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!

Galactic Man - Step by Step Part Two

Whew! I didn't think I'd get this done last night! I was running a little slow on doing the finished pencils and was a little hesitant on how to draw the monster! Anyway, taking a few minutes this morning to post up an update. I changed a few things here and there and I decided to not spot in blacks for a change. I'm hoping to rely on colors to make things pop out on this (heh, especially the fourth panel, what is going on in there?!) more than the blacks. I figure it'll look more fun, and light rather than too serious if I went all noir on it! So now I take these pencils and bring it to my favorite 'inker' (kinko's), then scan that copy into photoshop and darken up my lines to prep it up for the coloring stage. I'm almost there! Okay, I'd better go and get ready for work otherwise I'll be late! God bless and as a great man once said: "not my CAKE!" (genius line Ruce)

Galactic Man - Step by Step Part One

I'm going to take a break from ranting about comic books, for a bit, and start posting up some 'start-to-finish' pages on this comic book page I'm working on for a friend. So a little background on the project:

My friend Ruce Lumpkins (not related to Wille (snort! snort! Guffaw!)), always does a video project with the kids he teaches at this school called Jamestown. He's got an idea to present the video as if it were a comic book (with paneling and such, I'd imagine). He needs this quick sequence at the beginning that depicts a typical superhero page (okay, maybe-sorta-kinda). This is where I come in.

He gave me this sketch to work off of:

So, I went on to doing layouts from the thumbnail that Ruce gave me, but he and I decided to expand it from 3 panels to a full comic book page...

While I was thumbnailing, I was also trying to figure out what this character would look like, and whether or not I was going to draw him cartoony or 'realistic'.

Eventually I leaned towards the more 'realistic' look. To be honest my drawings on the rough page (later on) waffle between the two! I knew I didn't really have to draw much anything else in the sequence so the heaviest thinking I did was on his look.

Okay, so it really wasn't that heavy! Anyways, I thought I had enough preliminary work done and was itching to do the rough of the page. Since I'm a natural at procrastination, I was going to make sure I did this page on time (My deadline's in two weeks)!

Unfortunately I jumped in too fast! The sequence has Galactic man flying around, finding his birthday cake, caught off guard by a monster popping out of his cake and Galactic man being concerned about the messed up state of his cake. I rushed into the page so fast I laid it out without really designing the cake and more importantly the monster! I have a few sketches here and there, but I really am not too happy with some of the monster designs I've come up with. So when you look at panel 4 of the page where the monster's supposed to be... there's really just placeholder.

Well, I guess I'll figure out what that monster looks like when I start putting the page to finish! I just gotta cross my fingers and hope it's not hideous! Or hope it's hideous... but in a good way! Anyway, 'til my next update! God Bless!

WAY-off-tangent-P.S. I was just watching Justice League season 2 and man that's some good stuff! Gets to the comic dork in me!