le canard sans pitie

you asked for it.

Technically, you did, cuz the poll with the thing and the…yeah…

If you don’t remember (but actually care), this story arc featured a sexually frustrated little…whatever Pablo is…and his owners’ (Gogo and Didi) inability to cope with his habits. So they neutered him, and he promptly took up biting as a new compulsion. Implied here is that he’s been at this for quite a while, and even Gogo has a threshold when it comes to nippy, bitey pets.

I hadn’t posted or really drawn much that I was happy with for a long while, so this comic sort of functions as a massive restart of my brain. And this story arc was already pretty juvenile, so I threw in some slightly gratuitous shots for good measure.

Also, I’ve been up all night doing this while battling insomnia, so if absolutely none of this comic makes any sense, that’s my excuse.

Trivia: “Fridley’s of Winnepaneka” is a made-up store that apparently sells invincible bath/chew toys. It seemed like an appropriately midwestern type name for a shopping center.

Gogo’s shirt is my best attempt at “daikaiju”, which i believe means roughly “giant monster”, which for me somehow makes sense to have plastered on Gogo.

Pablo’s design continues to evolve too. For those who ask what he is, i prefer to think that he’s some sacred celestial being who, under different circumstances, would be revered like unto a god, but instead is the pet of a terrible girl-creature who couldn’t be trusted to care for a can of beans. Or just a unique lemur-like pet (and I’m aware he looks an awful lot like Stitch…i’m trying to move away from that )

well, enjoy! and thanks to all for the big response to the poll!…i kinda want to do all those ideas now, hehe

Slappy

my fave animaniacs character from back in the day. My sis mentioned her earlier today and i felt compelled to do a quick fanart of her.

Slappy’s pretty endearing in a way that most bitter old ladies usually aren’t…if you’re unfamiliar with the character, here’s a classic taste

Apparently bombs and anvils aren’t as funny nowadays. Damned kids, don’t know what you’re missing.

new audience

I’ve embarked on several new projects, two of which are especially interesting because they’re geared towards audiences I haven’t previously worked for. I think most of my work is generally consumed by teenagers and young adults, but with these two projects the intended audience is children and parents, the second project specifically being parents of adolescents.

Illustrating a children’s book isn’t exactly a new idea, but it’s a new demographic for me. I think it’ll be a challenge, simply because when I remember storybooks I read as a little kid, the story itself takes a back seat to the images, which stick with you much longer. As a kid, pictures are the words, whereas artwork maybe carries less importance when you get older. How many books or films are poorly displayed visually but memorable because of story? Working for children’s eyes, I think the formula is reversed. You could tell a ridiculous or horrible story, but good or memorable illustration can make it appealing. (Not saying this story is necessarily horrible or ridiculous, heh)

On the flip side, making an educational or helpful graphic novel for parents of teens is another challenge altogether. With The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, there was a wider potential for readership based on the premise of the book, which was a career guide, and the lessons were rather broad. This new work focuses on parents who are experiencing teenage rebellion for the first time, or for the first time in a dynamic way that demonstrates lack of control and a rift of understanding between parents and children–definitely a largely untapped market as far as graphic novels go. I wonder if such an age group is receptive to this sort of work. The thirtysomethings and fortysomethings of today might go for it; I’m just shy of 30 myself and still love picturebooks.

Warcraft

I guess these would be considered “old” by now, since I did these at the beginning of summer, but these are some character design concepts for “Warcraft: Legends Vol. 5″ from the story “Nightmares”, which was pretty cool to work on. It was also the first time I’d ever worked with previously established characters. Blizzard had to sign off their approval on each design and a certain amount of reworking was in order. This wasn’t as big an issue as it could have been, and the process was pretty painless.
I don’t actually recall a lot of the actual working process, but trying to recollect the actual gruntwork is a lot like trying to remember what it was like filling out your taxes. I did the thumbnails in a small sketchbook via pencil, but 90% of the work was done entirely digitally with a Wacom Intuos3 tablet and Photoshop CS3. I really like the digital method because it feels so much more malleable. Edits and tweaks or whole revisions are much easier, I think, but the tradeoff is that it can take a hell of a lot longer to get things done. When working in Photoshop, I tend to work at a highly magnified level, and the broad strokes and comprehension of the full page that you get with working on actual paper is lost because I’m eyeball-deep in pixels blown up to 300%.
I also realized that I’m really, really weak with backgrounds. I feel much more at ease with characters than I do environments, and even though I felt I improved with the Warcraft comic, it wasn’t saying a lot that I was actually addressing backgrounds with a vague level of sincerity. Between that and trying to force myself into creating more dynamic panels and camera angles than I usually do, I think the comic was a step in the right direction, but a lot more needs to be done for this sort of thing to really pop.

misfires

Some stuff I wish I still worked on, or wish had gone through, or whatever. Not everything works out or is sustainable. I need to remember these things, what went wrong, or what I could have done to make them better, so I don’t make the same mistakes. Still, sometimes things just don’t go anywhere.

spinning tires

I’m not a fast worker, that’s for damned sure. I’d like to say I don’t spend as much time daydreaming while drawing as I did in math class, but the truth is I’m often miles away even while I’m doing what I like best.

Sometimes it’s just me being a perfectionist and not being able to uncork speed and creativity, other times I just can’t figure out what to draw or how to draw it. Conceptualizing is, I think, the hardest part of anything I’ve done. Execution can be time-consuming, but settling on what in particular to execute can just grind me to a halt.

Most of what I’ve shared on deviantART is more or less complete in nature, at least from a per-upload perspective. I’ve preferred to submit only what I consider to be a fairly completed piece (with the exceptions of a few scrapbook materials, most of which are horrifically dated) But in doing so, particularly with Bomango, story and characters only come out in bursts, and a cohesive comic narrative has not been forthcoming.

My goal here at this blog is to offer more insight as to what I’m working on with a more bare-bones approach to sharing my work, rather than inconsistent and maybe overwrought submissions at dA. Which means I’m going to probably post crap I’ll be itching to take down almost immediately, but we’ll see how this goes.

Anyhow, I’ll offer a few creative smatterings or smatterings of creativity as I go along and warm up to the idea of true blogging. I might also try to share current work from clients as well, at least as far as NDA taboos allow.

riting is harrd werk

I should state that I’m not a professional writer, I have no published works consisting solely of writing, and these journals comprise the bulk of my written works, for which I receive no pay whatsoever. Although I guess if you count comic writing and subsequent illustration of said writings, then maybe I am, but I’m not banging out columns or reports or great narrative works. And anyway, my literary triumphs include phrases such as “HELLS YEAH, I HAS ANGRY, BITCH!” and so…no Pulitzers now or ever for me.

But I do have some skill! By which I mean I can cobble together sentences in a way that wouldn’t cause an English teacher to blow their brains out or move to the mountains with a typewriter and a long, grizzled beard. I began reading and writing prior to kindergarten and by sixth grade was cranking out long, terrible, TERRIBLE novels on a Smith Corona. Seriously, it was crap you wouldn’t dare wipe your ass with, but they were the heartfelt writings of a child whose world consisted of dinosaurs and a deep-seated hatred of math who thought Jurassic Park was the greatest achievement of human cinema. But I liked reading, I liked writing, and even though I wasn’t especially good at making great works with those tools, I was able to use them to get high marks in at least one non-art-related class. (Math and science, not so much.)

My point is that, when you stop to think about it, being able to write at all is something of a special skill. Many people can read and write, but it’s less common to read stuff that isn’t full of grammatical errors, punctuation atrocities, or just mangled ideas. I suppose it’s a casualty of the age we’re in, that shorthand or just an undisciplined use of typed or written language is acceptable since it’s all so common, and at the end of the day, if you can make yourself understood, you’ve satisfied the core requirement of language.

But on the other hand, if you can’t type one or two sentences without butchering your spelling, or spending your profanities too freely, or forming a cohesive argument without third-grade tactics, you are stupid. Your typed words will often have more traction these days than spoken ones, and if your written speech reads like the jabberings and mispronunciations of a 5 year old, you ought to be treated like one. This isn’t snobbish elitism; when I read a sentence like:

“dude macs r sux pcs rul!!!!!”

I do NOT envision someone with an educated mind, a good salary, and respectability amongst his peers advancing an argument. I think of someone who regularly shits themselves, embarasses themselves and those around them in social settings, and even though they’re ostensibly writing about the nuances of computer technology, I picture them using a keyboard with a baseball bat in between bouts of touching themselves or making awkward sexual advances towards farm animals. Worse, it makes ME stupider to read those kinds of things, because all I want to do is hit someone until all their teeth fall out, which does no one any good.

Maybe I’m part of a disappearing mindset, where spelling and grammar actually matters in communicating ideas, and that the future belongs to those who have wisely realized that these things don’t matter. Maybe it’s smarter to let these things go, and let loose the floodgates so that every online article or newspaper column or magazine feature reads like a comment board on YouTube. Maybe classes that focus on people being able to read and write are just a huge waste of time. (Which they were, largely. Remember reading stories aloud in Lit class and suffering through someone’s horribly stunted recital of some story? Absolutely intolerable to students who could actually read and were seven pages ahead…) It’s quite possible that I’m a pompous ass who makes a big deal about writing stuff even though I couldn’t add two double-digit numbers together in under a minute to save my life.

As a final thought, I’m actually kind of impressed with the quality of the comments that I’ve seen here on deviantart. The philosophical journal entry a few dates back with its deluge of comments actually featured quite a bit of lengthy responses that weren’t grammatical atrocities and were surprisingly engaging reads. I also noted that more than a few comments were written by people whose first language is NOT English, who can write circles around a lot of people I know whose ONLY language is whatever passes for English here in the U.S.

Oh, and if anyone points out any spelling errors, or the irony that I wrote a long, rambling, boring journal entry about effectively and coherently communicating ideas…have a cookie.