Drawings

by on May 31, 2018 at 12:06 am
Posted In: Art, In Progress

Queuing Up Old Drawings

I’m gonna be posting scans of old drawings and sketches from my various old sketchbooks and scraps from throughout my collection. I’ll be posting them up Sundays and Wednesdays in sets of 5 until I’m all caught up to only what I’ve done most recently. The sets will mostly be older work for now but I’ll be tossing in a recent sketch here and there.

 

★★★

Jake and His Familiars

Watercolor, 2013

Jake was originally going to meet and contract familiars throughout his adolescence. It was a very manga/shonen-esque concept that would be typical of how I originally imagined writing Jake.

I made this as a “bookplate” for the copy Orbyss Beta that I made for my graduation portfolio at Ai. Plucked and scanned from a watercolor sketchbook and printed onto watercolor stock that I glued into the first page of the book.

 

★★★

Jake Flame Study

Markers on Rendr Paper, 2014

This was one of the first times I started playing around with Copic Markers. I was going for something with a definitive Manga look with as few colors I could manage. They’re expensive!

 

★★★

Unfinished Jake Sketch

Watercolor, 2017

This Watercolor sketch is from when I first started playing with Jake’s proportions, deviating from the classic shonen average slim teen stereotype indicative of it’s genre. I became enamored with the idea of Jake growing up to be  the shortest man in the room and owning it.

 

I’ll ink this digitally later.

 

★★★

Jake Knocked Back Tripping

Pencil, 2017

Drawn on a scrap, while I was at work where I most certainly shouldn’t have been drawing, is this little sketch of Jake in an off balance motion. Was he knocked back? Certainly! Is he in a fight? Who knows! I was having trouble getting Jake’s pose down in this so I just rolled with the errors and made then part of how he was moving.

 

I definitely wanna revisit this later.

★★★

Angry Muscular Jake

Pencil and Marker, 2018

In the sketch which I definitely didn’t do on a scrap at work, I wanted to play around with giving Jake an imposing presence; an appearance I could use for dramatic effect; or comedic effect in the right context. It’s a challenge to get this strong look out of him when we all know what a shorty he really is. I was mainly focused on his overall shape/physique, but since it was a sketch, I took the opportunity to explore some of his potential expressions. Faber Castell markers are fun over graphite.

 

★★★

Jake and Mallow

Pen and Ink, Digitally Colored, 2012

This was my first time playing with flat coloring. I wanted to try working in a style inspired by some of Katsuya Terada’s Legend of Zelda illustrations. I don’t know that I succeed but I can say for certain that this drawing still informs my style today.

 

★★★

 

Thanks for looking!

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The Big Site Update (Part 2)

by on April 11, 2018 at 11:57 pm
Posted In: Art, Blog, Devlog, Updates

After the Death of Phillip Mk. V

It was time to switch gears and work on something else for a little while. Up until that point I’d managed to do a few revisions to some of the comic pages that are up as well as first draft pencils of the rest of the 1st chapter. With that in mind I decided to start working on the site again.

If you scroll through the blog archives you’ll probably come across my “devlog” that I was writing as I first started putting this site together. It’s not the most ground breaking or beautiful thing in the digital world, but I’m fairly content for now. I’ve wanted my own site since the olden days in middle school when everyone was off on the net making their own Angelfire and Geocities.

I was hooked from the moment I found Angelfire’s old html editor and learned

<html>
<head>
<title>Mage Punk Archives</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

I think I still have an old website from my high school web design class stashed away on a hard drive somewhere. I’ll revisit that in the future. But for now, let’s outline the changes I’ve made since the update that didn’t happen in November.

First, I reformatted the website a little.

  • Created new icons for the menubar
  • Reformatted the website.
    • Changed the site width. Made it a little more compact.
    • Removed the sidebar
    • Recent posts on the front page are now more compact in appearance.
    • Added a Gallery and a placeholder page for the Shop.
    • Revised the About section a little.
      • Might just move this info to the bottom of the front page and turn this space into a Profiles section.
    • Tidied up the Archives page a little.
  • Uploaded comic revision and wrote full posts for each one
    • Created new comic title cards (seen on the front page)
    • Added published dates to the comic page titles to account for reordering.

 

While the sidebar was useful for putting out a lot of static info at once, it made the front page a little too busy/cluttered. I like the simplicity of the no-column layout and the challenge of giving everything a fair chance at being seen. I still have to re-implement many of the widgets that were there into the current layout of the front page but I think that it can wait for now.

 

Then, I made the navbar illustrations.

The first time around, I made them too big and detailed for the size they’d be displayed at, so I used the default ComicPress navbar for a while instead. You’ll probably still see a few of these make their way into the pages of this site as little spot illustrations. It’d be a shame to let them just sit in the gallery.

Sometime before I started working on the site again, I started work on some little icon illustrations as a break from some beetle and flower studies that I was doing at the time. Before I knew it –(no, actually, it took about a week of work. I totally knew the whole time.) –before. I. knew. it. I’d made a whole set of illustrated graphics for the site.

Lesson learned I think.

 

Finally, it was time for comic revisions to go up.

I’d mentioned doing revisions on the pages I’d posted but I’d rather go into more detail about this in a separate post (The Big Update Part 3: End). For this post I only wanted to mention and show off the title cards that I made for the front page. Before the update, I made these smaller title card images that went in the side bar. They were fun to make, but I’m more attracted to the idea of using splash images on the front page.

 

 

Basically, there was a lot of image editing near the end

From the time I first dipped my toes into it in college, to the many years of putting it off or not having enough time at once, it has been an interesting ride tinkering around and learning to use WordPress. It currently feels like a Chimera-esque menagerie of plugins and self-taught CSS. I still have a lot to learn but I’m at a good enough stopping point for the time being. I’ve spent as much time as I could working on this site for the past two weeks (counting illustrations and image editing). It’s been an experience.

 

It’s time to start drawing again.

Unfortunately, I only ever have enough time for one project at any extended period of time. I’ll do my best to find a good balance between working on projects and posting here consistently. I still have a handful of small spot illustrations and banners that I want to draw for the site but nothing too numerous or complex. This coming Sunday, I want to try to post the 1st draft pencils for the rest of Chapter 1. I’ll also be writing one last post explaining what I have planned for Mage Punk and how I hope to present it on this site. I also have a ton of older art that I’ll be uploading in the coming weeks. After that blog posts should hopefully be a little more succinct than these have been.

 

I do love to ramble.

 

★★★

 

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The Big Site Update (Part 1)

by on April 8, 2018 at 10:25 am
Posted In: Art, Blog, In Progress, Updates

The one update that didn’t happen in November as originally intended

Back in the years of old (2017)…

During the month of Inktober, I posted an announcement of some big update planned for the middle of November. As fate would have it, the Ides of My Month passed by and nothing went up.

It was a cold Inktober

For a while, I succeeded in keeping up with Inktober’s tight deadlines; but I was dissatisfied. I got off to a rocky start, daunted by the ages-old question of “what the FUCK do I draw?”

Then, a week into Inktober, I came across 2pblog‘s own super gorgeous Inktober illustrations.

They reminded me of Katsuya Terada’s old Legend of Zelda illustrations, whose style I sought to emulate and adapt into my own before I finished college. Having found a niche that I was comfortable drawing in, I tried to create a few illustrations of Mage Punk scenes along similar veins as theirs. Taking up, at most, half of a 5″x 8″ sketchbook page, they were meant to be small illustrations that I could finish in a timely manner.

Neuroticism is a Terrible Hubris

Despite their small size, my drawings still proved to be a little too ambitious. Inktober’s daily deadlines and my own tight schedule made a tiring combination. The plan was to finish the pen and ink line art in October; then, color them in that first two weeks of November. Ultimately, I only managed to finish 17 of the 31 planned drawings for the month. Colors were done in December. The holiday season wore me down until I was unable to work on much of anything at all.

I kept fairly active on Twitter and Instagram, where first I posted the colored illustrations after finishing them; but that was about the most that I could manage at the time. I was still proud.

You can see the rest of these drawings in the new Gallery page! Check em out!

 

Then, November was over and suddenly, it was 2018.

The 18th year of the Third Millennium began with a few miscellaneous drawings here and there. I worked to get back into the flow of drawing regularly. I also began wrapping up work on some revisions for the comic pages that had already been posted on this site. Chipping away at my goals for the year was a slow going process, but everything was going smoothly otherwise.

In February, I’d taken some time off work to take photos of the buttons I was selling at  last yevarious consar. Along with a little research, I was starting prep for opening on online store and it’s possible that I over value presentation. I thought the photos looked pretty neat.

 

My phone dropped dead on me a few weeks ago.

As suddenly as that sub-headline, Phillip Mk V (my phone) just shut off on me and wouldn’t turn back on; And preparations for opening up a proper online shop were suddenly derailed because I didn’t have my phone automatically backing photos up into a cloud.

There were still other tasks that needed doing towards opening the shop but, disheartened by my loss, I instead began work on what would eventually turn out to be the finishing touches on this website.

 

★★★

 

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Absent But Not Gone

by on February 13, 2017 at 10:32 pm
Posted In: Blog, Updates

Final Flame HQ in some of its glory.

Staying alive and fed takes a lot of time and work.

Things have been so busy in my life that its been difficult to keep up with this comic of mine. Probably because I seem to insist it should have fully detailed environments on every page. Combined with working a full time job to evade poverty, it’s pretty difficult to scrounge that kinda time.

As a result of my hubris I’ve been completely absent from this site I call my baby. Thankfully, next week I’ll be taking a vacation from work that I’ll be able to use to finish more Mage Punk related work.

 

Building a world from scratch can be pretty arduous.

Since I’m trying to introduce readers to a fictional world that my partner and I are building from scratch, it feels extremely important that there be environments that can help anchor it as a believable place. I think that as the comic goes on, and I get to introduce readers to more of Chaos City and more of Orbyss in general, I’ll be able to take it easier on the environments and focus more on character focused pages.

Not that I don’t love doing the enviromental drawings, but it’s a major drag wanting to tell a story only to get bogged down by having to spend so much time on so much detail on a single page. Especially when I have so little time as it is. The next page after the one coming up has one more big set piece and after that the rest of this chapter will be mostly character interactions.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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More City; More Drawing

by on January 2, 2017 at 2:39 am
Posted In: Blog

A Less Chewy Perspective This Time

You can get a lot done in 30 minutes with good references and Clip Studio Paint’s perspective ruler.

I’m working on getting the next MP out as soon as manageable. Here’s a sketch of an important building in this chapter in the meantime.

 

Until Next Time,

 

Thanks for reading

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Isometric Perspective is Chewier than Anticipated

by on November 21, 2016 at 8:12 pm
Posted In: Blog, Updates

Isometric Perspective WIP

Isometric Perspective Proves More Difficult Than Originally Believed.

I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I originally intended the next page to be a simple exchange of dialogue between characters. Then, I decided it would also be a great opportunity to show more of Fahrenopolis. Inspired by classic RPGs, using an isometric perspective seemed like a great way to focus on texture and color; particularly, Fahrenopolis’ affinity for brick and mortar masonry. It also seemed like a fun way to move the characters through the city. Since an isometric perspective is uniform in all directions, it’s easier to draw than a scene with a traditional view. Unfortunately, even though it’s an easier perspective, extra attention has to be paid to rendering all the extra little details.

Anyway, I’m working on it now. I ended up in a heck of a slump last month and progress fell to the wayside. With that in mind, if you ever come to the site and wonder, “where the heck is this guy??”, I’m pretty active on social media. Twitter especially. Tumblr sometimes. I often produce gems like this:

 

If you ever get tired of me not ranting in your feed about things or want to know if I’ve abandoned all hope, follow me.

With that, I leave you to build my city; brick by brick apparently.

 

Til next time,

 

Thanks for reading!

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