I’ve been thinking for a while on how I can approach the subject of color theory as an artist who works primarily in black & white. I know how to work in color as well, and I choose to work in monochrome for the benefits it gives, but no matter what your artistic intentions are you op...
2015-01-02 09:43:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello! It's been a busy holiday week for me and this is actually the last post of the year so I wanted to just take a moment to say thank you to everyone who has been supporting me in this endeavor. You mean so very much and I try my hardest every month to return on your support. Thanks for sticking...
2014-12-27 03:06:26 +0000 UTC View Post
I like to make very painterly comics, as you may have noticed, and I like to draw backgrounds in all of my panels. I also write a story which can call for lots and lots of people to show up in the background, and since I’m not just doing lineart and simple tonework for all of my art...
2014-12-19 08:00:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Here is the weekly progress I've made on the comic since last week's post. As you can see I'm very nearly done with it, I just need to knock out some backgrounds and put my patented hand-lettering technique over the dummy font. I'm expecting this page will be done by the end of the weekend, since th...
2014-12-12 09:24:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Whenever we start telling a story we have thousands of ideas in our heads we want to fit into the narrative. We often think up tons of details and little side-stories we want to include in our comics, and we only think up more as we push forward in our work. It’s a natural par...
2014-12-12 09:21:04 +0000 UTC View Post
When planning the overarching story arcs of my comics I know where I want them to end up, but the details in between I tend to iron out organically as I come to them. I never thumbnail too far ahead, usually only a few pages at a time, and by the time I burn through those thumbnails I...
2014-12-05 09:44:36 +0000 UTC View Post
If there is one major thing I learned from making a webcomic it’s how much things can change the longer you work on something. Writing a story comic is a long-term endeavor whose length isn’t readily apparent from the start, or even at the halfway point, especially if you’re wri...
2014-11-26 05:39:49 +0000 UTC View Post
When I was younger I had the privilege of going to a formal art school and one of the foundational things they teach us is perspective. We learned about horizon lines, vanishing points and the geometric formulas to accurately scale same-sized objects (in our case telephone poles) at t...
2014-11-21 07:07:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Last week I did an overview of my comicmaking process up to the point where I had my sketches done. This week I’m going to continue the series for this page just to push it along as quick as possible. Over the years I’ve developed a somewhat-efficient system of making comic-...
2014-11-14 10:53:08 +0000 UTC View Post
For this week’s art journal I’d like to do something a little different from normal. Over the past few weeks I’ve been very busy working on things I wasn’t allowed to share- which makes it terrible journal material- so I’ve been digging into lesson-style conceptual breakdown...
2014-11-07 08:29:49 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been a while since I've been able to work on my comic, since I was working on game stuff for SPX. I started the comic page once I got back but some freelance work fell in my lap and that took me the better part of the month to do. I started it up again on Sunday and I was hoping to have it done...
2014-10-31 11:13:43 +0000 UTC View Post
I’ve been thinking about doing a writeup about letters for a while. There are a lot of areas to explore about them and I like to keep these journals organized, following some sort of internal rhythm to help all the words make sense, and I haven’t been sure how to capture that rhyt...
2014-10-31 11:08:33 +0000 UTC View Post
I haven’t been able to work on my comic recently but it wasn’t by laziness or disinterest. As you may have heard I was hired last month to draw a full seven-page comic in another artist’s style, which was a very interesting challenge to tackle so naturally I jumped on the opportunity....
2014-10-24 09:01:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Cars are probably one of the more intimidating elements of a modern or semi-modern story setting that you can’t really always get away without ever drawing. What probably makes them really intimidating from a design perspective is that they’re made up of so many facets which themselves ...
2014-10-17 10:07:32 +0000 UTC View Post
I was thinking about what I could write about for this next article and I thought about machines, since that’s a sort of thing people tend to have trouble drawing. The first machine I thought about was firearms, and then I started breaking the article apart in my head: classical handguns,...
2014-10-10 08:11:55 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been a bit since I posted a comic page. I've been busy splitting my time among other projects but I budgeted a couple hours and started fleshing out the thumbnails I'd plotted. This page is a very social back-and-forth between the town's mayor and the sheriff so I did a lot of camera-turning an...
2014-10-03 06:34:24 +0000 UTC View Post
I know I say a lot of things are my “favorite part” of making comics but for serious, motion is probably my most-favoritest part of making comics. It’s an illusion; a magic trick where you simulate motion in a motionless format. This week I’d like to talk about how I app...
2014-10-03 06:29:50 +0000 UTC View Post
From the very beginning of my comic-making career I’ve experimented with how to draw clothing and I can freely report that it’s actually pretty tricky to master! It’s a case of layers, where bones move flesh which is encased in fabric and different tightness, thickness and quali...
2014-09-26 10:05:44 +0000 UTC View Post
I’m finally home from SPX and I’m completely burnt from traveling so I decided to give myself something light to work on that I can type up quickly and get some rest (next week is going to be a big lesson post about drawing clothing folds and wrinkles, by the way), so I decided to expan...
2014-09-19 08:28:58 +0000 UTC View Post
This week is SPX and I’m cutting down to the wire preparing for a big trip but I don’t want to do a “we won’t update this week” sort of thing because that would not be responsible of me, so I’m going to share something interesting instead. I’d like to keep doing longer l...
2014-09-12 06:34:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Hands are, hands down, the hardest parts of the human body to draw in handsome illustrations. It can be a real white-knuckle affair trying to handle that sort of curving, overlapping topography but there are a handful of handy tricks you can thumb through to get a better grasp on what it is...
2014-09-05 12:17:49 +0000 UTC View Post
This week I’d like to continue the art lesson-oriented journal entries and write a little bit about how to draw a human head, and by “draw” I don’t mean a technical lesson on how to actually -draw- a head. My aim in writing these types of journal posts is to provide insight an...
2014-08-29 10:24:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's the current state of the comic. I've been tangled up with other things this week so I couldn't put as much time into it as I'd have liked to, but I'm nearly out of the foreground stage. I should have it backgrounded and out the door this weekend, but one way or another I promise you this is t...
2014-08-22 09:47:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Everyone knows having a reasonable understanding of anatomy is important to drawing people. Even if you choose to bend the rules and draw cartoony it behooves you to have a working knowledge of how the human body is built so your abstraction into cartoon is informed and makes sense. &...
2014-08-22 09:43:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Here is a progress on the page so far, I got hung up on other work all week and I just got the inks and some painting done, but this page also illustrates a couple points I was making in my post about Lighting, namely how I try to facet my subjects in terms of where I want the light to come from and...
2014-08-15 10:16:25 +0000 UTC View Post
As anyone who has followed the development of my art over the past seven years can tell, lighting is one of my absolute favorite parts of painting. Light and shadow have such an incredible power to affect depth, space, perspective, reader attention, mood and every artistic element und...
2014-08-15 10:10:22 +0000 UTC View Post
This week I’d like to talk about an abstract concept, one which is often spoken of but hard to define and even harder to measure or quantify. It’s an inseparable part of the creative process known as either Artist’s or Writer’s Block and it’s been the accused in the deaths o...
2014-08-08 10:10:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I used to stream my workspace while I made comics, but I’d only ever broadcast the inking or painting phases, the latter being so slow-crawling a process that I am convinced no one actually wants to watch it. Painting backgrounds is usually more engaging because more obvious things ...
2014-08-01 10:24:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking less about the mechanical process of drawing comics and more about the methods of writing them (mostly because it’s interesting but partly because I’ve been focusing on game development and non-comic freelance work lately). I talked abou...
2014-07-25 09:54:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Last week I talked about writing and creating characters and the evolving process of turning a general idea into a flawed and multi-faceted human being with goals, ambitions, hangups and social connections. This week I’d like to continue talking about the writing process and go into...
2014-07-18 09:18:29 +0000 UTC View Post