This Is What I Feel Like When I Wake Up In The Morning.

I just realized something.

Mirrors don't flip something left to right. They flip things front to back.

This is, officially, blowing my mind.

'Nother charcoal drawing. WhiteFox likes snow. WhiteFox likes snow very much. Also, I am apparently one of those select few who has the right kind of face for tea-shades, so I consider myself lucky there.

I don't really draw my avatar all that often... I'm not really sure how to define him. I don't think of him as a fictional character, persona, or mascot. He represents me, but I don't think of him as being me. I guess he's like the visual component of a pen-name.

I don't like this drawing as much as the one I previously posted, probably because I didn't get to define the planes of the face or neck. Course, when you're matte white, there's not a lot you can do. I did play around with using unblended strokes to add definition to the hair and beard, and it was an informative exercise, but it doesn't carry a whole lot of visual impact.

Still... I like it. 

An Icosahedron. A while back, I figured out a nifty trick for drawing them at any angle whatsoever, and even in perspective.

Hatched it for penmanship practice. Nice little refresher exercise. 

Balian here (and his twin brother Xanthus) are private security agents for Perihelion Industries. They bump heads with Galen from time to time

Balian is sporting an "Escort" model man-portable railgun. The coolant runs out after about fifteen rounds, but that's okay, because the quick-change barrel lasts for about twelve. In spite of this, however, the Escort is the weapon of choice for the designated marksmen of PHI's private security forces.

Balian usually operates in full-body powered armour. On the top right is his helmet.

Below that is a profile sketch. I usually do one those before I draw someone at an angle, to help me sort out the proportions of the head and placement of the features.

Man, I've been neglecting my tumblr.

Not dead, just busy. I'm trying to get this comic thing started, which involves a lot of design and concept sketches. Which are messy. So, I'm filling out three pages of sketchbook a day, but very little of it is presentable.

...And drawing dodecahedrons. I'll post about that some other time.

Here's another charcoal thing, I love it. Windy oaks have got to be the very epitome of spooky trees. 

Quick observation: publishers like Marvel/DC put out a 32 page comic every month... those books have like twenty people working on them: pencillers, inkers, colourists, typesetters, cleanup artists, etc... 

re: artists working themselves to death and why the HECK is this the standard

the entire thing about the death of an animator in japan due to overwork is exactly why i am completing chapter 1 of 1989nk in months, not weeks.

this has been one of my biggest fears getting this project off the ground. the standard for work output by artists is set so fucking high nowadays. we’re ALL expected to perform at the level of the outlier. (This was apparent to me as early as in Art School, when we were all treated like we were absolutely fucking useless for not being able to do an entire 5 minute 3D animated film all by ourselves like that one guy in our program.) Artists who overwork themselves and overachieve (whether by perceived necessity or choice) unfortunately create an illusion to consumers and employers that their level of performance should be the standard. It creates a nasty cycle, because more artists start trying to adhere to that standard and it gets passed on and on and on.

i’m honestly fully expecting my deadline for chapter one to be too long of a wait for some people. “This other artist got their 30-40 page comic done in 6-8 weeks, why is yours going to take 6-8 months?”

listen, its because i don’t want to not be able to draw for the rest of my life at 30. I dont want to destroy my wrist and make myself ill and make the quality of the comic suffer because i have to live up to the vicious overwork cycle that’s completely blanketed the digital art/media/comics scene. If another artist takes only a few weeks to do their comic? Fine, but you know, theyre most likely suffering BADLY for it, and even THEY shouldn’t have to do that. They really, really shouldn’t. Overwork and over achievement frankly needs to stop being praised and heralded, because its not only extremely damaging to the artist themselves, but it also creates that cycle i mentioned.

Trying to keep up with the immense production quantity and speed that other artists seem to be doing has never, ever been possible for me and I’ve occasionally tried, only to seriously break myself. Even the amount of work I do is considered a lot by some, so then how is it that to me, it always feels like chicken scratch? It feels like i’m STILL not doing enough, ever. Even with the amount of work I do, I still feel like a lazy sack of shit and feel crippling guilt when I’m taking a break to do anything else but draw. I constantly feel like I’m losing the race. That isn’t right. That isn’t fair.

i just really, really hope that people don’t see my production time for 1989nk and go “that’s too long, artists don’t take THAT long to do work” because. well. honestly, they should.

Computers Warping My Brain Again

I'm sure everyone has had one of those moments where they did some sort of mistake in real life, and thought "Ctrl-Z!" to no avail.

I was inking something, thought "Where did I put my hawk-quill nib?" and instinctively reached for Google Search.

I'm pretty sure there's just no hope for me anymore.

So it's my birthday. I drew myself a gift for it.

It's lazy, but I feel like being lazy right now. No jubilant celebrations or anything, just a quiet day to myself.

Finally, at long last: I have a name for my style of work: Tradigital... Woo! Time to go re-tag everything I’ve ever posted. Fun story: I was thinking about how to categorize my work, and I thought, It’s kinda part traditional, part digital... tradigital! And I thought, I wonder if I’m the first one to think of that. So off to Google I go, and it turns out, I wasn’t! And I went, “Cool: now I have a name for it!

Also picked up a new term a little while ago: “Spotting blacks,” which is where you fill in solid black areas of a comic frame... funny that in the myriad of comic how too books I own, it wasn’t mentioned once. Good thing to know, since spotting blacks is the part that I do digitally.

This little guy is a carbuncle: a lizard about five inches long when he’s not all curled up. He has a gemstone inside his head that, if extracted and correctly processed can be used to create a potion that grants the imbiber... I dunno, eternal life, or the ability to perceive the essential nature of reality, or something like that. Removing the gem kills the carbuncle, so this one is having a little quiet time sitting on his own belly, ‘cuz poachers got most of his family.

Wow: this one looked so much better as a pencil sketch than it does on screen. Especially that hind leg, jeez.