Hey, a new picture (that’s not secret until 2028).
This one was done back in November, and I was well enough to try inking it on paper. It worked out ok — even if I felt someone set my entire body on fire for the most of it — but it wasn’t someting I haven’t been able to again since, so the total number of paper pictures in the last five years remains at… two.
It was a nice day though, feeling like old times, and going “oh right, this is what I do, I remember now.” Not so much the paper part of it, but just drawing. And I have been drawing more lately, so the months ahead do seem a bit more optimistic, after a long time*.
* (in this particular room, no guarantees about anywhere else)
Advertising work generally isn’t too exciting to post, since it tends to be a person using a new phone, or a closeup of a shoe, and usually there’s about six minutes total to draw it all, but a while back I did a few pictures for a sports promo that had a different setting — not sure if it even got shot, but drawing the rain was fun (for six minutes).
(These could, as always, also be filed in the “why don’t you just draw comics this way (and at this speed)” folder.)
Maybe I can’t do comics just yet, but I can do pictures that take as long to read as one — this cover was for an old friend Goran Sudžuka’s (and Stephanie Phillips’) new book, so I wanted to go all out on it if I could.
A hiatus with work and blog (and literally everything else, but that part’s not new), because of the body very much not cooperating again, but there’s still covers I didn’t get to here. More unexpected subject matter too. In anticipation of the last cover, here’s the first four —
(you should be able to click on them and just use the arrow keys)
One from last year that was just too slow to make it to press in time– I remember it being a particularly impossible period so I’m amazed I managed to draw even the patterns — though without the color I probably consider it only 40% done, if that much.
During the silence while I was finishing the A+M comic, I forgot to mark the occasion of the blog making it through a full year. Hooray. I still think it was a good idea.
So what now, in year two? More new pictures, hopefully, and maybe more personal stuff beyond the new years cards. But since new work doesn’t exist until it’s complete (I have by now finally learned not to announce anything except in retrospect), today a few more bits from the archive — one of the many obsolete versions of a next thing.
More impossible times lately, but trying to use the few OK minutes to work on the card. I missed pages. I only did two in all of 2023 (the previous card). Here’s to more than two in the new year, and I hope you’re all having a nice quiet time until then —
Done during one of my more uphill times, but I was happy to be able to do a cover for Ben Stenbeck’s creator-owned book. And since it’s for another artist, I allowed myself to do it almost how I’d do it for myself.
Sometimes a cover is best as a simple picture of the person standing there, or a dynamic action shot. Other times, a completely different approach works out better and leads to more interesting places. Here’s a case of the latter working out better. How didI end up with these circles?
I had a few directions for this one, from the maximalist “just put everything in there” to a 3D one (using the model I made sometime in the middle of issue four of Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy and then promptly forgot to actually use for reference for the rest of the book.)
The other day I got really fed up again with only posting covers, them being the only new material to put up here.
I had this sketch around which seemed like an easy candidate to finish and make into a stand-alone picture: just two guys and a robot. You know, the sort of thing people post. Free-floating art on the internet. “Warmup” drawings. What ifs. Ads for more substantial things that don’t exist and probably never will.
I didn’t need it to mean anything, I didn’t even need to particularly like it. Just something small and sort of finished and new to put up1, a throwaway image.
The second hardcover omnibus volume is out now, collecting the last (and best) volume I did with John Arcudi, Pirate’s Ghost and Metal Monsters of Midtown, as well as the first book, The Iron Prometheus by Jason Armstrong and Mignola, and short stories that were originally collected in the fifth paperback, A Chain Forged in Life. Roughly 470 pages of Lobster.
