Did me up a fresh lil drawing this weekend, and yes this may sound weird, but it was for my dentist's bday. My girl works in a dentist office, so its just natural for her to make friends with the people she works with, and my dentist there, is one awesome guy. He's got the illest tattoos and plays some rad synth music. He's fallen in love with my iono robot, so i thought id do him up a pic. So one friday afternoon in the middle of panera, i conjured up this lil fella, and that night i managed to knock out the photoshop heavy colors. I'll prolly dismantle it, add a different bg to it, change the name on the shoes, the screen will prolly say gabo or gaza, and then sell prints at cons. Them kids gobble this stuff up.
In other news, i have this nagging, cronic itch in my throat, like a soar throat type thing, and its bugging the hell out of me. It feels like its starting to fade, but damn its so annoying. I think its been causing my lack of production art, i've really only been doodling lately, besides the pic up top. I'm getting back into the mix fo sho though, so hopefully i can get back into full steam this week. I've got A LOT to make up for CHICAGUA, little less than 30 pages to annihilate by the end of march, gotta have em done so i can print up the book for the beginning of may.. i should be able to swing that, i hope.
I've been waiting many many weeks to let this bit of news loose, but yes... i've been given the epic opportunity to draw short comics for AniCoz magazine! Its a fresh lil chicago based cosplay magazine that is picking up heavy winds. I hope that makes sense... what i mean to say is, its blowing up very fast. The mag shows off people's costumes of different anime/manga/game characters, which they were to anime conventions, coupled up with reviews of thoe cons across the US, its a pretty neat magazine, not to mention the list of upcoming conventions on the back cover! Something i wish i had when i was younger.
I met the lovely creator and chief editor of the mag many moons ago at a small anime con out here in the burbs (the-reactor.org), and we got to talkin a bit online here n there, and after the first couple issues, somehow it came about that maybe i should do a short, cute comic for the kids to read. So i took advantage of the opportunity and put together a 2 page comic showcasing my lil bread peoples, sally and frenchee. So far it seems to be receiving great reviews, people are liking the addition to the magazine, so thats really exciting. I've got a second one brewing in my noggin, so hopefully i can get that done soon. If you wanna pick up a copy (only 5 bones!) just click up on the picture of the mag, and click on the purchase link on the left! OR, just go to EGSA or Fast Food Anime! They've got a lot of fresh pics in there, and even a tutorial on how to make a werewolf costume.. pretty rad stuff!
As for other stuff, i havent been doing much of anything lately. It sucks when you totally cant recall doing anything of importance. I know i've been workin on the new design for entervoid.com, but shit... besides silly sketches in my book, i havent really done much productive. One or two pages for the book i'll be travelling around with at conventions, but thats about it. I gotta start busting ass fo sho.
My scanner is dying. I spent about 30 minutes messing with it. The diagnosis? Every time i plug it in, (via usb) it runs its own lil "AM I RUNNING OKAY?" test, and last night it messed up for the second time since the beginning of the year. It runs all the way up to the end, and then just gets STUCK, and makes this awful CLICKING noise, like its screaming for me to help him, but papa cant do nothing cause lil scanner boy is stuck behind a glass window. Its really upsetting when something you spent some big money on, (80 some dollars is a lot of money to me.) starts to break down on you... seemingly for no reason at all. Sure sure, i could have taken better care of it, and stacking books and other heavy shit on it prolly isnt the best thing to do, but all in all its lasted a damn long time. I got the thing sometime back in '01 or '02, so i'm rather proud of its life.
Well gabe why dont you go out and just get another one? Okay sure, i mean i got money. I CAN go out and buy another one, but you know what i'm going to end up paying? To begin with, i only buy electronics at work (best buy). If i cant get an extended warranty on it, then i dont feel secure. Not to mention that most of the scanners they sell nowadays are more expensive than all-in-one printers that happen to have really shitty scanners attached to them. But to top it all off... THIS SCANNER HAS BEEN WITH ME FOREVER, itd be like going out to get a new dog when you know the current one is on its way out... theres something, sick about that. Yah okay i'm being a bit dramatic, but dammit thats 100 dollars i can spend on like, ... food? printing comics, posters, art supplies! I mean sure, i can always run to school and scan whatever needs scanning, and thats what i do with all my 11x17 pages, but jeez... theres nothing better than drawing up a quick lil epic doodle and scanning it up real fast to show off to the rest of the world. JUST AS I WANTED TO DO LAST NIGHT.
Eventually the damn thing fixed it self (God only knows how..) and i managed to scan the caca i've been conjuring up these past few days. In other news... when i was Panera on wednesday night, a kind gentlemen type cat came up to me and chose to chat it up and ask me about my art. Nothing much was said, but we exchanged biz cards, he claimed that his company often hires people from columbia (art school down in the city), so now i'm intrigued. He called me up this afternoon, but i couldnt answer the phone, so i think i'll give him a jingle back tommorrow... see what this leads too.
My throat is killin me right now, ive had this damn cold since last friday night, and its really starting to overstay its welcome. I dont think i said that right, must be the nyquil. But i digress, please, sit back and enjoy the eye soldering art you are about to download into your optics!
I've been wanting to update for quite some time now, but i've been tryin to get over the fact that the ketches i'm about to post, for the most part are complete crap. I think i've just been forcing myself to sketch when i'm between classes or during break time in said classes. I think maybe its also my ego tryin to show off, tryin to put up my dukes, so these kids get a taste of what i'm capable of... as most of them drawing the same character or general THING over and over again.
And there i go bitchin bout the kids at school, who unfortunately dont know any better.. BUT IM WORKIN ON THAT.
While i was inkin a page for CHICAGUA, i had a young lad by the name of GENE (hyperboy.deviantart.com) who stumbled about and was taken back by the detail in my pages, i introduced myself and encouraged him to join entervoid.com (of course i told him i invented it) and to my surprise he actually knew about it.
After check out his DA account, i came to realize this cat knows a lot more people that i know... not something i had even fathomed when i talked to him. The kid has MAD potential, his style is just ACHING to break out and annihilate the weaklings at school, and if he lets me... ima give that kid all the tools he needs to do just that. I need someone to challenge me there, someone i can hate...in a friendly manner hahaha.
This week has been one of the best weeks for me, professional than i have had in a very long time, in the next coming weeks, i'm going to pull up so much awesome news and work and love that i'm gonna explode. And all this good news thats come along means i gotta bust my ass even harder. As of late of i've been slacking on these pages for CHICAGUA, due to some personal issues, but now things are back on track, and soon enough i'll post some pages of that for all of you to read... for now please, allow me to burn your eyes with this crap sketch love.
Talk about epic, you can email a blog post to your account.. how nice.
I wonder if it'll work via cell phone txt message?
LETS TRY WHY NOT.
(i tried to email through my fone, but its one of them SMART FONES, and just seems to be TOO smart to send to an email address via normal mms txt. stupid smart fones.)
(after trying this i realized that if you upload a gif animation to blogger, it doesnt run, lame. BUT, if you post it from a url, it DOES run. blah.)
RESPARK.NET (my host) is experiencing some technical difficulties, which is why you wont be able to see the images in the posts before this one. So in order to continue, i've had to move my base of operation to a sub folder under entervoid.com, which i used to have, but never really updated. What hurts the most though, is the fear that i might not get my files back. I didnt really make a back up of all the stuff i had posted before, why? because i totally trust the internet way too much.
Hopefully i've learned my lesson.
I managed to finish a few projects this week, and i've gotten some great news on others, THAT I SHALL DIVULGE WHEN IT HAS ALL BEEN SETTLED AND WHAT NOT.
I dont really have much to post, i've been doodling a lot in my new sketchbook, but i'm just tired and my the damn S key on my keyboard keeps acting up. So i leave you with some really stupid sketches.
Recently i was approached by a comic artist by the name of Mikolaj to throw in some page for a anthology (i'm assuming) in some other part of the world. I should have asked him where exactly, but i figure i'll do that once i turn in th pages (if you click on his name and go to his blogspot, maybe someone can tell me what language that is?) Moving on though, i decided to take the first 10 page of CHICAGUA and give him that.
Now my dilemma is this: Should i feel bad for not doing my school
work 100%, so i can finish up these pages and get some exposure in another country? Shit should i even worry? Really the worst that can and will happen is that the teacher is disappointed and marks me late on some projects. I can live with that. If the teach were to take some other abrasive attitude with my excuse for not having my shit done, could he really take that attitude when i told him its for a publication in another country, and it can potentially expand my audience exponentially? I'm almost positive that all he would do is encourage me to get both of the tasks at hand done as fast as possible.
Either way, i'm almost done with the pages, and once i have that together i'll be posting them.
I'm happy to report that i've been doodling more, rather than going straight to production work. It's a really great way to warm up, and i know i've been neglecting that practice for quite some time now, so doin this is really starting to jump start my brain before i get to the nitty gritty.
I'm trickling in some more of these random sketch session i had weeks ago at the panera near my work. This is the level of creativity i want to get back to and beyond. Lately its been nothing more than horribly rendered figure studies, which often turn into incoherent scribbles. My fav piece there is fat dude with the long jacket, he's one of the characters in my new short i'll have done for the con season. Name is still unkown, but i think i have an idea of what it'll be. Something a lil personal, a dedication of sorts.
I've noticed that a lot of kids who take advance life drawing class at school, dont really carry on the lessons that they learn in class on to their growing skill set, and i think for the most part its for two very simple but problematic reasons:
a) the act of drawing a person PROPERLY, (as in proportional proper) completely and utterly disrupts their comfortable way of drawing their characters, or characters they enjoy drawing.
b) the idea of drawing a person properly has taken over their previous stylistic way of creating a character, and they cant find that middle ground where proportions and their infinite mathematical connections meet style.
For me, i fall under the category of B. It seems that lately i'm more obsessed with making sure that a characters muscles are properly displayed and the proportions are just right, according to what the average human should be like. I get scared now tryin to draw really fat dudes with longer than normal arms and big fat heads, cause it just doesnt look right to me anymore, it doesnt look RIGHT. But i'm happy to say that today as i was workin on some motion studies for characterization class, I sorta broke out of that mental block and totally busted out the meanest lil egg lookin dude to date.
And so now that i write this, i realize that i totally forgot to scan some of those images, and since i'm ready to pass out i'm just going to leave you with some older sketches i've churned out at the panera down the block from work.
