My Comic Book - Page 24 - Finishes Part 2

All done! Putting this page to finish was a great way to start off the year! I have been so creatively blocked these past few days, it's been a relief for me to finally get this out of the way. The strange thing is, looking at this page, there wasn't anything really that particularly difficult about it to warrant me getting stalled in drawing it. Just my brain going "duh", I suppose. One of those creative mysteries that just simply happens, I suppose. One day you zoom by a page and the next day you can't even bring yourself to draw a straight line. I don't think I could ever get rid of those lull periods permanently but I think I can keep on drawing and practicing so that those long stretches of creative blocks can be shortened.

The next step is to go to Kinko's to get the darks to an inked look, and I may be messing around with it to add some speed lines and spot in some blacks. That stuff I think I can do digitally though. So, I will have one more page to do and I can put the penciled art for issue one to bed! Quite exciting! Anyways, that's it for tonight! This past year has been a good year, many changes and many, many lessons. I'm quite fortunate that God's given me a countless number of blessings this past year, both big and small, and I hope He does the same for you! Happy New Year!

My Comic Book - Page 24 - Finishes Part 1

Yep. Still procrastinating!

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Comic Book - Page 24 - Roughs

I am still procrastinating like crazy.

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

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

Argh.

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

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

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

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

I hope.

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

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

Getting back on track

I have hit a wall.

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

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

Not gonna happen.

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

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

For Mr. Lau

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

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


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


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

For the Shanth Man

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

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

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

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

...uh...

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 12 - Page 22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 11 - Page 22

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 10 - Page 22

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

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

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 9.25 - Page 20 and 21

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

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

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

Hanggang sa susunod! God Bless and Good Night!

My Comic Book - Day 9 - Page 21

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

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 8 - Page 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 7- Page 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 5.25 - Page 19

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 5 - Page 19

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

Okay... maybe-sorta-kinda!

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

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 4 - Page 19

This will be a pretty quick post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now onto the REAL meat of this blog!

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

Steadler non-photo blue

Prismacolor non-photo blue


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

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

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

My Comic Book - Day 2 - Page 17

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

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

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

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