The Proposal: Part 7 - Final colors

Whew! So...

It's been quite sometime since my last post and a lot of things have happened since then! I actually finished coloring and printed my book out just in the nick of time! I did stay up until 6 AM the night before she came back to town, but I got it done. I was messed up, but I got it done!

I proposed on 11/1/10, the night the Giants won the world series. It took some prompting to get her to read the comic without saying it was my proposal (she isn't a comic book geek at all!). At first she didn't really know what the thing was, but after flipping to the front page and figuring out it out it was us... she loved the book! And surprisingly even after presenting her with the oh so shiny ring, she still kept flipping through the comic, and laughing at the little gags! Her favorite panel? The sushi slice panel. Oh and yeah, the "will you marry me?" of course.

Anyway, let's get on to the final pages shall we?

I bought all sorts of different kinds of paper to print the book out, but it came down to good ol' cardstock since it just absorbed the ink better and looked the best. Anyway, that's it for tonight! Good night and God Bless you as He has me!

And by the by, she said "yes"!

The Proposal: Part 6

I am beat.

Got a half day of work tomorrow (yeah I know: lame!). Coloring tomorrow. Maybe paper shopping...

The Proposal: Part 5

Got piled on with work last minute last night... not much progress I'm afraid... and I'm late for work!

The Proposal: Part 4

Whew! I am trying to crank this stuff as fast as I can out, and still I'm behind! Anyway, I got pages 2 and 3 further along today.

I also picked up the ring today!

And even though I kinda knew this in the back of my head, seeing it just proved my thought; she's not even gonna see the comic book once that shiny bauble gets in front of her! Hahah! Heck, I couldn't stop being mesmerised by the ring myself!

Still this is worth it! It cannot get more personal for me than to give her a piece of art that I made. Strangely enough this is me at my sincerest! I hope she likes it! I'm itchin' to propose already and see the look on her face! Stay Frosty Bautzman, stay frosty!

The Proposal: Part 3

"I'm going to surprise my girlfriend and make a comic book as my proposal!"

Man, what was I thinking! Making a comic book is a lot of work! Anyway, as usual, I am behind schedule.

Work has been requiring us to come in on Saturdays an stay late nights, so it's been really draining on me to work on the book. The layouts were giving me a headache as there was so much I wanted to do but no time.

Anyway, the total page count should be 5 pages. I THINK I can do it. I had met up with my friend Roque at church today and he help me get over a layout problem I was stuck on. My brain is so friend, so it was good that I had his help to get me back on track. (Though his solution to my problem was to make a double page spread. Could be trouble...!)

I finished the first page's inks today and here's how it went:

It turned out okay, but I'm having difficulty working on a page that's smaller than what the Bomb Squad pages are at. It makes it hard for me to gauge what line thickness will look good at the printed size. However, this actually helps me as I am forced to simplify the way I draw even more.

Anyhow, I am beat! My hopefully-soon-to-be-fiancee will be back in 7 days time. So I really only have 6 days to work. Actually just 5 so that on the sixth day I can concentrate on the print looking good. And with Work hours going way over the proper work/life balance? This week is gonna be crazy! Okay I gotta crash! Good night and God Bless!

The Proposal: Part 2

I had to work late last night, so unfortunately I didn't get a chance to keep the comic book going. I'm pretty beat tonight, but I just decided to power through to finish this cover so I can move onto the interior layouts.

I have a few things unresolved from this cover though. Such as: "Where will I be able to place the logo? What does the logo look like?" I have no idea. I'll worry about that later!

Hopefully I can get through all the layouts this week! I'm beat. Good night... er... good morning and God Bless!

The Proposal: Part 1

So. I'm going to propose to my girlfriend.

The problem? Well for one the ring isn't here yet, and the other? It's near high impossible to surprise her! She'll pretty much sniff it out when I try to plan something romantic or take her to some nice place, that I'm going to propose. So I thought I could make something for her, and what better thing to make for a question like "will you be my wife" than a superhero comic right?!

Anyway, right now she's on a business trip in Georgia for two weeks. So I have a little time to work on a few pages for a short book. It's perfect timing! Genius I say! I was so pleased with my awesome proposal idea that I completely forgot that making a comic book was hard work!

The things you do for love right?

The book will have to be fairly simple so I can bust it out fast before she comes back (and hopefully the ring wll be here by then).

Step one will be to make character designs. There was a comic book we saw at Wondercon that she liked the art style for, so I'm just gonna base my stuff off of that. Here's what I came up with on the first night:

The second night (tonight) I was a little fried from work and pooped out, but I still tried to plow through. I figured, I could salvage the color sketch I did and turn it into a cover. So here's my rough of that.

The interior layouts are still stewing in my head, as well as the lead-up panels to the punch line, but I'll probably do some thumbs in 2 days time. I'm working on this book kinda seat-of-my-pants, and fast, but also kind of fun!

For now, I'm typing up these posts but not putting them up online (yet) so she can't see what's going on. Hee hee. I'm so sneaky! That's it for tonight! God Bless!

My Comic Book: Page 16

Trucking right along. Finished up page 16, and now I have a total of 17 pages! This one went fast, and kind of brought me back to understanding my initial aesthetic for the Bomb Squad: Simplicity.

I chose a simple style when I started this comic so I could tell the story and draw the pages as quickly as possible. This second issue though, I've definitely been adding in a lot more detail, and kind of reverting back to how I usually draw.

So, while I do like how this issue is turning out, I have to keep that in mind as I go forward. On the positive side of things I'm also starting to loosen up as I draw this book, and not laboring and nit picking every line on the page. Could be good and bad. We'll see at the end of the book!

That's it for today! Good Morning and God Bless.

My Comic Book: Page 15 update

Yay! I'm almost back to the point before my file got corrupted. Also, alot of things that were really hard for me to figure out before are coming out a lot smoother. I'm getting that giddy-ness again when I feel I'm about to finish a page!

Good morning and God Bless!

My Comic Book: Stop whining! Back on Page 15!

Well, God certainly knows how to get me back on the saddle.

On my previous post I was pretty down that my Photoshop file for page 15 got corrupted. I was pretty miffed that I had lost all that work. Later on that day, my girlfriend and I were going to the farmer's market in San Francisco (by the Pier Building) with two of her friends from out of town.

I got there a little early, an lo and behold I got to see an inspirational sight to get my juices flowing again.

This Rocket ship was created by a group called the five ton crane. It's quite a cool site to see and just what I needed to pick myself back up since it looks so similar to the 'plane' I have in my book:

Ain't that a hoot.

I thanked God right there and then for letting me be inspired by others at work, and not to be discouraged. At just the right moment and at the right time He picks me back up and sends me on my way again.

So at the end of that day, I quickly set up page 15 again. Here's my progress from that couple hours of work. Admittedly, I seem to move a little faster and more confident than before. And a few things are turning out a little better already.

And I took this pic for my buddy Shanth, who'd definitely get a kick out of this:

Well that's it for today! Good Morning and God Bless!

My Comic Book: Goodbye Page 15... see you soon Page 15?

Sigh.

My computer froze up last night from it's sleep mode. I've had it on sleep mode for a few days so maybe that's why.

Sigh.

More importantly, I've been chipping away at page 15 of my book for around 3-4 days. Waking up early in the morning before work to do some inking, or inking for a few hours after work. I've been struggling and fighting with this page for awhile now, and I was doing some good progress too. I fixed up a bunch of compositional and perspective errors, inking sound effect font, drawing the boring crowd in the background, and I had a few more items to ink, I was ready to finish it off this morning and move on.

Sigh.

Unfortunately, when my computer crashed it corrupted the file. So now I can't open page 15 at all. All I have left is a thumbnail that photoshop will taunt me with when I get ready to open it:

And an error window:

Sigh.

I suppose phrases like "suck it up", "don't cry over spilled milk" and "It'll go faster the second time around" come to mind. But right now, I'm just down.

Sigh.

I'm gonna go play some video games and punch some bad guys. Maybe I'll try to piece the page back together later this evening.

The neverending battle never ends!

My Comic Book: Page 15, 16, 18 and 19 thumbs

Got a quick update here, and mainly it's me scribbling, trying to figure out panel flow on the next few pages. Since I only have a few pages left, so I had to be careful that I showed everything I needed to show in the next few sequences.

Page 15 was difficult for me for some reason as there were a lot of thing I wanted to show in 1 page.

But I boiled it down to what I had to show. And while a part of me wants to show more and pace it out more in this one page, storytelling rules all, so I simply had to drop some things I had planned and show what was the most important.

Page 16 was a lot less painless. It was more work on me scripting and again, editing myself so it's not too wordy, but still get what dialogue I need to progress the story and introduce a character. And hopefully not lose new readers with another new face they've never seen.

With page 18, I had a tiny tiny thumb of what I wanted the layout to be for this splash page, but the real trouble I had was drawing my character in perspective for this action shot. Because she's made up of triagles and in so flat it started out difficult, but I think I got a handle on her.

Page 19 is sequence that's just in my head, and I don't have any layouts for it at all, but I went ahead and drew up the first panel kinda tight anyway.

Also you may have noticed me messing around with SFX and font in these pages. When my brain goes dead trying to do layouts, I switch over to do some type to let it rest and stew on ideas. Then I switch back to thumbnailing again.

That's it for today! Good day and God Bless!

Superman saves the day... for reals!

A friend of mine sent me this link to a couple being threatened by foreclosure on their home, but stumble upon a box of comics in their house. Inside the box? Action Comics number 1! This looks like a job for Superman!

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/superman-comic-saves-familys-home/story?id=11306997&page=1

My Comic Book: Quick Comp

When I had finished twelve pages into my book, I felt like I got stuck trying to finish the next half. I generally know what I want to do and how I want to end an issue, but I leave the details open so I have fun while drawing.

But it was tough with this second issue. My progress has been crawling since then and even though I have 15 pages, I feel like I'm still stuck. So I've been doing other things to jog my brain. I've been doing color studies for the pages, trying to work out the cover, doing thumbnails and yesterday, i decided to plop out some placeholder lettering.

From that I decided to do what I did in the first book when I got stuck halfway: I printed out the pages and put them in one of those art sleeve/folder things.

And just like that, the act of physically flipping through the pages, my brain started filling in the gaps. And I realized this: I have exactly the right amount of pages to end the book where i want it to! And now I know exactly what to draw on those pages! Yay!

Artist's block is the worst. So I'm glad I got un-blocked! Now time to get it done! That's it for today, Good Morning and God Bless!

Wedding Present

I drew up an old high school buddy of mine a wedding present recently. He had specifically requested that I depict them as super heroes, and hey I can't really argue with that art direction can I?

It's been pretty busy at work, so it was tough for me to find the time to get this done, but I got it done anyways! I just started with dynamic poses, and I kinda re-organized the figures on a page afterwards. I didn't really have a composition in mind, I just liked the figures I initially drew.

Judging from all the drawings I've drawn with hands in perspective, I must love Jack Kirby a lot or have some kinda hand fetish...

Then I inked it digitally..

...and then added color. It's been awhile since I put my color theory to good use, so the first pass was kinda lacking:

It wasn't until I used my best friend adjust hue/saturation in photoshop, that I finally got colors I liked better!

So this post is for my buddy Ryu! Congratulations to you and Delphine! Sorry i couldn't be there! Here's a link to his site. He's a very talented photographer when he's not busy getting married!

Iron Man

Drew up an Iron Man. His hand was too big initially so I used photoshop to scale it down a little... it's still too big...

Spiderman

Kinda big headed, but hey.

My Comic Book: Page 17

I still have to draw out pages 15 and 16, but here's a work in progress for page 17.

Torch and Thor

More doodling while verifying bugs on the game I'm working on...

Flame on!

Daredevil and Thing

Just messing around at work inbetween running builds and stressing. When I started drawing the Thing, it dawned on me (yet again) just how awesome Jack Kirby's stuff is and how he created som fun characters to draw.

And I know this is the neverending battle... but it's clobberin' time!

My Comic Book: Page 12 and 13

I've been working on my comic book whenever I get some free time, but I've noticed I'm kinda getting too detail heavy on the last couple of pages. I definitely have to over-ride (pun intended) my penchant to do detail, so I can concentrate on telling the story. However, I felt like these pages needed it.

I HATE backgrounds, but I really needed to have some kind of establishing shot: a shot of the building, the distance the plane was from it... and well, everything else. Since I've been rusty with drawing and my perspective is pretty horrid, I gave myself a little help, and modeled the scene in Maya.

I did a quick render of that and used it as reference. And while it did help me do the perspective and shot set-up really quickly, it was still a lot of work to get it all to a state I was satisfied with.

Anyway, that's it for tonight! 13 pages down and 11 more to go! Good night and God bless!

My Comic Book: Page 9 and 10 WIP

I'm just working through some of the pages. These pages are a little busier than the other so I wa a little unsure about the storytelling. Sometimes, I end up slapping some color onto the pages to to mess around with color to see if I can help the flow a little.

Okay, that it for today! The Neverending battle continues!

My Comic Book: Page 7 and 8 inks

Movin' right along.

I'm getting used to waking up early/sleeping late to get these pages going.

I'm hoping I can reach page ten by the end of the week! We'll see! Okay, gotta go, it's looking great outside today! God Bless!

My Comic Book: Page 4, 5 and 6, inks

I finished up the inks for pages 4 and 5. It was a lot tougher to get the background crowd all finished up than I had initially expected! I guess I'm a little bit more rusty than I thought. Anyway, slowly but surely, I felt like I was getting back into the groove of things after finishing these two pages.

Page 6 felt a little bit better as I drew it. Hopefully, it gets easier as I keep doing this on a regular basis. I guess the trick will be carving out the time to keep this going!

But I guess that's the whole thing right? I gotta keep pushing, and keep going to make this book happen. Anyhow, the neverending battle continues! God bless and good night!