More Red Space Suit

Working a little more on this Character Design class demo. This time, the lineup in color, and a turnaround for Little Red Space Suit herself...




I think I'm going to use these guys for a storyboard sample, too. There will be spaceships.

More Demos

Here's another in-class demo. This one was a quick sketch for my comics class, to demonstrate a few inking tricks.

Little Red Space Suit

I'm teaching a Character Design class again, and we're just finishing up the traditional "Little Red Riding Hood" assignment. To me, the main point of this one is to arrive at a wide range of character types - young and old, male and female, nice and nasty - and so I give my students a lot of leeway in interpreting the story. Last time, I did a cute Halloween-themed lineup as a demo, so this time I thought I'd do something with a (slightly) more realistic aesthetic:



This, of course, would be a Little Red Space Suit version, in which our heroine is taking a payload of oxygen to Grandmother's asteroid only to find that she's been replaced by a shape-changing alien. "What a lot of eyes you have, Granny!" "All the better to see you with, my dear."



Here's the rough draft, before I cleaned it up, reshuffled the characters, and redesigned the Hunter character. In the real world, you could do all this with Photoshop, but we're keeping it old-school in the classroom.



A few alternative candidates for the shape-changing Space Wolf.



And here's me working out a new design for the Hunter, including a high-tech laser axe for slaying monsters.

Scotland Barnes, who's teaching another section of the same class, posted his own awesome development drawings over on his blog. Go admire!

Dark Age: Labraid Revisited

This blog is looking a little monochrome at the moment, so let's pull up another color piece from the archives. Here's an updated version of Labraid of the Red Hand, previously featured in this 2009 post.

6 Hour Comic: My Rise And Fall

Wowzers, here's my second comic for this week! This was done for a "6 Hour Comic Day" at the Academy of Art, but it took me about an hour and a half just to script and thumbnail it, so the total elapsed time was actually seven hours. Lots of tiny panels in this one, plus cameos by a duck-billed platypus, a naked mole rat, and a couple of dodos.

Perspective Primer

I'm currently teaching a bunch of introductory comics classes, and I just discovered that I'm pretty bad at explaining perspective in lecture form - and downright terrible at drawing intelligible diagrams on the board while I'm at it. Comics to the rescue! Taking a cue from David Chelsea and Scott McCloud, I've put together this quick and simple Perspective Primer in an attempt to de-confuse my poor students.

Update: Here's a printable Acrobat PDF version.