date with the night

Dinogeddon page 14 now up at www.dinogeddon.com.

you party?

page 13!

this is one of my favorite pages so far.

i think i'm going to challenge myself by trying to stick to a weekly update schedule. i'm thinking wednesdays. we'll see how that goes; if i can easily do it, maybe i'll work my way up to two pages a week, and so on. still working on side projects and commission stuff. we'll see!

since i live at my desk now, i've spilled honey all over my workspace, and yesterday it was silver nail polish. maybe i really am as messy as everyone says.

roar

finally finished another page. i know i'm super slow, but at this point it means a lot to me that i'm able to keep making comics at all. this page was quite a triumph for me with the mood i've been in lately.

this is probably my favorite page so far in terms of coloring :) and i actually simplified my coloring techniques a lot so i can be faster, but i actually like the speedier look better. i'm learning so much all the time, but there's always more to learn! it's exciting.

also i'm getting pretty tired of hand writing the words, and i worry that it's too sloppy and hard to read :/ anyone know of any good free comic-y fonts that would kinda fit the Dinogeddon aesthetic (if you know what i mean)?

help!

okay, i need some help, guys! (if anybody still reads this blog....)

here is the latest Dinogeddon page i just finished:

i'm not sure if i'm happy with it, and i'd like some input before i'm done for sure. in the last panel, i have a little introductory blurb about Ronnie, obviously. i plan on having similar blurbs for all the main characters. the main reason is because it's a pretty big cast, and while i think everyone looks different enough, i wanted to give readers some tidbits of solid information they could grab onto to help them identify all the different characters, and help them keep track of who is in what gang, etc. and i thought it would be fun and maybe add a bit of humor to add an irrelevant factoid or two linked to the character's personality. but after getting the ball rolling with Ronnie's here, i'm beginning to second-guess myself whether it's a good idea or not, or if so, if i executed it properly.

i know my handwriting can be hard to read, but i like the look of my hand written lettering for the comic and don't really want to use a font. (and yes, i have tried making a font out of my handwriting, and it just ended up terrible.) i thought about having the blurbs in little boxes, but i was thinking that might be too cliche? i don't know. maybe it would be easier to read that way. and like i said, i'm wondering if i should do the whole blurb thing at all? maybe it would just be better to let the characters unfold for themselves over time? i don't really like it when comics have to have bio pages or whatever, unless it's like a series catch-up kinda thing, and eventually i'll probably have a character bio section on the Dinogeddon site, but....like i said, it's one of those ideas i originally really liked, but i'm not so sure comes off as well in practice. what do you think? keep it, lose it? change it? and how?

farm animals

Corey and Jenelle from Teen Mom 2

Sailor Moon and a sugar packet

plus, i got this in the mail last night! Battle Kittens: the art of R. Dart. i strongly suggest everyone get it, as her art is mind-meltingly good, as is her Battle Kitten stuff, which i really hope develops into a full-blown comic or animated project some day. apparently she was a background artist for Mission Hill and is now a character designer for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, two of my favorite animated series ever, so that could help explain my fondness for her stuff.

and it's Gammy-approved!

Dinogeddon page 9

i think maybe i ratcheted up the colors too intense on this one, or made it too red or something...the colors are supposed to be gradually getting darker and more intense because the sun is setting, but maybe it's too much too soon. i'll probably tweak the colors some more after i've taken a break from staring at it so long.

honest mistake

secret confession: those ultra sound pictures of fetuses never really look like much of anything to me and kinda creep me out.

PONYGASM

page four of my weird dream-based erotic comic thing. i guess i'll call it Ponygasm because i can't think of anything else.

i'm still working on Dinogeddon too, but i've been feeling lately like working on side projects like this, and maybe even painting, or at least sketching.

choking and keys

embarrassing old comic pages based on real life.

i can't find the rest of the pages, but it ends with Jack being abandoned by April and Lance, and he finds a pay phone on his own and calls a tow truck, and waves at Lance and April as the tow truck goes by them. then he shows Subi that he still has the key that they had to remove from his stomach because it was caught at just where his esophagus ends, and Subi is grossed out.

derailing

page 8

teardrop

pretty much a verbatim transcript of an awkward encounter at a stupid family thing. i only slightly exaggerated his hideousness. his teeth were...hard to look at.

i guess i'm so used to bottling things up that sometimes i open up the floodgates at any given opportunity, even if it's just someone smiling vacantly and condescendingly at me whilst i pour out my heart to them, when they obviously couldn't give a shit and were just pretending that they did. oops.

Q Lazzarus - "Goodbye Horses", youtube

unrelated, i've also come to realize (at length) that i become too easily attached/smitten with nice people, just because they are nice and make me feel that my existence is validated. just because someone is nice to me doesn't mean they care, at least in that way. they're just being nice.

downtrodden

page 6

the Darkness - I Believe in a Thing Called Love video, YouTube
it kinda weirds me out that the lead singer of the Darkness looks a bit like an ex of mine, haha.

i guess my parents' house is totally destroyed. all my childhood toys and my old diaries and shit are gone. kind of depressing.

so tired/bored with everything.

i need a vacation in the worst way.

we are animals

page three of my horrible erotic pony dream comic

the Europeans - "Animal Song" video, YouTube

trouble

page 3

swallow

click for full-view

 

 

this page almost killed me, blah. i have such a love/hate relationship with coloring. still not completely satisfied, but you gotta know when to just move the fuck on sometimes. continuous forward momentum is something i'm desperately embracing right now.

waiting for some action

the first two pages of my crazy sex dream comic. i love bathrooms at clubs/bars that are covered in graffiti.

...i dunno, man. :|

fucked up my shoulder lifting weights i think...but at least it's not my drawing shoulder, ha.

Spring, stop teasing me, baby. come on. you know nobody can love you like i love you.

fffffffffffffffffffff, Automelodi<3
Automelodi - "Schema Corporeal" video, YouTube

it's not like a day will come when i'm satisfied

at last - the first page of Dinogeddon. i figured i might as well go ahead and dive in, you know?

click to enlarge

i hope i'll have an official Dinogeddon site up soon. i feel kind of uneasy, like almost sick showing this off, i'm not sure why. i guess because this is a pretty personal project for me, as silly as it is, and it's been so long since i steadily, seriously created comic pages i kinda wonder if i can do it. we'll see, i guess!

the bite

after 20 pages, i feel like i'm finally beginning to get a feel for these characters and how i should be drawing them. it's decidedly looser, more cartoony, way more expressive, i think. most people probably won't like it, but i think it feels right. i feel like i tend to over complicate things, especially in art, like i'm trying to compensate or something. but sometimes less is more. not usually, but rarely.

ugh, the going is still so slow though, because of being drained from work so much. but i will prevail!

snow is ruining my life this week.

i have looked into the maw of the abyss

back from FanExpo! it was quite an experience. the first day was an absolute nightmare; i had gotten next to no sleep on my bus, and my one friend who was driving us to Toronto had gotten like no sleep, and our other two friends who drove in from Pittsburgh had to leave at like 5 am so of course everybody was super tired. then we got held up at the border getting in and that freaked me out. then we got lost forever in Toronto trying to find our hotel and a place to park the car, and when we finally did make it to the convention center it was really late, and i got like the worst migraine i ever had.  so painful. i ended up getting sick right in the doorway as we were rushing to make it into the room, which was really embarrassing at the time, but now that i look back on it it was pretty funny. it's really humbling to have your mentor/one of your favorite people that you just met for the first time helping you clean up your vomit, heh.

but the rest of the night went good. after i threw up and took some headache medicine, i felt sooo much better, and everyone else ordered room service, and we watched mixed martial arts fighting on tv, then sat up watching Fear as late as i could with Ross, and it was such a funny movie, wow. gotta rent it. anyway, the rest of the trip was pretty good too. i think we all felt like champs for having made it through that first day. XD

i had a really good time hanging out with Nick and Justique at the Audioshocker table, i'm glad they let me invade their space like that. i finally started trying to come out of my shell a bit and mix it up and talk with people at the con and  stuff, and i met so many incredibly talented and nice people! it really touched me. it might sound sappy or whatever, but as much crap as it is to struggle and get to cons and you may have to put up with some bad stuff, it was totally worth it to me to just be around these kinds of people, to feel their energy and know that they get it. that we all have similar goals in creativity and self expression and being passionate about something other people might not understand. again, i probably sound totally gooey, but for maybe the first time in my life i was sure i was on the right track and doing the right thing by me. i was sure this is where i belong. it was definitely a significant experience for me, and i'm really grateful to my friends who made it possible, and whose friendship has inspired me to put my all into my projects the way that they do.

also my mom called me today and i told her all about the con and how it went and how it made me feel, and i was surprised because she was actually really pleased and happy for me and supportive. i kinda wasn't expecting that reaction at all, so it was nice.

but yeah. back to drawing!

artifacts of a misspent life

just about everybody seems to be doing these old art posts, and while at first i was hesitant to join in, i guess i might as well join in the humiliation. they're just drawings. and at one point i thought they all looked good. in a few more years i'll probably hate everything i'm doing now, heh.

going back as far as i can manage. in first through fourth grade we had to keep little journals to practice writing in. i didn't like writing much, but my teacher let me get away with just writing a few words then filling up the page with illustrations sometimes. looking back, i have a new found respect for teachers because if a kid handed me this stuff, i'd have no idea what to make of it. it also makes me wonder...people had been telling me i had a talent for drawing since kindergarten, but how were they sure of this? is this considered good art for a 7-year-old? how can people tell one kid can draw better than another? it all looks the same to me. i also like that i didn't figure in any of the other prominent features of the ice cream truck, but i remembered the gas tank, right in the middle of the side of the truck, where it should be.


most of my later elementary school-middle school art is lost because it was before i had a scanner, and most of it was in notebooks i'm not sure what happened to. the early stuff was pretty bland, a comic about stick people, and a series about talking dogs (i was pretty much only into drawing animals as a kid). later i worked on an epic comic called the Crown about a princess with a sentient crown that protected her and gave her super powers for a few years. i also did one that was very anime/manga-influenced parody of folklore and mythology where i basically took parts of it i liked and changed them around however i wanted.  and the heroes of the comic were an ineffectual pagan goddess who got kicked out of olympus and a guy who could change sex at will because it turned out he was the son of a demon and a valkyrie (how typical).

in high school i started a web comic starring these guys, a foppish guy with a skull for a head for no reason and a gay guy who always wore pigtails. i later re-vamped the comic with the skull-headed guy as a normal guy (below) and started to redo the series with a more cohesive storyline, but after working on it in some form or another for like ten years, i just got tired of it.

back to the old stuff. this is yet another comic i briefly worked on right after graduating high school i think. around that time i was really into victorian stuff and ghost stories, so...it's a post-apocalyptic victorian ghost story XD most people i showed it to liked it, but someone i admired who was also a comic artist said it took too long to get going and i couldn't figure out how to re-work it, so i eventually just dropped it. still had the anime-ish influence thing going on, obviously.

around the height of my zombie obsession, heh. probably 2001-2003?

zombie studies from my sketchbook. i think i paused the romero movies and drew from them. XD

my first-ever completely digital artwork, haha. i was really into the mixing cute shit with gore thing right after i discovered junko mizuno.

circa 2004, i think? during this time i was trying to figure out my "signature style" or whatever, so i was copying the styles of a lot of artists i liked. right here i was really into foo swee chin.

super old eve. she's the love interest of the straight guy from the pair of guys above.

for a little while i was really into doing these shitty, crude, vector-shape drawing things. 2005 probably?

this is an actual album cover i did for my friends' band in like 2003-2004. i'm so shocked that they actually paid me and told me i was a good artist. at the time i was really into old black and white cartoons and thought they were kind of creepy.

imitating mizna wada here.

i drew cutesy shit like this for a while, mainly because girls really liked it and it was marketable.

sketching from life. that lady was really wearing that shirt.

cave girl stuff. this is what basically lead to Nyla, a character that hasn't been in anything yet but i plan to use her one day.

first sketches of Sidney.

that's about all worth looking at i guess (or not looking at). one thing that kinda bums me out about looking back on this is how much more prolific i was when i was younger even though i sucked. guess i have a lot to work on.