Quick Studies

A few sketches from Thursday afternoon's Quick Studies workshop. I could only stay for an hour or so, but it's always a super fun one. Now to gather my strength for this weekend's 24 Hour Comics Day marathon!

Asking Elves

By the way, here's something I'm currently doing with the inimitable Jake Forbes. Over at Ask An Elf, all your burning questions about Christmas and Santa Claus will be answered by sources of impeccable credibility.

Dark Age: Tuan the Hermit

I've been intermittently posting character designs from this story, and since this particular project seems to be back on the shelf for the time being, I hope you'll indulge me as I share a couple more of them...

Little Monsters: Final Cover!

At last, here's the new cover illustration for the completed edition of my Little Monsters comic anthology, which now features seven different short stories. I'd better hurry up and place my book order if I want to have these ready to sell at the Alternative Press Expo in October!

Sketchbook Monsters & Robots

A few recent sketchbook pages for your amusement. I've been playing around with an idea about giant robots fighting enormous H.P. Lovecraft monsters, and after briefly trying to make the monsters weird and non-humanoid, I decided to go to the other extreme and visualize them as stuntmen in rubber suits. As it turned out, I really liked the visual of Cthulhu as a Godzilla extra. Some of these are also touched up with watercolors, which is a nice way to fill time while scanning images or watching Project Runway.




The heroic super robots are supposed to be thousands of years old, and so I played around with some ideas based on ancient cultures. This raises the prospect of a hundred-foot-high monster-smashing Venus of Willendorf, which strikes me as a long-overdue direction for the tokusatsu genre.

The Learning Cycle

Julie's always asking me when I'm going to post this, so let's make the magic happen! This is a poster I created for an assignment in my Teaching Principles class a couple of years ago, which was supposed to dramatize the Experiential Learning Cycle. Longtime readers of this blog will no doubt be shocked to see that I threw in spacemen, cutesy rocketships, and tentacle monsters.



Huh, I guess PlayStation buttons are the universal cosmic language.

Do As I Say, Not As I Demo

Just for filler fun, here are a few demos and examples I did during for my comics classes this summer. First, I did this for a quick in-class exercise where you're given the first and last panels of a story, and you need to fill in the story in between...



And this for another in-class exercise, where you have to include at least one example of every type of "camera angle."



Finally, this was a quick demo of using black and white shapes to create simple backgrounds. There was much discussion of the ominous owl pinata featured in the last scene...