Earp 2

As Earp 2 is out tomorrow I thought it would be a good time to share some of the pencils with you:





Update: Here is the top page coloured by Kyushik Skin. Looks pretty damn nifty !

UXB gone all superhero and shit!?

34 is up.


...and here's some classic Fall (something for those who can't be arsed going to the comic site) It was either them or Shakin' Stevens...

UXB 33 and some process stuff...

Well what do you know, I got the latest page up just in time...
I'm not going to set a specific day or time for the delivery of each page, I'll be happy just as long as I get it finished and uploaded "sometime" within the week!


I thought I would share some of the stages of getting this thing done.
OK, first is my really rough layout/thumbnail. I usually keep pretty close to the original thumbnail- however a few changes were made on this one. I changed the angle of the carriage in panel 1 and pushed the guys back a little in panel 5 for better readability when the chain comes up into frame in panel 6. I also decided at the last minute to give the "horses" gas-masks ...


I then create an ink layer- lower the opacity of the thumbnail and away I go. It's all pretty organic at this point- resizing when I need to, erasing and redrawing until I'm reasonably happy with the inks. The backgrounds are inked on a separate layer.


Then the speech bubbles are added. The lettering was done by none other than Sean Philips! Yeah, he had some spare time...

...

No not really. I simply used his font, bought and downloaded from the Comic Book Fonts website.
Then it's time to get into the colours. I decided to keep them quite muted and as a final touch faded the backgrounds out a little to give the art a little more depth (another good reason to keep the BG on a separate layer)

And that's it! I'm a terrible fiddler though (no, not a fiddler on a roof or the other type -- you know what I mean!) so I'm sure I'll hate it tomorrow- but for now, at least at this precise moment; I'm quite happy with how it turned out...


Now just to stick it up on the UXBCOMIC website.

Cars

...in the french disco pub style:



I think Bill Bailey has just surpassed Numan's classic; and all it took was some bike horns and a dodgy french accent...

Distractions

UXB 2 and other stuff

Starting into the second run of UXB. The first page was posted last week and the second has just went up.

Will try my best to stay on track.

Other news: I was quite recently brought on board as illustrator for the comic EARP: SAINTS FOR SINNERS ( Radical Publishing.) I penciled only a few pages for issue 1, however with issue 2, I took over as the main artist. I had always wondered what having your work 'inked' by someone else would be like, well... here, I am having my work literally 'painted' over by the artist Kyushik Shin. It should be available early March.

I'll see if I can post some images further down the line.


The covers are by the excellent Alex Maleev.

Tom Baker and the lasso of truth...

Friday the 21st was my last official day in the office. My latest contract for supervising the storyboard dept for the 2nd season of the animated TV series Hot wheels Battle Force Five has reached completion! We had some really great board artists this time around which made my life a lot easier...because believe me; the good and reliable ones are incredibly hard to come by. So Elie, Tom, Jean, Kenny, Todd, Dennis, Victor, Sam, Jae and Joey- Thanks!
Some of those guys may be first season, but whatever...

I never mention my day job on the blog too much as I like to keep the two quite separate...

Come to think of it... I don't talk about storyboarding too much on this blog either. I was asked, quite recently, if I would like to write (and illustrate) a book about the art of storyboarding. I declined the offer.

That's not to say that I may succumb to it at some point. If I did, I think I would like to do it a little differently than the usual text book type approach. The thought of also having to get permission from all the various companies that I have worked with over the years if I wanted to use their boards also puts me off...however, I could quite easily avoid all the red tape if I drew all the content up from scratch, creating completely new boards.

Perhaps it could be a more behind the scenes day to day look at storyboarding. An industry insider look, so rather than getting overtly technical and pontificating about the wonderment of the sequential image... I just bitch and moan and make it more like a comic book, and the comic book becomes the storyboard... hey, hey...that could be fun. Kinda like a Harvey Pekar slice of life, complimented with the wit of Peter Bagge's Hate.

It could be the Samuel Pepys of the storyboard/animation world (minus the eyewitness account of the Black Death of course...) However, I would fear it may end up more in the vein of the Kenneth Williams' diary...

The fact you would be writing about storyboard artists would possibly infuse the comic with an unhealthy amount of hate and despair ....maybe too much. In fact there would be no humour at all...just desperate souls; depressed and lonely crying out at their meaningless existence and onset of carpal tunnel (OK, now I'm just specifically talking about me...)

In all seriousness... do we really need another "how to" book? You would be better off picking up a Toth or an Eisner comic for staging and composition, read some online notes of Brad Bird for the technical blab or better still... watch some f#cking movies!

Myiazaki, Chuck Jones or Hitchcock would be a good start. Quite like that Batman animated also...

Happy New Year.

Here's a freebie for your listening pleasure:

The King Is Dead the latest Decemberists album will be available for streaming in its entirety here until its release on Jan. 18.

As a bonus, here's a track from one of the best albums of last year:
Sufjan Steven's The Age of Adz.



Now that we are all a little older...