the neverending battle

My Comic Book: Page 23 final colors (cheat page!)

2012-01-25T00:27:00.000-08:00

Creating comic books is such a giant mental challenge. Locking yourself away to write, draw, ink, letter and color takes it's toll after awhile. It's so easy to procrastinate or make excuses after a tiring day at work.

When I work, I find that if I do little countdowns for myself on how many pages I have left to finish, it helps push me on. I usually have a couple pages in the Bomb Squad that I know should be easy for me to color. I usually color those last, like a mental ace-in-the-hole that I bust out when I'm starting to get fatigued. Does that make any sense?

Anyhow, this is one of those pages...

Fortunately, this page works with the simple monochromatic color scheme to signal a flashback much like in the first issue. And that's it for tonight. And that brings me to...

2!

more!

pages!

left!

God Bless you guys and good night... er, morning!

My Comic Book: Page 21 Final colors

2012-01-24T00:41:00.000-08:00

All done. 3 more pages! Woot!

My Comic Book: Page 21 WIP

2012-01-23T00:06:00.000-08:00

Blocked out a few colors in this pass. Hopefully I'll be able to finish this tomorrow. I'm so CLOSE to wrapping up the second issue... I'm actually getting excited! maybe a month or so from now, I'll be ready for the final print! Good night and God Bless! Onward, Battle that never ends..!

My Comic Book: Page 20 final colors

2012-01-19T23:55:00.000-08:00

4 more pages to go!

The Neverending Battle continues!

My Comic Book: Page 20 Colors (Work in Progress)

2012-01-18T23:58:00.001-08:00

Swimming, swimming, just keep swimming...

My Comic Book: Page 19 final colors

2012-01-16T18:58:00.000-08:00

Colored in Page 19 after the break. Not sure if these crazy colors are going to look okay in print, but I gotta keep moving! 5 more pages to go!

Francisco V. Coching

2012-01-07T23:23:00.000-08:00

My Dad bought me a book I was searching for yesterday. It's a book called "The life and art of Francisco Coching". Here's a cover shot that I got from an article Gerry Alanguilan wrote up:

My dad read a few of those komiks from back in a day when he was growing up and he remembers some of Coching's titles and a few others of his contemporaries (with Virgilio and Nestor Rendondo as his favorites). It's sad, because Filipino Komiks didn't seem to survive very well at all. Add to that a few of the amazing talent left the county to work in the states (and they seemed to disappear there even though they kicked SO much butt). Anyhow, it seems this book does a great job of showcasing a lot of Coching's work in that era (that I unfortunately missed).

So, have a gander at some of the pictures I took from the book and join me in enjoying his artwork.

The 'banjo' playing girl is my fave of this batch.

I like that tiny figure of the woman on the middle on the left side.

Love this cover.

I like the dress drapery here.

I see some Hal Foster in there, Great use of the graphic blacks.

Awesome.

What's crazy too is that he was able to draw and write 3 different projects with a bi-weekly schedule! Hope you guys enjoyed this stuff as much as I did! Hangang sa susunod na kabanata!

McFarlane + Alcala

2012-01-04T17:24:00.000-08:00

No drawing updates today.

I'm on vacation and spending time with my parents, siblings and many assorted nephews and nieces for the Holidays in the Philippines. My wife and I have been staying in a room where my old comic books are still in.

Quite a few have gotten dinged up, tore up, misplaced or simply given/taken away. Everything else that's still there is ravaged by the heat and humidity.

I was tidying them up and deciding which ones to bring back to the states with me, and of course I can't help but flip through most of them and relive my childhood.

I found a few of the american comics I got actually have a few filipino artists in them doing pencil or inks. Which is an extra treat for me: I always feel like I never got influenced by the awesome filipino comic book artists when I was growing up, and I'm craving their stuff more and more as I get older.

Check these panels from Batman Year two, with Todd McFarlane penciling and Alfredo Alcala inking:

Great looking Alcala inking, giving a very solid, gritty feel to McFarlane's pencils

Check out the awesome hatchwork that's a nice contrast to the graphic looking Batman in panel 1

When I was young and stumbled onto this book, I had already seen McFarlane's Spider-man run before it. I remember not liking Alcala's inks because I was an Image zombie. Now that I'm older I realize I was a total idiot. Haha! I like how 'crime-booky' Alcala's inks did to the pencils and it fits the story pretty well. And hey, Alfredo Alcala is always awesome.

Switching gears, check out this awesome panel I stumbled onto, flipping through The Vision and Scarlet Witch #8:

That could be the best comic book sound effect ever. Gonna have to steal it!

That sound effect elicited a loud chuckle from me when I saw it! The title is also very Powerman appropriate! That's it for tonight in the PI! God Bless and a belated Happy New Year and hope you guys had a, as Powerman would say: 'Sweet Christmas'!

What??!!

2011-12-13T09:03:00.000-08:00

I was flipping through a recent Superman compilation book that was given to me as a birthday gift (well, it's an early present), and saw this image and wanted to share.

Too awesome.

The book is called Superman from the 30's to the 70's. It's a good compilation of work, mostly in black and white, but it doesn't list out the writers or artists of the issues reprinted. Or even which issue was reprinted, so unfortunately I can't give credit where credit is due. The story, from what I can tell is called "Superman: Our first imaginary story." At least in the splash panel's lettering. In the caption on that same panel it says: "Read the adventures of 'superman, matinee idol'..."

Anyway! Just thought to share what I thought was a cool sequence.

My Comic Book: Page 17 final colors

2011-12-10T18:14:00.001-08:00

Just finished up this page!

Final colors

I originally intended the last panel to be a totally monochromatic orange color since it seemed to really emphasize the action. But while coloring, I found that because of the way I composed it, it would still work even if the only thing orange was the background. The green colors from the panel next to it seemed to help connect the action just as well.

Christmas is coming soon, so I think my output will probably have to slow down. Good night and God Bless! The Neverending battle continues!

My Comic Book: Page 17 WIP colors

2011-12-08T00:39:00.001-08:00

Quick post tonight. Just blocked in the basic colors for this page.

Blocked in colors

A lot of the color scheme's already been figured out in my previous pages, so I just dialed this one in. Next step will be to add shadows and speed lines to help focus some of the important stuff going on in the panels.

My Comic Book: Page 16 final colors

2011-12-06T00:19:00.001-08:00

Finished up the colors for page 16.

Work in progress

Final colors

I've been going bonkers on the coloring lately, ie. adding a lot of detail using color. So much in fact that I had to go back to some pages and tone down some things (some of my clouds are looking a little 'poofy' instead of angular for example). I have to remember to try to keep the detail simple and keep the look of the book uniform. This page helped me try to figure out that balance a little bit.

The large solid areas for color are tempting me to fill it up with color effects, it's really tough to resist the urge. Anyway, that's it for tonight... er... this morning! Good morning and God Bless!

A ninja-shirt-birthday for my wife

2011-11-27T16:31:00.001-08:00

Taking a break from coloring, I created a little design that I got printed onto a shirt using cafe press. I knew I wanted to draw her ninja persona from my wedding proposal comic around a year ago, but I honestly didn't know what kind of composition to go for. Here are some of my thumbnails trying to figure it out.

Preliminary sketches: I went with 3 one on the top row.

Still not really knowing a design, I went ahead and inked the character and tightened it up. I started trying to draw some tree by her feet in this weird 'fish eye like' perspective, but it wasn't working. It was too busy and called a lot of unnecessary attention to itself, and when you did look at it, you had no idea what it was supposed to be!

So then I started coloring in the figure and started putting a flatter background design. Just simple colors so the heaviest blacks (the character) would stand out. Also I opted not to tilt her in this composition. The tilt was just me trying to make a confused layout more interesting.

I was getting somewhere at this point but it just wasn't enough. The cherry blossoms and stars just just seemed so... loose. The pieces just weren't fitting together. After a lot of messing around, I found the best answer, was of course, the simplest one. I added the branches of the cherry blossom tree to ground the composition.

It's not perfect, but definitely better than what I was initially going for. It took a lot of me really messing around, but I got it done to a state I'd be satisfied with to present to my wife. I sent it off to cafe press and ordered it onto a tank top.

The color came out a lot more faded and a lot more CMYK-y than I'd like. Still the print version has a certain charm to it. The design's a lot lower on the shirt than I wanted too. Anyway, the wife loved it when I gave it to her! And that's all that counts right?

The Bomb Squad update: I've finished coloring page 14 of the book, and I'm onto page 15. I'll try to do another update soon. Good night and God Bless.

My Comic Book: page 12 and 13 final colors

2011-11-20T20:06:00.001-08:00

That Flu really kicked my butt. Been out of commision for so long, but now I've decided to just push myself to just get this spread done. I'm still not 100% but I'm good enough to finish up these pages. There are still a few things I'd like to mess with on the colors for this spread, but I really need to move on.

I had a more monochromatic scheme for the panels on the bottom, but adding a few splashes of color helps it along a bit without taking away from the main image.

My plan is to finish coloring the remaining pages by the end of the year. I'm not sure if I'll make it, but I certainly won't do it by nit picking everything to death! Onto page 14! Good night and God Bless!

My Comic Book: Page 12 and 13 colors WIP (round 2 and 3)

2011-11-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

Still plugging away on these pages. Caught a pretty bad bug (and still recovering), so I was out of commision for 6 days.

Going for simpler color scheme initially...

...but I seem to be headed for something more colorful...

I had wanted to keep the colors simple, but the more I kept working on it, the more I felt the building also needed color. It needed presence, to make it have more importance. I mean it is the thing the Bomb Squad's trying to save for an issue and a half now, right? Not quite done with the faces on the bottom, and not really sure about their color scheme either yet. I'll figure that out next time... the Neverending Battle continues! Good night and God Bless!

My Comic Book: Page 12 and 13 colors WIP

2011-11-01T00:31:00.000-07:00

Not much color going on in this spread, but believe it or not I've spend a lot of time trying to figure out how this page will work!

It's still not quite how I'd like this color scheme to turn out, but I think I like how the bright yellow "EEEEE" lettering is working with the red and blue.

My Comic Book: Page 11 Final colors

2011-10-26T01:24:00.000-07:00

Finally finished up this page.

Aaaand, onto the double page spread (gulp)!

My Comic Book: Page 11 WIP Colors part 2

2011-10-25T00:47:00.000-07:00

Did I even do any work??

Slowly, but surely! The battle continues to never end...

My Comic Book: Page 11 WIP colors

2011-10-21T00:33:00.000-07:00

Just clocking in a Work In Progress colors page for page 11 of the book.

Fairly straightforward coloring this time around... keeping the colors relatively simple compared to the past two pages. Okay I gotta sleep now...

My Comic Book: Page 9 final colors

2011-10-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

When I laid down these colors, I thought it was too nutty. Usually when that's the case I walk away and then when I come back to a page, I realize it's not THAT crazy. That didn't quite happen for this page! It still makes my eyes bug out when I look at it.

But I think that's a good thing. This page is meant to be a big punch in the face when the reader gets to it. I'm not quite sure how the final print color will look like, but one thing at a time right?

Onwards to page 10! And the neverending battle continues! God Bless and Good Morning (and what a really nice morning it is from South San Francisco!).

My Comic Book: Page 8 final colors

2011-10-09T15:37:00.000-07:00

There's been quite a lot of things that have been going on since my last few posts. I bought a house, work has kicked up into overdrive (I was the only animator in Cityville for awhile!), and oh did I mention I bought a house? Anyway...

It took me awhile to get this page done. My wrist isn't as tired anymore, and I think I'm slowly getting back into the groove. I caught myself nit-picking my color choices again, so I just had to force myself to move on.

Anyway. Onwards to page 9!

Yet another weigh in, my thoughts on the New 52...

2011-09-20T23:32:00.000-07:00

Honestly? I'm enjoying it.

I didn't buy everything from the first 3 weeks, just what seemed to appeal to me as I was browsing. Sidenote: Looking around on comixology just pales in comparison to going into the comic book store.

I've bought 13 titles so far and borrowed 3 from a friend to read. There are 7 that I'll be back for the second issue for sure, 4 that I seem to be on the fence about, 3 that I'll flip through at the comic book store and 2 that I'm fairly sure I won't be buying. Not bad numbers for DC, right? Note: I'm missing one book in this shot, Demon Knights, and I'd probably lump that with the second on-the-fence row. I've categorized the books in this photo:

Top row (I'll buy the second issue): Justice League, Action Comics, O.M.A.C., Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and Resurrection man. Action comics was the strongest for me, putting a spin to Superman that's polarizing fans, but to me, seems pretty true to his spirit. I'm not a fan of Grant Morrisons writing as he dissappointed me with Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis by any stretch, but I've enjoyed his All-Star Superman run. He seems to keep in good form with Action Comics.

Action Comics #1

O.M.A.C. was a fun throwback book for me. A lot of awesome kirby-esque action with Kieth Giffen supplying some great storytelling. I was a little nervous with Dan Didio being co-writer on the book as I wasn't fond of his Wednesday Comics Metal Men run. But it turns out, O.M.A.C is one of my top pics for the 52. I'm not sure how new readers will respond to it, but I'm definitely eating it up.

O.M.A.C. #1

Justice League was a good intro book. Plenty of great action, and some good art from Jim Lee. The story is easy enough to follow, and it takes it's time introducing new readers to a few characters. People complain that the whole League isn't there, but I think Geoff Johns is going the right way with this. A few team books in the 52 line up threw every character at the reader and it makes for a confusing read. Demon Knights, Legion Lost and the Authority are examples of this. Where the team intros are done pretty well, I think are in Jeff Lemier's Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. Anyhow, I enjoyed the Justice League, and I remember reading and re-reading it multiple times. It was fun.

Swamp Thing, Animal Man and Ressurection man I'll lump up together. I enjoyed them because they were in this interesting horror/superhero category. I've read a few vertigo books that do this, but to have these type of books exist in the the DC universe is pretty refreshing.

Second Row (I'll peek at these at the store, and lean towards buying #2 if budget allows): Green Lantern and Batwoman were pretty solid and fairly new reader friendly. but I think because I know the type of books these are, and I know fans will eat it up, I might pass them up just to help support the other genres coming out this month. Men of War didn't kick my butt but shows some pretty good potential. I haven't read a war book in a long time, so this title while not having an amazing first issue, might get me to buy #2 if it starts picking up. Demon Knights is also a cool book, but I feel there were so many characters being introduced, it never totally grabbed me. Again, the Swords and Sorcery genre being tackled here is intriguing so I might be back.

Third Row (titles I probably won't pick up again): Mister Terrific was actually entertaining, but I don't think the character grabbed me enough to make me come back for it. It wasn't anything bad, but compared to the others, it's not as strong. Deathstroke was actually kinda fun, like a super-villain crime book. Pretty solid story, but it's rare for me to go for books with the bad guy as the main character. Still, I'd say it's a pretty solid entry into this 'genre'. Legion Lost I felt threw new readers under the bus. There were too many characters, it was hard to relate to any of them. I liked the art, but there was too much story crammed into it, it just got to be too much.

Fourth Row (I definitely won't be reading these): I always felt like the Authority and Stormwatch were these cheap knock-offs of the Justice League (well, Midnighter and Apollo especially). I feel like those books capitalize on what a nerd like me loves about Batman and Superman and puts a gritty spin to it. And now with the DC reboots it becomes more apparent to me how much of a copy they are. The first issue didn't really do much to bring me on board. Batgirl everybody seems to be loving, but I felt like it was a very standard super-hero story. And this is probably fine to some, and a good starter for those not used to the genre, but I felt like this book could easily be part of the old DC line-up. I didn't feel like Batgirl's voice was quite as strong as what I've enjoyed from the past Oracle stories or from the awesome Batgirl: Year one series. This new Batgirl isn't for me.

I've noticed that a majority of the people reviewing these books are mostly fanboys (makes sense). I've read and listened to a few reviews that have absolutely infuriated me because their basis for why they didn't like it was so... unsubstantiated. One didn't like superboy, because they couldn't get around buying a book that had "superboy" in the title. One just felt like the definition for the 'reboot' meant bringing in new readers but not really rebooting the character (yeah that one was odd). One just HATES anything Grant Morrison writes (and I'm not a fan either, but Action Comics has so far been the strongest and gutsiest of the bunch). Anyhow everybody's entitled to their opinion, and I'm entitled to not read or listen to them. And for my blog, here's my opinion:

I like that DC's trying out some different approaches to revitalize their sales. I like that the effect of their hype machine has been positive and drawing more customers back into the stores. I like the marketing hype their doing to get the word out, I believe the comic book industry really needs to reach out to a broader audience to survive. Some books will succeed, and quite a few will fail, but at least they're trying something different. I'm hoping that there will be alot of books in the 52 that I'm turned off by but completely appeals to the younger audience. In my twisted logic, it would mean that DC is succeeding.

Why? Because I don't think the target market for comic books should JUST be me anymore. I should be a small part of the target market. When Morrison is throwing in some modern age slang into the books, it totally flew over my head. I actually had to look it up. I thought that was good! Why should I know the nerdy in-joke? These books shouldn't be aimed at me! This industry I love is dying because it's growing up with me... and more to the point, it's not reaching to anybody else. Kids nowadays would rather plunk down 99 cents for angry birds than a 2.99 digital copy of a comic book. It's sad, but I can't really blame 'em.

The title that the Nu52 is missing? An all ages book.

Anyhow. Better stop the rant. I wonder how the masses who don't blog or write reviews feel about the 52?

The Store is open!

2011-09-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

I got around to finally setting up a store page on this blog.

Up top next to the "home" tab you can see there's a new "Store" tab that leads you to the ONE thing I'm selling (for now!). Bomb Squad #1 is available on indyplanet. Click on the "buy it" button to send you over to the page, it also has the first 6 pages up available for preview. Of course, you can just go through the older posts under "my comic" on this blog and check out a ton more preview pages!

Soon... I'll have 2 issues to sell at the store... not yet but soon! The neverending battle continues!

My Comic Book: Page 7 final colors

2011-08-29T23:04:00.000-07:00

Ugh.

My wrist is still not back to 100%. I really need to rest it for a bit, so I'm not sure when my next progress post will be... sigh...

Here're the final colors for page 7:

It can get pretty frustrating when I go online or to the comic book store and see so many great artists doing their thing, and I can't finish my pages. I feel like such a slacker. Anyway, I'll be back in action soon enough.. until then, keep on battlin'!

The budding potential of webcomics

2011-08-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

When I started doing work for videogames, I've always been so involved in keeping tabs with that industry through a number of websites. I've been doing this for a few years now and I've built up some go to sites.

What's funny is that I never did that for comic books before. It's only lately that I've been catching up on finding all sorts of websites out there, a lot are a little too fanboy-ish for me and a handful that are just fanboy enough.

Anyways!

Through those sites I've stumbled upon some interesting 'mutation' that comics have gone into: digital comics! I'm not as well read on this stuff as some people are out there, but it's very interesting seeing this new medium start growing and evolving. Most bother me because of the format, and honestly I am more fond of flipping through printed pages myself, but there are some that are exploring the digital medium is interesting ways.

I'm pretty much last on the scene but I wanted to share a few links on some of these that I stumbled on:

This first one's a korean horror webcomic that really utilizes the act of scrolling to immerse the viewer. Pretty cool little gimmick. There's no need to understand it, it's still pretty readable. Unfortunately I didn't catch the name of the person or the studio that did this one, sorry!

Scroll down, down down!

This next one's by Vincent Giard. I like his art style, and storytelling but he also adds to his sequence with some cool motion to enhance it.

Vincent Giard

Turbo defiant Kimecan by Feran Daniel makes the viewer click to get panels to show up in the order they should be viewed. I'm not too big of a fan of all the clicking to read a sequence, and I kinda like being able to see the whole sequence altogether, but it does present certain interesting things, that are almost manually controlled storyboards.

Feran Daniel

This last one's pretty neat. I think I liken it to being the pop-up book equivalent of web comics. It's called "never mind the bullets" by a studio called Steaw Web Design. Cool use of parallax scrolling (brings out the inner video game nerd in me), to reveal some things or even play motion forwards and backwards.

Microsoft and Steaw Web Design

I'm really quite a traditionalist when it comes to making comics, but seeing these webcomics definitely opens my mind up to it's untapped possibilites. It's all very exciting to me! I can't wait to see what new stories and storytelling techniques pop up.

Until the next post, the neverending battle continues!

My Comic Book: Page 6 final colors and Page 7 WIP

2011-08-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

Posting up some pages real quick! I kind of messed up my right wrist when we had a company outing to a trampoline park (no lie). And I kinda didn't take care of it when we had a team outing and went bowling last week! Plus work's been kinda nutty, as I'm the only animator (for now) on the crew! So I haven't really been working too much on the book.

I just started coloring the pages in again, and I'm hoping to crank up the speed a little more...

Page 6

Page 7 (Work In Progress)

That's it for today! Good Morning and God Bless you as much as He has me! The Neverending battle continues!

Sleepy Genius' 1942: Joint Strike step by step design

2011-08-15T22:04:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a quick break this post. And just wanted to focus this on a friend of mine's blog.

Before I started worked at Zynga, I was working for a console development company called Backbone Entertainment. I was there for around 10 years, and a I worked on quite a few games there. A few didn't turn out so hot I have to admit, and even though I never got to make the perfect game, I do have a handful of favorites from that list! One of them is 1942: Joint Strike for XBLA and PSN.

I was the art lead on that project and the lead designer on that project was Marcus Montgomery. He's set up a post recently that details a very cool step-by-step of the work that went through some of the decisions he made for that game. It's a great post and really opens up the nooks and crannies (trials and errors!) of the intricacies of designing a game.

I mean, how crazy of a responsibility is it to be a game designer, right? Design makes it all work. For design to function correctly, it pulls all the disciplines together and makes 'em sing. While I love making the art and all, what really sticks to me as a player is how fun the game is, how balanced it is, how challenging it is, how unique it is; usually everything else once I get past the visuals! Basically, art gets me to look at a game, but it's the design that gets me to love it.

Anyhow, click the link and have a gander at the sleepy genius.

I also have a couple of old posts here and there on this blog for you to check out too. Good night and God Bless!

My Comic Book: Page 4 and 5: Final colors

2011-08-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

I finally got page 4 and 5 in the can! Work's been a little crazy the past 3 weeks, but it's somewhat slowing down now. Somewhat since work at Zynga doesn't really slow down...

Anyway! I shifted the hues of the hook and the 'rope' attached to it from my last post because my focus seemed off. In the previous version, my eye was drawn to the rope more than the hook because of the color contrast. A blue hook against a green background versus an orange one on the same background? C'mon now. Color theory 101.

So I switched the warm color to the hook since I want the reader to follow that, while reading the sequence. Then I got into nitpicking colors again and contrast:

Version A

Version B

So it's probably not very recognizable, even with two versions right next to each other, but there is a slight nit-picky difference!

In version A, the lower left corner has a higher contrast between aisle and the floor under the chairs.

While contrast is nice since it brings out objects and focus, in my case I actually wanted the crowd to just be a monochromatic color so the background as a whole contrasted with Bombgirl. What the contrast in the floor did was bring unnecessary focus to that area and not to Bombgirl (more like her feet and the screaming dude's face on the corner). It also made a heavy line that cut that panel up that I didn't really need.

In version B, the colors are a little bit closer in contrast, so that area is a little more uniform, so my eye goes back to Bombgirl since she has the most contrast within that panel.

OR. I'm just crazy. The Neverending battle continues! Good morning and God Bless!

My Comic Book: Page 4 and 5 WIP

2011-08-03T09:15:00.000-07:00

Just a quick progress post for the day:

Just laid down the base colors and started filling in some shadows. Colors are probably gonna be tweaked some more as I work through it...

My Comic Book: Page 3 colors

2011-08-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

I'm going a bit slow on the coloring process, but I'll post up what I have so far.

I've been messing with ONE shadow on this page for a few hours already, and I caught myself futzing too much with it. Still not the best shadow, but the point of these colors was to move fast and to aid the story. A somewhat misplaced shadow wasn't going to destroy the flow. (the shadow in question are the ones on the upper right corner of the last panel of the page if you're curious.)

I'm starting to fall into the mode where I'm nitpicking things too much. I need to constantly remind myself, that while I want a certain quality, I need to lean more towards fun and flow. Otherwise, I get stuck way too long on the process, and I bog myself down. I started to draw The Bomb Squad to loosen up, so I didn't get too anal retentive on things. I hated that I would cripple myself artistically and mentally when I thought way so much about what I drew, that I ended up not drawing (Heh, though I'm sure some people would say my art would be much better if I did think about it more!).

As it is I'm already taking too long with issue two! Alright, that's enough for the battle today. Good night and God Bless!

My Comic Book: Coloring phase! Pages 1 and 2

2011-07-23T22:07:00.000-07:00

I've finished lettering the book and am putting up what I have so far from page one and two of my book:

It's been awhile since I've colored my first book, so I've been struggling with the look of the first few pages. It's pretty simple coloring, I know, but for some reason I was stuck and kept noodling the Hue/Saturation sliders.

When I color, it's rare that I plop down the colors and immediately feel it's right. I usually color it in, then I need to step away for a few seconds, sometimes longer, then come back to it. If it doesn't bug me when I come back to it, I feel like I can move on.

The color treatment I did for Cityville, started off as how I applied colors for my first comic, but evolved into something that involved more gradients and line fills. I got so used to using those tricks to bring focus or clarity to those tiny icons and spam images, that coming back to something that has a very simple look threw me off. I had to really force myself to be okay with plopping down big flat colors on these pages!

Also, I have a dual monitor/Cintiq set up on my PC, and color on my Cintiq. I use some pretty funky colors sometimes, and it really wigs me out when I drag the art over to the other monitor and see how messed up my colors could look! I get so unsure about my colors when I do that, so I have to keep reminding myself that the first book turned out somewhat okay and trust the Cintiq! Still, it drive me nuts to see it on the funky monitor...

Funny that I chose the simple colors to make my life easier, but it's actually giving me a headache! Ah well, onwards!

My Comic Book: Pages 16, 17, 19 to do lists and lettering

2011-07-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

I finished 'inking' my last page around 3 or 4 pages ago! So now I'm onto the fun parts like coloring and lettering, and I don't mean that in a sarcastic way!

For some reason there's always this great feeling when I'm attaching word bubbles to characters: it's like my story starts coming more to life, one bubble at a time. When I'm applying colors, I find it's a lot of fun trying to bring more focus (or less) to things that are needed to make the story coherent. Maybe, mentally I just feel like the hardest part (for me) is done, and I can see the end in sight.

Here are a few pages that I've finished up:

Page 16

Page 17

Page 19

Here's a screenshot of my lettering process. I use Blambots' "Crime Fighter" font for my books. They do some great fonts and offer certain ones free for independent creators. But even if you had to pay for them, they're pretty inexpensive.

Yes, I am using a dirt old version of Photoshop: 4.5!

As I'm starting to put the polish to the book, I'll go through the pages one by one, trouble shooting any mistakes I may have made and making a little checklist for myself. And for a pretty unorganized guy like me, to-do lists are great!

That's it for today! The neverending battle continues!

Big Lens Fast Shutter Icon

2011-06-16T00:36:00.000-07:00

A buddy of mine from High School was setting up a podcast and called me up asking for some help designing an icon for it. Thinking it couldn't be THAT hard to design an icon, I said "I'll do it"! Famous last words right?

The podcast was going to be called "Big Lens Fast Shutter" and focused on giving expert advice to normal joes on how to take great sports pictures. His main art direction for the icon was that they were going for a look that had a propaganda-ish look, and also had a 'viva la revolucion' kinda feel to it.

Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to work on the icons, since he needed a really quick turnaround for it. I was also working on some other things as well at the same time (I'll post that up at a later date!). I came up with two designs for him to pick and to speed up the process I worked completely digital.

This first design, was pretty straightforward, I took a reference picture and worked off of that. I'm not very good at vector art so I decided to draw the icon huge then shrink it down; sharpening up the line work.

The next one was a little more involved, and to get the right angle I took a photo of myself and just exaggerated the size of the lens.

I also did a vertical composition of the icon just for kicks.

My friend and his co-host picked the second one, because they liked the thought of this tiny guy impossibly holding up this ridiculously large lens. Check out the icon in action here and listen to their podcasts. They're pretty entertaining and chock-full of great information! Also, check out their website for a sampling of some of their great photography too!

That's it for tonight! Good night, God Bless and let the Neverending battle... er... never end!

My Cityville Work

2011-05-24T00:53:00.000-07:00

I've been working at Zynga as a 2D/3D artist for almost 10 months now, and it's been pretty busy! Being part of the launch team for Cityville would do that! The thing I enjoy the most about being there, is the opportunity to be able to draw again for a living. When video games started shifting heavily to 3D artwork, I had to adapt and learn 3D programs and a majority of my work relied less on my drawing skills. But with social games, there's still a large need for art to actually be drawn! On Cityville, I get to utilize both my 3D skills with animation and from time to time, I pinch hit to help out the 2D staff.

If you're familiar with Facebook social games, you'll know the games rely on spamming your friends' walls to get them to keep playing, get rewards and advertise the game. Well, I get to make that spam! The character designs for the game aren't mine so it's a style that I had (and still continue to) wrestle with and try to get down. Also, a lot of these assets have to get pumped out quick, so you'll see me struggle through some of these; there's quite a few mistakes in there that make me cringe now that I see them again.

Here's a few examples of my process. Not very different for how I draw my comic book! The art on the far right is the final version seen in the game.

I usually work at around 4 times the size of the actual icon, and I use Photoshop, because I'm not that savvy with Flash (yet!). I shrank down some of the preliminary stages just to keep everything uniform.

Above are some icons for materials that you'd collect in the game. I found these to be a lot of fun (in the problem solving kind of way) to do. You might notice, with these icons I start going nutty on making things shiny! It was kinda neat to play around with effects so forgive me if I went overboard!

Below, I tried to organize the icons in chronological order from my earliest work to the latest ones. It's really interesting to see my progress and what I have problems with or what colors I tend to go with. There's a LOT of iteration that goes into these icons, sometimes even a complete re-do after it's colored in and finalized. And with tight deadlines it can be very stressful and nerve-wracking! But all in all it's done for the good of the game.

I sneaked myself into the second icon. I just couldn't resist! Here's a hint: I'm not the lumberjack.

By pumping out so much of these and with so many iterations and corrections, I've been able to learn quite alot and I feel get better at drawing and drawing for a deadline. I have a lot of issues with perspective still, and have learned how to cut corners but still provide an interesting image. And, of course, composition plays such a giant factor. These icons are such a great exercise, requiring me to find new solutions for storytelling, color theory, clarity and hitting deadlines! Some of these lessons I can see are already seeping their way into my comic!

And that's it for tonight. Good night and God bless you as much as He has me! Heck, more!

Sad Days for Comic books... the battle continues!

2011-04-21T00:04:00.000-07:00

So, I was looking around for a birthday card for my brother in-law this past weekend and I stumbled onto a card that was a sad indication of what my favorite medium's status is nowadays.

Here's a little lead-in to the card: It recounts the glory days, and waxes nostalgic, building up to the happy birthday and what a great life you've been living punchline... blah, blah, blah. Suffice to say, It's not the card I bought, but I took a pic of something in it that bugged me:

Apparently, reading a ton of comic books is now considered nostalgia... (okay, granted the context of the card is talking about childhood as well, but lumping it with penny candy and fountains in drugstores? Dem's foitin' woids!)

Meh. Rant over. Bomb squad #2 will soon be entering the battlefield!

Speaking of which, I have 19 pages done and wanted to post up a few pages, but I didn't want to ruin the 'ending' of book 2 either, so my posts on the final pages might be few and far in between. Not to worry, you may not see all of it, but I'm still working on it.

I'll try to post some more other art on this blog though. Here's a little hint at what it could be:

Anyways, good night and God Bless! The Neverending Battle continues!

My talented family

2011-04-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

Just thought to share a few cool things I've been seeing from my nephews and my wife this past month or so. Basically, my nephews are awesome. My sister's been sending me a few drawings they've been doing lately of superheroes and they're great! They've really been a great inspiration and a good way to keep progress on my own comic book in check! Though I have to admit I'm having a real hard time keeping up!

My nephew Joaquin, pumps out most of these images, but my other nephew, Ramon, also likes to keep up with big brother.

Painted Wolverine! (by Joaquin)

Hulk Smash!! (by Joaquin)

Mighty Thor! (by Joaquin)

And not to be outdone by his Brother, Ramon has his version too!

The world's finest! Definitely my favorite of the bunch! (by Joaquin)

And last but definitely not the least, since we came back from Wondercon, my wife has gotten into felting. We had passed by this "Wool Buddies" booth at the con and she bought a kit. And after that she can't stop making her own. And more recently: making 'our' own. She's currently making the giant octopus creature from our proposal comic:

How cool is that octopus head, huh? That white figure on the side is my first attempt at this felting thing. It's fun but very time consuming! I'll finish that little project, but I'm going to have to postpone felting so I can get back to finishing my comic! One project at a time, right? Okay, 'til next time!

Barda

2011-03-28T00:37:00.000-07:00

For this post, I'm still trying to get back in the drawing groove of things. This one's of Big Barda. She's definitely one of my favorites from Kirby's creations while he was at DC. I'm a big Kirby fan much like a lot of people on the planet, but with this sketch, I stumbled onto something firsthand that everybody pretty much already knows: Kirby was a really great designer.

While I was coloring in my Barda pin-up, I realized she looked just fine with just flat colors (last drawing above). Kirby's use of solid blacks and pattern are so well controlled they act like a form of 'shading' that makes his characters so strong even with just simple flat colors applied to them. So the scales in her uniform act as a gray and her gloves stand out because they're the brightest 'shade' even though they're really just the same color.

Personally, I kinda liked the flat colors that were used on Kirby's characters back inna day more than today's gradients/'modern' colors. I guess I kinda understand why now! I think a lot of his DC work has the flat color process more in mind than his Marvel ones. Or possibly his later designs just leaned more towards that style (like his eternals designs)? Or maybe I'm just reading into it too much?

Anyway, my Barda Pin-up isn't the best. It's kinda wonky in parts, but I think for the amount of time I spent and the fun I had in doing it, I'm satisfied. Pretty much the opposite of my last post; that Superman Pin-up was kinda depressing! Well that's it, until next time good night and God Bless!

Superman

2011-03-22T22:43:00.000-07:00

Strangely enough, for a guy whose favorite character is Superman, and whose blog is even named after one of his memorable intro lines... I don't have any drawings of Superman. So, just to kinda get me slowly back into the groove of drawing again and finishing my book, I set off trying to draw him up.

Look out, here comes a rant.

You know I really do like the Man of Steel. I'm a fan of Batman, and I LOVE Batman year one, and sure I was into Wolverine too, but I think the older I get, I realize I get really sick of all the dark and brooding heroes nowadays.

The comic book industry set off to make comic books so mature back inna day, that in my opinion it alienated newer generations to enjoy them. Comic books are mainly geared for older comic book nerds like me. Not really for kids, and not really bringing new readers in.

Plus, I think where I am now, with what I'm trying to do with my comic book, I want to reach out to younger comic book readers. Not to say Superman is just for kids (Geoff Johns and Grant Morrisson's recent takes on him have been great super hero reading), but his appeal is just more bright, universal. He's a hero's hero. Anyway, that's me ranting... let's get back to drawing...

As I was drawing I came to realize three things.

One: I can't draw Superman.

Two: My anatomy is horrible.

Three: I can't draw.

Here's the proof:

Yeah, pretty sad huh (shudder)? It was a lot of starts and stops, and a lot of disappointment because I couldn't get what is in my head out onto paper. On top of that, I saw Superman only as how he was drawn by other artists. Joe Shuster, Neal Adams, Kurt Swan, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Jerry Ordway, John Byrne... great stuff right? But what was mine? With a lot of struggling I got a rough sketch done:

And with still a lot of messing around and sloppy trial and error, I brought it to finish:

To be honest I still don't know what MY Superman looks like. The drawing that I ended up with was kind of what I settled with and deemed passable. I guess it'll have to do as my representation for now, I'll have to work on the Big red 'S' a little bit more...

Okay until next time! Up, Up and AWAY!

Super Delicious Space Cowboys

2011-03-17T00:43:00.000-07:00

Well, let's see... where to start? A lot of things have happened since my last post!

I'm happily married now, I quit my old job and have a brand-spanking new one, and Wondercon is right around the corner and my 2nd book is not even close to being finished! Okay, that should get us all caught up.

I'm trying to get back into the groove of things and get back to the comic. Planning a wedding and Honeymoon and all that can be quite a schedule changer! For the meanwhile, I'm going to throw up some freelance work I did a couple years back. This work was for a facebook app called Super Delicious Space Cowboys done by Ohai. I was hired to do some character designs and assets for the game.

It's interesting to dig up these because they really do show the process of designing. From my initial concepts all the way to the final product, you can see all the back and forth that goes on between me and the client. I thought it might be a kick to share that here.

Though... I have to admit there are QUITE few drawings in there that make me cringe looking at them! Warts and all on this blog right? Anyway...

This first guy was a monk character. It was kinda hard to pin down what the client had wanted for this character so you can see the look and the attitude for him is always changing. I'm not too keen on the final pose or design of the character I ended up with, but as long as the client is happy, then so am I!

This next one, was for a hacker-type character. I liked the second pose I drew and brought that through to the final. As far as design goes I think I'm more biased toward the third green sketch I did with the hood.

This guy was the first one I designed from the bunch and I think this nailed the look and attitude for the client. We got rid of the mecha arm and kept it closer to a real cowboy design.

I remember this last character was a tough one as well; a diplomatic like character I believe was the description. The initial direction was to make her regal, like Cate Blanchett-y type (we can all see that I cannot draw likenesses too well from that second sketch, huh?). But we took her to a different direction later, owing a lot more to Inara of Firefly for inspiration.

Anyway, I need to go to sleep! Check out Super Delicious Space Cowboys on Facebook here if you want to see the final product. Good night and God Bless!

The Proposal: Part 7 - Final colors

2010-11-09T00:55:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-30T02:53:00.000-07:00

I am beat.

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

The Proposal: Part 5

2010-10-28T09:37:00.001-07:00

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

2010-10-27T02:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-25T00:09:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-10-21T01:36:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-19T00:26:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-15T08:43:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-09-13T08:02:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-09-11T07:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-14T14:39:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-08-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-16T13:28:00.001-07:00

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

2010-06-18T21:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-16T17:26:00.000-07:00

Kinda big headed, but hey.

My Comic Book: Page 17

2010-06-16T09:22:00.001-07:00

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

Torch and Thor

2010-06-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

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

Flame on!

Daredevil and Thing

2010-06-10T07:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-26T07:15:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-07T21:54:00.000-08:00

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!

My comic, Issue two, page 4 and 5, inks

2010-03-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

I'm going slow this year, trying to finish the second issue. I'm definitely not going to make it for Wondercon, haha!

Here's a work-in-progress of the double page spread that occurs on page 4 and 5 of my book. I hope to finish this by the end of the week! All I have to do is the crowd in the background and the sound effects. So close...

The Neverending Battle in the Philippines

2010-01-07T00:22:00.000-08:00

The Neverending battle never ends even in the Philippines...

Posts on some Bomb Squad #2 pages will be coming up soon!

My Comic, Issue two: page 4 and 5

2009-10-03T17:36:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to get my second issue up and running, but I simply keep running into lazybonesitis. My schedule is supposed to be an issue a year and I am not looking too good this year. I've got around 11 pages roughed in so far, with the 12th page halfway there. But at this rate I'm not going to be able to make it in time to sell it at Wondercon (besides, I haven't even signed up for a booth in artists alley yet!).

Anyhow here's a few sketches of my process in trying to get pages 4 and 5 of the book to work.

This page took a lot of trial and error. I kept playing with the camera angle to make it as dynamic as possible when the reader lands on this two page spread. I didn't want it to look just like the final page of the first issue, with Bombgirl hanging onto dear life as the plane was crashing. So in this case, the composition, while in a similar perspective as the last issue, is now tilted up. I was trying to signal that Bomgirl has gotten more pro-active about her predicament. Here's a scan of the tighter sketch before I bring it to final.

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

Space Invaders Exteme

2009-09-19T20:31:00.000-07:00

I worked on Taito's Space Invaders Extreme for the XBLA a few months back. I helped with upresing the graphics of the game and adding some extra spit and polish (it's out now, go buy it!). It was fun to go back into manipulating pixel art again. With all the new fangled 3D art I've been doing, it was good to do the 2D again, even if it was just processing the stuff.

But hey I couldn't have asked for a better game to process the art for! I was a big fan of the DS version of the game when it first came out, so it was a blast to be able to tag my name on the legendary franchise (even in a tiny, tiny way)!

These pictures are some wallpapers for the xbla downloadable content I got to create. That's it for tonight, I'll see if I can post up some work I've been doing for The Bomb Squad #2 next. Good night and God Bless!

Bare Knuckle

2009-06-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

I'm a Sega guy.

While everybody was growing up going nutty over Super Mario, Mario Kart, Metroid and Zelda: Ocarina of Time on their Super Famicoms (I guess I should say SNES since I'm in the US now!), I was spending all my hard earned allowance/chore money on my Sega Mega Drive (Genesis, I mean!) and absolutely loving Golden Axe, Eswat, Sonic and of course, Bare Knuckle (cough, Streets of Rage, cough).

I love beat 'em ups and Bare Knuckle and all it's three iterations will always hold a special place in my childhood.

I mean how could you go wrong? No boring exploration, collecting coins or talking to villagers. Just me fighting crime with my two fists and eating random pieces of meat hidden in barrels!

Everytime I hear Axel's grainy "Gran Uppa!" battle cry going over Yuzo Koshiro's thumping music, it brings a geeky tear to my eye. What can I say, I really love these games!

Drawing these guys was so much fun! As I was working on these, I would remember playing the games over and over during those summers in Hong Kong; beating up on Mr. X and his army of punks.

Adam (the dude above) never really made it back as a playable character after the first game, so it was cool to give him a slight update but still stay true to what he looked like.

Can't really go wrong with jeans and a shirt, so I didn't mess with Axel's get up too much. Gran Uppa!!

I remember having a crush on Blaze, back then. But man, put some clothes on girl! Kikousho!

And of course, I gotta draw one of the punks they beat up on, right? Complete with 'droppable' pipe and knife that you can use to beat up his other homies with! I hated those knife guys!

These were such a joy to draw, they totally transported me back to those worry-free days. Well! Enough nostalgia for now, the neverending battle continues! Gran Uppa!

Masters of the Universe: Jitsu final

2009-05-31T21:10:00.000-07:00

Jitsu is all done! I handed in the two pieces I made for the art show yesterday over at Double Punch. Pretty cool little space they have over on Powell street, I think it should be a cool show!

Anyway, I'm pretty beat! My apartment is still a mess from all the drawing I was doing; there's reference material, Caran d'ache, masonite and fixative all over the place! It was good to bust out the ol' Caran d'ache though, it's been awhile since I actually worked this process. It's a breath of fresh air to do art that's not digital for once.

I'll post up some pictures of the show when it opens on the 20th next month. That's it for this post, good night and God bless.

Masters of the Universe: Jitsu WIP

2009-05-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

I feel all artsy-fartsy.

I'm working on another piece for this Masters of Universe show coming up. But that's not what makes me feel all artsy fartsy. Trouble is, I only work on the piece at night. The other trouble is, I seem to be having a hard time seeing my colors if it's not under natural lighting. So I'm waking up early and rushing home from work trying to catch those few hours of precious sunlight, to work on my piece. Yeah, what a prima donna huh?

Moving on... here're a few preliminary sketches for the Jitsu piece:

The idea was that it would be as a matching piece to Fisto. But I felt like I was forcing it to be an accompanyment. So the first few sketches I had, weren't really working.

So after alot of futsing around, I started doing a wider composition.

Here's a few shots of the piece as I'm working on it with Caran D'ache crayons:

The piece is starting to come together, but there are some key issues I'm running into, mainly with his face and hands (which are uh, probably the most important parts of the piece!)

Alright, that's it for now, I'll be up early tommorrow, hopefully I'll have an idea how to tackle Jitsu-face by then...

Thanks Zander!

2009-05-19T20:42:00.000-07:00

Wow.

I recieved my very first piece of fan art for the Bomb Squad! How awesome is that?!

A friend of mine, Kevin James, picked up a copy of my book, but decided to also pick up the Bomb Squad sketchbook for his son, Zander James, to take a look at. Apparently, Zander enjoyed the book and really liked seeing the process that it took to get to the final product. In fact, he was so jazzed that he drew a little scenario for the ol' Bomb Squad (totally unsolicited, I swear!).

Okay, now that's just cool. Zander even caught the little radio-signal word bubble effect I did for the Kid when he talked!

Way cool.

When Kevin handed it to me, it was such a great feeling! There's really nothing more satisfiying than seeing someone draw my character, because of the simple fact that they wanted to!

Okay, now let me tangent rant a little here.

The Bomb Squad is my way of trying to bring comics back to kids. A majority of today's comics, in my opinion, are targeted to kids that grew up with comics 20 years ago. In other words, big dorks in their 30's like me.

Today's kids are lost with the 20 years worth of comics continuity nowadays. Comic book subject matter seem to be written for such a mature audience, and even 'child friendly' characters from back in the day get kinda get 'muddied up' (I liked 'Identity Crisis' like everyone else, but holy smokes is that some mature subject matter for the super friends or what?). And while I enjoy these books, I feel kids nowadays are losing that connection to the medium because their catered to such a specific audience.

Comics are rapidly being over taken by movies, video games and pretty much everything else as a story telling medium. I mean, kids know spider man and the x-men because of the movies! That just seems so backwards to me. Where are the next generation of comic book creators going to come from? Will comics even be around for the next generation? Actually, Robert Kirkman has an eloquent mission statement that sums up what I've been thinking for awhile now.

ANYWAY. Rambling.

So, I can be all rah rah rah, let's make new comics, let's bring in the next generation, I'll draw Bomb Squad for this purpose, yadda yadda yadda. But... would it work?

Well, I'm not so sure if I can affect ALL of the next generation, but I do know I affected at least one of them, even for just a small moment! And I have proof! So thank you very much Zander! Thank you very, very much for the cool drawing! And the Squad thanks you too!

Now if only Bomb Girl could figure out a way to diffuse the bomb she's standing on!

And the Neverending battle continues! Good night and God Bless.

Masters of the Universe: Fisto

2009-04-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

I'll admit it. After the high of comic con I've been at a pretty serious slump in trying to get my comic book done. Granted, there are many other factors that have kinda put a mental block on me getting back on the saddle and drawing issue two of The Bomb Squad, but I really can't blame anybody else.

Anyhow, while trying to get over my artist block, I drew Fisto for this upcoming art show. I went back to using my old school Caran Dache technique I learned in college from my old teacher, Tony Gianello (I think that's how you spell his name). It's a process where you layer 'scribbles' of crayon lines on top of each other, focusing on mass and blending color with each layer that's put down. If memory serves me right, it's a process that similar to egg tempra, but a whole lot more forgiving.

I'm pretty rusty at it, but it sure was fun to bust out the caran dache again. I'm starting to get nostalgic about the ol' college days, but I'll just skip to Fisto and spare you.

I began with a few sketches of Fisto's face, really quick ugly little sketches, but they help get the ball rolling.

Afterwards, I draw him in an action pose. I wasn't really thinking about composition at this point, but luckily the piece was simple enough so that it wouldn't be such a big issue later.

I picked up a nice 16 x 24 piece of masonite from home depot and scribbled a rough first pass of the composition.

You can see I was trying out a circle shape as his 'background' but it really wasn't working for me. I took a picture of the sketch in progress and put a simple graphic shape and messed around with the background colors in photoshop. I think I like the sharp angles better than the lame circle I had initially planned to be behind him.

I went with the blue color and started trying to match the color with the caran dache crayons. Something funky was going on with his foot in the foreground so I scrapped that and drew a new one.

With this caran dache crayon medium, I spray a clear matte fix over the piece every now and then. The coating acts as a fresh new layer for me to draw on, preserving the colors underneath and helping me not mush the colors around when I work on top of them.

The foreground foot was starting to feel a little better, but now there was something weird with his knee.

So after another coat of spray fix, I changed his knee. I also shrank down the size of my signature, I always feel like my signature gets so intrusive sometimes. Anyway, here's the final piece: Fisto in yo' face!

Well, I gotta go! Good night and God Bless.

Wondercon 2009 Day 3

2009-03-02T21:19:00.000-08:00

Hoooo-wheeeee! Wondercon is over and I am beat! Day three wasn't as insane as Day two, but not as mellow as Day 1. It was raining that day, but people still braved the weather and there was a good amount. Saturday was such an awesome day for sales I only had 7 copies left to sell, and sell them I did! I actually sold out!

Sue! Wheat! I am very thankful to all the people that came by the booth and bought a copy of my book. Every bit of encouragement helps for me to keep on going! I'm also very thankful for the guys over at Ghostbot for letting me share their space and work the booth. And of course, I'm very thankful to God that He's given me the opportunity to be able to pursue a dream I've had since I was a kid!

It was a very tiring weekend and we were all on our last legs because of the madness of Saturday, but we all trooped on and managed to push a few books. I took a quick break and visited a couple friends of mine from RISD: Andy Ristaino and Chris Bennett.

I hung out with them at the end of the first day and we ended up going into a CBLDF sponsored auction where people could donate sketches for people to buy and have the proceeds go to the CBLDF. That was a lot of fun, I don't think I've just sat around drawing with other artists in a long time! Anyway, it was cool to see Andy and Chris again.

I think the biggest highlight for me happened around the end of the day, as we were breaking down the booth. We were handing out free sketches that day, but ended up having one left over. It was a drawing by Brad and it was just kinda laying around at the booth, when a little girl with her father walked by. I figured, why let the sketch go to waste? And told them they could have a free sketch. At first they were in disbelief when I told them, but they were so happy when I gave them the drawing.

They wanted to thank the artist that drew it, but unfortunately Brad was taking a lunch break (yeah, his lunch was at 4:45 or something that day!). Still, they were very happy and I caught glimpses of the daughter showing off her cool Wondercon Sketch to the rest of the family. Brad had finally returned and while we were telling him how his sketch made a little girl's day, that family passed by the booth again.

They were so happy to see the man who had created the sketch, and immediately wanted to snap a picture with him. They wholeheartedly thanked Brad and It was so cool to see the geniune appreciation they had for him and his sketch.

After a week of just busting out sketches, putting on our salesmen gamefaces and worrying about how to sell as much of our stuff as possible, it was nice to see someone actually appreciate the artist behind the sketches. It was a good way to end our first con!

At the end of the day, packing up the Ghostbot/ Bomb Squad booth was pretty efficient with all four of us pitching in.

That's it for tonight's post! Wondercon is over and the neverending battle continues! Goodnight and God Bless!

Wondercon 2009 Day 2

2009-03-01T07:37:00.000-08:00

When I got to Wondercon on Friday, the foot traffic was not bad. A few people stopped by, some customers who had never seen my work bought a few copies of my book, and it was good. But, it didn't seem like I could sell much.

This is my Day 2 shirt. day 2 was such a rush, I took this picture while brushing my teeth. That's my toothbrush in my mouth in the upper left corner...

Anyway, upon entering Day two I had similar sale expectations for Saturday as I did on Friday. The Ghostbot guys whom I was sharing the booth with were also thinking the same thing. So to drum up foot traffic, they had decided to offer free sketches. They even let me tag along and do a few sketches of my characters! This is the booth at early morning setup:

And sure enough, once that "Free Sketches" sign went up, boom! Actually, more like KRAKA-SROOMA-DOOM! There was a flood of people all over the booth! The Ghostbot guys had to keep a waiting list and have people come back to the booth to get the sketches! On top of the free sketch idea, the crowd was different on Saturday.

A lot more families, kids, teenagers, people with costumes, R2D2's, The Watchmen, Spiderman back packs... you name it! Everybody and their mother was there (Actually one of the Ghostbot guys mother was really there)! It was that double whammy that just made the day go by so quickly because we were all drawing sketches at such a breakneck speed, selling the books, hob-nobbing with the fans... whooo!

Here's a view from my corner of the booth as I witnessed the power of Ghostbot! I didn't get fifth Ghostbot, Kris into the pic who dealt out some sketch madness as well...

I don't think I've ever drawn my character that fast in so many poses! But for every sketch I did, each Ghostbot must've done 3 in that time! I mean, I know the amount of work these guys (and gal!) have to do on a normal workday, but I've never seen them in their working state! And lemme tell ya that was impressive! It was like that scene in Raiders of the Lost ark when Marion and Indy have to shut their eyes when the Holy Spirit is released from the Ark! I had to close my eyes otherwise I would melt like a Evil Nazi with glasses...

Here's a pic of Ghostbot breaking down the booth at the end of the day... What a day!

Anyway, the day went by so fast and a few friends came by, I met a few nice people in publishing and people also trying to get their own stuff going, it was really fun. Thanks to my friends who brought by food, I didn't really leave the booth much but we were well stocked with Beard Papas, Dim Sum from Yank Sing, a Turkey sandwhich from Firewood and Beef pot pies! Yeah, I ate alot!

I've almost sold out of my stock! I think I have 7 books left. Definitely, my sales were better than I expected, I was actually hoping to just sell 10! Good thing my friend told me to print more and I bumped it up to 50. So, thanks to everyone who bought my book! You guys definitely made me more optimistic in cranking out more issues! Okay, I gotta get ready for Day 3! Woooondercoooon! And Awwwaaaayyy!

Wondercon 2009 Day 1

2009-02-28T00:13:00.000-08:00

I survived day 1 of the Wondercon! Whoo! Pretty cool to be on the other side of the table, but also pretty tiring! I took a few pictures:

Here's my Wondercon Beef Brisket Breakfast from this hole in the wall restaurant around my neighborhood. Yum! See my name tag? It says 'Exhibitor'! Oooooooo...

Here's a shot of a shirt I had made of Bombgirl from my book to promote my Comic Book.

Here's me having a total dork out at the beginning of the day over by my area.

It was pretty cool to have people drop by and say they like the book. I think my favorite moments were when I'd catch people do a double take and actually stop and look at the book. Even if they didn't buy it, there's a certain sense of satisfaction to know the Bomb Squad was able to attract attention. Especially in a place where everything else is asking for attention!

I think it was good that I changed the name to "The Bomb Squad" rather than "Bombgirl". When I heard someone else say it (someone I didn't know), it sounded nice to hear it. A little shout out to my buddy Roque for suggesting I alter the the title a little!

I shared a booth with Ghostbot and their producer extraordinair, Corrine Lau, hooked Ghostbot up with a goodie bag, filled with food and water for the day. And she also made one for me too! Thanks Corrine! And the best part of the goodie bag? Everything in it was "Ghostbotted"! Awesome!

Whew! I am beat! Day 2 here I come! Good night and God Bless!

Wondercon Bound!

2009-02-22T08:34:00.000-08:00

I'm going to Wondercon this year, but for the first time ever I'll actually be on the other side of the booth! My friends from Ghostbot had a little extra space that they have generously shared with me! Here're the details:

Wondercon
Booth 415
February 27 - March 1
Moscone Center South
San Francisco, CA

I'm really excited to be able to jump in and actually take my first step into the comic book industry! And with the Ghostbot guys to boot! I've just been in my safe little apartment producing my comic book, but I've never truly let it loose on the general public (Sure I post up some pages on my blog but that's like 2 people seeing it!). I'm anxious to see how it's recieved!

And the Wondercon will be my ground zero! I'm selling the comic book itself as well as a Sketchbook edition. I just got the copies a few days ago and now all the promotional stuff I have is set up. Have a look-see:

To see all this stuff together is definitely a cool feeling. Multiple copies of my book, a big ol' poster of the cover, the shirts, buying little frame thingys to hold my comic book upright... it's so surreal. True, I haven't sold a thing yet, but it's such a blast for me to realize, whether it fails or suceeds, this is the launch of my book! The neverending battle is beginning!

If you're going to the con, drop on by and say hi! Good Morning and God bless!

Robot concepts

2009-01-24T11:20:00.001-08:00

Today, I just successfully got my router to work! Now my 360, PS3, Wii and PC can now be on at the same time! The possibilites are limitless!

Now with my PS3 and Wii updating themselves, I'm just popping on my PC for a quick post on some old concept art I did with robots...

A lot more misses than hits, but hey, what can ya do!

Until next post, God Bless!

The Jetsons

2009-01-11T00:12:00.000-08:00

Just posting up a couple of Jetsons drawings I previously did. I never really watched a lot of the Jetsons growing up. I saw a lot more Flintstones instead.

But doing some research when I was prepping up for these drawings was a lot of fun. It was cool to see how these characters were constructed and trying to figure them out. Plus it was a great excuse to watch some episodes!

This first one I did was pretty much standard, by the numbers action shot.

Some people had remarked that it looked like the Jetsons vs. Arvin's robots. And it pretty much is because I hadn't had the chance to soak up the Hanna Barbera style at the time I drew this (... still haven't!)

This second one was a little unorthodox. It started off quickly and I was pretty confident that I got the composition figured out so 'easily'. Oh how little did I know! Here's the early thumbnail:

The finish was a struggle. The shape of the drawing changed many times and I was trying to wrap my head around how it would work. I drew the image in 3 different segments and I had to manipulate those assets in the computer later. I was fighting with it until the end, it was pretty frustrating.

I ended up with this crazy long image. Kinda cool I suppose but rather unwieldy and odd! Oh well, that's what I get for charging in there like the Sandman with no back up from the sinister six (snort)!

This Episode of the Jetsons was a pretty good one! See if you can track it down! Eep! Opp! Ork! Ah! Ah!

Until next time! Good Night and God Bless!

1942 and WOTB: ego boost

2009-01-07T14:14:00.000-08:00

Well, I just came back from my vacation in the Philippines! Apparently I'm more jet-lagged than I thought as I slept for 12 hours and woke up at 1 in the afternoon today. I still have a lot of unpacking and laundry to do. I miss my family already and the fact that I'm leaving the really nice weather of the Philippines for my cold lonely San Francisco apartment makes it even worse!

Luckily, whilst surfing the internet to catch up on my usual stuff, I landed on a certain top 20 chart for XBLA's most downloaded games of 2008. On it, are two of the games I worked on (1942 and Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3)! Yay! Number 14 and 19 respectively!

So in light of that, I'm posting a test video I did for how I wanted the special move effect done in Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 done. I mocked up this anim with the original assets from Mercs and I think a Chrono Trigger background (I can't remember, game nerds, please correct me). The explosions were mine from the GBA version of Grand Theft Auto and the concept art of Wolf's face is from Sach Steffel. So click away at the link below!

For a peek at how it ended up looking in the game there's a clip of it in here (scrub to 0:22 for the start of one):

Okay, enough bragging and ego boosting! I go back to the grind tomorrow! Good afternoon, God Bless and a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

My Comic: The test print

2008-11-15T10:56:00.000-08:00

I haven't been putting up new posts about my comic book progress because I didn't want to post so much that people wouldn't want to read the final thing when I got it done! Anyway, I have a new post now about my comic! Tan ta da duuun!

Issue number 1 is all done and colored! I'm missing a cover, but the all the heavy lifting is done!

I was so excited to finish I wanted to see it in print ASAP! I sent off a test print to this company called ka-blam. I heard about them through Keith Erickson, a friend of mine at work. He published his own Dr. Pineapple comic book with them. The print he showed me of his black and white book was pretty nice, and apparently they do full color stuff as well.

The wait between sending my order and getting it was excruciatingly long, even though it really only took a week! I just wanted it already! When my book came, I was so giddy. I mean, sure nobody else sees this thing on shelves and all, but to finally have it in my hands... the feeling's priceless.

After around a year of working on this thing, it felt really good to have it in my hot little hands! It felt kinda good to tell people, oh yeah, I'm working on my comic book, here! Have a look! It's a crazy feeling for me to be able to do that.

The colors came out pretty good considering how saturated most of my schemes are. It's also a good guide for me to see how my digital colors look like in print. I'm still having trouble getting the hot pink I like to use to show up!

I'm so ecstatic over having it physically here, all stapled and everything, I don't think it's quite sunk in yet: what do I do with it?! I'm not quite selling it online yet, as I want to do it when I'm close to finishing the story arc, so I think I should show it around to publishers and editors. Get some kinda feedback, reaction, whatever.

But, I don't really know how to do that.

Nonetheless it's part of my dream, right? So this coming year, I'll definitely push myself out the door and put on my hob-nobbing game face and hit the comic book conventions and see what happens! Not my greatest strength, but definitely something I'm going to have to do, or else I won't know if my book can succeed or fail.

Anyway, that's next year's conundrum and prayer! For now, I think I'll just sit happily thumbing through the comic I made for an audience of one (so far!).

It's been a long road, with so many stops and starts, and I am very thankful to God that He's given me the strength to see this first issue through. That's it for this post! Good day and God Bless! The neverending battle continues!

Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 - Minesweeper/Coyote

2008-08-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

Next up on the Wolf of the Battlefield front is Coyote. The red bandana wearing Rambo look-alike was never part of the initial character designs I had drawn up. What he was before was an explosives expert/minesweeper. I got a few reference materials on bomb diffusal equipment and sketched up his initial design.

He ended up being one of my more favorite designs from this game. I actually took his arm design from a previous design I did for Backbone (way back when we were still called Digital Eclipse). Since that old design was never used, I was happy to work it back into the minesweeper.

Alas ol' minesweeper didn't have such a happy ending. Midway (pun intended) through the project cycle, Capcom had switched management teams. We had lost our Capcom side producer. The new management wasn't quite happy with a few of our characters. They had wanted to change a few of the designs and sadly, the minesweeper got the ax. In his place, they wanted Rambo:

Apparently, he looked too much like Rambo. I didn't know this but Sly Stallone didn't really like other people using his likeness, even in a parody. I had heard that he had sued other video game companies for having his likeness. So, in an effort not to get the pants sued off of us, upon Capcom's request, I went through a few re-designs of the head.

I had already designed a few UI screens with the minesweeper, and because I really liked his design it was really painful to redraw everything all over again.

Really painful.

I think I was already close to my breaking point at this time, but I still had to push through. I remmeber trying to draw the options screen and I was just having such a difficult time trying to get the drawing to look right. No matter how much time I spent on it, I was simply too tired to get that drawing right. It still looks kinda funny, but it's passable.

So, while I like how the Rambo character turned out, I really do miss the grumpy ol' Minesweeper. Well at least, my blog will be the only time he'll be able to see the light of day. So here's to the old codger! That's all for tonight! Good night and God Bless.

1942: Plane concepts

2008-07-28T00:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a couple concept pieces I did for 1942: Joint Strike. With the constant back and forth we had with the client designing characters for Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3, we decided that we wanted a less character driven 1942. It was such a back-breaking endeavor for me to create cutscenes and try to single handedly do all the character design work for C3: WOTB, that cutting out characters for 1942 sounded like such a good idea (even though I like having characters in the game).

I had actually started warming up to the world war 2 characters theme outside of work, on my free time, and even created some characters. Luckily, we shot that idea down from the get go, otherwise I'd be so burnt out after shipping 1942. For 1942, the characters were the planes themselves and not so much the pilots. So I went about drawing a P38 Lightning and a D98 Mosquito.

Boy, these sketches just proved to me how much practice I need with vehicles and perspective! I am so bad at vehicles, it's not even funny! I had such a hard time getting these things to look like some form of plane! This task definitely led me to a great appreciation of technical illustrators and industrial designers.

That's it for this morning! Next post, I'll go back to the character designs of Commando 3! Sa susunod...!

1942: Joint Strike is out!

2008-07-24T23:48:00.000-07:00

The other game I worked on for the PSN and XBLA is out! 1942: Joint strike is now available for download!

The Lead Designer of the game, Marcus Montgomery, and I have been busy watching the message boards and reading through some remarks about how sucky our game is and thereby effectively lowering our self-esteem for the day (sometimes for the week!). Sigh. Can't seem to please anybody! Anyways.

Here are some 'turnaround' sheets I mocked up at the beginning of the project. The schematics of the planes are collected from various internet airplane sites (thank you various internet sites!). I overlaid some colors and mocked up the in-game planes' paint jobs.

Later on during production it was decided not to have specific countries tied to the planes. So we got rid of the American, Japanese and British markings. With these 'turnaround' sheets, I tried to give the UI artist, Diana Fong, some kind of reference to show her what I was thinking for the menus, and at the same time help give the modelers schematics to work off of.

The idea was mainly to give the game a very old-timey, sepia, sky captain-y look. So I went so far as to take a look at some pamphlets and their typography back then. I really liked how they mixed cursive and bold print in the references we had gathered, so I aped that in the mockups. We wanted to do propaganda posters, but I told Diana I wanted to lean more towards the American ones and not so much the usual German army type ones we've always seen.

I'm also posting up a line up of the silhouette sheet I created for Marcus and I to take a look at for our propsed plane types, relative scales (which is all fake) as well as bahavior types. This sheet was handy for us to have a quick glance at which silhouettes were working and distinctive enough for us to use. Marcus had some aversion to the flying pancake, but I wanted that in no matter what! So we made a compromise. I actually cannot remember what ithat compromise was life of me, but I got to keep the flying pancake! Yaaaay!

Tomorrow, I'll post up some concept art I drew up for the Mosquito and the Lightning. It's a great example of why I shouldn't be drawing vehicles! Haha! Alright until next post! Good night and God Bless.

Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 - For Sano

2008-06-29T00:08:00.000-07:00

Well, WOTB: Commando 3 has been out on the PSN and XBLA for a couple of weeks now and I've been closely looking at the reviews and the comments from a few forums. And it's been getting a mixed bag of reviews. Our average review score is landing at around 65%. Our highest so far has been an 85% from 1up.com and the Lowest is a 40% from Giant Bomb.

It seems I've really ticked off a lot of people with the art style I chose, especially in my character designs. In one case it seems to have really grated on a reviewer's nerves so much that He couldn't even get past how atrocious my stuff was that it basically brought the score of the whole game down! Here are a few examples of people's comments on my art work:

"The logos, menu layouts and pause screens are well-done, but the character art kills the overall package. Sorry folks, this one just doesn't catch the eye. Environments are nothing special, attention to detail is sometimes lacking, and did we mention the character art?"
- Ryan Geddes review, ign.com

"yea... not to be excessively critical, but im in the art industry. and i gotta say, the character art in this game is really weak. it looks like something i'd pull out of my a55 back in college when the the deadline for an assignment was 1 day away and i didnt even start working on it yet."
- 'drtaco99', Gamefaqs poster

"I think the art/style is fugly and low-budget looking. It doesn't match the series, type of game or even anything else Capcom is known for. I really hope this is the last game to use it since I'd rather have NO art than BAD art. The explosions and environments are decent looking without that cartoony crap spoiling it.."
- 'CrossHanded', Gamefaqs poster

"for an indie developer, i'd be less harsh on the artwork. this is Capcom, though, and i'm sure they could have spent the $100 bills they light their $1000 cigars with to get one of their regular artists to put a portfolio together." -'xenodolf', Gamefaqs poster

While I've developed a fairly thick skin for criticism for my art and being able to decipher constructive criticism from even the worst critic, I don't think I expected to get such a negative reaction from a lot of fans.

I think it's safe to say that if a sequel for this game would be made (which I doubt), I definitely shouldn't be a part of it! It's quite a blow to the ego reading some of the postings. People will go out of their way to state how they didn't like the character designs, but otherwise they enjoyed the game. For awhile, I really felt like I brought the team down.

In any case, I know I gave it my best shot. I definitely did not want to make another 'realistic' looking game. I'm one of the few that's pretty much sick to my stomach seeing the same old boringly-designed-space-marine-versus-boringly-designed-space-aliens-FPS. The way I see it, if other people can have their boring mediocre designs drive their games, why can't I have my boring mediocre designs out there too!

The thing is, I didn't think people would hate my drawings this much! One poster took a line from Dane Cook and said the art made him want to punch babies (that ran as our office in-joke for quite some time)!

Anyway, don't worry I'm okay, I've gotten over just how bad of an artist I am. Case in point: I just watched Wall-e. And I am both amazed at how awesome the Pixar artists are, and depressed at far I have to go as an artist!

Anyway! In one of the forums I ran across this one poster named 'Sano'. Now this guy didn't like my art either, but there was one thing I did that he liked. Here's what he said in the posts from the Capcom-Unity Boards (I'm 'Biggedy' by the way, and 'CapKraig' is the Capcom-side producer of WOTB: Commando 3):

I had initially thought it'd be a funny reference if I made the Commando's prison outfits mirror another Capcom character's prison duds. In this case it was Cody, from Street Fighter Alpha 3. It was a fun, but maybe a little obscure way of sneaking in an in-joke.

So when Sano posted, I was so happy that someone actually caught my reference! I was so pleasantly happy that day! One dude! One dude got my reference! Cool! That one guy expressing his appreciation for my in-joke (not even my art, really!), tipped the hate-scales for me by a lot. In my pessimistic head it went like this:

"Maybe nobody liked my art and maybe I caused the game to be brought down a few notches of where it could've been, but one guy actually got my gag! Cool!"

I think I would've been fine if it ended at that. But a few days later, Sano came back to post a screenshot of the panel he liked so much. Wow! He really liked it!

But that screenshot's too blurry, so...

This one's for you Sano, perhaps the only one I managed to entertain with my art! Thanks for single-handedly picking me back up from "my-art-sucks" land and bringing me back to "my-art-sucks-but-maybe-I-can-get-better-someday" land! And in true neverending battle style, here's the rough thumbnail of the drawing:

That's it for me! Good night, er, good morning all and God Bless!

Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 - Wolf

2008-06-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

One of the games I worked on is finally released on the Playstation Network (and next week on the x360). So now I can unleash the hounds on my blog! Shuffling through this art made me realize that I generated a lot of art during the course of this project. In hindsight, I'm amazed because the project was on a very, very tight schedule and budget! How did I ever survive that?

Anyways, I'm posting up some of the concept work I did for WOTB: Commando 3, starting with some character designs. The first one we'll start with is Wolf himself.

Initially, we weren't working on a game that had the Commando license. It was just a game that kinda paid homage to it. I don't think we were ever thinking it would actually be the successor to Commando and Mercs. The license came in surprisingly (and a little painfully) later on. So what you'll see are some early designs that got scrapped as well as the final designs.

I had a lot of frustration trying to get a set of character designs Capcom had wanted and it was tough to try to please them especially with management changing hands midway into the game. So rather than shoot myself, we enlisted the help of another designer to help me out, Sach Steffel. Before I jumped onto the project, Sach had done some initial designs for the original pitch document. Who better to help me out than her right? Even though Sach was on another project at the time, she was able to help out and do double duty. I think having her help out maintained a little bit of my sanity as I also had to lead the art for the rest of the game.

For a couple of the characters she had helped me 'unlock the code', and get something the clients would agree on. Our styles are fairly different, so when it came down to generating the final assets for UI, cutscenes and turnaround sheets for the modelers, I had to translate her designs back into mine, so everything was unified. That was actually a pretty fun process! I think I had fun identifying and taking the important parts of her designs and seeing them through. Anyway, make sure to visit her site, she's got some great stuff! This turnaround sheet is what I ended up generating:

Mind you, all this initial character designing was before we had the WOTB: Commando 3 license. Later on in the production cycle, once we already finished generating character assets for the game, we had to go back in there and change it again! It was down the wire too, I remember being so stressed having to re-draw all the UI assets over. Ugh , the pain. So for the main characters alone, we ended up doing re-designs, new models, textures and cutting out two other characters and generating a brand new one (more on these guys in a later post).

So the blue guy above keeps more in line with the original Mercs dude, except he's wearing a shirt (it gets cold in the jungle). So, even though we were bummed about all these changes, the team did an amazing job pushing on (I guess having no time to spare will do that to you!).

My favorite piece of art I did in the game were the M-crashes. They were 2D panels that slid in whenever the player did a special move. They were also the most action packed drawings I did of the characters within the game. Plus, I'm such an old school nerd, 2D panels sliding in are always fun!

Wolf's pose is based on the original pose the main character was in, in Mercs. I was actually surprised it only took me one rough sketch to figure out the pose he'd be in. With all the work that was piling on top of me my greatest fear was being so stressed and fatigued that stiffness would start creeping into these panels. While the stiffness does appear in my later drawings, (in UI assets, cutscenes, etc., hey, I'm sorry I was tired okay!) the character M-crashes, thankfully, made it through fine.

That's it for today, I'll try to post up more of these next time! Sige!

My Comic: page six

2008-05-31T11:13:00.000-07:00

Plug, plug, pluggin' away! Just finished page six of my book and as usual it took me longer to figure out the colors, yada yada yada. Anyway, the main difficulty was this outside scene now had 'real colors' in it. My main character's uniform is for the first time revealed to the reader... and to myself!

Yep, all this time I had no idea what color my main characters' uniform was to be! I've always colored her in a monochromatic fashion, I never really stopped to think about her color scheme. Anyways, after much mulling over and trying out different colors, it occured to me there was only one color that would work for her all those other times I colored her in: white.

My friend, Roque, cautioned me though: since he and his studio (Ghostbot) had done a pilot where a character was all in white before. He told me it'd be a tricky thing to do. And sure enough, I was raiding my collection of Samurai jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars animated (Genndy Tartakovsky version) for some color help!

I got her colors to work on the page finally, but there was something missing to her being in all white. Something about the color of her visor was bugging me. It seemed so plain. As usual, when stuck with color theory, I messed around with Photoshops' Hue/Saturation adjustment tool (best thing ever)! And now her visor becomes a very distinctive part about her, and gives me a nice variable to mess around with when I stick her into tricky color schemes. plus while coloring it in, it also gave me ways to incorporate the visor color into story telling too, so it ended up being a win/win situation.

A little side note/ bruised ego rant: the visor color and her design, I've realized, is a tip of the hat to Battle of the planets. I hadn't realized that's what I drew inspiration from until a friend of mine pointed it out! Makes sense! I even have a sequence in the book that's like the intro where they all float down in a circle (Silver hawks does this in some of their episodes too if I remember correctly!).

My ego has taken quite a beating realizing that my stuff isn't very original, but I've gotten over it after with awhile. It's quite a humbling experience, mind you, and really knocked the wind out of my sails for awhile. Anyway, I picked myself back up and remembered what I originally set out to do on this book.

I wanted to have fun while drawing comics. And I wanted to tap into that same fun I had as a child that I believe is missing in me nowadays. Apparently, I am totally tapping into that childhood better than I thought! I have found working on these pages has brought back the sense of enjoyment I used to have when I drew comics for myself a long, long time ago. The main thing that gets me over my unoriginality is that so long as I'm aware of the people I'm ripping off ("influenced by" if that's too harsh!) and simply embrace it, and strive to build on their knowledge, eventually I'll get better.

Heck, I'm ripping off Yoshitaka Amano, Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, Genndy Tartakovsky, Jack kirby and frikking Sonic the Hedgehog to name a few! Hopefully I'll learn a thing or three from these people (and hedgehogs)!

My giant sized ego always makes me forget this truth: I am far from being anywhere good yet. But hopefully with this comic book, I can start working all my assorted kinks out! So thank you for dropping by and taking a look at my personal work-in-progress, truly warts and all! And that's it for today! Good day and God Bless!

P.S. And I know this has been stuck in your brain since I mentioned it; sweet intro isn't it? Gonna have to steal something from there! ;)

My Comic: Page four and five colors

2008-05-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

Got some more updates for my comic book. Everything seems to be going well. I do have to confess though, I can't believe how long I take dwelling on colors, especially on something so simple! The reds really weren't a problem, but for some crazy reason, I had a hard time deciding on what color the shine of her eyes would be on panel two of page six.

I kept switching from a light red or sky blue, to an undersaturated blue, to a white, to a dark green, to black, to... well you get the picture. On one hand a red hue was the safe bet, but when I slapped that blue on there, there was something nice about it (at least to me). I kept stressing out whether people will get thrown off by it too much. Anyway, I ended up going with the blue of the sky. It makes for a nice highlight, and connects the panel to everything else. I think what really clinched it for me was that it also signified what she's looking at (the sky outside). Now I don't know if anybody's gonna even get that, but in my head (for now) it makes sense. That blue color is also the perfect lead in for the next page.

Well, at least if I can get it to work! Tune in!

My Comic: Page Two and Three colors

2008-05-23T00:39:00.000-07:00

Strangely enough, coloring these two pages seemed to take more brainwork from me than the first page, even though these pages are a whole lot simpler than the first. There's something very difficult about coloring a very sparse background. My brain thinks it needs to color more in than it should, and add more details. I found out, while coloring these pages, it seemed the simplest solution was the best.

Anyways, I'm tired! No long winded commentary this post! Good night... er... good morning and sundan ang susunod na kabanatan!

My Comic: Page one colors

2008-05-18T21:36:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a lot of posts up on my blog recently, but for once it's not because I've been slacking off! In fact quite the opposite! I have just finished inking, cleaning up and lettering my comic book! And I've just finished laying down the first color pass of the first page! Quite exciting!

I'm just coming off of three weeks of comp time from work and while I slacked off a bit in the first week, I made sure to keep a regular work day for the rest of it and power through to getting my comic book done! So, a lot of days spent scanning, piecing, re-sizing, inking and lettering went into effect.

While all the other things felt like the usual production work, I gotta say: adding letters to my comic made it come to life! It was such a rush to put bubbles and arrange panel flow!

I'm not sure if the final panels' colors are going to be these since I don't know if that color scheme will work for me yet later on in the story. A friend of mine has suggested I do a quick color study on thumbnails of the whole book so I can take a look at how I want the colors to interact. I kinda just plowed into this first page without knowing if these are going to work later on... Anyway, it's a work in progress, hopefully I'll have more in the coming weeks!

I'm also a little paranoid about how my colors look on my screen compared to everyone else's monitors. My Cintiq's colors look like how I'd want them to be, but then my secondary monitor's colors look out of whack. Sigh. The usual stuff I suppose! Anyway, until next post! Good night and God Bless!

Special thanks

2008-03-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

Hooray! My games have been announced! I just wanted to do a quick post with some links of screen shots and videos. It's always quite exciting to see a little bit of buzz at the end of a project. It almost makes me forget all the crud the team had to go through to get this stuff done... Almost!

Well, we're not out of the woods yet, there's still a few more things needed to be done to tidy everything up. But for now, it's cool for once to see the game screens on something other than my dev kit.

Maybe later on when these games are actually out the door and downloadable, I'll start posting up some of the character designs and pre-production stuff I did. For now work your way over these links:

Commando 3: Wolf of the Battlefield

http://www.gamespot.com/video/943724/6187647/wolf-of-the-battlefield-commando-3-official-trailer-1

http://kotaku.com/367289/gallery-wolf-of-the-battlefield-commando-3

1942: Joint Strike

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/188546.html

http://kotaku.com/367292/gallery-1942-joint-strike

There are a lot of factors that went into going into this game and a lot of unknown things to plan for, everygame does. Anyway, the more I look at these two games (Commando and 1942) and how they were able to come together, the more thankful I become to God. I've been blown away by how many 'coincidences' fell into place to get these games pumped out in such an excruciatingly small amount of time. It's absolutely impossible! These games are a testimony and a milestone to me of God's amazing hand.

The sad part of it all is I couldn't even include God as a special thanks into the credits. I guess it's policy not to have religion in the credits. The credits! In our own personal thanks! I couldn't even do that. Can you imagine that? I remember being able to do it a few years back, but nowadays it seems people are getting touchy over who other people wish to thank! Amazing. Will wonders never cease. Sigh.

Well, I still have my Blog, so this posting is a giant special thanks to my God. Definitely without whom I would have utterly gone insane and turned into a sniffling, crying ball of flesh during the course of these projects (moreso than now)! Thanks for His guiding hand and assuring me everything will be okay, even when I was so highly strung and stressed.

My biggest shame is that I let these games overtake my life, and ignore everything else, even Him. But my biggest joy is in knowing that even though I did that He never turned His back on me, He was always there.

If this kind of praise offends you, what can I say? It's the truth and this is my Blog. You can find your "politically correct" views in any number TV shows, websites, magazines and so on these days. And you know what? You can find it in the special thanks section of video game credits too.

But here? I get to praise Him. I mean it when I say it old-school: Thanks be to God! Good day, and God Bless. Until my next post!

Back to my comic - Part 1 googleplex

2008-03-09T16:54:00.000-07:00

Things are looking pretty good; my Commando 3 project at work is finally starting to wrap up, the sun's is shining amazingly and I've been getting some good nights of sleep. It's time for me to get back to doing what I love the best: comics!

Sadly though, I seem to always have a bunch of postings that are exactly like this. I work on my comic book, some big thing totally gets me off track, and come back to it again (and have a hard time doing it). I keep trapping myself in this artistically unhealthy pattern of start and stop. I really need to be more consistent with setting aside drawing time for myself. Anyway, for now my schedule's back to normal. And checking in on my comic after half a year or so reveals this: I haven't done anything. Nada, zip, zilch. I suck.

So, to kick start my return, I did two very expensive things: 1) buy a smokin' new computer and 2) buy a 20 inch Cintique. Now, while this has lead me to live like a miser and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches three meals in a row (okay maybe just two!), I have to say it's definitely eased me back into comics creation quite painlessly. What can I say? The Cintique rocks!

To warm me back up to my comic book I drew a little pin-up of my character:

Yep. I think she's noticed that I've been gone too. I'm a little wobbly with my line work, but with some practice I think I can do my second issue all digital. Anyway, I'm back! And I'm setting a new deadline for myself! Again! Here it is: My comic book totally finished by the end of this year! From colors to letters to a brand spankin' new cover! Bring it on! ...and gulp!
And before I leave, I thought I might post a totally random (and yet awesome) picture a friend of mine took awhile ago when the Osamu Tezuka exhibition came to town.

I have to admit, I look like a total doof in the picture, but considering I'm high fiving Astro boy, my nerdness is quite appropriate. If I can even channel a fraction of Tezuka's energy into my comic book I think I'd be very happy! Alright, I'm out for now! Good night and God bless you. Easter is coming!

For Daniel

2008-02-19T23:40:00.001-08:00

The older I get, the grumpier I get. I'm becoming a crotchey old geezer at thirty-two. It's such a sad truth. It makes me grumpy just thinking about it. I was IMing a friend of mine about it and he seems to share a similar disposition. We were trying to figure out how could this have happened. How could we have turned out to be such cosmic killjoys? I can point my finger at all manner of stuff: work, stress, lack of excercise (I'm trying to go back to the gym! Honest!), rainy weather, the color of my shirt... whatever. But really, everybody goes through all this stuff too, I have no true excuse to be an "old fart". I remember being a cheerier person when I was younger. As an artist, my mindset definitely affects my artwork. When I get down to making art, it can usually change whatever mood I might be in (default mood settings = grumpy). But I guess I have to get down to actually making the art first! And lately, I just haven't had the time to work on my own stuff.

Three or so years ago I joined a missions program with my church(Bethel Christian Church) that helps out orphans in Kenya. The AIDS epidemic runs rampant there and many children are left without parents because of it. For a small monthly donation, it's possible to send a child to school and give them a decent meal.

The first child I sponsored had dissappeared along with a relative of his a while back. The second child I sponsored, one of my church elders had actually met and wanted to be his sponsor since they got along so well. So now I have my Third: Daniel Mutie. From some of the updates I've gotten, I've learned Daniel follows Kamba tribe culture, wakes up at five o'clock in the morning to start his day, is now in Class Five at school and he likes to draw.

With the kids I've previously sponsored, I usually try to draw them a little something. But it wasn't until Daniel that I actually got to sponsor a kid that also likes to draw. Very cool. Unfortunately, since I've been so busy with being so self involved, I wasn't able to send a quick drawing to Daniel for the longest time. But that's okay. Daniel took the initiative and drew me up something and sent it to me just before Christmas, 2007.

It's the kind of inspiration that I needed when I needed it most. There's nothing quite like a child's drawing. It's very honest and pure kind of mark-making. I don't think I'll ever get to a state of drawing that's as free or as unburdened as when I was a child. When I see children's drawings, it reminds me to strive for that kind of freedom, that kind of fun. I've become such a grump in my old age, I've forgotten that I make art because it's fun! I don't think I've ever been as prolific in creating art as when I was a kid, and some of the coolest stuff I created was when I was a child! Now that mr. Grumpalupagus has entered the building I've been such a stick in the mud about drawing.

Well, I definitely had to draw something for Daniel now! But I really had no idea what. How could a comic book dork like me be able to connect with a kid a whole ocean away? I kept trying to think about it, and realized the most sincere way I could do it was with the medium I liked the most: comics! Abuh--duh! I wrote up a simple letter I could send to him, and started trying to figure out a way to draw myself. I wrote out the monologue I had planned and started drawing my poses in a panel by panel progression.

I wanted it to be like a Sunday comic strip, just like the ones I enjoyed reading growing up, and was going to experiment a little with my medium. I would sketch out my comics in pencil, but then I'd use my Wacom Tablet to do the inking and coloring chores.

I have to admit the final product isn't the best it reminds me of one of those boring web comics (Sorry Daniel, I'm pretty rusty)! But--! It was a good experiment for myself, and a great way for me to get my bearings back in the creation of comics again. It was good for me to try and figure out if this process of drawing from start to finish was something I could manage. And you know what? I think just with constant practice on the Wacom I can get comfortable enough to do my drawings fully digital. But baby steps first!

I can actually see from panel to panel, my depiction of myself started solidifying a little better (ie. not staying on model!). I suppose that's what I get just going in there all gung-ho! I also notice I have a hard time depicting myself, as a stylized character. Must be some kind of mental thing. Maybe in time, I'll get better at that too. Anyway, while not the best stuff I've done, I'm actually happy with how I worked on this little comic strip: it was very fast, very fun and very first-impulse. Maybe it felt like a faint echo of how I drew when I was a kid? Maybe...

Anyhow, with that done, I picked out a picture of myself to send off to Daniel. He had requested one awhile back.. I picked one out from my trip to the Philippines that I was sure he'd get a kick out of:

Crazy huh! That's me and my sister, holding a baby tiger! Nutty! And this was few days after I had heard about the crazy incident that happened with the escaped tiger in San Francisco Zoo! And better still? The whole picture taking process only cost us around ten bucks!

Thank you, Daniel, for getting me to remember what fun it is to draw! Unfortunately my drawing muscles seem to be out of shape, but hopefully I can keep up the 'exercise'. I still have to finish up the first issue of my comic book after all! God bless you all and good night!

Balut and Bibingka!

2008-01-03T23:48:00.000-08:00

I think this is probably going to be the last Philippines-based blog post. I'm returning to the States on the 7th of January and my flight leaves the Philippines on the 6th. I've had such a great time being back home it'll be sad to leave my family (a rather large family at that: We tallied up to 17 for the trip, not counting my two brother in laws and the 4 maids and 1 driver we had to help out in the chaos!) . I just came back from a great trip we had in Batangas and Tagaytay (two other cities in the Philippines). I'll post more on that next time though. For now, I'm posting up pictures of when my parents and I went to Market! Market! In Fort Bonifacio. That's my mom, posing quite nicely next to the fried pork and barbecued chicken! Hi Mom!

While Market! Market! is the usual large mall that one can find in the Philippines, my favorite aspect about it (surprise surprise) is it's food court. My parents tell me old-school Filipino Bus terminals were structured with some kind of food area next to it so that while people waited they could eat. The food was usually at an affordable price and the most part food that's prepared fast and ready for take out.
Market! Market! follows the same design, just everything's a whole lot larger, so more food choices, a decent vegetable and fresh fruit market in it, tons of seating space and of course a big parking lot to house all the public transportation. I had a whole slew of food there like Pancit Lukban (Chinese-Filipino style noodles with seafood) Sisig (Made of TRUE not FDA approved pork parts! Not the best sisig that I had, but I had to eat it just cause!), Fishda (Barbecue style Fish) and Balut! Unfortunately the Balut didn't have a substantial duck fetus in it to really write home about, but hey, part of the true Filipino eating experience right?
I went to this restaurant called "Tsoko.nut", they have some great hot chocolate there and this Filipino dessert called Bibingka. Bibingka is like a giant desert rice cake that's baked on a banana leaf. It usually contains a salty egg in it and is served with butter and coconut shavings. I love this stuff!
My brother tells me, back in the days when we were colonized by the Spaniards, they brought over Hot Chocolate. Apparently the Spaniards back then didn't want the filipinos to get their hands on the high class hot chocolate they dubbed "Chocolate Eh" (Say "Chocolate" filipino style with me: "Cho-Ko-Lat-teh"). So for some time the Filipinos couldn't get their hands on the good stuff. Sometime later however, my countrymen either got their hands on some "Chocolate Eh" or swiped a recipe from the Spaniards and created our own slightly watered down version of it. We dubbed it "Chocolate Ah". This old school Chocolate brew is the kind they serve at "Tsoko.nut" ("Choconut" if you haven't guessed it yet). Oh and the hot chocolate is awesome, too. Here's a pic of my sister and her son (who seems uninterested in taking a picture with food at the moment!) and close up of Bibinka and "Tsokalate Ah" above it. Yum!
The comic segment for this post comes in the form of House of Secrets number 128. The first story's artist is Leopoldo Durona. I like the line weight that he employs in this short called "No Way to Run a Railroad!". It's the very nice, expressionist thick and thin variation he employs throughout the story that really grabs my eye. His style reminds me a lot of B. Kreigstien's artwork, down to the nice color choices to denote action, like using a bright red background color to add emotion to an act of murder that takes place in the story (I want to do an entry on Keigstein too as I just started getting into him recently, but that'll be for a later date!). Durona's got some nicely composed panels and page flow too, so it's an easy read.
The second short story of the book is my favorite. It's the story that introduced me to Alex Nino. Alex Nino has a style that I really like, he employs line work in a very distinct fashion that makes it so interesting to me. It's line work that has roots in old-classic-filipino-komiks style but it's soo slick and stylized, it's all his own.

Something that's very telling to me about an artist's work is how they approach drawing 'effects'. It's so hard for me to make my own effects so interesting, so when I see other people do it successfully it always kicks up my appreciation of them a thousandfold. So when I see someone draw their 'default cloud', 'default smoke' or 'default mirror reflection', I can tell if they got the 'stuff'. In this short, Mr. Nino even makes the word balloon speech arrows have so much character! If you're not familiar with Alex Nino's stuff you can easily see him strut his stuff in Disney's "Mulan" and "Atlantis". I think I recall him being an effects artist for Mulan, but I could be totally wrong.
Anyway, enjoy the pics! I included the whole 3 page Alex Nino short for your enjoyment! I'll probably be posting stateside next time! So long and God Bless from the Philippines!

Edible Memories

2007-12-30T04:01:00.001-08:00

Coming back home always triggers so many great memories. I was leafing through some old photo albums my mom and dad have at home, and I spotted one that collected a few pictures from when we were living in Hong Kong. Here's a pic that pretty much sums up just how big of a nerd I was back then (and now!). I remember my Brother shoving the comic books in my back to add just that nice amount of dorkdom into the picture. I was quite the chubby kid back then.

I loved to eat! In fact, I think I tie so many good memories I have to food (if you couldn't tell from my previous posts). Anyway, more nostalgia abounds as my parents pulled out one of the old shirts I made from my old HKIS (Hong Kong International School) days. From the looks of it, I had a lot of John Byrne influence going on in this drawing from High School. See that ammo strap? Those are really little pencil-bullets! Genius. A calculator gun and ruler sword? Avant Garde!
And speaking of High School, I met up with an old friend of mine from HKIS, who has since moved back to the Philippines. John and I used to play basketball together with our 'crew' called the MTBA (I'll leave that acronym undefined: let your imagination go wild). Ol' John played Shooting Guard, while I played Power Forward. We went to Fort Bonifacio's High Street area and hit the local arcade called Timezone.
Of course we had to play the b-ball arcade game for old times sake! We played 3 games and suffice to say, I got pwned hardcore by John. But my saving grace is that I grabbed a lot of rebounds from when my shots bricked hard off of the rim.
We also hit some other spots, like the newly opened Mall of Asia, a huge mall built on reclaimed land on Manila Bay. It's a nice gigantic mall, and John and I got lost in it a bunch of times.We headed out to the 'Baywalk' area after going through the mall and were gonna check out the nice sunset but unfortunately it was too cloudy for that. It was great to see the Bay. My country is such a beautiful place, it always awes me how amazing and picturesque it can actually be.

But then I'll look at the bays' garbage infested shoreline and it makes me sad we don't take better care of it. There were tons of these weird insects skittering about that John and I have lovingly dubbed 'sea-ipis'. "Ipis" means "cockroach" in Tagalog. Sigh.

We headed over to BF Homes Paranaque for some Brother's Burger for some dinner. I grew up in this subdivision, so it was quite startling to see all the progress that's been made since I've been gone. Anyway, the Burger was great. 'American Style' but it still had a slight filipino taste to it.
And for Dessert we hit Conti's and I had a slice of Mango Bravo. Conti's management used to run this place my family ate at called Dates and Nuts. So eating there was nostalgia city.
Tangent: The Philippines has a lot of pirated goods that the government has been cracking down on, but still there's a lot of places that still have it. I never even knew this stuff was illegal until I moved to Hong Kong (which has it's own fair share of the pirated stuff, too). I always thought that was okay! I've even been to one where they had it's own security guard in proper uniform and everything. (I didn't buy anything though! Honest!) I did find it awesomely odd to see they had a pirated copy of "Zapped" starring Scott Baio. End Tangent.
Okay! Comic book time! Here's another comic in my collection that was re-printed in the Philippines: Plop #16. It's a comedy, satire-ish comic with a slight EC-eqsue twist. It features stories like a guy who turns into a frog when kissed or a dude that falls in love with a dandelion. Yeah, mull that over a I think I really liked the art when I picked this up as a kid, and I'm glad to see that I actually had some taste back then! Lemme give you a line up of the art inside, and see if you can disagree with me! The cover is done by Wally Wood with a Sergio Aragones collage/border! The pages that bookend the interiors I believe are also Aragones but since there are no credits on it I can't really verify that (They look cool though!). Sidenote: These first and last pages introduced me to DC's Cain, Abel and Eve, way before I saw them again resurface in Neil Gaiman's Sandman.
Then comes a short by Ric Estrada called the "Make-out Queen of Lord Byron High!" I don't think I even understood what "make-out" meant back then! Those crazy Americans! Anyway, I remember enjoying a lot of the characters Ric Estrada had drawn in that short, especially his depiction of the impossibly untouchable make-out queen herself, Sylvia Glutz.

I remember not quite understanding the dark humor in the next short called: "Love is a Dandy!" back then. It featured a guy who fell in love with a dandelion and ends with a punchline of him killing his uber hot/health-conscious neighbor for cooking his flora-and-fauna-flame for dinner. Yep, "The Magazine of weird humor" indeed.
Still, I remember enjoying that tale even if I didn't quite understand that humor back then. I remember liking the art a lot, and this is where I can pat myself on the back for having great taste even as a young, chubby, comic book nerd; I recently discovered who the artists for this short were. The credits list the artwork done by "S. Ditko and W. Wood"! Awesome! Melody, the plant loving main character's (Hubert's) friend definitely looks like a Wally Wood girl. However, Huberts' poses look straight up Steve Ditko. I just watched a great BBC documentary about Steve Ditko recently and realize that mr. Ditko is very particular about his artwork. I wonder if he liked his collaboration with Wally Wood?Anyways, I really liked the art in Plop #16, hope you enjoy some of the scans I've posted up! That's all out of me for now! God Bless and have a Happy New Year!

Churros, Burgers and uh... Christmas Bread!

2007-12-27T07:22:00.000-08:00

I didn't get a chance to post during Christmas, so a belated Merry Christmas from The Neverending Battle to you! I'm currently spending the night over at my sister's house and am absolutely taking advantage of the faster computer she has to update my blog.

A lot of things have been going on since my last post... mainly eating! I've already gained a good 5 pounds since I've been here, so I'm going to have to limit my eating a bit so I don't end up like the Blob. Though I have to admit it's hard to do so when I know I won't be able to eat again until the next time I come back to the Philippines.

My mom, my sister and I had lunch at this filipino restaurant called "Dulcinea". They have some good food there, but the real draw for us was the dessert: "Churros". Unlike the versions I can find in San Francisco, the Churros in the Philippines are usually not as sugary and served with a nice cup of hot chocolate. The churros are crisp and light while the hot chocolate compliments it being nice and thick. The chocolate flavor is pure, so it's not too sweet (but it's not exactly dark chocolate either). Take my word for it, it's great!

I went with my nephew and my Brother to Manila's International Port in my last post. My brother finished work at around 1:30 AM that night and we had all forgotten to eat dinner. So we went to another great place I loved when I was a kid. It was this fast food place called "Tropical Hut". The burgers filipinos are accustomed to are unlike the burgers served in the states. We usually add a little bit of a "sweeter" flavor to our burgers. I honestly can't quite describe it, maybe it has a pork flover to it? Sugar? I dunno. But I'm not sure if foreigners would take to it. But hey, if you're in the Philippines give it a shot! It's a burger that I always crave when I come back home. I remember I kinda had to get used to the 'blander' taste of Burgers (I suppose that's actually the 'real' beef flavor) when I first came to the states. Anyways, I love Tropical Hut hamburgers!

Okay, my Brother knows I'm craving some old school 'filipino' food. Mainly the stuff I grew up with. For some reason, it's stuck in my head when my brother took me to this bakery in our area and he bought me this bread and soda (soda bottles cost money so usually back then the soda was poured into a plastic bag!).The bread has this red sweet stuff in it; what it's made out of I have no idea. Anyways, my Brother had some of this bread sent to our house the other day. It's called a very peculiar name: "Pan de Regla". Pan is bread. Now, Regla in Tagalog means a woman's period.

Yep.

So, I guess that red sweet stuff is kinda like the color of when a woman menstruates. Yum. I double checked with my family just to see if maybe I just knew the slang and didn't know what it was really called, but that's what they know it as! My mom decided to give bread a little dignity and dubbed it: "Christmas Bread". Anyway, my mom sliced it up and served it with this great cheese that you can only get in Philadelphia. It was a great combination.

Okay, our comic segment for this post comes in the form of DC comics presents number 48. It features Superman and Aquaman fighting thise alien race of octopi that can go toe-to-toe against Aquaman's marine controling powers (yes really). It's also got a sequence of Aquaman and Superman fighting (of course) and Superman being controlled by Aquaman while the man of steel was unconscious (I had no idea he could do that).

But the real draw of this book comes in the form of the back-up story featuring the Black Pirate. When ever I come back home I find I become increaqsingly curious as to the state of Filipino comics past and present. I buy a bunch of locally produced comic books, good or bad, just to see what kind of stuff we can produce. I only started getting interested in filipino comics when I came back from the states after college. I've been trying to catch up ever since. So when I noticed that the Black Pirate back up story was done by a filipino, it tickled my fancy. The artist in question is none other than Alfredo Alcala. Mr. Alcala was one of the filipino talents that migrated to the states way back when. He's got an amazing sense of light and composition. He's and amazing draftsman and absolutely awesome with pen and ink. His stuff is astounding.

I've always felt bad that I never was influenced by the old filipino "Komiks" guys when I was growing up. I feel I've been influenced by so much Western comics, that I'm not connected to the evolution of filipino comics. Their sense of anatomy and linework is just something distinctly filipino and it's something that I lack. Sigh. Anyways, I can always just keep drooling over their stuff until it hopefully seeps into my own! That's it for tonight! God Bless you all and Good night!

Champurado

2007-12-18T03:28:00.000-08:00

What a difference rest makes! I just skimmed over my last entry, before starting up this one, and suffice to say, the tone of this post will be in the opposite direction! The main reason? I'm on vacation!

Production is still pretty insane at work, but my boss was kind enough to let me take some time off so that I can visit my family in the Philippines; I haven't been back home in 2 years. I get to spend Christmas and New Years with my family. Today's my third day here, I've met up with my brother and sisters and their respective families already; however there's a lot of catching up to be done still!

I find everytime I go home it's this odd mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. I get so used to living in the United States, the first few days coming back usually throws me off. I'm glad to be home though! I feel like I trap myself in work mode so much in the states, that when I come home to the Philippines, it's snaps me out of that funk, and resets my world and brings me back down to Earth. It's good to be home.

My favorite food when I was growing up was this dish called "Champurado". It's chocolate rice porridge. Sometimes, you can add little dried fish (called "dilis") onto it to give it a little texture and contrast. While the rest of the planet will probably find that utterly disgusting (and show case it in an episode of Fear Factor or something) , I absolutely love LOVE it. My mom told me when I was young I wanted her to make my birthday cake out of it! This morning my mom made some because she knew I was craving it, and I tell ya, it was great to wake up to it's smell! I scarfed down copius amounts of it (She made it using Ghirardelli chocolate too, to boot)! Here's my mom and dad modeling my beloved foodage.

Coming home also brings back a ton of memories and nostalgia. My mom actually kept a lot of the old comic books I used to collect when I lived in the Philippines and in Hong Kong. I was just rifling through some of it today and it's actually kind of fun to see what I was reading back then.

Back when I was growing up in the Philippines, comic books were really expensive (at least for my allowance). It was hard to actually get books in sequential order, and on top of that it was also hard to get books of the same title. I'm guessing the comic books that got exported here, were overruns of some sort or books that didn't get sold in the comic book shops. From my point of view it just seemed like some dude randomly grabbed as many comic books as he could, shoved them in a box and shipped them to the Philippines. It was really hard for me to keep track of any one storyline. So I have a bunch of random titles in my collection, not rare mind you, just absolutely disjointed.

So, I'll try to spotlight some of these books with my entries while I'm here in the Philippines. First up at bat is Jack Kirby's Mr. Miracle. In my older post I mentioned that I didn't understand "the King Kirby" when I was younger. But I have to admit this book left an impression on me (as well as his "Sandman" book). I loved Big Barda and the Female Furies! I think that may have been one of my first exposures to women superheroes being so kick butt. Literally! I mean "Stompa"! C'mon how cool is that! Anyway, the whole concept of a super escape artist was very different to me too, something new.

Also, I believe Mr. Miracle's mask, served as a subconscious inspiration later on in high school when I created this bad guy called "The Gatler" (I'll see if I can find a copy of that character somewhere)! In hindsight, it's funny how Kirby seemed to have left a pretty distinct impression on me when I was young even though I didn't like his artwork at the time because it made me nauseous!

This issue is actually a reprint: the 'Philippine' print. Apparently, a bunch of comic books were reprinted in the Philippines back when I was growing up there. All the original adds were pulled out and it was sold for a much cheaper price as well. While in hindsight that's actually really awesome, back then I didn't really feel these were 'cool' because they weren't the real deal. I was kind of an import snob (though I do have a lot of these re-prints in my collection in the Philippines).

Another interesting tid bit: I believe a majority of these re-printed comics usually featured a filipino artist in them (of course not Mister Miracle!). So I got exposed in some way or another to Alex Nino, Alfredo Alcala and Tony Dezuniega's works. I remember the comics were some fairly old titles too: GI Combat, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Tarzan and Plop! being a few among them. I remember picking up a Phantom Stranger with a back-up of Doctor Thirteen in it and thinking that was the coolest thing ever. I'll try to see if I can dig that up!

Anyway, that's it for today! I leave you with a jet-lagged, and yet a well-rested God Bless and Good night !

*Side note: I'm actually posting this on the 21st of December. I thought I'd be blogging like a maniac during my vacation, but my parents computer is so amazingly old I can't even post up any pics (a Pentium 3)! I'm at my brother's laptop now over at Manila International Port with my nephew, passing the time as my brother finishes up a project (he's got a much faster computer!). Anyway, I think it's probably safe to say I won't be blogging quite as much as I'd like!

Fatigue

2007-10-20T17:37:00.000-07:00

I am so incredibly tired. I was supposed to go into work today, but my body, mind and spirit just wouldn't let me. I came back from work last night at around 11:30 ish. It's been non-stop work for me for about 2 months now? I can't even remember.

Last week Sunday I was so tired I wasn't even able to set my alarm properly to wake up for church. I could've sworn I set that thing! Instead, I slept the entire morning away and missed even going to church altogether. Throughout this crazy crunch time Sunday has been the one day that I've been able to run to as my shelter and rest. The one day that I can meet with my church family and friends. To actually be able to designate some time in my life that's something else other than work. Missing it was quite a downer!

I went to work that Sunday afternoon at around 3. I left work at 6:30...

...Monday night.

That was a 27 hour work day. To top that off, someone broke into my car (smashing the driver's side window) in the company parking lot and took 2 dollars worth of quarters. Lovely. Fortunately, my company paid for the damages. But definitely, a broken car window was not what I needed at the time.

All this working was geared toward a Capcom Gamer's day build for our game that just got announced called Commando 3. I'm the lead artist on it so I'm managing and producing art for it. I should really be excited about it finally being shown to the public, but honestly I am so very tired, I can barely function correctly. Every day has been a work day minimum of 12 hours. Maybe when the dust settles I can look back at the game and I dunno... feel something? Right now my body and mind are ready to collapse. The fatigue's hitting me now, and the sad part is, I can't even take a breather. Instead I need to pour the steam on harder and crazier than I ever have before. I'm not sure if I'm up for it. But it's okay. I know everything will be fine.

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive and inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ that you are serving." Colossians 3:23-24

My mom gave me this little scroll thing to hang in my cubicle and it has this verse on it. I read it everyday before my day starts to remind myself. So far there has been some good buzz over the game's announcement. But in all honesty any positive thing people have to say for it really goes right up to God. And the main reason? Because I am so tired to actually produce anything good right now, it's only by His power and will that I can even prop my Wacom pen and mouse up to work.

I am so tired I have no idea what the days are anymore. Yesterday I didn't even know it was Friday because the days have been a long string of workdays. Haha. The project is almost done, and I'm so glad this will finally come to an end. The trouble is I'm dovetailed right into another one with an even shorter schedule. And there's just no way I can rest. So my prayers nowadays have been for God to give me alertness in mind and some peace to rest in Him.

It's like I'm running a marathon and I'm trying to scrape the very bottom of whatever it is I'm pulling my energy out of to keep moving to the finish line. It's quite a mental battle because the finish line is nowhere within eyesight. Just a bunch of curvy hills and cliffsides. And Spike traps. Maybe some land mines too. But like I said before, it's okay. Because what I hold onto now is something that I cannot see anyways. My Ace in the hole is faith that God will continuously prop me up, keep me going and give me my next 6th and 7th winds through out this. He knows what I can or cannot handle and my biggest lesson now is to rely only on Him.

Anyway. That's enough ranting for today. Oh yah. I almost forgot the reason I started this post! Here's link to a video of Commando 3 for xbox live arcade and the PlayStation Network:

I am so glad I have a solid team of artists with me. The team's doing a great job considering the incredible stress and pressure that's being put onto us within such a limited budget and schedule. I'm definitely blessed to be working with such a talented crew that can pull their own weight.

Maybe once the game is released for downloadable I'll do a series of posts on the charcter and vehicle designs that I did for the game. Anyway, I gotta get my laundry, I'm finding it difficult to do my laundry when I get home at around 12 oclock at night and the only thing I do in my free time is sleep! Good night and God Bless!

My own Comic Con: Part Two

2007-09-29T16:20:00.001-07:00

Whew! It has been a busy couple of weeks! Work has been busy as usual and my friend just got married this past weekend. I have a little bit of time now, so let me finish up what I started a few weeks ago! Back to Arvin-Con!

This next book I got is actually and oldie, but I never managed to pick it up myself for the longest time for some odd reason. It's called "Capcom Design Works".

Capcom is a videogame company that's been around for awhile and has a stable of well known franchises ranging from 1942, Ghosts n' Goblins, Bionic Commando, Final Fight, Strider oh, and yeah Street Fighter. They actually have a number of books out there on their studios character design, but I find this one to be the best of the bunch. I think I really started getting into their character design work when I initially saw the art for Street Fighter Alpha on the Playstation.

The anatomy of the characters was so beefy and solid, I was impressed at the fact that even though the anatomy was exaggerated, it still was based on reality. It just felt like it had such mass. And that's something I always have a hard time incorporating into my art. I think I was also starting to get into actually learning anatomy in college at the time, (though admittedly I'm pretty out of practice nowadays.) so this was pretty inspirational to see.

There's a ton of images in this book, and while a lot of it dwells on Street Fighter, There's some on their more obscure titles too. Like this one below, talk about buh-zaare!

I figure since everybody posts up a lot of Street Fighter stuff on the web anyways, I'll pick some of the ones that I usually don't see on the web. It's nice to see the studio run through a range of art styles and the art staff being so flexible. I find Character design, while being a pretty cool job, also ends up being very difficult and demanding. So I definitely appreciate the body of work presented within this book.

Next up is the graphic novel adaptation of L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" by David Chauvel and illustrated by Enrique Fernandez. Another on of those I stumbled onto it titles when I was in the comic book store.

Fernandez has a very vibrant color style and great fantastical character designs (is fantastical a word?). It's a very striking book at first glance. He's got a very playful use of curves and angles that's very apparent in his designs for the Lion and the Tin man.

Definitely a pleasant surprise as I thumbed through the pages of this book at the comic book store. Definitely something I'll probably try to have out on the ol' drawing table as I'm coloring my own comic book.

I picked up James Jean's "Process Recess 2" recently and this was also an unplanned buy (lots of impulse buying, huh?!). I've enjoyed his stuff when I first had seen it in the "Fables" comic book covers.

I like his color choices a lot, it's always pushing color theory, using some pretty off-beat colors but stil matching them together. He's very prolific at pumping out his art it seems, leaving me to jealously scratch my head wondering: "how does he do it?" I can barely pump out a black and white page in a couple of days!

The format of the book is to have one side of the page be the finished copy and the other side to have sketches and thumbnails of the piece. Hence the 'process' in process recess. Very inspiring stuff.

Okay, now the last book in our line up is from an illustrator named Shaun Tan. I saw Mr. Tan's work awhile back when I got into collecting children's books. My sister wanted to write a children's book and as she bought a lot of children's books for research, and I ended up being swept up into it as well.

One of the children's book I picked up back then was Shaun Tan's " The Red Tree". This book caught my eye because the imagery and colors were so striking. Very much like a fairy tale, with a lot of vibrant colors. I'll let the pictures do the talking.

He builds in this tiny red leaf into every drawing in the book, almost to a where's Waldo effect, which I can imagine might be fun for the kids to try to look for. The search for the leaf also compliments the story as it's about finding something. A very nice looking book.

Anyway, recently Shaun Tan came out with a graphic novel called "The Arrival". This was another unplanned buy, but I had to snap it up instantly because I'm a fan of his work from The Red Leaf.

The Arrival is a book about immigrants. The experiences, the tragedies, the wonders , the struggles to adjust in a new and foreign land. It's all very lovingly drawn and crafted. Tan choses a more sepia based color scheme, evoking a nostalgic (historical?) feel to the book. It's all wordless, but there's a lot of emotion carried through the panels and the way it's paced.

The book starts off set in what seems like a normal setting, with a man preparing for a trip saying goodbye to his family.

Then as the family walks the man off, the following imagery clues you in to the fact that this is not quite the reality we know.

A lot of this fantastical imagery in the book actually strengthens the narrative. We follow the man into this foreign land, and because the reader has never seen anything this... alien ... we too are put into the man's shoes. We relate to the main character even better. So as we read, we get the same sense of wonder and awe as someone who has immigrated to a different country, only magnified tenfold.

He does a sequence about the amount of red tape and examinations an immigrant might go through early on in the book. By using consistent, gridded pages, Mr. Tan is able to convey the feeling of how tedious and tiring that process can be.

He does a lot of playful things with depicting the passing of time whether it be with numerous panels or one big splash panel. I enjoyed "The Arrival" a lot from both an aesthetic and a sequential story telling sense. Maybe I relate to it a lot because I just got my Green Card?

Anyway, That's it for today! That's how I blew through a wad of cash for Arvin-Con! And that's not even counting the videogames I got or the shameless DVD's I bought (Buffy the Vampire slayer the movie, Big Trouble in little china, Alien Nation, Enemy Mine) Until next post! God Bless!