Charon Chapter One

I've spent most of my day today typesetting the first Charon Continuum chapter (Written by Dominic Archer and available to read online for free here) for viewing online and then re-editing it for the Kindle, when it eventually gets published on there.

My poster illustration from the post before is actually being used as the front cover. (Yay!)

I've actually really enjoyed working on the Charon Continuum, but I feel I might have to take a step back for a bit, because I feel like I haven't worked on my own projects in a while, through no fault but my own of course.

So far, in my sketchbooks I have three fully scripted out mini comics to draw up; further journal comics to do; as well as the main Graphic novel I'd like to finish scripting and then actually draw. So, yeah....a lot to be getting on with really.

Lucy Knisley and Sketchbook Making.

About a year ago I watched Lucy Knisley’s video ‘Life is the Story’ and I found it really inspiring and decided to make my own sketchpad.

I made it, and I did used it for a bit, but unfortunately it eventually started to fall apart and ended up being put to the bottom of my book pile and never being used again; I think maybe because I didn't make it very well (Spider-man wrapping paper)

Well I found it again yesterday, after a massive clean up in my room, and I decided to remake it. During my cleaning, I also found about 3 destroyed sketchbooks with all the pages falling out and decided to use those too.

I pulled the pages out of the sketchbooks and punched holes through every page, then I spent about 2 hours remaking the front and back covers to the new book, covering the board with nice fabric.

I think I’m going to enjoy using this sketchbook, it feels a lot nice in the hands then a wrapping paper covered book. I think it also looks a lot nicer too.

Dino Love

Started a new comic today, its about Love and Dinosaurs. 

Above is the first page, I've left out the dialogue for now, to keep the story a bit of a mystery. 

Page 2 Teaser!

...also known as HALF THE FRIGGING PAGE, because I couldn't pick between which panel to use.

First Original Comic.

Taken some time recently and sat drawing and finalizing my Domestic Abuse comic from University  (Title still to be decided....any ideas?) 

Gotten a few pages drawn up, colouring them inbetween my searches for employment.  Two pages basically done.

Hope you enjoy the teaser above. 

Taking Chances

So I've recently just completed the commission for Inez Meerema's Book, Taking Chances, which you can read here.

I actually learnt a lot doing this commission, especially digital painting-wise; which I've never completely mastered. But I think you can tell by the background of this piece, I've come a long way.  Below I've included some of my work up to the final.

Hand inked and scanned in.

Digitally coloured on CS6 Photoshop. (Cleaned up left hand and knee later on in process)

Final image with digitally painted background, without text.

First Commission!

I got my first commission since leaving University the other week and I've been working on it recently.

The commission is for a front cover for a book called 'Taking Chances' by Inez Meerema.

I started off with some quick sketchy thumbnails based on a short blurb she sent me about the book (I believe it's on wattpad).

I emailed these thumbs back to Inez, giving her some detailed descriptions of what I was going to do with each cover idea. She came back to me with her opinion, deciding upon number 4 as both her favourite and most appropriate for the story.

With the cover she chose, I took a lot of influence from classic comicbook poses/covers - which you may be able to tell.

The last two days I been working and reworking the two main characters designs and poses, trying to find the right combination and balance. Thankfully I bought a new light box recently, I found it made redrawing a hell of a lot easier, don't know what |I would have done without it.

Also, even within those few days my anatomical drawing skills have improved quite a bit (With help from the ComicTools blog- Thank you!) Starting to get pretty chuffed with my improvement- I need to learn to draw everyday, even if I don't feel like it.

I've ended up with the below as the final draft sketch for the two main characters on the cover. Now just to wait for my new paintbrushes to get here and I can start inking this up, and then onto my favourite part - the colours!

Chloe Noonan Fan Art

Here's some Chloe Noonan  fan art I drew this afternoon.

For some reason I found it hilarious if at some point Chloe lost her staff and had to steal a Lollipop Lady's sign to fight off monsters. I forget why now, but it amused me.

Chloe Noonan is a series of small press comics by Marc Ellerby. You can find his tumblr here. You should read them. 

Armour

Hand drawn, scanned in and then coloured using Photoshop.

Drawn using stock imagery from Grinmir Stock. 

End of Assessment, Start of show.

Assessment is over and done with now, so now it's the organisation of the end of year show. Walls are painted and everyones' work from my course is hung up. 

My work to be shown at the exhibition is not the final work I had for assessment but a stronger piece of work I had from before. The dull ache 'poster' I had before was really scrappy, however after cleaning it up and recolouring it on CS4 Photoshop, it has come out quite nicely, and really makes an impact on the viewer.  

I'll take some photographs of my work hung up in the exhibition and post them soon.

Experiment.

Picture 1 - Gesso and feathers on Somerset paper. 

Picture 2 - Mixed Media

Picture 3- Ink on Somerset Paper

Everything is getting a bit hectic at the moment, University deadline for assessment is getting closer, I've only got another week after this one and I'm still playing catch up at the moment, so this may be my last update for a while until everything has calmed down.

After doing colour tests, I decided to try using really feathers in my work (Picture 1). Although I liked the effect, it didn't quite work as strongly as my drawn feathers. So I moved off from that and tried a mixed media piece (Picture 2) , layering three sheets of tissue paper together. The front sheet just simply had the type on, the middle had feathers drawn on in ink, the back layer had photocopy transfers of real feathers.

I really liked this piece, however after my seminar I was told to revert back to drawing graphically rather than to continue with experimently with materials because I don't have the time between now and assessment to experiment to much.

Which I agree with, but I'm still glad I experimented, so I started drawing more graphically again and have also started working with a limited colour palette in inks, to try to help my work flow together rather than looking disjointed. (Picture 3) The last drawing is definately my strongest style in drawing, so I understand where my tutor is coming from.

Memory Poster Update.

Been working and reworking some of my memory posters, above are just two that I quickly scanned in. Both are drawn by hand using fine liner pens; as I was drawing more of the posters I found the other memories were coming out far more graphically than my realistic feathers. So I ended up re-drawing them again; I think the result works a lot better, more of a powerful image and it works well in the series of posters I've started producing. Today I've photocopied the originals a few times to carry out some tests to see if they will work as well with ink washes and colours.

Wonder Woman

It's a low-res version, so sorry for the poor quality.

Sorry haven't updated this week. Will do a massive update within the next week or so of my University work. But until then have a quick sketch of Wonder Woman I drew and quickly coloured today.

Started reading the new 52 Wonder Woman comics recently, absolutely love them; but I have to say I don't understand why they've reverted back to the old style costume from Jim Lee's design in 2010. I much preferred the practical approach to the costume update rather than the revealing attire she has in the new 52.

I think after University, I may take up a personal project and redesign some super hero costumes from both Marvel and DC, male and female, and design them to what I believe to be more practical wear for fighting and their abilities etc. Not as a 'I hate all those designs' but rather as pracitse, I believe the project will push my creative side a little more, a bit of experimentation.

Realistic Feathers

Got round to beginning the new section for my Universtiy project. I've started to mixing image and type on posters based around my memories of my Grandad. This particular one is based on the memory shown in the comic I drew back in one of my previous posts. I've never drawn feathers before, but I'm really happy with whats turned out; although I do feel they are a bit too realistic compared to my previous graphic styled imagery that I so loved. Perhaps I'll redraw them at a later date.

Drowning - Re-coloured.

So I printed out 'Drowning' the other day and I wasn't happy with the colours. I felt the blue of the water was too bright, so I've re-coloured it. Hopefully this works a bit better, I've changed the blue into a more sea-green colour and got rid of the white around the edges because I felt the were distracting the eye away from the woman. 

Before

After

Colour Practice

Well the last few days I've been trying to practice colouring things digitally using Photoshop, and I finally think I'm starting to get the hang of it. Unfortunately I ran out of my own illustrations to colour, so I stole someone else's to practice on; and it's turned out to be one of the best ones I've coloured. So with her permission I give you effuchu's 'clutter' now newly coloured by me.

You can find effuchu on Deviantart and Tumblr. Honestly, I implore you to look through her profile she has some excellent illustrations.

 

Currently doing my dissertation at the moment, so I haven't really had time to do my main work, but next week is had in day, so I can get back to drawing soon. In the meantime, have some photographs of my studio space and work I have done.

My University studio space needs a bit of a tidy up, towards the bottom you'll notice some other artists work I use as inspiration, they include: Becky Cloonan, Yuko Ota (from Johnny Wander) and Sam Bosma.

The other two photographs are of one of my draft pages for my domestic abuse based comic.

Panels.

Finally thought of an idea for a few panels to go towards a comic/fanzine. I done a quick test of colours/style of colouring on the two panels below.

Women's Aid

Haven't really done a lot on my main project currently other than reading. Been mainly concentrating on my disseration to get that out of the way.

I have however found out some truly shocking statistics through Women's Aid UK, a charity in aid of women who are victims of domestic abuse. Here's some of the facts I discovered:

• 1 in 4 women experience domestic violence over their lifetimes and between 6-10% of women suffer domestic violence in a given year (Council of Europe, 2002).  

• 12.9 million incidents: The British Crime Survey found that there were an estimated 12.9 million incidents of domestic violence acts (that constituted non-sexual threats or force) against women and 2.5 million against men in England and Wales in the year preceding interview (Walby & Allen, 2004). 

•  One call a minute to the police: Though only a minority of incidents of domestic violence are reported to the police , the police still receive one call about domestic violence for every minute in the UK, an estimated 1,300 calls each day or over 570,000 each year. (Stanko, 2000).  However, according to the British Crime Survey, less than 40% of domestic violence crime is reported to the police (Dodd et al, July 2004; Walby and Allen, 2004; Home Office, 2002). 

•  44% of victims of domestic violence are involved in more than one incident.  No other type of crime has a rate of repeat victimisation as high (Dodd et al, July 2004).

•  Fear of being killed: In a study of 200 women's experiences of domestic violence it was found that 60% of the women had left because they feared that they or their children would be killed by the perpetrator (Humphreys & Thiara, 2002).

• Homicide: On average, two women a week are killed by a violent partner or ex-partner. This constitutes nearly 40% of all female homicide victims.  (Povey, (ed.), 2005; Home Office, 1999; Department of Health, 2005.)  

•  54% of UK rapes are committed by a woman’s current or former partner. (Walby and Allen, 2004)

• Serious sexual assault was most likely to be committed by someone known to the victim (89% of female and 83% of male victims). Just over half (54%) of female victims reported that a partner or ex-partner had been the offender. (Coleman et al. 2007)

• 29 children in 13 families were killed between 1994 and 2004 as a result of contact arrangements in England and Wales, 10 of them since 2002. In five of these families contact was ordered by the court. (Saunders, 2004) 

• 1 in 5 young men and 1 in 10 young women think that abuse or violence against women is acceptable. (Zero Tolerance Charitable Trust, 1998).

Some of these statistics are truly disgusting, to think that humans can think of these acts as everyday blows me away. This is why I have now decided to do my work on Domestic Violence.

Newspapers.

I spent today pretty much doing intensely detailed doodling, in order to waste time until my tutorial at 14:15 in the afternoon. Drew two hands on separate paper, using the same graphic style as before but including some more detailed crosshatching; then went on to draw some hands bound together. I left the last illustration in black and white because I think it made a bigger impact as it was instead of adding in the blue/grey colouring.

After finishing these, I decided to shift everything about on my studio wall, I discovered that the separate hands worked really well when combined with the illustration 'Shame.'

After much 'faffing' with my work, I had my one to one with Ian Chamberlain. These are the quick notes I took from that tutorial:

• Domestic Violence? More people can relate and have experienced. Can also use my own experiences with it. 
• Can see my style of work in a Graphic novel/fanzine/printmaking.
• Look into current news rather than vague historical events e.g. Chikatilo.
• Perhaps take current event from newspaper and illustrate. e.g. M5 crash near Taunton. 
• Or look into major historic events and adapt into comic form e.g 300/ From Hell.
• Keep a narrative.

With this tutorial I discovered I was at a bit of a crossroads with my work. I didn't really have a concept, other than keeping a narrative; I didn't really know where to move onto, although through my research I had discovered what I was interested in: control, power, and the edges of morality. 

I will continue with research but perhaps keep too more contemporary and 'conventional' issues rather than serial killers.