Blog? Blog!

So it has been forever since I updated this poor blog. I have been drawing a lot in recent months, but none of it has been personal work. I've been doing some freelance storyboard work for Cartoon Network since August, which has been a lot of fun and I'm hoping they bring in full-time after the holidays. Who knows, though, it's been a long time since these kinds of things have worked out in my favor.

What little spare time I've had for drawing has been on commission work, which I fished for a while ago while unemployed and am only now really starting to get bites on (figures,when I'm too busy with my CN stuff to work on it). In the end it hasn't left much time to draw on my own.

Anyways, here's a doodle:

Meme

So there's this meme floating around on DeviantArt, it's pretty self-explanatory. I totally left out two expressions, and I need to go back and fix a lot of the others, but I know this next week is going to be crazy busy for me and I'm not going to be able to get around to those fixes for a while.

Sorry there's not more text to accompany this, I started a contract position at DIS today and I'm pretty beat - I don't know how well the day went in terms of the work I produced, to be honest, so the stress of that plus the fact that I'm just bone tired means a short post.

I also start a four-week action storyboarding class at Cartoon Network tomorrow night, so between the workload for that, DIS, and sleep I'm not going to have much time for my own art. Not that I've been really posting much lately anyways, I guess. But still, better too busy than not busy enough!

P.S.: On the subject of DeviantArt, here's the last comment I got: "the only thing that I dislike about your artwork is the eyes and faces of your people." Awesome!

Test panel

Inked with Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop. Still not satisfied. Will try another panel from the same page in another style.

There are a few leads from the CalArts job fair last week that I'm following up, plus some other opportunities as well. Hopefully something comes out of one of these things.

Tests

So anyone who reads this blog knows I've been punting around a comic idea in my head, but there are a variety of obstacles in my path. One, I need to find a method of cleaning things up that's fast but still appealing to me. Two, I need to find a method of coloring that also fits those criteria. I've yet to come across a clean-up method that I like as much as my sketch linework; cleanup is notorious for murdering the life of a drawing. I wasn't satisfied with the linework and coloring of the two test pages I did before, so I'm going to be experimenting with a couple different approaches in the next few days. I also still need to get some color issues worked out so that what I update on my main monitor looks like what I drew on my Cintiq. I've just been kind of hoping that what everyone else sees is closer to the latter than to the former.

Then there are story issues, but that's a massive pickle in and of itself. I did want to age up the boy character a bit, he was too young for where I would want to take the story.

Basically, "working on it" for the past week has meant idly sketching some characters, plotting vague story points and structures, and playing a lot of Fallout 3.

Quick Manga Studio doodle

To try it out. It's ruler functions sound amazingly useful for background work; I figured that kind of thing was something one would wish for but would never actually get. Honestly haven't tried it yet, though, so it might not be as amazing as I'm hoping for.

Fun fact: in Japan, Manga Studio is called "Comic Studio," because manga is a word in Japanese that means comic. Despite the name, it seems like a useful tool. John Allison uses it, after all, and he's never, ever wrong.

One last

Here's one of the last things I did for my GDC portfolio, which I figured I should post up since I haven't posted anything for a while.

Pretty sure GDC was a bust, job-wise. Haven't heard anything from the handful of places that had openings I could apply to.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing next; probably a mix of working on a Flash portfolio, taking some CG animation classes over the summer, and applying to some TV places I haven't applied to in a long while. There's the CalArts job fair in a month, but I haven't had much luck with that in the past and the alumni table is notoriously overlooked.

Run-veeeeigh

So Lissa had gotten me season 1 of Project Runway, which I plowed through earlier this week while working. I ended up picking up season 2 today while I was at Fry's (our old router went bust after some 9 years in service) and started watching it tonight. I sketched out my two favorite designers at the end of the first episode, and it's interesting that I did this because the very next episode revealed one of them (Andrae) to be totally effing crazy-pants. I also liked the nerdy Asian girl initially, but the tight time constraints of the show really don't allow her to incorporate any goofy wrist computers or hoodies with thermoptic camoflauge, so her gimmick is kind of lost. Also Austin Scarlett from S1, because he's super-fab.

That stupid Fidel Castro dude was appealing initially, but he's such a raging asshole that I can't stand him anymore. And yeah, I know that we're waiting on season 6 now and season 2 is old hat, but whatever. I'm slow that way with television shows. I also know who wins in the end, but don't know anything else, though the urge to check Wikipedia grows stronger by the episode. Right now my favorite for second place is Nick.

Also, I finished up a card the other day and took it to a place to print. I ended up going with the steam guy; I did like the girl but the drawing was irking me and I just felt like the trooper dude honed in a little better on the target demographic for next week (sorry, Nicole!). I kind of stopped working on her about 2/3 of the way through.

I can shut up about these cards now; I kind of just wanted some more finished drawings on the top of the page.

card designs

So a couple of the drawings are kind of crappy because I'm coming down with a massive, massive headache today, but I'm trying to solicit opinions on designs for business cards to hand out.
I'm worried I caught something at Disneyland, that notoriously filthy vector for diseases, over the weekend.

Other things

So I need to get a few other things ready for GDC and wanted to get some input. One is the spine for my portfolio, in the past I've just had my name info but that's kind of boring. I figured I'd get some artwork on the spine, with just a small bit of room for my name and info or maybe just putting that on the back. I was thinking of going with a group shot of the modern characters I designed a while back:

Alternatively, I could go with the some other guys. There's always something cool about dudes streaking through the air on rocket packs.

I've just got a cheap Itoya portfolio; I can't afford to spend $100 on a fancy portfolio case. There's always this niggling doubt at the back of my mind that recruiters look down on people with the same cheap Itoya portfolio as everyone else, but rationally I know they're more concerned with the contents than the delivery. I thought it'd be cool to do a wide aspect ratio portfolio, too, especially since I have a bunch of lineups.

I also need to get some business cards printed, I was thinking a design like this:

What do you guys think? Do you like them, do you like the idea but would rather other characters, or would you suggest something else? Obviously they'd be tricked out with color later.

I've still got like four major things left to do, and I'm running out of time. Gotta be working harder.

Man

So I have hit artist's block so hard the last couple days. I can't do anything I'm happy with.

On the other hand, this has been great for my Killzone 2 score. I was in the top 6% of the world last week. How? By being a sneaky little bomb-laying bastard, of course.

Dude

So I drew this thing, so I could feel less guilty while I'm playing the Killzone 2 multiplayer.
Same thing as the fantasy chick a couple posts ago. I want to get maybe one more steampunk design in, an environment or two, a monster for these fantasy characters, some storyboards, and maybe a couple vehicles in before the 25th of March. Pretty ambitious, I'll need to stop wasting time with KZ2. Y'know, later.

Guy

New things

More portfolio stuff. First character is a redesign of an old one that I never really liked, one of the protagonists from the universe with the previous soldier dudes. Second one is just a random fantasy thing.

Third verse, same as the first

Third one in this particular line-up. This is the one I like the most so far. I'm hoping the colors on my Cintiq are way more accurate than the colors on my monitor, though.

More shtuff

So that cleaned up drawing I did a few posts ago of the girl was a bit too clean for my liking. I liked the looser linework of the color test I did before, despite it being a weaker drawing. Hopefully I managed to capture that again with this other character from the same lineup; I'll probably re-do the linework on the girl at some point.

I also finished the third steam trooper and posted the lineup on my portfolio blog, since I didn't want to make a new post specifically for him as he's less interesting than the other two.

Follow up

I didn't get as much done the past three days as I'd have liked to do, between the super bowl, seeing Slumdog Millionaire (just to confirm what everyone else has said, it's really good), and a freelance test I've been working on. I did just finish up this guy, though. Fits into the same lineup as the guy in the last post, though he's popped up on this blog before a few times. One more in that line-up, then I plan to finish up the line-up the girl fits into. Can I finish these by the end of the week? Highly unlikely!

What do these two drawings have in common?

They were the first two finished characters to be drawn on my new Cintiq! I'm totally digging this thing. I wanted to take a picture of my workspace to show alongside them, but I'm having trouble getting a new video card working for my computer; this means I haven't gotten both the Cintiq and the monitor running simultaneously and that was the shot I really wanted to get.

Also, the contract work I mentioned a few posts ago officially went belly up after DIS underwent a major round of layoffs this Thursday, so I can't afford any of this. So that's awesome.

Sketching away

So as I mentioned in my last art post, I've been tooling away on a bunch of projects even though I haven't been posting much. The images I've been spending the most time on are a couple of lineups that aren't ready to be shown, but I figured I'd post a few sketches I was doing tonight of one of the hero characters for the steampunk project in my portfolio.

Testing

I'm re-working my portfolio, so I've got several projects I'd like to get character and environmental designs for. Ideally I can get a distinct visual style for each of them going on, and this is just a color test for the first of them (actually, the first of them is just me collecting the old steampunk stuff I did and re-doing it).

EDIT: Accidentally loaded a ginormous version. Fixed.

New Year's resolution

Maintain a paycheck for longer than a month.

That's the main one. The contract work that I mentioned in my previous post has been pushed back, and I'm reaching that point where I'm starting to get worried. So far my plan if this gig doesn't work out is basically to cross my fingers really, really hard. You might be thinking, "Jason, that's not a very good plan." And you'd be right. It's a terrible plan.

Anyways, I doodled a colored version of an old design I posted a few months back. I've been trying to use various brushes to get a more textured feel.

Hope you're all having a good new year!