Ok! So San Diego is finally upon us!! Huzzah.

I'm heading down tomorrow from LA, and am looking forward to spending a large chunk of Thursday afternoon exploring the Indie booths and Artists' Alley. I've also FINALLY thrown together a *rough* schedule of panels I'm hoping to attend over Friday and Saturday (an event in itself).

Friday and Saturday's programme for me will be as follows:

FRIDAY

11-12 - How-to with Chuk Wojtkiewicz: pencilled for DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, now lead concept

artist at Blur Studios here in LA.

12-1 - Masterclass with Mike Mignola: Expressionistic Atmoshperes

2.30-3.30 - Focus Features: 9 (Steve Acker, Tim Burton, Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly)

6.30-7.30 - Entertainment Weekly: James Cameron and Peter Jackson

SATURDAY

10-11 - How to Get a Job in Video Games

12-1 - Masterclass with Dave Gibbons: The Heroic Figure

1-2 - Masterclass with Jeff Smith: The Art of the Panel

2-3 - Drawing Lessons From Great Masters: Classic principles from great artists of early

20th Century comics and illustration.

4-5 - Paramount: Iron Man 2 (Robert Downey Jr. Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Scarlett

Johanssen, Mickey Rourke, Jon Favreau and Samuel L. Blackson.

6-7 - Digital Colour Styles and FX with Brian Miller

Sweet, right? A number of these involve bringing a sketchbook, so hopefully I'll have some sketches and samples to report back with next week!!!

See ya then!

New Comic Pages!

Not much time for new stuff this week with my trip to LA and the big San Diego Comic-Con looming, but I have got a couple of pages from the latest comic I'm colouring for Insomnia Publications.

The comic in question goes by the name of Average Joe, and believe me when I say there's nothing 'average' about it (pfft, someone was going to use that somewhere, it might as well have been me).

Unlike my lame jokes it rests on the completely unlame and awesome-to-the-max end of the spectrum. Written by the extremely talented Thomas Romeo and made manifest in the beautiful artwork of Mr Kelvin Chan, it's sure to bring about an end to third world hunger as we know it. Or at the very least, satiate the desire for a highly entertaining and massively addictive read.

Robot Pirates 2: Pilgrimage to Mecca-no

And some further developments with the Robot Pirates...

We've gone with a slightly more anthropomorphized design, and I've tried to make them look a lot more 'pieced together' from scrap metal and bits of junk. They're looking cooler, but could do with a bit more saturation looking at them now online.

Man, it confirms just how completely non-mechanically minded I am. I have NO IDEA how bolts and washers and wingnuts and doodahs and thingymajibs could possibly go together to construct a robot.

I blame it on my Meccano-deprived childhood. And Barbie. She is the Plastic Prophet of Evil. And Skipper is her acolyte.

Robots and Clowns and Awesome Chinese Steampunk Animation. And possibly Bears, oh my.

Yay! Finally some more stuff to post up. Clearly my 'five environment sketches in one week' didn't realy amount to anything. One might even say I produced nothing but a barren landscape... :-) *crickets*

...yes, one might say that. eh heh.

But other than committing heinous acts against the written word, I've suddenly found my free time to be taken over with character sketches. Partly because there's been a call for them and partly because... well, they're just easier to do. If you're lazy that is and don't mind doing them badly :-D

Nehoo, they are posted below.

In and amongst colouring Issue 1. of Average Joe (which is awesomely funny and has lovely art thanks Thomas Romeo and Kelvin Chan), I've started fiddling around with character designs for a children's project a friend is doing. It involves robots. And pirates. Need I say more? :-D Anyway, that's what the designs in the last image are for.

They turned out ok. I think the top right robot is a tad too Futurama influenced, and the bottom 'tank' looks like it was designed by a Japanese toy maker, but what the hey. It's a start! The other two character designs were just me playing around with a melancholic clown and a homeless mad hatter.

Anyway I'll leave it at that for today.

And with a final note... if you have a couple of minutes to spare then watch this. It's sweet. Beautiful production design.

Outline for this week: Four Exterior Concept Paintings. 

It was going to be five, but the above image took longer than anticipated. Which means I need to find a way to work faster in a manner that serves the painting if I'm going to successfully crank out another four pieces amongst various comic pages. The above is fine. I'm happy with the colours, composition and mood, but it would please me more if I could master the art of suggestive and expressive brushstrokes. Oh well, one down, three more to go...

Fil-ler

After a five-month hiatus this blog is being resurrected. Well, maybe not resurrected. Resurrection would imply that it was living to begin with, which is a bit of a long stretch considering that at its most lively there was very little to distinguish it from something a carrion bird might look upon as lunch. But we're trying again. There's a number of pieces to be going up in the next week or so, including hopefully the first page or two of a new short comic I'm playing around with. Until then, I leave you with the above character sketch from the afore-mentioned short comic. His name is Fil.

                                                                                                       

It’s another snow day today. Vancouver in all its vibrancy has succumbed way to easily to the dampening effect of a thick foot-and-a-half of snow (possibly an exaggeration, but then how accurate is a ‘foot’… I mean really?).  

I am LOVING it. 

Actually a foot-and-a-half might be a bit of an understatement, it is quite literally blizzard-ville out there. Everything has become so blanketed in white that everyday objects are outside floundering around in existential fits having lost all meaning, shape and form. Needless to say I almost joined them when after walking a block-and-a-half in a zigzag pattern I became completely and utterly disorientated. It only made matters worse when the snow-covered fire hydrant I thought was beside me, stood up, shook the snow off it’s coat and happily bounded off in the opposite direction leaving nothing but a trail of yellow snow and paw prints in its wake. 

I honest-to-god passed  people skiing down the road while out taking photos earlier. 

I have no other explanation for this bizarre turn of events than that I was obviously smoking mushrooms before going to sleep again and woke up embedded in a Lewis Carroll novel. Of sorts.

                                                  

                                                                                                                      

Soundtrack of choice:  Schlingen-Blangen by Charlemagne Palestine 

                                         Spiegel im spiegel by Arvo Part.