I'm going to have to interrupt our regularly scheduled geektacular posts, because I have just gotten a pretty hefty piece of letterage in the mail. So, if you're squeamish with people talking about God, then you may wish to back out of this post, because there'll be nothing but praising coming out of me today, o-boy o-boy! Today, marks a pretty big occasion in my life. A milestone, really.
Today, I got my Green Card!
Let me just state that when I say : "WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
I cannot possibly enter enough "O's" and exclamation points to reflect my joy at finally placing my mitts on this piece of plastic!
I am a permanent resident. I am a permanent resident!
It has been a long wait. Technically, I've been waiting and applying for a Green Card for around 4 years. But as a friend of mine stated, that's not taking into account the trust I've had to build with the company that sponsored me. So basically? It's been a good seven year wait.
I am so very very thankful to God right now, it's not even funny! There have been some pretty trying times placed in my way with the application process. Many times where it seemed if I did not compromise my values, I would not get the card. Many times I was afraid of the uncertainty of it all, and many times I found myself giving in to defeat.
But God held it all in his hands. He always assured me that it would be His will that would be done, no matter what the outcome. He pointed me straight and kept my head up to keep focusing on Him and Him alone. As a Christian, it's His will that I need to make sure is the center of my life. He constantly been reminding me that He's only going to give me the very best and nothing less. Granted, I may not know what the best is for myself most of the time (!)... but He does.
I remember one point in the application process, I actually found myself running around like a chicken with it's head cut off! I was so confused, rattled and just plain ol' stupid that time. Thankfully, He'd shake me out of it, reminding me to keep my pessimism and my doubt in check. He is always there, ready to pick me back up when I stumble and fall.
I cannot forget this day. I cannot dare to forget this day.
I've been clinging onto a simple pair of Bible verses I stumbled onto recently. They've given me comfort in times when life just makes me want to tear my hair out. The hair tearing, by the by, is from other things in life as well, and not just the Green Card! Anyways, the verses go like this:
"But I call to God, and the Lord saves me. Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress and He hears my voice."
-Psalm 55:16-17
I' ve always liked the second line "and the Lord saves me" and the last line "and He hears my voice". Me! He saves me! He hears me! Dorky ol' me! Thank you Lord! Thank you very much for hearing my voice! Thank you.
Good night to you all, and God Bless you as amazingly as He has me.
A few posts ago I had stated that since I missed out on the San Diego con this year, I went ahead an lived it up on my own and had my own imaginary comic con all by lonesome. Sounds kinda sad, in a dorky-sad kinda way, but actually all that escapist entertainment buying was a lot of fun! A lot of it was also spurred on by the fact that work has been really tough lately and my brain needed to do something it enjoyed a lot: geeking out.
So! This brings us to today's post. What did I end up getting during my 'personal comic con'? A lot of stuff, and actually I still seem to be on this mode of buying a lot of comic book related stuff. Not good on the wallet I must say, but very inspiring artistically when I surround myself with great art. Any way, let's get down to it shall we?
This first artist, Kow Yokoyama, I had stumbled through his stuff a while ago, but never bought the books up until now. I had thought it would be good research material for my current project at work.
His designs have a very 'real', utilitarian feel to them, with machinery that looks like it could've functioned in some crazy alternate world war 2 setting. I like this kind of tech where it's rougher, pieced together and not so slick looking.
Excellent designs and really detailed models are photographed in his 2 books "Maschinen Krieger" (volumes 1 and 2). While I saw his sketchbook on sale, I really like looking at the final model pieces.
Next up, I bought Volume 12 of "Modern Masters" (an excellent line of books), featuring Michael Golden . I think the first time I was exposed to Michael Golden was when I saw this crazy drawing he did in the back of Marvel Fanfare (or was it the Blade Runner movie adaptation?) a looong time ago when I was growing up in the Philippines.
I think he was inked by Terry Austin and it basically had every character in the marvel universe in it! I remember being so blown away by it. He is an amazing draftsman with a penchant for drawing very unique and varied faces onto his characters. He does some very crazy inking too!
I always heard about his run on The 'Nam when I was younger but since I was really into superheroes I passed on it. I picked up the compilations when I was in college and I can see how influential he was with the generation of artists after him (Todd McFarlane looks like he has some Golden influence).
There's some great stuff within this issue of Modern Masters, some will make your eyes bleed!
I had gone to Vancouver for vacation with my parents awhile back and I had found this comic book in a used book store by this artist named Nicolas Debon. The book is about a canadian artist named Emily Carr. Now, apparently Carr is a fairly well known artist, but I had just found out about her recently through Debon's book called "Four Pictures by Emily Carr"
It's basically a very simple biography of Carr's life. Debon picks out 4 paintings that Carr made throughout her career, and depicts the things Carr was going through at those periods in her life. Debon breaks the story up into chapters with a reproduction of Carr's paintings starting each one off. It's very fascinating to see Carr's progression within these paintings and it gave me a crash course on just how talented of an artist she was.
What grabbed me with the book was how simple it was to read, almost like a children's book. Debon has a nice color palette throughout the book, and is actually one of the reasons I picked it up.
I'm at a stage where I'm going to color my comic book, so my brain is just ravenous for any sort of color theory that catches my eye. A good find for me overall, 2 artists in one!
I love playing video games. I play a lot of video games. Now I know that's a turn on to all the ladies out there, but ladies please! Not now! I have a blog to dork out on! Ahe-hem. As I was saying, I play a lot of video games so I stumble onto a lot of art within the game and most times the concept artists aren't credited within the game or I can't figure out which name did what. I first saw this next artists' work on an ad for my favorite 3D action game, Shinobi on the PS2 (and I also love it's 'sequel' as well: Nightshade. So sue me.) It looked so kinetic, loose and very free. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out who the artist was. Luckily, that artist has been very prolific, creating artwork for some of the more popular video game titles like Devil May Cry and Sengoku Basara (Devil Kings here in the states). The artist's name is Makoto Tsuchibayashi. The book is called "Design Works" and I think it's published by Capcom (though Shinobi and Nightshade are Sega titles).
My favorite thing about Tsuchibayashi's work is how it retains a lot of gesture. This makes the art very action packed and fluid, with some awesome distortion of anatomy that favors dynamics rather than realism. Alot of times I find it so hard to retain some of the life in my thumbnails when I go to finish. I get too tight on my finishes. Tshuchibayashi on the other hand just gets nutty and seems very confident laying down a messy line. Very cool to see.
The book has a lot of Tsuchibayashi's recent work, but it also has some of the concept work that was done for Devil May Cry. While this isn't my favorite stuff from the artist, as it lacks much of the dynamics I love, it's always awesome to see an artists' progression. Gives me hope that someday maybe I can get better too! I guess I actually need to be drawing to do that huh? Ha!
Next up is "24Seven Volume 2". What can I say? I'm a sucker for anthologies. I mean a bunch of artists in one big book, it's like a cornucopia of flavors in one meal!
While of course there may be some flavors in there that taste like feet, it probably won't last too long, and you can move on to the next tasty flavor. 24Seven's connecting theme is robots. The stories seem to be themed very noir and range in subject matter from spirituality to politics to drugs. Here are some of the artists in the book and some of their pages:
Dave Johnson Gabriel Ba Miguel Alves Calum Alexander Watt Fabio Moon Dan Hipp
There are some stories in 24Seven where it gets hard to follow because the storytelling isn't very clear. Some, just end up bordering on being too preachy and melodramatic. There are some good ones in there too, but when I go into an anthology, I usually throw away the part of my brain that craves a well told story and just looks at all the various art styles I can steal from! Mwoohahaha!
This next book "Notes for a War Story" is drawn by a man named Gipi. It says in the back flap that he's a 'world-class virtuoso of the graphic novel'.
Well, just like Emily Carr I've never heard of Gipi, but I was drawn by the art style he employs in this book. It's the story of 3 friends trying to survive in the middle of some Balkan war. I haven't read through the book yet, but it seems like one of those coming of age stories with friendship at it's core.I like the different faces that Gipi renders throughout the book, everyone has a very distinct look, and he's got a very loose and painterly touch to them. There's a lot of texture and character that he plays with within his lines, colors and choices of shapes.Seeing European comics always reminds me of different ways of approaching sequential art, it's like this whole other culture and line of thinking that hasn't been very accessible to me from the comic book stores around me. There's a lot of awesome artists out there for me to find!
Wow. I bought a lot of stuff huh! And I'm not even done yet! Okay, I'm going to take a break for tonight. I have 5 more books to go! Two of which I actually just got recently, and again I wasn't expecting to actually buy these 2 books, but it's one of those strolling into the comic book store and inadvertently stumbling onto some great art type of situations! Okay, until next we meet good night and God bless!
I really have to fix up my website. That thing is looking old and busted, hardly the new hotness I used to think it was! Erg. There's definitely some stuff in there that's pretty cringe worthy. Trouble is, I remember it was a lot of work prepping up a lot of the things in that site when I coded it. The thought of a redesign is making me want to forget the whole thing! I just don't have the time right now. Maybe next year when my projects let up.
For this post, I'm putting up some old designs I did a while back for a video game pitch. Looking back at old stuff, at least in this case, is fun. I get to see where some of my bad habits are. When I'm drawing I get too antsy to get into the finishing part, that I tend to neglect the important stuff. Sure, I gloss over the usual stuff: mass, tangents, etc. But I find the funniest one I see in my work that I mess up is symmetry. Just look on over to the robot drawings: he's leaning to the left a bit.
Of course I could always pull the "not enough time" card to explain away the carelessness with many of these drawings. A lot of the character designs I've done for work has been under a short amount of time, and my bad habits tend to become magnified! And since the project I'm on now has a compressed schedule, and I've been really working hard to constantly double check myself every time. But really, when do we ever get enough time to do what we want?
Some of the turnarounds I did for this current project are rife with the symmetry funkyness. Thank goodness for being able to mirror images digitally! I think as an artist I get too tight too fast on most of my drawings. I need to remember to step back and not be afraid to scrap ideas and start over when things aren't working.
Lately, I've been doing a lot of digital correction and 'inking' with my current project... maybe I can get fast enough to work digitally that I won't be under so much pressure, and keep my bad habits in check? One can only hope!
That's it for today! next post I'll put up some of the cool books I bought during my shopping spree. I know I said that in my previous post but there's just so many, I get lazy just thinking about all the scanning and picture taking I have to do! Haha! And this is why my website barely gets updated! But I really do want to geek out a bit with the stuff I got! There's so many talented artists out there, it's fun to look at everybody stuff (humbling but very fun nonetheless!) Til next post, God bless!
Well 2007's San Diego Comic Con has come and gone, and alas, I couldn't make it down there this year! I'll just be living vicariously through the boys at Ghostbot as they post up some of the cool swag they picked up on their blog! It's been busy at work lately and I've found that the more stressful work gets the more of comics and toys I buy! This week specially, has been me compensating for not being able to go down to the con, so I picked up 100+ dollars worth of just various comic book (and not-so comic book) stuff! My brain must've figured since I couldn't go to the con, I'll just make my own con up here! Minus, of course, all the cool stuff that happens at the con! Sigh... Anyway for this post I'm just going to put up some stuff I drew on my own time while I was going through some reference material for work. I did this awhile back when I actually still had my own time outside of work! I kinda liked how some of the faces turned out, and maybe once I finish my current comic book, I'll try to explore this style further for my next comic book title. Uhhh, I'd better finish this batch of books first before I start daydreaming about the next one though, huh?
I'll try to post up some of the stuff I picked up on my binge in my next entry. While some are fairly cool, a bunch of it's just me... buying stuff for buying's sake! My wallet's not digging that! Not cool! Until next time! God Bless!
It has been an absolutely INSANE 2 and a half weeks! Work has been killing me, and I have had absolutely no life (not a big change but still, I'm dead tired!)! It's been eat, work and sleep. I'm cranking in some serious double digit hours-a-day for the past two and a half weeks. We have a killer deadline coming up and I'm not sure how much more my body can take, but hopefully it will all slow down a little bit by the 5th. And then my work hours will go from seriously-mega-insane to just plain stoopid-insane. I just have to hold out!
Okay, no more work talk! I will enjoy as much of my Sunday as I can! Don't think I have the strength to gab and ramble as much as I usually do on my blog, but that just means more pictures and less talk!
After the roughs, comes the obligatory run to kinko's to blow up my image onto two 11 x 17 proportions and then I use that a template for my bluelined pencils: I used to lightbox my layouts alot after the kinko's stage, but I really like working directly over my tighter layouts, so the non-photo blue method is my preference. There's something that's mentally freeing for me when I work like this. Here are the pencils: After this I make another Kinko's run and get my blacks to tighten up. Then I scan the photocopy in and spot my blacks ala Photoshop's lasso tool. After this I went onto the coloring stage using Photoshop. I usually color very simply, but even though the application is very fast with ol' bucket Phil, I end up tweaking a lot of values and messing around with stuff towards the end. I really wanted for a very eye-grabbing color, hence the crazy pink. I felt it was a color I don't really see much on the stands and I wanted this book to pop. And actually it cause a little bit of a controversy at work because people weren't to receptive of it. And honestly I didn't know how people would react to it. But the one thing I did know was that if there was one thing I wanted to stay it was this pink, consarnit!
I got in touch with Image comic for the size they needed the piece to be and I have to say I've grown up with comic books all my life but I never realize what an odd size it's in! I had to re-adjust the cover's dimensions a bit to fit tradepaperback size and cropping, but in all it was for the best.
Also I've never done print work before so I was EXTRA paranoid about converting the colors from RGB to CMYK. Some colors I used just didn't translate very well (like the pink!). Certain things had to change when I converted it over like DJ's head and the zombies' eyes.
GAH! What is that funky monstrosity above! Why, it's my DJ Paperback final CMYK colors! Wow, it looks even MORE horrible on blogger! Anyway, the actual file looks good in Photoshop but it looks horrible on normal computer browsers!
So I sent this off to Image to have printed and forgot about it when work started to get on a roll again. Oop, I said no more work talk! Anyway let's avert our eyes from that and onto the final printed cover. I was so excited when I first saw this on the comic book racks! My first comic book cover! Printed and on the shelves! The colors came out nice, the cover stock was a nice matte finish, it all came together well! I am definitely eternally thankful to my bosses at work and of course to God that I got this chance to realize a lifelong dream! A comic book cover by me! I need to get better dreams! Haha!
Looks like I managed to ramble on anyways, even though I promised to shut my trap! I'm hoping to start up coloring on my own comic book one of these days and I'll try to post up progress on those as I go along! Until next post! Good night and God Bless!
I worked on a cover for Backbone Entertainment's comic book called Death Jr. a while back, but I wasn't able to post up my progress while working on it. I just recently got the go ahead to blog it up from Backbone's PR since the book just came out this past Wednesday! It's the cover to DJ's collected second arc as written by Gary Whitta with interior art drawn by Ted Naifeh. Work's been really busy for me lately and I had actually totally forgotten about the cover. I had no real idea when the release date of the book was going to be. Imagine my surprise as I was just doing the usual comic book run at Dr. Comics and Mr. Games, when out from the corner of my eye I notice something familiar on the shelf... It was my cover! This is my first cover for a comic book so I was absolutely floored to see it on the comic book shelf! The feeling was surreal... I can't describe it! I picked it up and was just staring at it all during lunch. My first cover! In my hands! Printed! On an Image comic! Wow. I couldn't believe it!
Anyway enough blubbering and senseless prattling ! I'm here to post up some pictures on the process it took me to get that sucker done! This will be a 2 part post. This first bit will be all about pre-production: when I'm trying to figure out the look of the characters and the layout of the cover.
I initially did a bunch of sketches, mainly to get the feel of the characters and what Death Jr. would look like. I remembergoing through alot of drawings trying to figure him out. Did I want him cute? What kind of shape was his head? How did I want to draw him? What pose was he going to be in?
I knew I wanted DJ to be in an action pose, being very much the hero. To me, his character, while like-able, was someone that could easily be overshadowed by other characters, like Pandora. I always felt that Death Jr. played Mickey mouse to Pandora's Donald duck. So this time, I wanted to give DJ the spotlight.
Next up on the design task was the rest of the scooby gang (sorry watching too much Buffy!) Surprisingly, they weren't as painful of an experience. Maybe I was a little bit more comfortable and less apprehensive with drawing them once I had kind of figured out the look for DJ.
On a long side note: I was really nervous about drawing this cover because A) It was my first one and B) Well, because I was kinda following after the first volumes' cover artist. Which uh, was by a guy named Mike Mignola! Holy Polaris, Batman! Trust me, it was super sweaty palms all around while I was drawing it! My palms are sweating now as I'm typing about it! And! AND! As if that wasn't enough to make me feel insecure, they put the wrong cover image of the Death Jr. Vol. 2 trade on the Image comics website (and in Previews too, I believe!). And guess who that drawing was actually by? Oh just some dude named Jeff Matsuda! You know the guy who did the designs for the recent TMNT movie. You know, the dude who designed the new Batman Adventures stuff. Yeah. That dude. Saints preserve us! But wait it gets better! The reason I had gotten the cover job was actually because the original guy slated to do it was swamped with work. And that guy was this guy named Steve Purcell. You know? The guy that did Sam and Max? Oh yeah. That guy. Hera help me! It's a waterfall in my palms now! (side note to the side note: cool! Jeff Matsuda chose the same 'blog-skin' that I did! ...Oooookay...)
Okay anyway, enough with the ventage (What can I say? All the Buffy and Angel DVD sets were for 20 bucks at Best Buy! I can't stop it from seeping in every now and then!). With the DJ gang designs out of the way, I started drawing the bad guys of the book. Fitting them into the appropriate style and looking at Mr. Naifeh's drawings to get a basis for the characters.
Then, I went on to some thumbnails as to how I'd like to compose this 2 page spread. Lemme tell ya, the 2 page spread, while they may be the COOL-est thing for readers to see? They can be pretty difficult to plan out! Here's the sketch that got me started:
I chose the smaller one to the bottom right as my composition, and started to lay it out on a slightly bigger sized area (half an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper). The idea would be DJ and Pandora are on the front page fighting off a horde of somethings away from their friends. But unbeknownst (always wanted to say that) to them they are all being flanked by the main bad guys on the back cover. I a bit stumped at who I could draw as the 'somethings' that DJ and Pandora were fighting. I had no ideas who they could be...
I had only read the first 2 issues of the collection, and the third one was still in production. As far as the first 2 books were concerned there weren't any big fights or any distinctive mass of bad guys that I could really draw. Luckily, the third script had just come in and I was privy to some juicy plot points. And lo and behold, I had the best subject matter for DJ to slice and dice: zombies (well kinda)!
I got the pieces all in place, but there were still some things about it that I wasn't too keen on. The enemies in the back cover page, for example, or DJ's pose. I had some friends take a look at it and just give me some feed back and came up with this sketch:
DJ's foot position was changed, and I also changed the pose of the big guy in the suit and the guard hat. I figured I needed to break that composition of the swoop that made up the large black shape that held the cover together. I didn't like how DJ's foot ended up though, and the break-out shape still wasn't quite there. So this came about:
I was pretty happy with how this turned out, and I was really itchin' to finally draw this cover up. My friend Rocky had commented DJ's foot and Pandora's hair were too close together in composition. It'd be nicer to have them further apart and let that space breathe. He had a point, but I really wanted to get out of the thumbnail stage SO bad, I went ahead and blew it up at Kinko's to prep it up for the blue line pencil stage. I figured the remaining issues were something I could fix in the drawing stage or in Photoshop.
And that's it for part one! It makes me cringe to see all this pre-production stuff posted up here, but hey, warts and all only on this blog, right?! Next post will be about the drawing process and the finishes! Tune in for the next exciting installment! God Bless!
Instead of starting off with how long it's been since my last post (like all my other posts), let's jump into it shall we?
I wanted to add some form of background to the comic book's main character, with all the action that's been going on I realized, why would any reader care if these characters were put in danger? This was the first issue: no one knows who these people are! So I added this page in, as a little flashback when my character loses consciousness in page 22.The thing is though, after doing this page I feel I need some more pages to it. So... I think I might actually add 2 more pages into the front of the book... maybe. Anyway, I guess I'll make the judgement whether I need those 2 pages, once I comp my book up. So! What took me so long to do this page! I have no idea! It's just a bunch of black panels!
This page will mainly be text driven, I wanted it to be from the main character's point of view, so the reader ends up being in her shoes. Yeah, I know it's not a very subtle way of making the reader 'connect' with the character but, hey! Go draw your own comic if you disagree so much! I initially wanted to do the wavy borders for the flashback sequence, but in the end I chose to go with the motion of the tilted panels that were built in from pages 22 and 24. I'm also going to make sure that when I color this page in, the color scheme is totally different from the previous pages. I have to make sure that the reader knows we're somewhere and somewhen else. I want to confuse them a little, but not too much.
Man, this page has so much nothing in it, it's a wonder I took so long! Sigh.
I cannot possibly enter enough "O's" and exclamation points to reflect my joy at finally placing my mitts on this piece of plastic!
