Nextwave Sequentials (Part 2)
Posted by admin | Filed under Art, Work
Finally got around to finishing the second half of the set. In case you missed the first set, here are pages one, two, and three. These were all done on paper slightly larger than actual print size. Roughly 7.5 x 11.5 inches, give or take a cm. Here’s the plot if anyone wants to use it:
Page 4
——
Panel 1
Tabby starts to rant about why she should be team leader on account of how many X-teams she’s been in. Cap just gives her a “Psshh” expression. Aaron is still checking out Elsa.
Panel 2
Tabby yells at Monica, “And excuse me! ‘CAPTAIN MARVEL’?!? Aren’t the Avengers pissed you named yourself after a downed comrade? Hellooooooo…”
Panel 3
Close up of Mon: “Well, we’re cool now…”
Panel 4
Shot of Mon in bed with Starfox. Awwwwkwaaaaard…
Panel 5
Nearly identical to panel 3, but she has a kind of sheepish expression.
“We’re cool.”
Page 5
——
Panel 1
Monica’s POV. Tabby and Cap are just staring at her. Half pissed, half unimpressed. no dialogue in this panel, so win it with the facial expressions. Maybe Tabby’s got a huge bubble goin’, but her eyes are hella bored.
Panel 2
Same POV, but now Cap shrugs and says he thinks he should be team leader. Ignoring him, Aaron and Monica have turned their attention to Elsa, who’s looking at a screen and is gesturing for everyong to check out what she’s seeing.
Panel 3
They all crowd around the monitor. POV is from the monitor itself. Think Maguire JLA cover, but tighter and lower. They all look as if they’re in awe, except for Cap who’s a bit pissed that he’s not being listened to, but he’s also intrigued at what the team’s looking at.
Page 6
——
Panel 1 (Splash)
Exterior shot of the Shockwave Rider. We are trailing behind it as it flies toward a gigantic Cthulhu-esque creature.
“So uhhh… you still wanna lead the team?”
end
This page, I admit is a little in-jokey. Just FYI, Starfox was one of the Avengers against Monica using the codename Captain Marvel. Heck, he didn’t even want her on the team. I decided not to do what I planned in the thumbnails for panel 4 because Starfox without his uniform on, well… he looks like Wolverine. And I knew the panel couldn’t be very big, so I couldn’t really draw him differently enough to make him read as not Wolverine. So I opted to just show their uniforms on the floor. Doesn’t leave too much to the imagination, and the letterer can have his fun.
Did panel 2 differently so I could show people approaching Elsa rather than just feet walking toward her from behind. Third panel is my first attempt at something a la JLA demigod Kevin Maguire. See roughs.
Anyone who’s been following me on Twitter (JohnAmor) knows how much fun I had drawing Cthulhu. I did studies and all that junk. Whoodathunk I’d enjoy it that much? I had to change the camera’s position though because he just didn’t feel threatening enough when seen from above. Rule: Cthulhu does not ever look up at something. He just doesn’t do it. I wanted to do an up-shot instead, but that woulda made the squad’s ship too tiny.
So that’s the end of that. Sending these off to some editors and fellow artists for some feedback, then I’ll check on some awesome people I’m lucky enough to be doing collaborations with. Why they agreed, I still don’t know. Kicking the idea of doing Thor sequentials around in my head.
Tags: Art, comics, cthulhu, Next Wave, sequentials
Noise
Posted by admin | Filed under Rants, Work
It’s always there. Waiting. Mountain lion to your biker. Housefly to your warm apple pie. Mousetrap to your… mouse. I’m talking about distractions. They seem to be in cahoots with Murphy’s Law as to the absolute right time to strike and cripple my progress train.
I won’t be able to do the last page of my Next Wave sequentials quite yet coz I got assigned a bunch of tasks by this company I’ve been working hard to get into. I used to tell my college professors I’d get by just drawing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, that was before I had bills to pay. It’s not a comic-related job, this, but it’s the most promising illustration gig in town I could find. Managed not to make too big of an ass of myself at today’s meeting. Hope they bite. Also, if all goes well, I may be able to land an arrangement that will allow me to work from home a few days out of a week. Fuck-Win-Yay if that pushes through.
:::: :::: :::: ::::
I drink milk from a Bud Light glass.
Hardcore.
:::: :::: :::: ::::
I’m wondering if the 11×17-inch standard working size for comic pages is really mandatory. I’ve drawn on 8×11.5 (half the size above) since I started drawing sequentials seriously at the age of twelve, and it (to me anyway) comes out looking fine. I like to think I do details well enough. I don’t go all David Finch or Platt anyway, I tend to do simple bold lines a la Immonen or Ringo (bless you)… so maybe I can get away with working on paper slightly larger than actual print size. Should remember to ask an editor about that.
Anyway, yeah. I have to take a quick break from the NextWave stuff for dayjob reasons for a bit. But I already have some studies for the monster who will appear in the last page. And i’m quite happy with how that turned out. Chaz is busy coloring a piece I drew for some Steampunk fairytale contest thing we’re participating in purely for shits and giggles. Santini’s drawn his half of our collaborative piece. Viking Vemp and I are still planning our joint drawing. More on these and the final NextWave page in a couple of days.
Hopefully. Hope hope hope.
Tags: Art, artist, comics, cthulhu, lovecraft, work ethic
Two Days in My Pants
Posted by admin | Filed under Art
Posting some pics taken via my shitty pantsphone. Pardon the quality. Hung out with Alex and Leandro for a drink and draw session over the weekend. Pimptastic Fizzy and the Chaz showed up a bit later, but I was either busy drinking or drawing boobs at that point.
We argue about using blue pencils for construction, the convo never goes anywhere. Everyone forgets how to get rid of the construction lines in Photoshop. And I find the paper too waxy by the time I start inking. We suck at all that artsy fartsy shit, so we feast on chopped and spiced up pig face. No really. Then we dick around the second level of our new dive. I personally like the balcony, in this place ironically called, in this week of capsizing superferries, PIER ONE. All this while Frank/Fengshen rages across the upper parts of the country… and a little bit outside our drinking area. Sea Legs by The Shins plays on my pod.
Frank blows.
Also today, I finally got that tattoo design out of the way. I ended up leaning toward something very Alfonso Mucha, but there’s not much you can do Nouveau with an anchor for a subject. Excuses excuses. (Ssshh….)
All is well today….
But what really made it all worthwhile was this pic I automagically acquired over the weekend. See, we live in Cebu. And all the artists know each other. And there’s quite a few of us. So what’s the point of knowing all these talents if we can’t poke fun at each other every now and then? That said…
Bleedman vs Gravity.
Tags: Art, bleedman, tattoo design
I Spoke to the Goblin and He Said “Tattooo…”
Posted by admin | Filed under Art
Closing in on the homestretch of my Next Wave sequentials. Can’t wait to send those over to the people who need to see it — partially coz I wanna hear what they have to say and what I fucked up, mostly because I just want it out of the way already. Plus there’s a monster splash in the last page I wanna get to, but some studies are in order before I get there. Wouldn’t wanna offend his cult (hint hint).
Already thinking about what set of sequentials I should do next. Any ideas? Or maybe a tribute piece in-between. I was playing with the idea of a quick Next Wave vs Thunderbolts piece, but we’ll see.
Speaking of Thunderbolts, I love Ellis’s run. Gargan’s a man-eating bastard, Swordsman’s an incestuous freak, and Penance is just a total wreck. But I went nuts over 120 — where Norman’s screws come loose again. Deodato can do no wrong in that book. Norman Osborne’s awesomeness is so firmly engraved in my mind that I just had to do this intersketch as I was wrapping up a panel with all five agents of H.A.T.E. in a Kevin Maguire-esque down shot.
Left pencils pretty loose coz i knew I was taking it all the way to inks myself anyway. If someone else was going to ink it, I would have made my pencils a lot tighter.
Decided on an upwards light source with a shitload of hatching. I needed the shading exercise, also it just looked cool. Heh. Then I decided to murder it with some toning.
I’ve got a tattoo commission to work on today. It’s gotta have a fairy…person sitting on a beat-up old anchor. Still tossing the idea of making the sprite Bisley or Mucha. Hardcore or Nouveau. We’ll see.
Add me up on Twitter: JohnAmor
Laters.
Tags: Art, comics, ellis, green goblin, Next Wave, sketching, thunderbolts
Intersketching
Posted by admin | Filed under Art, Work
I recently woke up to the fact that I get bored waaay too easily when I’m working on only one piece at a time. ADD much? I tried to remedy it by skipping from panel to panel within a page. Failing that because the linear…ness of the plot made it feel like I was still doing the same thing, I tried skipping from page to page. I’d work on the fight sequence on page fifteen and, when it got tedious, I’d skip back to the establishment and build-up on page seven.
Bad idea.
This broke story momentum more often than not. So yeah, taking breaks from a page by skipping to other pages within the same book is a bad idea. It kills the flow. So what I did yesterday, I took breaks between panels by sketching something totally unrelated to what I was working on, on a clean new sheet of paper. Well maybe not totally unrelated, but it had enough of a thematic separation to keep things interesting and fresh for me. As a result, I didn’t feel the fatigue, and the monotony didn’t step in. The logic behind it all was that I was taking a breather from a sequential page by drawing a pin-up. And I was taking a break from the pin-up by doing the sequential. In essence, my afternoon was a productive series of interspersed breaks. And I got. Shit. Done.
The fourth Next Wave page is in the can, and here’s the Impulse piece I finished while doing so. It’s not the best comp I’ve ever done, but at least it’s something to work on.
And since I knew this wasn’t the main piece, Ta-DAAAH, I inked again. Clumsy, I know… but it kept me occupied.
Tags: Art, comics, drawing habits, fatigue, Impulse, Next Wave, work ethic
Eyeballing Escher
Posted by admin | Filed under Work
I know I said I’d post a day after the previous entry, but I got sick. I’m still sick. Bronchitis or some shit, what’re ya gonna do? heh. I’ve missed three days of work. I am so fired. Which would matter if I had plans of staying there, which I don’t. It ain’t an arty job. I know, I know. Picky shmicky.
Funny story: Prior to me getting sick, I had already been suffering from a work worm. You ever get those? That throbbing in your head that you get from lack of sleep? Lack of sleep that’s caused be the knowledge that you’re not getting any real work done? Work worm. I like it. I got it coz I’d been neglecting my NEXT WAVE pages for some paying gigs. No, I’m not happy about it. A comic gig is still the top priority. Cebulski already showed the first three pages to some editors, and well, let’s just say I NEED TO GET THE REST DONE. Some Marvel Adventures titles are opening up soon. I need to get off my ass.
::: ::: :::
For now I’m keeping busy with a project assigned to me by some contacts. In a nutshell, I need to adapt an M.C. Escher piece into… well… something else. First thing in my head was Are you kidding me? Second thing was Are you FUCKING kidding me? My printer’s busted, and I have no time to get the Wacom from Bossman Jeff. So I’m eyeballing the fuck out of this thing. Back to comics when all this hoohah is done.
Ohhh gaaaaawwwd…
::: ::: :::
East West Exiles has just gone live — it’s a site the viceroys and I have put up to keep in touch, what with everybody being busy and all. Check it out.
Laters.
Them Plans
Posted by admin | Filed under Art, Trash, Work
So I haven’t updated in a while. Heck, I haven’t touched a pencil in pretty much a month. I know, I know. That sucks. But it’s cool now. Things are finally getting back on track after the May vacation. The hiatus… from… stuff. Co-genius Matt and I are fast-tracking INSTRUMENTS — a series I can best describe (without giving too much away) as… well… Shonen. Look it up. Shonen, but not. I don’t know. Pray it gets Larsen’s thumbs-up, I guess — which has basically been in production for close to three years now. I can feel the Image pitch engraved in my bones. If that doesn’t work out, we’ll figure something out.
:::: :::: :::: ::::
My sister and I are putting together a screenplay, and the concept of it is pretty much what holds it all together, so I can’t delve into specifics. I’m not quite sure if it’s an art film though. Kafka meets Ferris Bueller’s Day Off meets Silence of the Lambs meets Donnie Darko… I don’t know. I haven’t seen my sis since Christmas. She lives up North, in Manila, where the story’s supposedly gonna be set. So I might have to go up there sometime within the next few months to get a feel for the place. I already hate it there though. Research on the screenplay per se starts this week.
:::: :::: :::: ::::
EAST WEST, the pub which me, Viking, Leandro, Fizzy, Flimflam, and all the other Viceroys have been patrons of for about four or five years, has closed. End of an era and all that shit. Gotta find us a new haunt, and soon.
:::: :::: :::: ::::
Things are happening. Nice things. To me. Yay! But I need to decide between the job I know I’ll like and the job I know I’ll learn something from. Something I can use for this thing I’m working on. Which brings me to…
This thing the Viceroys and I have been talking about. It’s pretty much us saying fuck it and starting up our own business. You can only paint other people’s houses for so long before you start wanting to build a house of your own, yeah?
Let’s talk NEXT WAVE, Marvel, and my work worm tomorrow…
But hey look, pencilled this today… my excuse for it being a bit of a mess is, again, the fact that I haven’t drawn in a month. Anyway, yeah…
