Fireside Conference

Here's a recently finished, moody panel from my upcoming comic "Symphony Number Six":

(click for larger version)

Boy, did that take a long time. Even though I saved myself some work by plunging parts of the image into blackness, I could always have gone further. I need to take a lesson from Marcos Mateu-Mestre, author of the excellent Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers, which I have managed to read three times without learning its lessons.

Rainy Sn6 Panel

I seriously picked the best month in Oregon to ink this comic.

The streaks of rain were added digitally in post-production. I almost added them directly to the page with white gel-pen, but I didn't. I'm glad, because this looks much better.

Concert Hall

Here's my most recently completed page of "Symphony Number Six." Took longer than I would have liked, but boy was it worth it. One of the pages I'm most proud of:

Ever since meeting the artists of Periscope Studio, I've been very mindful of "shortcuts" by which a large crowd can be depicted without actually having to draw a large crowd. Some of these are very evocative, and they certainly save time. Nevertheless, sometimes I think the effect of seeing a giant mass of people painstakingly drawn is worth it.

The conducting postures are inspired by Hans Schliessmann's live sketches of Gustav Mahler. The theater is the Berlin Konzerthaus, the lavish exterior of which will be featured in the first panel of the next page.

Happy Couple

Drawn during a boring meeting. I've been thinking about J.C. Leyendecker a lot lately.

Thad Face

Detail from a panel of Symphony Number Six - this is the protagonist, Thaddeus Johnson: pianist, professor of music history, and assistant conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

Cozy Sn6 Panel

My most favorite comics, the ones that have "stuck with me" long after I put them down, have not necessarily been the ones with the most compelling plots or the greatest characters, even though those things are really important. They've been the ones that create a real sense of mood or atmosphere. I know that's not a very original thing to say, but it's true. I'm taking my best stab at it with my new comic, "Symphony Number Six." I'm so happy that I started inking these pages right as the weather is turning cold and rainy here in Portland, OR!

First Inked Sn6 Panel

First inked panel from Symphony Number Six. I'm so excited!

Symphony Weirdness

Half a penciled page of Symphony Number Six, a preview of some of the sick s*** you'll be treated to! I'll be done penciling this week, hopefully, and will be inking through October. If this is a horror comic, it had better come out before Halloween!

You're gonna love this comic.

Doodling during bible study

Never ever ever ever ever enough time to draw - it's all I want to do these days, and it's the only thing I'm NOT doing. "I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." - Beckett

Character-in-motion sketch

This was a sketch I did last night while haning out with friensds. I'm playing around with some characters in an upcoming collaborative project. Rather than do straight, "orthographic" character designs that just emphasize proportion and costume, I wanted to draw characters in action and in setting - taking a cue from some of the amazing video-game concept art I've seen lately. I was drawing so rapidly and having so much fun! I wish I got to draw more these days.

You may have to tilt your monitor a little bit to see the picture clearly - I was using some really light pencils, and the scanner didn't pick them up very well.

MLK 24-Hour Zine

This past weekend, I participated in a fundraising stunt for the Portland Zine Symposium. The goal was to make a 24-page zine in 24 hours. A bunch of us holed up in the IPRC with pizza, donuts and coffee and set to work!

Because I didn't trust myself to produce coherent text after 18 hours of wakefulness, I opted to do an annotated printing of one of my favorite sermons ever: "Can A Christian be a Communist," by a guy you may have heard of named Martin L. King Jr.

I first came across a transcription of this tape-recorded sermon one night a few years ago. Wracked with anxiety from my never-ending quest to reconcile my commitment to Marxist politics with my love for Jesus Christ, I despondently turned to Google and found a sermon with my question's name as its title. Though the sermon is available online, I wanted to do a decent printing of it . . . hopefully this zine will fall into the hands of some other struggling Christian leftist, and the words of King, Amos, Isaiah, and of course Jesus will help to order his or her thoughts, as they did mine.

Allow me to summarize, briefly, King's thesis [spoilers]:

For the zine itself, I added illustrations of some of the philosophical and political figures King mentions, as well as some miscellaneous spot-art to liven up the pages.

G.W.F. Hegel

 Ludwig Feuerebach

 K-Mizzle

 Archbishop William Temple

 James Meredith

 Ross Barnett

This was really fun and enlightening to make. I've already mailed out zines to my sponsors, but if you'd like a copy for your secret commie library, try to get a hold of me - I sell them for one dollar, plus shipping if you're not in Portland.

Apple Netwon

I drew this for Stumptown Underground's upcoming anthology with the theme of SCIENCE:

March Penciling

Hey y'all. My progress on Symphony Number Six has been pretty slow, but I'm still getting some good penciling in. Here's a sequence:

And here's a panel I just drew yesterday, depicting Cincinnati Music Hall. I love placing my vanishing points really, really far apart!

Bride of the Water God Fan Art

Hey guys! I know it's been a while since I've posted anything here. Symphony Number Six is chugging along (slowly) but I took some time out this weekend to do some fan-art for Bride of the Water God, a deceptively compelling manhwa by Mi-Kyung Yun, published in English by Dark Horse. ("manhwa" is, I believe, Korean for "twelve educations of the adulterous winter," but I might have that wrong.)



I drew the titular water god, Habaek. He's a pretty interesting character - short-tempered, haughty, but also quite loving. He's trapped in the past in more ways than one - figuratively because he can't move on from his ill-fated first marriage to a human woman, and literally because every day when the sun rises his body transforms into that of a small child.

BotWG has more wrist-grabbing than I've ever seen in a comic or anywhere else. A panel of a wrist being gripped by somebody's hand occurs probably 7 or 8 times an issue! Sometimes it's erotic, sometimes it's violent, sometimes it's humorous. Mi-Kyung Yun clearly loves to draw grabbed wrists!

February Figure Drawing

I went figure drawing with the Periscopalians yesterday. Erika Moen hired a terrific-looking model. I'm please with some of the rapider sketches, but as we transitioned to longer studies my still-lingering inadequacies as a draftsman became more apparent. I was sitting on the floor for most of this, so my point-of-view resulted in some funny foreshortening.







Here are Steve Lieber's renderings of the same subject - can you tell where he was sitting in relation to me?

I'm Still Drawing, I Promise!

This month I began my next comic, "Symphony Number Six." Since it'll only be 32 pages long, I'll be releasing it all at once and won't be maintaining a regularly-updated website as I did for SNitLoE. But for my friends who want a behind-the-scenes peek, I'll be posting the occasional panel on this blog. Here's panel one:



Yes, I am once again beginning a comic with a car driving toward the horizon. Looks a lot better than last time though, huh?