dynamic compositions are cool! I have to look at Jack Kirby's work and get recharged!"

That panel (panel 6) gave me some difficulty trying to figure out, but I think I drew something that I'm fairly happy with. Good suggestions from the Rock man and all in all, I'm pretty happy with how this page turned out.

So 5 pages in 2 and a half weeks. Wow that's slow! I gotta figure out how to go faster! This experience was very educational, it taught me a lot about the characters in my book, who they are, what they look like from various angles, the world they live in, what methods are faster to draw them and just generally how I tend to work. I've got a total of 22 pages finished for my book... only two more to go! I'm pretty excited to finish it off!

Anyway, thanks for stopping by! I will now go back to my regular slow posting speed! Until my next post! Good night and God Bless!

My Comic Book - Day 11 - Page 22

Almost there! I thought I was going to take it easy today, but instead I ended up working on this page for a bit. I took a long dinner break but then I came back in to finish off what I had done non-photo blues for yesterday. This means I technically just have one more panel to worry about for tomorrow before the page is done. I was pretty tired though, so the finishes aren't quite as tight as I'd want them.

When I ran my thumbnails by Roque on this page awhile back, he had commented that initially panels 1 and 2 were too alike in composition, and that perhaps changing up the composition in panel 2 would help the storytelling. He added though that maybe that was too much in the line of storyboard thinking, like in TV or movies. He had a point about the composition being too close to each other, but also a good point about maybe that was a storyboard thing.

Movies and comic books share many common grounds; but because movies are shown only through one 'panel' (the screen) and comic books show them in multiple panels side by side they are also two different beasts.

I did something that I think would probably be a confusing thing to do in film format thinking, but might actually work if it was in the comic book format.

I mirrored panels 1 and 2, so it's almost treated like a schematic of some sort or maybe like those cheesy t-shirts with a characters' front view on the front side and the backside appropriately enough, on the back. I made sure to tilt the angle of the view as well, to make it extra clear that these were the opposite views of the same scene. I'm hoping that the blatant symmetry in the angles of the two panels makes the mind of the reader set up this space faster than usual. Hopehopehope.

The 'phobia panel' of panel 6 is looming, but hey that's for tomorrow! I'm outta here! God Bless and good night!

My Comic Book - Day 10 - Page 22

I had a few errands to run today so I had a pretty short work day. Maybe 4 hours. Tops. And not even a very concentrated 4 hours at that.

Though I feel like I slacked off, I was very surprised at how quickly I was able to get the shapes blocked in today for this page. I think because a lot of thinking is already finished in the thumbnail stage, this laying out process actually goes by fast. Definitely my choice to keep the style very simple, affords me to focus on my storytelling more.

Unfortunately, I have a 'phobia panel' in this page, and that's going to be panel 6. It's a shot of the defunct robot falling on top of the main character. Fortunately, I got a bunch of other panels to keep me busy. I think my hands will be pretty tired after this page too: there's going to be a lot of lettering involved.

I think with my vacation wrapping up, I'm feeling more of a need to relax a little. So this page I think I'll stretch out until Wednesday to finish up. In the meantime, I can catch up on laundry, some doing-nothing-time and just enjoying the rest of my vacation. Though I'm not going to finish my book by the end of vacation, I'm still going to hit my 22 pages mark! Aaaand that's it for tonight! Paalam and aydeeeyos!

My Comic Book - Day 9.25 - Page 20 and 21

Reading my last post, apparently I planned on writing something up for the next day: on the day I got my new car... Fool! I tried working on that day but I just had car on the brain. I had to run a few errands to get myself ready to drive, and I had to wait up until 9 o'clock in the evening to get it! But I got it! And unfortunately my comic book got pushed to the side; and I was doing so good too!

Nevertheless I have snapped back and will try to resume the schedule! I took photocopies of my pages yesterday and today I had Bucket Phil ink in pages 20 and 21. I have to say, Photoshops' magic wand, expand selection then ctrl delete functions are Phil's best friends. It makes it easier to block in those blacks without being so anal with the lasso tool about it.

Tomorrow, unfortunately, will be a half day. I've got to get parking permits for Ol' Betsy (that's the name I've given my ride!) ASAP or else parking in my area for more than 2 hours gets her towed! But as far as my 22 pages schedule goes, I'm pretty steady. My vacation of 2 and a half weeks is about to end! Great Ceasar's Ghost! Holy Moley!

Hanggang sa susunod! God Bless and Good Night!

My Comic Book - Day 9 - Page 21

Hoo-RAH! I finished page 21! I really pushed it today, but I definitely worked more than 8 hours. It was good because I got this page out of the way, but bad because I still took longer than 8 hours to finish it, from blue pencil layouts to finished pencils! I left more spaces for ol' Phil to darken in, giving me more time to focus on line weight than manually trying to pencil in my darks (I end up doing some that way anyways).

Most of my day was spent on refining this page from the layouts, and the character clutching the wire on panel 3 was the hardest one for me to do. Actually there are many inconsistencies I can see throughout the book, and things I'd like to go back in and fix. But I figure, instead of going back, I'll move forward and get better with practice and just sheer quantity of drawing. I see alot of comic book artists that start out with me not liking their stuff at all, but because they're always working, always drawing they become these amazing artists. And why? Not cuz they spend eternity nit picking their page to death, but because they just simply keep drawing and moving forward. Hmmm... that's a good excuse for me to keep being careless and going off model!

Some of today was spent with me trying to find car insurance and talking to the dealership! Just think, tomorrow I will be a car-less wonder no more! And also tomorrow, I will most probably be doing the biggest slacking off of my comic book ever! Ah well, can't win them all! Until tomorrows' post! Aydeeeyoz!

My Comic Book - Day 8 - Page 20

So I'm posting up the new page 20 pencils and it turned out I finished this pretty fast. I had finished penciling this page by noon today and the thing that sped it up was me leaving all the blacks to be digitally inked in later. I would've been able to finish laying out page 21 today too but alas, I had to go to the car dealership today and arrange to get a car! So, by Friday I should be driving around town in my brand new Toyota Yaris Sedan! Whoo!

Okay, but I'm still left with the fact that I didn't do too much today. So, I vow on great Rao, that I will work like a madman tomorrow on the next few pages! Uh, mainly 'cuz on Friday I might be driving around doing car crap too.

Okay so let me talk about some of the things that happened on this page. Yesterday, I was pretty disappointed with how the figure on panel 4 was ending up and it's readability. Today, I realized that the figure was too stiff. It just didn't seem like she was in action enough to flip around and get into the position she's in in panel 5. I changed her to be more bent, flexible so she looks like she's in the process of flipping. Added to that I made her kinda mirror the arch of the doorway behind her as I was using that as a device to point the eye downward to the figure in panel 5. Also, by doing this, I'm hoping that repetition implies motion to the reader. On top of this I turn her face so that she's looking at the wall she's going to land on, just to emphasize the fact that she'll be flipping and landing onto it.

I still am not to keen on the read of that panel but definitely feel good enough that it'll get the job done as to not confuse the reader. The rest of the pencils went by without a big problem. Anyway, I'm hoping tomorrow I'll have pages 20 and 21 inked (gulp). I was really hoping to get all 3 layouts done by the end of this week... but hey, I gotta buy a car!

Comic book day was today, I picked up 52, Ex Machina, Casanova, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter. 52 has it's ups and downs in the storylines but this week's (nineteen) is one of it's ups, the series has a lot more personality in it than Infinite Crisis. Gabriel Ba amazes me at how fast and consistent he can draw Casanova (definitely pointers to me!), though Matt Fraction's writing in the first issues confused me a lot, he seems to be getting better. The Green Lantern books I have on hold because I got into the whole 'Hal-Jordan-returning' thing, and Jeff Johns always seems to be able to get me coming back for more. Ex Machina is always a good read, I've been a fan of Tony Harris since Starman and Brian K Vaughan's writing had me hooked on Y (never read Runaways though). I picked up Martian Manhunter mainly 'cuz I'm a sucker and I'm curious to see where DC's gonna take the character instead of his usual green Superman phase.

And to top it off? I hear Adam Hughes is going to be doing comics again with his new All-Star Wonder Woman! Whoo!

So that's it! Sa susunod na kabanatan! Good night and God bless!

My Comic Book - Day 7- Page 20

Here's a work in progress of the pencil work I'm doing to page 20. Panel 4 has always been problematic, but the solution that Roque suggested was to cut out the multiple figures that denoted her flipping in mid air.

While the final solution may not be as cool as the multiple action poses (I'm a sucker for that stuff), it does do 2 things for me. One, it establishes where the characters are in relationship to each other and two because the figure flying through the air is singular, the read from right to left isn't as tricky to do. That and I made the panel tilt downwards to help with the read. That said, I'm still unsure about the figure in that panel.

I've started to leave more work for Bucket Phil in my pencil stage, just to save me some time. The downer is that I can't quite see my blacks spotted in so any problems that may occur I won't be able to tackle early. Today, I also blew up 2 more of my layouts to 11 x 17 working size so I should be stocked up with plenty of work to be done for this week.

Anyway, for some odd reason I'm pretty tired out today so no meaningless ranting tonight! I'm outta here!

My Comic Book - Day 6- Page 20, 21 and 22

I spent all of today thumbnailing, and trying to get these sequences right. I thought because last week I was only working a page from thumbnail to finish, I might not be seeing the whole narrative picture (and I wasn't).

So, this time I tried to tackle more in one go, to see the sequences work together. Not really too sure if the sequence reads all that well, and I'm asking a lot from the reader on page 20 panel 4 because I'm making them read right to left. This was actually a pretty tough one to set up, I wanted to make things dynamic, large and just more frenetic than the early pages, and at the same time readable.

It was really tough to do this so if you look at the thumbnails they're pretty well erased. I pushed it a little more today ('cuz I felt guilty only doing two pages of thumbs) so I thumbnailed page 22 as well. I think my fear in my comic book (as a whole) is that I'll try to be so clear in a sequence that I lose the 'fun' that I like to see in comic books. In pages 20-21, though I'm afraid I may have gone over to the 'fun' side too much? Anyway, I've sent some of them over to my friend Roque, so he can be my guinea pig for readability.

Today's Sept 11th and it's funny working in the vacuum of my apartment: I'm so out of touch with seeing how the world's mourning on this day. I actually went to Yahoo to see some videos about 911 like presidents' speech and the memorial they had in New York. They had some snippets on ABC and CNN as well and it was good that I could search it out and watch them. Though, I have to admit I had to force myself to do so, simply because I just didn't want to face that sadness again.

I remember that month was a very odd month, almost like a weird haze was over my brain the whole time. I remember trying to piece together what just happened in my head. I remember being worried because I couldn't get in touch with my friends in New York on the phone. Seeing those images on TV is something I won't forget.

The strange thing too is, (now looking back at it) the beginnings of this comic book was my own way of dealing with the 911 incident. I made a group of heroes to fight that kind of evil. Drawing comics allows me to escape, maybe even to right some wrongs in my own world, so I guess it was a logical coping mechanism? Of course, 911 isn't the sole thing that drives the book, but It's definitely in there. I think in time, I'll start figuring out the other subconscious things I've buried into this book!

Anyway, that's it for tonight. Good night and God Bless.

P.S. Just got off the phone with El Rock man, and he added some great comments to help out my pages, featuring some comp changes in page 19 to make the sequence work better. But---! That's for tomorrow, which is actually almost today!

My Comic Book - Day 5.25 - Page 19

Well I did a quick kinko's run and here's what the final page ought to look like. I Can't really classify today a full work day (hence the title) as all I did was a couple hours or so of line tweaks and photocopying!

Right now my head is trying to figure out how to layout the last 5 pages of the book without it feeling too rushed. It'll be a juggling act next week as I'm trying to buy a car and do this comic at the same time! I feel some late hours happening! Man, I'm such a slave driver! Aydeeeeyos!

My Comic Book - Day 5 - Page 19

Hooray! It's the end of my first week keeping eight hour days to work on my comic book, and I actually maintained it!

Okay... maybe-sorta-kinda!

This page turned out easy to produce and though I'm still going to tweak a few things here and there, I thought I'd post up what I had. My biggest gripes are on the 'readability' of panel 3 and the face of the character on panel 4, but in all, I think it turned out fine. I think I may be able to solve panel 3's problem with colors, but we'll see.

I just have to run over to kinko's tomorrow and have ol' Bucket Phil fix anything I may have missed and I can file this away 'til the coloring stage. This page may be an easy one for Phil to tweak as I think I went a little lead happy and shaded everything in.

Anyways, I'm off to my weekend! I'll post the final blacks tomorrow, but otherwise, it's time to relax! God Bless and magkita tayo ulit!

My Comic Book - Day 4 - Page 19

This will be a pretty quick post.

Today, I hardly had any serious problems and everything pretty much just fell into place. The only real problem I ran across was I finally figured out the profile shot of one of my characters (uhhh, shouldn't I have figured that out before I started the comic???). It was good to figure this out, but bad at the same time because I may have to go back to some of my pages and fix her to match this profile. Still, I'm not doing that now, maybe once all the pages are completed, I'll do a general 'model' pass. Maybe.

I even slacked off today for a few hours playing video games. Makes me wonder how much I could've really gotten done! I had to adjust the brightness and contrast of this scan so that the non-photo blue would show up, it's probably a nonsensical mess right now, but trust me it's all going according to plan! Mwooohahaha! Anyways, tomorrow I believe I can take this to finish relatively easy (famous last words)! Until next we meet! God Bless and good evening!

My Comic Book - Day 3 - Page 19 (the non-photo blues)

Okay, so I knew this day wouldn't be as comparably productive as days 1 and 2, but I got some good things done today. On my list for the day were: have lunch with the gang from Ghostbot, make a comic book run, go downtown to buy some non-photo blue pencils and of course buy a video game to make me even more non-productive!

But amidst all this malarky, I still did get layouts done for page 19 of my book! This page I've scanned in has two variations of layouts for page 19 (one on the top left and one on the top right). The page layout on the right is what I'm most likely going to end up doing, but there were some quirks about both layouts initially that I needed resolved.

So I enlisted the aid of Roque Ballesteros (he of Ghostbot fame) to be another eye to have a look at this page. He suggested to cut out a panel and add one in, to clarify some storytelling issues (the panel cut out is panel 2 on the left page layout and the new added panel, is panel 4 on the right page layout). Both very good suggestions, and he also suggested I go with panel 5's figure on the right page layout instead of the one on the left. A big thanks to the Rock man for giving me some good feedback! With this resolved, I'm a whole lot more confident about tackling this page tomorrow.

Now onto the REAL meat of this blog!

Yesterday I was out of non-photo blue pencils so I went to Pearl's in downtown to get my favorite col-erase pencils. Just my luck, they didn't have any. So I picked up Steadler and Prismacolor brand non-photo blue pencils to give them a try. I stopped by Kinko's on the way home to give these pencils a little 'taste test'. But first, if you don't know how I use these pencils here's a little quick summary. I do layouts onto bristol paper purely with non-photo blue pencil. Once I have the layout I want, I go over them with a normal pencil; choosing the right line, adding line weight and generally bringing it to finish. I go over to Kinko's, photocopy the art, and voila! The non-photo blue pencil marks go away like a bad dream, and I'm left with a clean, stark dark line. Okay? So now back to the pencil test, here's what I got:

Steadler non-photo blue

Prismacolor non-photo blue


Nothing beats the ol' col erase because that stuff really doesn't show up when I photo copy it, but the runner up is Prismacolor. But what the heck is up with the Steadler brand?? That stuff doesn't even drop out! False advertising I say! So if you ever need to go for non-photo blue pencils and Sanford's col erase is nowhere to be found? Go for the hard lead prismacolor ones. The softer prismas don't drop out too well and actually end up worse than the steadler brand.

And that's today's boring consumer lesson! Until tomorrow, good night and good luck!

P.S. Comic books weren't shipped today because of Labor day so another trip to the store tommorow is needed!

My Comic Book - Day 2 - Page 17

Hooray! It's all done! The 4th panel definitely did me in as it took me most of the day to figure out how to draw that one measly panel! I duplicated the binoculars' images in panels 1 and 2 and had bucket Phil hook up the blacks on the first panel (though admittedly I should do digital filling more often in order to save time!

Whew, I'm beat! Tomorrow I don't think I'll get as much done since I have to run some errands around town, but nonetheless, I can thumbnail like a madman for the next few pages while taking the bus to said errands! Am I slacking off you say?

Well... kinda. The official reason for one of the errands is picking up some supplies for the comic book, I was killing myself today trying to draw with what little non-photo blue pencil I had!

The slacking off part is because there's a video game coming out tomorrow that I want to pick-up (Yakuza from Sega) and since it's on the way to the art store... I may get distracted! That and hey it's comic book day tomorrow! So for now, God Bless and hanggang bukas!

My Comic Book - Day 1 - Page 17

So it begins! This is the first day that I'm doing a normal 8 hour day onto my comic book, and what did I learn from it? I'm really crazy slow! I need to get faster! Especially since I'm drawing some pretty simple characters. Makes me want to try using inks somehow... who am I kidding! My inks suck! I scanned in a few pages from my sketchbook, some of the drawings are from a while back, but these pages actually have some horrible scribbles of my thumbnails and early bits of the script (oh and some people on the BART).

I was working from a script that I wrote, which kept changing and changing even as I was drawing the page! Luckily, I work for myself, otherwise I would've hated me for making so many changes! The word bubble of the character going: "Status!" on panel 3, was actually a last minute addition, done as I was drawing him. It works for the characterization, (I think) but definitely something not possible to do if I was part of a larger team.

I'm finding I'm getting really stuck with some of the backgrounds, peripheral characters and props a lot, since I'm still trying to figure out the overall style as I draw. Definitely not an advisable route to go when jumping into a page! Also, I'm finding as I work there's always that one panel, in every page, that scares me to draw. So, what I'll end up doing is drawing everything else, hoping that when I get to that panel, I'm really warmed up and ready to tackle it.

I think my pace will be around a page every two days. We'll see how I keep up especially when I have no idea how to stage panel 4 on this page (that's my 'phobia-panel' for this page)! That's it for today! Aydeeyos!

Let's go back to plan A

I think it may have felt like something of a wake-up call. Maybe it comes with age? Some sort of urgency to get things done?

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

This blog started out just as a little digression from my website. It was supposed to be a little supplement of Freesuperheroes.com that addressed the comic book geek in me. It kinda did for the first few posts, but it has grown into something more.

I've always had a passion for comic books, for art being told in a sequential format, especially when the sequences can exist side by side of each other. I've been drawing comic books since I've been a kid; and there's just something very special about the medium to me, that film, books or video games just cannot capture. I've been dreaming of having my own book published for a very long time.

But reality loves to slap me awake from the warm and toasty comfort of my dreams! In order to feed myself, have a roof over my head or maintain a visa to stay in America (oh yeah, I'm not from this country by the way), money's gotta be made! And comics can't really provide that! So I got myself a job in the video game industry. Not a bad thing to be sure! And everyday I am definitely thankful to God for blessing me with that! And hey, video games are fun!

There's always going to be that itch though... my need to tell stories through comic books, even though it's definitely not as lucrative as the film or animation industries. I've been very hard on myself for not drawing a comic book, or I'd always think about doing a comic book series, but I never motivated myself enough to do so. I'd always get depressed seeing all these creators on the comic book shelves, consistently pumping out their own books, believing in their ideas and sticking through a number of issues.

I finally got tired of my own whining and at the beginning of 2006, I made myself sit down and draw comic book pages, no matter how tired I was, after work. My goal was to get myself to finish a comic book within a year (roughly 22-24 pages). And the overall plan was to make a 5 issue story arc for the comic. Once all 5 are done, then I'll worry about pushing it on a publisher, or even publishing it myself.

Fast forward to now: towards the latter half of the year. I've chosen to do a simpler style thinking I'd be able to handle the drawing chores easier this way. I've gotten side-tracked here and there, got lazy every few weekends, but I've actually got 17 pages to show for it! Unfortunately, not lettered or colored, but I'm getting there. But how am I really doing?

I'm short by 5 pages, I have no idea how I'll end this issue, I face the prospect of adding pages, I have to fight the urge to want to go back and change things, I have such a hard time drawing in this style, work drains so much out of me all the time, everybody else is better and faster than me and the ever present feeling that I might be drawing the world's suckiest comic of all time hits me everytime I touch pen(cil) to paper!

Yeesh. Cry me a river.

I'm going to get this book done even if it kills me! And I just might hit my deadline with some of the latest news at work! My company felt like rewarding our team for all the long hours we worked on the project (It's called Death Jr. 2, for the psp, go buy it kids!). So I get 13 days of comp time!

13 days! Whoohoo! But instead of sitting around doing nothing, throwing pity parties, the plan is this: I maintain my regular work schedule but instead work on my comic book! I've always wanted to see what I could do if I had a regular job doing comic books, now I get to put my money where my mouth is!

So, what does this mean for this blog? Well, instead of me solely gearing it for comic book talk, I'll be adding in more stuff like the previous "step by step" posts into it. I'm making it into a broader blog, something that can still have me geeking out about comics but it can also include other things such as the process of me creating my comic book. So, me ranting will still exist (as you can tell by this crazy long winded post), but so will the warts and all (okay maybe not all) things that happen to me as I create my comic book. Heck I'll probably post stuff about the video games I play that distract me from getting this book done!

Or at least that's the idea! To kick it off, starting next week I'm going to try to post something up everyday, like a journal, no matter what I have, no matter how little it is and no matter how crappy it looks. So for 13 work days (hey I gotta have a weekend for crying out loud!), I'll have a little compilation of the stuff I went through to get my comic book closer to getting done!

So, say goodbye to "Comic Book Rantings of a Spotful mind" and Hello to "The Neverending Battle"! Since Superman has always been my favorite hero (That's right! Take that dark and brooding superhero lovers!), I'm stealing his little caption, to describe (not to mention melodramatic-ize) my goal to get myself making comic books! I sprinkled a small amount of sketches and pages from the comic book I'm making around this post: makes it a lot less of a yawn fest! And with that, I'm off! Come back on Monday to see how much I've slacked off! God Bless and Good night!

Scatterbrain Pin-Up - Step by Step Part Seven

All done! There are certain bits of the final piece that ended up looking better than others, and even though I was really hesitant to apply the colors, I think it turned out to be okay!

I hit a few delays on the way to the finish line though. First I got caught up in collecting all the photo reference materials, then I got stuck when I fiddled around with colors too long (I have no idea why!) and it was also tough for me to find the Painter settings and tools that I wanted. In the end I used something in Painter that was close to being a default setting anyways! Sigh.

It's funny, in hindsight while this was the style that I chose to render this pin-up out in (those last four words make no sense when you read them out loud together!), I realize it's a style that I don't do much of anymore, it's hard for me to bust it out! Lately, I've been drawing more out of memory, simpler, more cartoony and switching to this style really showed me how badly I am in need of figure drawing! What a kick in the pants! To add irony to it all, even the cartoony style I draw in now is something I'm still trying to figure out!

Well, anyways, I'm done with ol' Scatterhead! Maybe when I finish up the comic book I'm working on right now I'll post up some pages of that to share for next time. Tune in! God Bless and Goooodnight!

Scatterbrain Pin-Up - Step by Step Part Six

I would like to think that it's taken me this long to put this project to finish because I was really having a hard time deciding what colors to use, or that it was difficult to try not to over-burden the drawing with colors and yada yada yada. Maybe it's just me, but I'll make this sweeping statement: I think artists have this mutant ability to procrastinate and get sidetracked... And I totally used my mutant ability to the fullest in this case!

Hmmm, I just thought of a few artist friends of mine that totally break that theory... Actually, more than a few! Okay, okay, I'll admit it! I'm lazy! But I am side-tracked and lazy no more! I had a hard time pinning down what colors I wanted to use so I made a few test pieces just to get a general sense of what I wanted:


I ended up leaning towards the red background more, just because it made the it made the image lean more towards the horror. I swear I must've gone over these color comps a million times and was running myself around in circles, luckily I had a friend online that I could send these color thumbnails to, to get a fresh perspective and that really broke the stalemate and got me going onto my next step for final colors. Thanks Doreen!

Scatterbrain Pin-up - Step by Step Part Five

I went to the ever trusty Kinko's (As long as you don't print anything in color! Oooh jab to the solar plexus!) and made copies of the drawing to make the blue line drop out and to make the contrast stronger. I take that photocopy, scan it into Photoshop and fiddle with the brightness/contrast even more and ol' Bucket Phil spots in my blacks.

Funny thing is, once all the blacks were spotted in, I noticed this large black spot right in the middle, where the bottom of Scatterbrain's cloak is. It was a huge gaping, boring nothing. Right in the middle! In the thumbnail it seemed it would be okay left that way, but my layout changed inadvertently due to me moving the thug on the upper right's arm. So digitally I went back in and made these creases on his cloak. And strangely enough that little change helped it a bit! Whew! Thank goodness for computers!

I noticed something else too, maybe because I'm doing this project right after the previous one, but... is that Galactic man working for the side of evil?!?!

Scatterbrain Pin-up - Step by Step Part Four

I went over the non-photo blue pencils I did with a regular pencil and fleshed out the drawing, adding line weight, shadows and correcting things here and there. At this stage, I usually like to fill in all the blacks so I can 'see' what the shadows do, but this time I planned on my trusty Photoshop assistant, Bucket Phil to do that for me (aaaand cue crickets)!

Scatterbrain Pin-up - Step by Step Part Three

Armed with references I finally took to drawing out the Pin-up. I got rid of certain things in the original thumbnail and I had to move things around slightly but generally the composition's the same. It was tough to scan the original non-photo blue cleanly so I had to take a picture of it instead, convert it to grayscale, and adjust it's contrast and values. Whew, I can't believe this pin-up is taking me this long! Anyways that's it for today, I gotta crash! God Bless!

Scatterbrain Pin-Up - Step by Step Part Two

This next step in the process actually took me longer to do than I planned for. I wanted to approach this in a different style from Galactic man and am planning for more darks, shadows and realism. I haven't worked in a 'realistic' style in awhile, so it took me some time to figure out how to draw things!

Since I was having such a hard time getting a good start on the pencils, I took some photo references to get me all prepped up. I have a hard time making stuff up like shadows and folds as is, so a little reference material goes a long way! Like so:


I have a slew of other pictures , but since I make a bunch of really silly faces in them, I opted not to share that with the rest of the world! Anyway, you probably get the gist! Since this step was so big for me to get my brain moving, I decided to make this a separate post. Next up the non-photo blue pencils! Oh and my having a random plastic skull model (whom I've cheesely dubbed 'Scully') hanging out in my apartment came in pretty handy!

Scatterbrain Pin-Up - Step by Step Part One

Looks like I got a new assignment.

My friend Shanth Enjeti (Ol' Rocket Pistol himself and creator of Springball), hooked me up with a project to do a pin-up for a new comic book called "Scatterbrain", published by Markosia Enterprises Limited. I jumped right on it of course, I mean who could resist doing a pin up?!

I didn't really know much about the character so I did a little research and went out to my local comic book store and picked up issue 1. I read through it and tried to think up what would be a cool pin up. From what I gather, Scatterbrain's almost like this Spawn-ish, Batman-y type character with the power to magnify people's fear by a thousandfold. Most of the first book though, centers around the cop that's out to get Scatterbrain, so seeing the character in action was pretty sparse.

I was pretty much drawing a blank on how to approach this , so while on my way to work I drew up these thumbnails to get my brain a-workin'.

Looking back at these, it seemed I was going for a lot of perspective and dynamic compositions in my first few thumbnails. With him staking out badguys and hiding in rafters and such. Instead, I ended up going with a much flatter composition. I pretty much stumbled into it by accident, because as I was doing more thumbs, I found I started filing in this one in particular a lot more.

So I stopped myself! I have a hard time transferring my thumbnails to a larger size when I've already figured everything in the early stage. I have a hard time replicating the spontaneity of it all. It's a bad habit to jump in there without a plan... but hey! So I guess I subconsciously picked a composition! Now I'm ready to take on laying it out onto an 11 x 17 page. That'll be next time! So, adios, paalam and God Bless!

P.S. Whoops! I had no idea I had some kinda comment lock on my blog! Sorry for you guys trying to post! Thanks to the Rocket Pistol for informing me!

Galactic Man - Step by Step Part Five

Whew. It's finally done! After countless hours of keeping myself awake with Yahoo music, Christina Aguilerra, Hilary Duff, Ryan Cabrera, the pussycat dolls and Usher (stupid pop music really wakes you up! Except Christina Aguilerra's actually pretty good... Did I just blog that?!) Mission accomplished! All that's left to do is to send it off to Ruce! It was quite the photo finish, but it's done. Hope you guys liked seeing how I worked, warts and all! I'm gonna pass out now! God Bless and good night --- er, morning!

Galactic Man - Step by Step Part Four

After a bunch of false starts, finally got some colors that I like. That took alot of messing around

with Photoshop's handy-dandy adjust -> hue/saturation tool! (what would I do without it!)

... almost... done...

...must... go... to ...sleep!

Galactic Man - Step by Step Part Three

Okay a pretty small update, but nonetheless, an important one. After photocopying my original, I scan it into my computer and adjust the brightness and contrast in photoshop. I altered the the page a little here and there to make it fit onto the 'digital page'. Then I added in frames for the panels...

And now it's off to colors!

On a side note, my friends Roque (Click on the link to "Ghostbot blog" to see more of his stuff!) and Sonia (an awesome Graphic Designer, go to www.niachia.com to see what's the what!), just had a baby boy this past July 18th! 8 lbs 6 oz. and 21 inches long! So this is a special "Not my CAKE!" shout out to them! Oh, and their kid's name is Greyson.

And I know what you guys are thinking.


...and yes, that is a VERY cool name! 'til next time (which will be pretty soon! Gulp!) God bless and aydeeyos!