jackcomics

Jeeeez! I intended to post this image on the day after my last post, which was over a week ago.

But anyways, here's one more picture from the tag-team studio play day. I drew the bird, my wife Ellen colored it, and I cut it out and pasted it on the colored-paper-and-colored-pencil background.

My wife Ellen and I took a Friday off a little while ago and spent the day playing in the studio, something we often want to do, but VERY RARELY actually take the time for.

Part of the time we did some tag-team doodling. One of us would start a page and pass it over to the other, who would work it a bit and pass it back, and so on.

This is the winner for "Most Times Passed Back and Forth":



I think it had a total of 8 different passes in colored pencil (I think 4 different times), acrylic ink with pen and later with brush, white acrylic paint and collage.

Playing around with faces again. These came from some portraits in the NYTimes Magazine. Biden's smile was so off center and strange I felt moved to draw it.

Here are poor likenesses of our V.P. and White House Chief of Staff:

Here are a couple more sketches in the "no idea what I'm going to draw until it's drawn" mode. I've been working a bit to expand past the improv heads to figures and environments.

I had a rare impulse to play with color on this one. The edges are all warbly because my sketchbook paper isn't up for the whole water-media thing, and I couldn't get enough weight on the scan bed to flatten it out completely.



I've been enjoying the process of sitting down to sketch with no preconception of any kind as to what I will draw. I just clear my head and start making shapes.

In this case, the shapes were a throwback to a series of abstracts I was doing about ten years ago; similar curves and angles, and a similarly prominent foreground/background interplay. blah blah blah. Maybe I'll post some of that old stuff one day. I keep thinking about it off and on, but then I don't bother digging it out.

I did a bit of sketching over the holidays, but my scanner broke. Now I have a new one, so here's one of the sketches:



Also in the news, I'm afraid I won't have a regular episode of Jack this month, because I've been working on a piece for the program at STAPLE!, which I will be attending in March (my first ever convention as an exhibitor!!).

I'll post the 2-pager for the program as soon as it's finished.

I like doing these, infrequent as they are: sitting down and making shapes without any preconception of what it will be...

Lately it's all heads. My ambition is to branch out into bodies one day. Environments are a fond dream, over the horizon.

Here are a couple of sketchbook improv heads.





Not a lot of post-worthy stuff right now. I'm working on my first-ever mini for STAPLE in Austin in March.

Soon I'll also have a printable pdf of the Coyote kid's book I was posting sketches from a while back.

Here are the finished versions of a couple of the pages of the kids' book I've been working on.





The story is a mythological-style origin tale of the sagebrush bush in Nevada.
I just finished the dozen or so drawings and now will be wrapping up the layout in InDesign.

It will be printed up legal index size (11 x 14", folded to 11 x 7") with 16 pages plus the cover, and will be used for childrens' programming at the Nevada State Museum. The kids will get to take a copy home as a coloring book!

I'll probably post a pdf of the whole thing when it's finished.

(Many thanks to Alec Longstreth and the Indie Spinner Rack for explaining to me what "index" size means for copied books, and finally helping me understand what A1 and A4 and so on actually mean.)

Here are a few more pencil sketches for the Nevada Museum kid's book. The Coyote is the main character, but Kokopelli has a pretty big part as well.



( a couple more behind the cut )

I'm working on drawing and laying out a short kid's book as part of an interpretive program for the Nevada State Museum, written by a friend of mine.

It has some desert animals in it (surprise!), and I'm working up the characters now. Here are a few working images of the coyote. I'm trying to distinguish him a bit from the ones in my own comic. Hopefully he's a little skinnier and bonier...




( click for more sketches! )

I finished the piece that was taking up all my comics time a few days back -- I'll post about it soon -- and after such a frenzied push on the drawing and inking (well, frenzied for me), I took a little time off.

And then last night I really started jonesing to draw something with ink, so here's a sketch.



It really did make me feel better, even though it's nothing too special.

We were down in Big Bend for an overnight stay this week (it's a reasonable day trip from here, but we always want to stay longer -- one night isn't enough, but we take what we can get).

We stopped for a while on the trail and I tried out my new Pentel brush pen that I got for this portable-ink-sketching purpose. Here's my first time out with this new implement:



Crazy messy, huh? That big blob in the middle was the first thing that happened: you're supposed to squeeze the thing to get the ink to flow into the brush, and I squeezed too long trying to get it started.

The line goes REALLY fast from fine-and-wobbly to big-and-fat. And in the wobbly department, it didn't help that I was drawing in a palm-sized 4x6" sketchbook that was only as steady as my non-drawing hand.

With the first disaster out of the way, here's my second try:



I was much happier with this one, and overall I enjoyed the brush pen. It forces my to ink both faster and messier, which is something I've been slowly pushing myself towards with my normal-brush inking.

Here's another T-shirt design for our little town's independent 2-screen theater.

Here is a sketchbooky kind of total improv sketch I did last night. I was quite pleased with it, especially since it just started with squiggles and no actual idea of what I was drawing.

There was a kind of street festival in downtown Alpine over the weekend.
Our office was closed, but our neighbors (a gallery and a salon) both had art openings, and there was a Tahitian dance performance and a band playing along the street.

To participate in our absence, we put some dancing people up in our windows!

Here are some views of them from outside and inside (back-lit):



( Read more... )

I was tipped to this fun (and now woefully out-of-date I am sure) drawing meme from the Flight blog.

Here's my version of myself as a teen and myself now:

My comic takes place in (or near) Big Bend National Park, which is located about 90 minutes' drive South of our little town.

We go down there as often as we can, which in practice turns out to be laughably -- nay, pathetically -- infrequent. But back in April we did manage to squeeze two nights in a row at one of our favorite spots in the mid-elevation desert scrub. This place is very much like I imagine the setting for my comic and every time we go I get to refine my ideas about the story.

And I actually took a minute to do a couple of sketches. wow. This one got an extra teeny bit of love from photoshop.

I am definitely not a hero-drawing kind of guy (nope, not so much with the bad-ass), but this project was for our local two-screen movie theater and it sounded like fun. I'm now wrapping up an Indiana Jones-style adventure shirt, and he also wants to do a 50's sci-fi design as well. The guy's gone crazy with the t-shirts.

And here's the actual object! It came out pretty good. I'm happy with the moodiness, and particularly with the type. This is some of the best hand-drawn type I've done so far. I hope you all like it.

This is a little doodle I did for a forum thread at the Indie Spinner Rack podcast site, sort of an indie answer to all the superhero redesign memes floating around. It was a general-purpose call to redesign the zebra.

And since I've had some snail-drawing practice lately in my own comic, this came to mind. And right after I finished drawing this, my mind followed this idea to its logical (though as yet un-drawn) conclusion: the Amoebra.