A bit more

A bit more page 36 work in progress. My anatomy kinda sucks, I'll have to make sure to work on that for the next comic I work on. Sorry FBC people.

I have this mild nagging anxiety that the better I get while working on Something Animal the less cohesive the art is going to be when it's all looked at together and the end product is going to suffer. Sort of like watching your child grow up and not noticing anything changing, then going back to look at school photos and not recognizing them.
Stylistically it's all how I want it to look, unraveled, frenetic and not all there but technically the quality of the first few pages is just not going to be up to the same standard as the last few pages etc. I can try to mitigate it with a few redos here and there but where does that end?

How do artists do a 60-70 page comic and have it all look so similar? Do they stop learning or do they just learn how to restrain themselves?

11:44

It's really

It's really coming down out there; I'm impressed California.

Right then

Right then, back to it.

This will need more blood, infection and pain by the time it's done but you get the general idea: ouch.

I keep saying

I keep saying to myself "use the good paper it won't get soggy, use the good paper it won't get soggy, use the good paper!" Then I use the cheap paper and it gets soaked. Oh well, these are my problems, one day it will ALL be good paper.

Bit of art then off to Trader Joe's and Costco on the 23rd of December. Brb 12 hours.

Here's a couple at different stages, ink and water color:

4 day

4 day weekend. My plan is to finish Something Animal! It's only another 30 some-odd pages... I might just have to start skimping on little things like quality.

Bit by bit.

I want to get as much as possible done before the Tofurky and roast beef battle royale in a couple of days. I often wonder how much of the Something Animal story is obvious by the stuff I post. Guy that looks like me beats up homeless people and vomits a lot. I assure you there is a lot more to it than that!

I'm developing

I'm developing a bad habit of doing all the coloring and manipulation to low res photos I take of preliminary art sitting on my lap in the car. Fortunately most of it is on separate layers that I can put high-res scanned art behind later and no one will be any the wiser. In the meantime do me a favor, imagine this but better:

Something Animal WIP, photo on lap, Photoshopped.

Secret sticky

Secret sticky note figure studies oh yeah Happy Fucking Holidays!

It's absolutely

It's absolutely pissing down outside; very inspiring weather to paint in. I've got a nice abstract, textured, moody thing happening here that I will try my best to ruin with details and outlines at my earliest convenience.

Something Animal WIP, ink on paper.

Help

Help, I'm stuck at work and can only work on tiny little sticky note page layouts!

Adjusted

Adjusted Sera's face a little to make it a little less Robert and little more Pris from Bladerunner, moved some of Paulie's features around to make him look a little less gormless (lol Photoshop). A bunch of dodge and burn, coloring and a couple of textures thrown in. More manipulation than I would usually do but I think it called for it.

It probably would've been better to leave this as a rough sketch and do a new "proper" version rather than just cramming this one through the machine just to finish it. The anatomy is a bit off and the poses are pretty bland/lazy but thems the breaks. I'm really happy I got this done within 24 hours and you never know, maybe I'll have the chance to redeem myself in the future.

The Concrete World pinup, mixed media.

Full disclosure: I did all the manipulation to this from a fairly low res photo (the one from the last update, with the carpet cropped out), just because I wanted to work on it right away, rather than a scan that I'd have to wait until later for. At some point I'll do a full high quality scan and drop it in behind all the color/dodge/burn stuff and it will probably look slightly better.

Throw a gun

Throw a gun in there for good measure, switched to the bob haircut (can't think why...) and some pretty standard posing stuff. I will probably hate this tomorrow (I already kind of hate it now) but that's generally how these things are.

The Concrete World WIP, ink and watercolor.

The Concrete World

The nice people over at The Concrete World asked me to do a pinup for their comic to which I said "Sure, what the hell".

Here's a rough sketch I did at lunch of my first layout idea:

It's a bit static for my taste and it would definitely need some tweaks and some anatomical correction-type stuff but I think it's a decent enough starting place.

Ink and ink on paper.

About time

About time I had something decent looking on here.

The paper is soaked

The paper is soaked and Meg's almost home, good time to take a break.

Something Animal beatdown in progress, ink and watercolor on not-thick-enough paper.

If it's worth doing...

I mean honestly, who cares how good your "sitting on a bus" or "having a chat at a bar" scene looks?

Not me, what's who.

I care about how compelling and visceral your violence is. This is something I have to get just right for this project. I want to make you cringe and make you really not want to be there. The last page was a bit weak, I'm giving it another try.

Doesn't look like much, but this is how they all start:

Something Animal WIP, ink on paper.

Speaking of

Speaking of a savage and fatal beating, this one is coming along quite nicely.

SA work-in-progress, ink on paper.

This is

This is really just becoming the "Something Animal works-in-progress Blog" which is not what I intended. I'm finding that although I like taking breaks from it to work on other projects I lose consistency and momentum when I do so. Either that or I just don't have enough time to do both. What I would really like is to power through to the end of Something Animal get the printed copies in my hand then move the fuck on - The Way Out Is Through etc.
I only hope the Fanboy Comics people have a nice follow up project waiting for me to work on when I'm done.

I have also been secretly working on an outline for Riot District that is getting a bit out of control. I can't show it to anyone, of course, because then they would know I've been crazy this whole time.

I really like that you can see reflection on the ink in this photo that you wouldn't see in a scan.

I'm really

I'm really looking forward to these next couple of pages. I've got a sneaking suspicion this homeless guy is going to get the living shit beaten out of him in a very dynamic and artistic way.

When all is said and done I will have spent over a year on the art for Something Animal. It's looking like it's going to be about 60-70 pages, all painted and then laid out in Photoshop, just over a page a week. Way too much time to dedicate to a project like this project to be honest.
I need to find a way to get this down to about 3 months which is about a day and half per page. Sounds pretty iffy but I think if I can do about 2-3 comics a year with some one-off, covers and other art/photography/writing stuff in between I could be happy.