Witch Wings

Congratulations Julie!

 

Congratulations Julie! Julie, my wife, has just landed a job teaching French in Brampton, just north of here. We just came through a year of her in school and it's been tough. She had less time and had to rely on my meagre income but now things are looking up.

Julie's going to be an amazing teacher.

"Hisss.........."

Tried and tried to get a semi finished version of the Robot museum thumbnails done tonight but I've hit a wall. Which is fine because it's raining and there's a book I want to read. As I finish up the thumbnails it's looking as though it will be three or four books coming in at about 90 pages each. I'd like it to be a finite series but we'll see. There are so many different projects I want to do.

Feeling quite excited about things really, things feel pretty clear moving forward. Top shelf publishing Maddy Kettle is probably the thing that made things crystallize for me. There was still some uncertainty of what i was going to do. Picture books, adult comics, kids comics, freelance illustration. I'm only really good at kids books. It's what I respond to and I think comics are the most interesting form of story telling. A magical way of telling stories and following ideas, nothing else like it.

Above is a sketch. Not sure what's up....

Aother iPod Noodle

From The Archives, A Piece I Did For Scholastic, Robot Museum.

A gouache page from the 13 page Robot museum I did for Scholastic a few years back.

Train

A street car sketch on my ipod.

A Facebook Comment About Digital comic Book Readers.

 Taken pretty much exactly from a Facebook comment I made:

OK, so far I've tried comixology, Graphic.ly, Comiczeal, the Dc and Marvel apps and I've just download the iVerse comics app.

Comixology seems to be one of the best bet even though it's pretty disappointing. It looks like the top shelf in the most commercial comic shop. All marvel and DC with only the barest nod to Indy books. Instead it's all Zuda and Zuda like comics.

Where the heck is Fantagtaphics, Drawn and Quarterly and others?? Top Shelf at least has a great online digital selection but I wish they'd get an app!!

Graphic.ly is a bit of a let down. A lot like Comixology but with even less selection. although it has Mouse Guard which I thought was great.


Comiczeal doesn't count as it doesn't really sell comics. You get a bunch of wonderful, free Golden age comics and you can import stuff from your computers.

Great app but it's a different category.

DC's app I had some technical problems with so I buy all my DC comics from Comixology who seem to have the same catalog.

I use the Marvel app a lot great catalog.

What looks most promising is iBooks, of all things. apples own reader app. When I searched the store ( I'm doing all this as I write by the way....) the first comic to pop up is a Jeffery Brown OGN! that blew me away. You can even get some individual issues! Weird. I didn't expect that....

Big Robot, No Colour.

Here's an picture I posted earlier but without colour.

Storm

Here's a warm up sketch I did in pen and ink and Photoshop on Sunday.

KAS Again....

Here's an

older version of the Robot Museum KAs, done on my iPod, that I much prefer. My other one had too much Astro Boy, which is kind of where she comes from. I want her to be a bit scary and a bit cute.

Jupiter

Here's a sketch I did while listening to the audiobook of Ben Bova's novel Jupiter on the street car. I did it on my iPod with sketchbook Mobile and Adobe Photoshop Express.  I just stumbled on PS Express and it's become an essential app. I really needed an app to play with the contrasts and saturation in my digital sketches.

This picture is something of a spoiler but I'm not giving away the ending or anything....

The book is a hard sci fi story about a religious science student doing his post doctorate on a space station in Jupiter's orbit and the conflicts he encounters.

Of course I couldn't help but make the ship look a little Victorian....

KAS

Here's a sketch of another Robot Museum character, KAS. I'm not sure about the design or the name but she's coming along. She's Quentin's friend. She comes from the outer colonies, working for a mining company.

Here's What I'm Thinking.. (Business Models)

It looks like things are getting more and more digital. It's raining iPods and Androids.I'm not sure where things are going in publishing but maybe it's time to think about how to treat old formats. I'm thinking that Robot Museum will likely be available in multiple digital formats so what will the physical collection look like? I was just out walking and I'm thinking installments of 80 pages in French album like collections, bande dessiner collections.

                                                                 (photo by byronv2)

I'm thinking this because it seems that this might be the most appealing way to present a comic, as an art object rather than in pamphlet sized graphic novels.

I'm still thinking about this. And I'm writing this as I think about it...so, you know. Be kind.

So, how would you like to read your comics in the coming years, assuming things will be mostly digital.

Old Man Watching Sesame Street

 Went to a retirement home for a birthday the other day and Henry was watching Sesamestreet and this older gentleman in a wheelchair wheels in and sits and watches it with Henry. Great moment. I did an iPod sketch of him at the time with Sketchbook Mobile. He looked like the guy from Up.

Big Robot

Avery quick sketch I did with Copic Markers and Photoshop. I drew this while watching Batman Brave and the Bold over breakfast (Kashi cereal). I've left in the mistakes because it's a sketch. If you don't see any mistakes than I meant everything.

Currently pushing to finish pencils on The situation. Almost there!! I'm feeling a bit fatigued from working on this and working part time. I'm a wimp though.

On breaks I work on the robot museum outline. It's going really well. I'd love to do an epic, multi book series of the robot Museum. A long Space Opera series with different characters. I can't think of a better way to explore ideas and stories.

Currently reading Jupiter by Ben Bova and The Man in The High Castle by Philip K Dick. Both great books. The Dick book is a bit slow but that's likely because I've read so many alternate history stories since. The Ben Bova book is an audiobook. It's well performed but I'm getting tired of audiobooks. The reader always imparts something disagreeable to me that wouldn't be present if I was reading it myself.

I'm actually reading more and more books on my iPod. It's habit forming. It's so easy to read anywhere. Anywhere but glaring sunlight.So now I always have an iPod book, an audiobook and a paper book on the go....

With Brushes

I have my head buried in pencils, working on The situation. Almost done. After that it will just be Maddy Kettle and Robot Museum on the side.I haven't been able to post much of The Situation but I'm hoping I'll be able to post more of the other projects.

In personal news I'm still working at the art store part time and Julie's still looking for work. I hope to have good news on Julie soon. Henry's great and will be 2 next month. 2!!

Reading through the classics of science fiction right now. There are so many great, diverse SF books. Just finished Arthur C Clarke's 2001 and now I'm reading Philip K Dick's The Man in The High Tower, which is powerful and surprisingly contemporary.

Also really looking forward to HBO's Game of Thrones.....

iBird

iPod doodle. i think I was looking at the Tweetdeck icon.

The Ancient Robot Mechanic

A new character for the robot Museum. The story needed another... biological life-form. He's an earlier clone of the main character. The second sketch is the first shot at his design. The first is pretty close to how he should look.

501 Neville Park Street Car

Manga-ish

iPod sketch

Here's a sketch I did on my ipod using Sketchbook Mobile. I'm always accumulating robot drawings hoping they can appear in the Robot Museum today.

Quentin (reposting an old image)

Here'a a panel fro my first stab at Robot Museum a few years ago. Since then I've rewritten the whole series and it's changed extensively. It's become more space opera and the science has become a little harder.  As my freelance work subsides I'm going to try and find time to work on it.

My plan is write the story and back story while I work on other projects and post the in progress work here.

Robot Museum Design

Anyone who follows this blog will probably know the Robot Museum, a science fiction comic I've been working on for 5 or so years, on and off. It's a big universe filled with monsters and robots. Very few human characters at all. A little darker than some of my stuff. It's a comic I really want to lavish a lot of detail and work on and draw for people like me rather than a demographic.

The story follows Quentin, a genetic cross breed of different species as he tries to do the right things in the face of an impending interplanetary war.

At the moment I'm seriously considering self publishing it . The main reason I'm thinking this is that when you work on a project with a publisher there are inevitable breaks in the work. This happens when the editor or editors need time to look at things and discuss them. This is fine but there have been times that it has gone on a long time and made the project difficult. I'm specifically thinking of a short comic I did for a comic a few years ago. The editors took all summer to discuss something. When I had started up again I had a hard time with the project on a number of different levels. It's hard to maintain enthusiasm when there are breaks in the work like that. Also, I had a hard time matching paint colours from before and after which lead to a ton of problems.

I'm not complaining about these breaks, there are just part of the system but I really want to do something without worrying about this and a million other things.

The biggest problem with self publishing is the the fact that there is no editor. This wouldn't have been obvious to me until I saw what an editor can do to my stories. The difference is like and day.

Microstoria: Archeology

More of a comic doodle than anything, a little comic done all in Sharpies and Photoshop. Stars are curtesy the Hubble.

Some white Lines

Some sketches from Whitelines sketchbooks. On the phone, on the bus etc.

Heretics Of Dune

The last two weeks I worked a lot at an art store to make some money to help pay for a computer I just bought. I live on the edge of Toronto so there's a lot of travel time on the street car. I love the street car. During the last weeks I listened to an audiobook of Frank Herbert's Heretics of Dune and would sketch scenes or characters . They are really sketchy but boy, were they ever fun to draw.

Henry And The Glass Floor

This is Henry looking down through the glass floor on top of the CN Tower,1,815 ft high.....

Droid

A really quick sketch inspired by the Droids childrens books I read as a kid.

Sketchbook, A New Toy

Someone's put me on to another iPod sketching app, this one called Sketchbook. This one's less of a doodle app, as Brushes is and more for sketching concepts for serious work. that's my sense of it anyway. I'm still figuring out the controls but am amazed at how intuitive it mostly is.

Thanks so much to Henio del Castillo for alerting me to this wonderful thing.