Dark Engine TPB

 

Volume one of Dark Engine will be available in time to make it a great XMas stocking stuffer.  More info on this to come.

Dark Engine #4 Cover

Cover for Dark Engine #4 in which flying monsters abound!  Order early and order heavy :)

being creative for me

I love drawing stories. Even if it's only one image I want people to be able to read a story from that illustration. I'm working with a bunch of writers right now, enough to keep me in projects for a few years. That's fun, and I love the collaboration.

Random Person: "I think I hear a 'but' coming on."

But... sometimes it feels best to have projects that are only mine. I want to be selfish and choose which of my "darlings" I'm gonna snuff and which I'm going to coddle.

To Keep myself sane, I'm working on some personal stuff, while working on the collaborative stuff. For a guy who pulls a regular "joe job" while trying to work his way into the comic world, this isn't easy... but necessary. You may have seen the post of the new Mr. Simian comic I'm working on down the blog page. Along with that adorable monkey-man I'm reviving my favorite inner devil, Lil' Charlie.

One of the benefits of doing this is that it will allow me to update my blog more frequently (writers tend not to like it when you give their entire stories away on your website).


Lil Charlie is coming back...

I am first developing some prints that I have been thumbnailing out, and will show more progress on in the near future.

Just got to thinking, without the old ZUDA up anymore a few comics I did aren't online anymore.










This is the only entry that I did all alone. Looking at it now, the dialogue was horrible and a bit redundant but I had fun with the characters. The other entries that were up on the site were collaborations, and will only be posted if I get permission for it from my co-creators.

quick panel...

...from the project I'm currently working on. It's an anthology piece which will be printed in B&W.

What's on the table today?

... got a lot of stuff going on today, here's what my table currently looks like.

The Act-I-Vate Experience

The ACT-I-VATE Experience from Carlos Molina on Vimeo.

Just finished watching it, and I haven't been this jazzed to get to work in a long time. I've been excited about web-comics for a long time... now it's like my head wants to explode with candy and streamers flying out.

My Process Step 002

Alright, I figure since I shared the first step of making this strip, I will do my best to keep folks updated in the process till the finish(this will also crack the whip on me getting this done).

This is the thumbnail stage. Since I'm basing this on an idea that I scribbled for myself, based loosely on myself, in this stage I tare apart, rearrange, expand and contract on the text. Dialogue is still up in the air, but space still has to be considered for the text to go.

Here are a couple of brush warm-ups, about 2.5"x1.5" I did at the start of this to get myself in the mood.


The actual thumbs are done in a mix of blue pencil and ball-point pen at 3"x4".
The first page of the comic is just there to set a bit of the fantasy element of the story and to establish the time of year and maybe implant a little bit of craving.


Since I avoided an establishing shot on the first page, I needed to set up the environment that the story would take place in. That's the only real pupose I set for this page.


I know in on the third page that I'm going to put down some narration where the dialogue is gonna wander around a bit, then return the reader to the story.


The fourth page is when fantasy and reality will begin to overtly mix.


I set some restrictions on what I can do on the page (firm belief in the idea that people become more creative when they need to find ways to work around limitations). The main rule for myself was that I would work in a twelve panel grid. No page so far actually uses twelve panels, but the grid format seems to fit a horizontal composition really well.

A bit more of this story to create, I'll post up the final few thumbs tomorrow.

Since folks were asking...

here's the finished inks.

More Digi-Inks

a full page of Digi-Inks that I finished late last night. Gonna rework a page that I decided was the weakest in the proposal I've been working on. Should have it all wrapped up by late this afternoon.

panel in progress

making that journey between pencils and inks, one tiny step at a time

just found

Found this picture from the 08 SDCC. I'm standing behind a few of the other CBT creators while we were all doing a signing at the Image booth. It was nice to have a place to duck into when going to my first San Diego Comic Con (or Comic Con International as they call it now-a-days).

Early rough pencils, to a page I'm currently inking. This project has been fun to work on, due to the good back and forth in my collaboration with the writer. This page started as a splash, and I felt a couple of small insert panels would help show everything the writer wanted in the panel and help lead the eye around a bit (yes, I like lots of panels on a page... I think this makes me a brain-damaged-comic-artist). I whipped this up and sent it to my writer, who liked what I was doing and then suggested some subject and order changes to the smaller panel, which will make the page much stronger in the end... and tell more than I initially was.

For this comic the I'm going back and forth from doing the pencils traditionally and digitally (obviously this page is digital), but all the inking up to this point is being done digitally.

a panel...

... to one of the projects I'm currently working on. I illustrated it separately from the rest of the page (I was using this guy to help get a feel for the story), and will crop and adjust it as needed to fit it in with the rest of the panels.

Today seems to be one of the days that is consistent at the start of every project I've ever worked on. I have a look in my head of what the pages should visually feel like, but I haven't put in the time to develop the style I'm working in yet. That means that the rest of the day/night is to be spent exercising my abilities and sketching/painting till I feel comfortable with what I'm doing.

I realize that I haven't shown any of my own art here in a while. So I'm going to post a bit of different things I have going on (with a lil description when allowed).



This is something that I'm working on at my leisure, and have been for a long time. It's the first page of an adaption from my buddy Devin Hansen's book FROM THE BARSTOOL. Since this is a "do as I find time/for fun" kinda thing, don't expect it completed for a little bit yet.


A trial panel for THE KISS. It's a graphic novel written by the talented Elizabeth Genco, and set to be drawn by me. It currently has a publisher lined up, and I am awaiting word from my editors to go full-steam-ahead on it.


THE ADVENTURES OF MR. SIMIAN lost in the ZUDA competition in July. I'm not bitter about this, especially since there was a lot of talent in that particular month. Currently, I'm awaiting word on one groupl looking at hosting my comic and considering other venues as well.

Brandon Seifert, writer of the comic WITCH DOCTOR, and I are talking about a collaboration on a short comic. The man is busy and so am I so I don't expect to be working on this till next year, but considering his talent and the talent of those that he's worked with I am excited about the prospect.

The comic I'm currently developing my style for is being done with a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and comic pro (we decided to hold off on naming each other until we had a bit more of this in the can). We do already have a couple of publishers interested, which is nice.


A page from a comic I'm doing with writer Josh Hechinger (COMIC BOOK TATTOO, THE GRAVE DOUG FRESHLY, YON KUMA). He wanted to try his hand at a certain online area... I liked the story and can always use extra money for the holidays. Josh writes in a fun way that is very influenced by manga, I feel more influenced by a mix of American and European comics... so we end up with something completely different in the end.

hmmm... other stuff...

I might have a comic in the upcoming POPGUN VOLUME 4. If you don't know how POPGUN works, it's a visual mixed tape. The editors get lots of submissions from various creators they've talked with, and then choose out those they want to give the book the rhythm they desire.

A few personal comics I'm working on (two I've mentioned in earlier posts and one I haven't) will have to wait until I knock out some of the stuff I'm working on for other people). THE DEVIL IN THE GRAPE is a story about a man who had the veil that covers the world lifted by a beverage found in the catacombs of France. NUMBER 5 which I experimented with in one form before is being re-imagined as a horror comic in children's book form (to allow me to play with techniques that wouldn't fit in a normal comic). Finally, MR. SCARY PANTS is about a nice boy with a very scary split personality.

There are other writers I'm in talks with to do work for a bit down the road. They know who they are, and the sooner I figure out a way not to need sleep or food anymore the sooner I will be on those projects.

Thumbnails

a posting of thumbnail... because I really like thumbnails. The first six are for my next submission to ZUDA (two finished pages without text are in earlier posts).

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And I've never shown these her before, but here are the thumbs I sent off to Rantz for the Comic Book Tattoo story I did. There is something about the "not caring as much about lil mistakes" that makes me like the feeling of thumbs more than finished art most of the time.

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