Well, I didn't actually get to art as much as I wanted to this week. I did some thumb nailing but mostly I was doodling bad doodles trying to get myself out of an art block.
I'm going to give this Value Composition another week so I might product something up to a colour sketch of something.
So, here is my page of thumbnails. I was trying to find a composition for battle charge style image. There are a couple I like (6,12 and 14) and that I might expand into more detailed larger thumbnails to explore.
#12 is not exactly a battle scene but I wouldn't mind expanding on it into a different type of illustration. or adding details to it to make it a more subtle battle waiting scene.
Anyway, not so interesting but making an effort to spend a little time posting.
I'll leave behind 2 sketches I posted last week.
I've started using my deviantART account again. I've posted some art on there, and I'm going to make sure to post lots of sketches in my scraps. I'm trying to find some more artists to follow on there because most of my DevWatch represents my interests of 6 years ago and doesn't necessarily thrill me any more.
I've done a TON of tutorials for Copicmarker.com and for everyone's convenience I've been keeping the list on the resources page of my website.I've done 15 since the last one I posted on here. Wow. They must really like me...
We've sent our Gateways to Beyond comic to the printers. We're expecting the first batch April 4th. Cutting it close for some of our conventions but barring any major issues we should be OK.
Heres some recent art work - all created for Tutorials, oops. One day I'll do art for me, haha.
VCon is next weekend, and I wanted to have a fresh drawing to have some new prints. I was doing a tutorial for Copic Marker and finished it early. The tutorial will be posted in a few weeks (I've frequently done tutorials for Copic) in the mean time, here is the image which will be available to buy as a print at Vcon this weekend.
I can't begin to tell you how many people are commissioning me to draw X photo in my style. I was happy though, this was my first winter scene of the year OuO
I did a drawing! OMG. I know. I've done nothing but comics for so long, I almost forgot what it was like to just sit and draw for the sake of drawing.
I thought I'd post the instagrams all in one place just to show the progress.
So I didn't win the deviantART San Diego Comic Con Sponsorship but I'm not at all surprised, only slightly disappointed. I wanted to win for the validation of winning and someone saying my stuff was good. I'm the only person who pats me on the back. I never had an interest in a mainstream company picking up my work, and in retrospect I believe that's what they were canvassing for.
Working for one of those places (DC, Marvel) is actually one of the few art related jobs that makes me cringe.
Having said that, I had a lot of nice stuff happen this week that helped boost my spirits and this time, from a Company that I really like and respect.
Copic marker featured me on their new Copic Social Network - Copic Color In fact, it's been 2 days I've been up there and I'm still the "featured Created".
On top of that, they've been tweeting the heck out of me as well, and as a result I've gotten a few new followers.
I also was featured my submission on their Tumblr account! I was pretty please about that.
I love Copic as a company their PR is great, products are amazing and ...ya. I want to work for them! LOL
So we've also got a lot of convention lined up! check out Gurukitty Studios blog and see where we will be and when!
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 :)
Kinda experimenting with some skin tones, and some accents....In reality I just wanted to colour Victor with his moustache. It gets a little hard on a person to be drawing cartoony stuff all the time, every now and then I want to bust out some drawings of my more....real characters. not that these guys are real looking at all...
Side note, I'd like Aaron Ekhart to play Victor in a TV movie of Conflagration
This is my character Victor from my Conflagration Comic. I've decided that he needs a moustache. I've been going through my characters and tweaking them, and trying to make them more believable, and also more drawable for the comic etc. I thought since Victor is a bit of a baby face, he would want to age his face a little and the way men do that is with a moustache, I'm assuming. But I wanted his moustache to still fit his happy go lucky, sarcastic, slightly clumbsy and snarky but sometimes DEAD SERIOUS self and I thought this slightly curled puffstache was the one for him... so here he is in all his "I'm a big boy" glory - Victor and his moustache. This is how he will appear in the Conflagration chapter of the comic, but in the Embers comic he will be baby face :3
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.
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
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:
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!
So I tried to get on livestream yesterday but my internet has been so screwy it really hasn't allowed much of anything lately. So instead I've been snapping little photos with my overhead camera as I've been working on my illustration.
starts at the top and scrolls down. The very last picture is the current state that it's in (as of typing) so as you can see, its a long process, lol. the first 5 are working on the wall, then the Tudor style horn cup, and skin, then Vic's hair.
Its Copics on Xpress it blending card.
This is by far my favourite paper to work with!
I thought it important that if I have 12 days off I should get something completed in that time, illustration wise. something more epic than the usual little portraits I've been doing. Also since I wont get much time for these sorts of work once I go full tilt on Hello, Albertosaurus.
I feel like I needed more art of groups of my characters together.
Nakia, Edlyn, Demi, and Victor.
That's a corn cob on Demi's drink, She's getting her revenge with Mr. Scorpion. Nakia will have a drink and the BG is just drawn really light in Non photo blue so you can only see a hint here or there of what it is. LOL
I feel like I should be creating a decent sized piece of art in my vacation time, not JUST comic pages :P
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:
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!
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!
So I took the opportunity I created by being organized in the morning to Live stream another couple quick marker drawings.
I coloured 2 images. They were sketches I drew at Vancouver Comicon in January, and I kinda liked how they turned out, so here they are. As usual I love the rough sketches more than the completed images but I like how Stacy turned out especially. I used a very limited palette with her and I think it turned out well.
Sketched on really smooth Claire Fontaine paper with my Drafting Pencil.
Stacy is the pouty one, and Pehny has the braid.
Now here is the video of the colouring proccess. it's about 50 mins long.
My Copic Class starts tomorrow! There is still time to register! I'm a little nervous, but then again... I'm not. I've had such a good response to my blog, and my many tutorials out there I'm sure I can make it worthwhile for the students.
I am also teaching a second class through my work. I'm going to be teaching Acrylic Gel transfers In North Vancouver. If you're a card maker this is a really neat and unique way to add some dimension and texture to a card! Check out the information on the class here.
After these classes are all done, I'm going to try to get my natural life rhythm back! If my work schedule can be more consistent that would be much easier but I wont hold my breath on that one, or I'll turn blue and die.
I'm going to go back to working on my Comics consistently, and occasionally throwing out a free bee to you guys, though they won't be with the regularity they were in the past.
So I've been sketching here and there:
Here's a page of hand sketches I did in my new sketchbook.
Rough hand sketches. Blue ColourEno pencil.
Also, and Kitty might kill me for sharing this image before her, but I coloured it so... whatever :p
Kitty drew this sketch and I was itching to play with my markers so I did some skin colour testing on it for her. Here is what we came up with.
Hey! Phew, I finally finished this one at last. It took a little while, and was a little nerve racking with the red over top of such a light background since red is such a strong colour, a little smudge would pretty much be permanent. LOL.
I did the background first with a series of Cool Greys, layering in all the trees and snow, then I took a colourless blender and dotted the while bg, to give that dense snowy look (I showed this technique before), then coloured Penelope, that way I didn't have to worry about accidentally dragging red out into the bg when I tried to colour it. I then couldn't decide on the birds colour, so I scanned it once Penelope was nearly done, and then coloured the little bird roughly a few different colours:
Seeing which bird would look the best!
It was pretty clear to me after seeing this that the red bird would be best. it complimented her dress well, and still stood out!
So, then I finished colouring it, and then I put copper leaf on a few of the beads in her hair, and on the birds longest tail feather. The original looks way way way better than online, partially because of the copper leaf looking so special in real life,but also the yellows didn't scan well, so the warm light casting on the snow between the trees just kind of... died...
Here is a little work in progress of the sketch I posted before.
RED IS HARD! it doesn't erase, and I have a SOMEWHAT limited pile of reds in my Copic arsenal, so I'm jumping all over the reds finding sets to blend with. I think this is going well though. Got sort of a watercoloury look right now.
I did the bg first this time, because knowing there was going to be reds in the foreground I never wanted to risk smudging it out, cuz it never goes away. also I wanted to be a little sloppy, and just erase the greys on the areas I wanted to keep clean anyway.
I like it so far, I hope you do too. Going to try to finish it tomorrow.
In early 2011 I will be starting Online Copic marker classes on the CDAC. I will strive to make them universally applicable to all purposes not just illustration or crafting. They will be entertaining, stimulating and informative, and I think they're a pretty unique angle for markers.
For the most part classes will be affordable, 1 month long, have at least 1 assignment, free digital images, and a give away at the end of the class. you will receive a completion badge for your blog or website as well.
if you think you'll be interested in the classes please feel free to fill out this short form to be informed when enrolment begins. You will not be emailed for anything but Copic classes hosted by myself.
Please help me by spreading the word to your friends for me, I'd really appreciate it! I'll be cross posting this to all my blogs, so I apologize if anyone watches more than one blog, you'll be bombarded.
