Daily Deviation

HEY! I got A DD today!
SChweet!
Albertosaurus Page 9

Thanks to Damaged927 and kangel for that!
Heres some info on the comic:
Hello, Albertosaurus is a Comic memoir of a trip myself, Kitty, and our dad took to Alberta to visit Dinosaur National Park and the Famous Drumheller Royal Tyrell Museum. The comic will be a full colour from cover-to-cover graphic novel. It will be coloured traditionally with Markers and will be a 6"x6" square comic. It will be available to purchase in the shop and at conventions when it's complete.

The first chapter is available to read online here at dA as well as other places (see links in description of the DD - too lazy to dig) and the rest will be print only :)

Thanks so much!

OOPS... gunna be late for work, LMAO!

Production Diary - Hello Albertosaurus photos

Well, I'm pretty fond of how crazy my thumbnailed pages are in my book for working on Hello, Albertosaurus so I thought I'd share with you the crazies that is my notebook for H,A.

Enjoy!
OH, Next week after I colour my page on Live stream, I'm going to make a tutorial on how I make my print files for print and web for the comics, so if anyone else is looking to publish comics it might be a good thing to check out :)

Page 11 Coloured Live

I finished colouring todays page (which will be posted shortly) Live on Livestream! Check out the video!
How are you liking the comic so far?

Watch live streaming video from guruubii at livestream.com

Page 10 Live stream

Page 10 Of Hello, Albertosaurus I coloured live on Livestream just now. Check out the Video if you want. You can watch me make a mess with my Copic Airbrush. Gosh there were some scary moments in there :|

Watch live streaming video from guruubii at livestream.com

Drawing B.C.

So, I've posted Page 8 today (which is technically Page 9 because I didn't post the illustration page online) you can check it out here if you like. I really enjoyed colouring this page, but it got me thinking about how potentially monotonous my comic could become. B.C. is pretty renowned for its gorgeous scenery of tree's and mountains, and when you're driving through the rockies you can't look away from all the amazing, but once it comes down to illustrating a drive through the rockies, there is a real danger of being boring. hopefully I've avoided this fate so far in my comic (I hope you're reading it).

Every Monday from now on I'm going to colour the latest comic page live before its posted. It takes me around 2-5 hours each page to colour it, but I've been told its interesting to watch so, maybe you'll tune it. I'll try to download them after and post a fast motion version on Youtube as well.

Watch live streaming video from guruubii at livestream.com

SO I've got 3 more commissions to work on, and then if I have time before the staff meeting I'm going to sketch the next page, or work on some more character design tweaks for Conflagration. But first... a shower!!! :p

Some sketches, and an inked Comic page

So I thought I'd share a cluster of sketches from my sketchbook. Most of them are of my character, Bala, but there is one little sketch of jack and a caveman. I'm trying to tweak their designs a little bit to something I wont struggle to keep on model in the comics. I always design someone then after I draw them a few times some little trends in how I interpret them comes up so this is what usually happens. Balas face shape has been simplified a lot.

I am also trying to do something to Victor's (main character of conflagration) face. besides simplifying him for repeated drawing purposes, I'm also thinking that he needs a moustache, but its pretty clear I need to research more types of moustaches to find the one that doesn't make him look like one of the village people. LOL

They're not the best drawings, but for scribbles of moustaches, it was alright.
Okay, so now for the rest of the day, until I have to go to a staff meeting (on my DAY OFF FROM THAT JOB! hate!) I'm going to be colouring todays Hello, Albertosaurus comic page on Live stream so watch for it:! here is a preview:

Sketch Cards - Dinosaurs!

I was trying to get some sketch cards done up for the Convention on Sunday that were dinosaurs and Hello, Albertosaurus related. These dinos I thought turned out really cute! Theres also a Moma in there from BATP.

All coloured with Copic markers on Bristol sketch cards (the only time I use bristol)

Click to visit the image on dA

LochNess. Not a dinosaur as much as a cryptid. Could be a plesiosaur though.

Click to go to dA

Orthocones! I liked playing with these deep blues. got carried away!

quetzalcoatlus! 

Spinosaurus aegyptiacus! in the rain :)

Therizinosaur. I used copic airbrush on this one.
His colour scanned bad. his neck and throat is actually
fluorescent!

That's about all I got for you! I hope you enjoy them :D These will all be for sale at our next convention! thats March 20th!

Hello, Albertosaurus - Production Diary - posting online!

Some of the inside pages of Hello, Albertosaurus are chapter dividers, and I've tried to do something kinda of cute with them so far. My dinosaur style is... a little odd... LOL!
So here is a sneek peek and the chapter 1 Chapter page:

Albertosaurus is Sad by `guruubii on deviantART

I also coloured some of it on livestream as well if you're interested in that sort of thing

Watch live streaming video from guruubii at livestream.com

So, Chapter 1 is going to be posted online for all to read, while the rest of the comic is going to be print only.
you will be able to buy it online in our shop or at our conventions.
I'm excited! The Comic is available now, the page 1 is up, it will update on Mondays!

Read and RATE Chapter 1 online at your favourite places:
smack jeeves
gurukitty
Drunk Duck

I'm also working on getting a gallery of my own art up on Gurukitty.com so I'm not always hosting on places like deviantART but I want to find something with a commenting system. One of the things thats actually enjoyable about dA is the interaction (though it's few and far between, the hope is there). I might have to use tumblr or blogger for a gallery... hmm.. Any thoughts on that?

Studio news:
Kitty and I are working on getting a pretty fancy pigment printer for our studio so we're not ordering online for prints. The benefit of Pigment VS the standard dye based printer is the archival quality. Pigment is archival and has better ink stability. So we can be more assured that the prints I sell will be worth the price no matter where the purchaser puts that print. I also have access to lower cost ink refills for the printer I have in mind through my work so it makes it a rather cost effective adventure for us.
We can then print on special papers that will best reflect the medium they're create in (and will also serve to further protect the art work being printed).
Canson has created a gorgeous line of artists print papers that I've now used quite extensively and they're phenomenal. When you can and print a watercolour painting onto their arches paper, it's incredibly hard to find any difference from the original painting! On top of that, the paper (being watercolour paper and other types of artists papers) will actually allow you to continue to paint on the print itself! This is a good way for us to create a unique product to sell.
This all came about with a few print service frustrations lately.
Over at deviantART I found that half of the prints I wanted to order hadn't gone through the approval Queue, so in order to purchase the bulk quantity I needed, with a shopping cart of mixed approved and some not approved, I'd have to go through the cart twice and place 2 separate orders with 2 separate shipping charges! I angrily submitted to this and went to purchase them to find that when I went to put through my order of the un-approved batch that they had cleared from my cart. So the orders were quite big and that was a lot of wasted time. besides that, the quality control of dA prints is very low now. They used to be good, but now I get prints that have bad trim on them and on top of that there is no artists identification on the prints at all.
Other print places online have a great reputation or wonderful services but have limited payment options, or don't ship to Canada.
So our solution will have a big start up cost (at least $1000) but in the end we'll have amazing print quality, the ability to print mini posters, cards, ACEO prints, and an infinite number of other things. The quality of our notebooks/ sketchbooks (convention only product) will go up as well as our bookmarks, and comic covers (mini comics).
This change will hopefully be happening in the Summer sometime (July/ August) so watch our for Print sales, and if you want to order prints from deviantART before they're gone forever, you better get on it, because once we have our own printer it will be prints through our shop only.

So there's the news! Back I go to work on more comic Pages!

Hello, Albertosaurus - Production Diary -colouring

So I've spent a great deal of today working on Hello, Albertosaurus. It's been fun. I've got a full page coloured and I'll finish the second page here in no time. Once I've got a few pages done I'm going to start posting them online to view. The first chapter will be viewable online while the rest will be available to purchase either through our shop or at Conventions. Hopefully by the end of this week I'll have some pages started to go up :)
Here are some little teaser pictures:

Production Diary - Hello Albertosaurus Inking

Well, I'm moving slowly, Juggling projects and life, but I'm getting stuff done!
I've done the pencils for several pages from Day one(my chapters go by days of the trip) and so today I started inking some of the pages that were fully pencilled.

page 4 being inked on my Light Tracer 2

The Light box is a great one, but being that I'm working in a smaller format than Jeri does on Daqueran, the big light box can be cumbersome for me, especially since I like to work on my desk.

I'm excited that soon I'll be getting the 9x12 light pad from artograph. My store where I work is going to be getting them in soon (they already have the 6x9). its got a glass top so the surface will stay flat, and it's narrower so it will not sit so high on my desk. Also since it's 9x12 it won't take up so much room on my wee desk.The day 1 chapter will be readable on line once I get some pages set up and I decide where about I'm going to be posting it on line. Probably just on the website.

Anyway, back to inking.

Hello, Albertosaurus - Production Diary

been working on Hello, Albertosaurus today. I was going to wait until after my Memoir course at Emily Carr, but I already know how to make comics, I took a course on it on 2004 as well, so why wait? I'm really only looking at the course to give some specific insight into making it a memoir more than the comic making part.

Anyway, I started working away on the page planning aspect of it. and I had an unopened sketchbook that turned out to be perfect. I have everything set up here, my post it notes, Triangle (improperly labelled as a t square, lol.) travel journal, and post it notes.

I am finally making use of all that table space I cleared out so I could have an art desk. When I'm home alone I often find it awkward to draw on the couch because I prefer to listen to music than watch movies while arting, but Kitty likes the movies. On my desk I'm right next to my music, and google, for referencing.

So I wanted to plan it out pretty well before tackling the full pages. I'm going to be colouring the whole thing in copic markers which as many of you know, can be a rather time consuming operation with all the layering and blending, so I want to make sure I have as few redo's once I get to the colouring stages, as possible.

Since my comic is going to be in a square format, Post it notes were a beautiful way to plan out my pages. I've taken 2 post it notes per page in my sketchbook, and each post it represents a page in the future comic. Then I have room to dabble little notes through out the margins. If I need to change a page, or add a page, I just un-stick the post its to re arrange. I've also left the back sides of the pages blank, in case something needs adding in etc. See my photo for a close up of a page layout page.

I'm so happy to finally have a Full Spectrum lamp at my desk. It's true what they say about reducing eye strain, and the colour matching! my Copics never looked so good! when i look up from the desk, my whole apartment looks like I'm looking at it through a glass of apple juice. The world is just yellow! LOL

Anyway, back to work!

Hello, Albertosaurus Colour

Here are some cute coloured model sheets for the 3 players in Hello, Albertosaurus, as well as a little scenery drawing of Dinosaur national park! A little idea of how the comics are going to look!

Daddys nasty yellow nicorette gum, HAHA!

The layers of colour in the hoodoo's was one of my favourite things.

Buttons on hat vary from picture to picture HAHA!

Not happy with how over-saturated this one turned out. Bad editing. its quite earthy in real life.

Hello, Albertosaurus

I've finally settled on "Hello, Albertosaurus" as the title of my memoir comic. The poll didn't help me choose, it helped me decide what I hated.
The cheezy filler titles I threw in there just because they were dino words got the most votes but I'd never fathom calling a serious comic those. It was pretty clear people didn't have any idea of the story while voting.

Anyway, having said that, here is a quicky little modelsheet for the 3 main characters of the comic.

Little Jepi: standard pose, Talk to the hand pose, Starch worship, jumprope
Little Daddy: standard pose, wont climb hoodoo pose, nicorette bubble pose
Little Guru: standard pose, eating poutine pose, punting pachyderm pose, 2 run poses.

as time goes on and I solidify more I'll show more of them. I have many animals, characters and settings to design to match the sand-bag design of these little guys here.

Just as a side note the final product is going to be a perfect bound comic/ graphic novel. I will not be publishing it online except extra material like this, and promotional things.