Tiger Lung Returns

I'm slowly building up material for my paleolithic shaman adventure comic, "Dead Lands" (the previous iteration of which can be read here).
Pictured above is the cover for a self-contained 20-pager I'm putting together right now - and below, a test page from inside the story!


And lastly, an early-ish development drawing for the main character, Tiger Lung.

Oh, the stories we tell

These are two pieces from my storytelling class this semester, a class which is rapidly becoming one of my favourite. Above is a brief retelling of Little Red Riding Hood - below is a simple sequence of narrative images showing a character go from hero to villain.

The Death of Adulthood

A conceptual illustration for class. I've been listening to/watching/reading a lot of Joseph Campbell lately, which lead to this illustration: the various myths and rituals that our culture(s) have had to demarcate between childhood and adulthood have gone the way of the dodo in our society, with the few cultural milestones of this transition being largely optional. What does it mean, then, to be an adult in a post-industrial society that seeks to keep you a mindless, consuming adolescent?

What I was doing this summer

"Prophet" Cover by Marian Churchland

On "Prophet," you've got Brandon Graham writing and Simon Roy on art. What stood out for you in their pitch?

"I was a fan of Brandon Graham and his work on "King City," and his outline for "Prophet" was fantastic. "Prophet" from the outset will appear to be the biggest departure from the original look and feel of the "Prophet" that myself and Stephen Platt made popular, but it's no less amazing. The storytelling of Graham and Simon Roy is staggering. You can read the book without any word balloons and follow the story effortlessly. The look of the book is reminiscent of Moebius and Geoff Darrow -- it's a gorgeous, European-style graphic novel. Don't sleep on this book. In the original "Prophet" series, John Prophet was awakened from cryo-sleep in a sarcophagus and had to deal with the reality of a brave new world. This new series finds John Prophet awakened from cryo-sleep in a brave new world where he has to deal with a much harsher reality than anything he faced in the original series. "

- Rob Liefeld on the upcoming book that Brandon Graham, Richard Ballermann and myself have been working on this summer. And I can finally talk about it!

Basmachi Fighter, Soviet Conqueror

The final of the Protagonist - the basmachi fighter, looking back over the last chunk of free Central Asia.


The counterpoint to the Basmachi Fighter - his soviet antagonist riding past the ruins of Samarkand.

I tried to make sure the two portraits were connected by similar compositions and approaches to lighting.

The Giant-Hunter's Daughter

This semester, I've got a really stunning class on character and storytelling with Kevin Kurytnik instructing us - an awesome dude who does tons of amazing animation stuff. Some of our first assignments so far:

Design Three Characters



...and then further refine them and help define their characters and the story you want to tell with a sentence for each character. Very fun so far...




Plus, a little rotoscope test...

A Busy Week

Well, this semester feels like it's gonna be really busy. Already, I'm doing so much work!

Here's some life drawings...




AND BEST OF ALL: A really fun animation chronicling British Politics from 1970-79! I love the cut-paper stop-motion!

BASMACHI FIGHTER! (studies)

One of my first projects this semester involves developing portraits portraying a protagonist and an antagonist from SOME story, element of history, etc. For the protagonist character, I decided to illustrate the somewhat tragic figure of a Basmachi fighter - the muslim rebels, backed by the western powers, that fought to keep Central Asia free from Soviet 'liberation' between 1917 and 1931.
(The soviet conquest of central Asia is especially interesting from a cinematic perspective as it birthed the 'eastern' genre some thirty years later - a russian variation on the western, using many of the same tropes as the western, only with Soviet soldiers and muslim rebels replacing the cowboys, bandits, mexicans, indians, etc,)

Here are a few studies for said portrait.





Next week - the final.

The last year begins.

Well, after a crazy busy summer of work and play (the fruits of the former which will be in print sometime next year, I believe), school is BACK ON. To celebrate, here are a couple pages of a short-lived experiment that I was working on back in April.

Check 'em out.

Miss Cambridge 1215

For our "Going medieval" subject this week: Miss Cambridge for the year 1215 of our lord.

God, medieval times must have sucked.
drwnblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/going-medieval-results.html

A Mother's Love

Another awesome week at Drwnblog!

FILTHY GIANTS

Our week's topic at Drwnblog - "Crevasse of the Jötunn". Go check out one of our better weeks of work - with an ADDITIONAL TWO AWESOME GUEST ARTISTS!

Military Robot

Another INCREDIBLE week at Drwnblog! Check out everyone else's wicked stuff HERE

ALSO! I had an awesome weekend at the Calgary Comic Expo - I got to meet a bunch of cool people, enjoy the company with the entire Acts of Violence Crew as well as Vic Malhotra, who recently collaborated with my friend Ed Brisson on a Murderbook story. I even got to see William Shatner hanging out with the mayor of calgary, Naheed Nenshi. Thanks to everyone who attended and made it such a great weekend!

Cosmonautical Ideas

The brainstorming page for an old cosmonaut short I drew in 2008 (Which you can read below in the little flickr window...) The worst thing is that some of the ideas on this page probably would have been more interesting then the story that actually came to fruition. It's a little cliche and melodramatic, but for an early effort...

Fastest Tentacle in the West

My entry for this week's drwnblog challenge: GUNSLINGER.

In doing this one, I guess I just figured the doing some boring old human in western clothing was NOT ENOUGH. So here - the fastest tentacle in the west prepares to bring hot death on some desert bandits ( out on some godforsaken planet further up the galactic arm).

Check out the rest of this week's entries today (or preferably tomorrow - the other guys are slow) at our site:
http://drwnblog.blogspot.com/

If an astronaut collapses in the forest...

Does anyone hear a sound?

This is just a cool page I found while going through the endless piles of paper I've left around my parent's house. The first and only page of a project that remains unexplored, but the visual themes will be showing up in some large and small projects slated for release in the fall (ish).

Gentlemen of Fortune

This week's topic on the Sketchblog? Gentlemen of Fortune!

The what the rest of the team did HERE:
http://drwnblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/man-of-fortune.html

An ACAD Sketchblog!

A little something that a group of my art-school pals have put together - a weekly sketchblog! Take a look over at http://drwnblog.blogspot.com/ !!!

If a tree falls in the forest...

Big Henry Takes Offence

To start, this is sadly the last school-related post for the next few months. But it is also with joy that I post - I was recently given a shout-out on the blog of one of my all-time comics heroes, Warren Ellis, for one of my other final projects. (If you've never read Transmetropolitan - or even Freak Angels, the awesome project he's serializing on his site, I'd highly recommend it...)

For our final project in our figure illustration class, we were given six weeks to design a 16x32 inch horizontal illustration that highlighted the figure. For myself, I'd just seen the movie Winter's Bone (again, go out and watch it - it's the best movie I've seen in two years at least), so I wanted to do something that touched on that gritty, rural american aesthetic.


After much drawing and compositional planning, this was one of my comps from about early/mid-project.


After finally nailing down the specifics of the composition and all that, I did a few media tests (like this one here). Once I was satisfied with those, I dived right in...



...starting...



...and finishing the linework...



...and the tones in inkwash...



...finally finishing the image off with some nice light watercolor washes for color and a bit of acrylic for the highlights. Ideally I'll be able to scan this on someone's giant oversize scanner and play with it a bit more in photoshop, but for now, this cruddy little photos is this piece's only digital presence.

And I'm okay with that.

ALSO!

In the hubbub of finishing the school year, I forgot to hype a short comic I drew earlier in April! Written by Michael May and drawn by myself, it's for "Panels For Primates" over at Act-I-Vate, an awesome charity being run to help out a Primate Rescue Center.
Read our comic RIGHT HERE.

"Reading is AN ADVENTURE!"

This is a bit of process for one of my latest illustration projects.

The idea behind it was a metaphorical illustration for a corporate client. In this case, I took on a kid's book company and used as my basic metaphor "reading is an adventure".


This was my first set of comps - basically, the little boy being taken literally on an adventure.


However, this final, like the comps before it, was not particularly metaphorical at all. Instead of implying that reading was an adventure, it simply shows a little boy going on a bunch of adventures with an Indiana Jones type character.


So, after the crit that exposed the rough edges to this concept, I added a couple of elements that would drastically change the concept to imply the power of the kid's imagination, which is really the point of the illustration. The descent of adventurer and boy into the depths of a sinister amazon temple became an imaginary journey down the kitchen stairs... creeping past undead amazon warrior(esses?)s became sneaking past a brother's room, down the hall. This way, I could both showcase the idea of adventure while emphasizing the safety of keeping these safely internal (inside the house and inside the head).

Basically, this was my attempt to salvage a project's concept without having to re-draw the whole thing.

End of Term Work!

It feels SO GOOD to be finishing up the year - but with that satisfying closure comes a bit of sadness. It's been a good year.

Here's one of my final projects. The idea was to take two or more distinct genres, meld them together, and develop a variety of narrative landscape pieces from there. With that in mind, I thought up the research settlement of Delta - a human frontier town on a far-off low gravity world. Of course, there's not only humans living on this planet - there are strange, radially symmetrical native species and a whole host of interstellar refugees in the region, as well.


Here's a view of the town from the air.



Morning at a very multi-cultural covered market.


The natives pursuing their next meal.


Kal-Tuhn gangsters (some of the less savoury members of the refugee species) flee from a water robbery.


Two motorists along the Delta-Karakhun Highway get into an altercation.

More soon! (Bikers, robots, and more!)

A medium-sized wad of work

Basically, a little dump of schoolwork...

... from earlier in the semester...

And a couple of weeks ago...


...and hell, even a few days ago!

The Buffalo Commons

An illustration project meant to show to opposites - in this case, the ancient west of the buffalo versus the modern west of urban sprawl.

The idea with the half/partially rendered human artifacts is to show their transient nature in comparison to the hardiness of a balanced ecosystem - contrasting the imagery of the american dream (the domestic suburbs) with the symbol of the traditional and perhaps future west (the bison). The article/idea that this would be matched with would be that of the buffalo commons, a proposal to convert much of the slowly emptying great plains states into a big national park.

More reading on the matter can be found here:
travel.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/travel/08journeys.html?ref=...
www.marysvilleonline.net/articles/2010/12/15/news/doc4d09...