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.