Eik of Late

It's been ages since I put up anything from Eik, and much has progressed. I have about 40 pages (of 52) inked right now, and colour is just around the corner. This wintersession, I am working under the guidance of R. Kikuo Johnson, with my two fellow comic artists, Myken Bomberger and Anita Tung. To summarize, our project is a three-person anthology under the working title Fracture. Each of us is working to complete a comic of around 40 pages to be placed in one book. Our works are pretty diverse both in themes and visual style, so it should make for compelling reading. I'm honored to work with Myken and Anita, as they are both very talented artists. Anyway, enough back-patting, below are some inked parts from Eik, mostly in order.

Last note, say 'Eik' similar to as you would 'Ike'. Eik is primarily a Scandinavian name which can be used for any gender. Literally, it means "oak". The world of "Fangren" is based on the word for "prison" in Norwegian and Danish, which is "fengsel" and "fængsel" respectively.

Drawing along...

More Eik (first two are consecutive spreads, the third is from later in the story)..it's coming along. And now 52 pages long!

It's a very comics fall.

Below: Two random spreads from Eik and my first strip to be put in the All-Nighter once it restarts up.

Eik is still coming

I swear! (proof below)

What I'm doing with my life currently.

Usually when I'm bad at blogging, it's cos I'm too busy doing real actual things in the physical world to document them in the digital one. No exceptions here. I wanna take a couple seconds here to explain what's eating up all my time.

This fall I'm doing a collaborative independent study with Myken Bomberger and Anita Tung, mentored by the great Paul Karasik. We're each doing 30-50 page comics which will eventually all sit side-by-side in an anthology this winter. My comic has the working title of 'Eik' and is a kind of confusing complicated story about a character in another universe who repeatedly breaks up the social hierarchy and pays the price. But it's also about drawing little weird characters running around and trying to communicate in frenzied pantomime (metaphor for my life?). It's super intimidating since I've committed myself to 50(+?) pages and time is already ticking away.

I've made a bunch of process work in developing this so far, so enjoy some random images from the first stages of development.

Some Character Designs (Eik is top Left)

More character business

thumbnails pt. 1

thumbnails pt. 2

Working on using sketchup to create buildings/perspective to save time. Also sketchup is apparently a good skillset to acquire.

Note taking

I thought I would share a little of my sketchbook today, since working in it is such an essential part of my creative process. My sketchbook is essentially a record of all the stupid/genius ideas I come up with as well as a receptacle for random bits of paper, images, doodles, class notes. I know a lot of other artists use several sketchbooks or have one reserved for "good" stuff, but for me it makes the most sense to cram everything together as a sort of comprehensive record of my brain.

Anyway, here is the current cover of my sketchbook as well as a few pages that combine classwork or class notes with whatever my hand feels like drawing at the moment.

It's hard to tell, but this book is about the size of a math textbook. Perfect!

Left - studies of the Brian Chippendale piece 'home on the run' as a part of a comics assignment. Right - some quick figure drawings...and other stuff. 

Left - Psychology of gender notes. Right - first page of art history notes.

Continuation of art history notes - this part of class was a very fast slide lecture.

A couple revisions

I reworked two of my XX/XY projects slightly based on critiques I received in class and on the big scary world of the internet.

What's new? Text bubble, no more lines behind the figures, a few minor adjustments to the bodies. Most significantly, person #6 lost her giraffe legs and person #7 has top surgery scars. It's still not where I'd like it to be, but hopefully it is less problematic (visually & conceptually) than the original image. Next!

This was pretty difficult to revise since it started out as a fairly small ink drawing. Mary sat down in a chair and put on some pants (she's no longer stuck wearing an impractically long dress). Meanwhile, the plants on the right grew a an inch or so and jesus put on some brighter shoes. Half the revisions were made directly onto the original via white gouache and more ink, but the entire pants & chair area was drawn on a separate page and photoshopped in. A few more adjustments were made in photoshop to clean up stray marks. I wish I could have made Mary's halo smaller, but it turned out to be too time-consuming and frustrating a task to complete.

Conceptor Page Two

This week was a big switch up in comics. We had to make another page in colour, this time using Pelikan Opaque Watercolors on 300lb paper. For those that don't know, 300lb paper is REALLY THICK and also REALLY EXPENSIVE. But it is very worth it. Learning to use the opaque watercolors was a real trial for me and it took way longer than it should have. However, I'm pretty pleased with what the medium can do, so I'll continue working with the watercolors when possible.

I decided to continue the story from last week (conceptor) for two reasons: I wanted to see the contrast in materials and I just like the idea a lot. It's actually a pretty startling comparison as far as saturation and value range goes. The scan is a little too dark, but you get the idea. Below the page you'll see I've included the sketches I made to figure out the panel layout and value placement, as well as page one for contrast.

(page one)

Initial thumbnails

More finished value study thumbnail and some sketches

Conceptor

This week in comics we had to make a page in colour, which was...intimidating to me. I looked very hard at some moebius comics and then made the comic you'll find below. I also included the sketchbook studies I made beforehand while I was planning it, for context. After class today, I made the digital version of the comic, to see what it would look like with cleaner, more solid colours. Next week is watercolour, so I'll be continuing this story into a second page.

Shifter 2.0

For this week in comics, I made some changes to the existing pages of Shifter and added an extra page on the end. It's optional as far as the story goes, but if I were to continue making pages for Shifter that's the direction they'd go in. As far as the improvements to the first four pages, most are pretty subtle but they made a big difference in the overall look. See if you can spot what changed...

Tezuka-mania

My current comics project is to make a comic of several pages that is informed and inspired by the methods of Osamu Tezuka. If you haven't heard, Tezuka was rightly considered the "God of Manga" and possibly created more comics than any artist in history. Several of his works famous in the states are Astro Boy, Phoenix, Black Jack, and Buddha. I'm a huge fan of his work and I'm currently waiting for the return of Phoenix pt. 7 to the library. I made a couple of scans from Phoenix pt. 5 for reference, they give a pretty good idea of what I'm looking to pull from in Tezuka's work.

My project will be 3-5 pages and is set in a futuristic environment inspired by Tezuka's worlds. I just finished the first page yesterday, seen below.

I've got high hopes for this project! Below is a sketchbook spread that includes the thumbnail  I used to plan this page. You'll notice that it's fairly refined, and that's because I went through two or three messier versions on the previous page. On to the next one...

Self Portrait (not finished still)

Still in progress self portrait. Photo is pretty glare-y/wrong colours.

More rough animation

2nd third of my animation, approximated. i swear he'll be okay in the end.

the roughest of cuts

(ROUGH ROUGH ROUGH TOTALLY NOT CLOSE TO DONE!!!!)

Anyway here is a really approximate sketch/draft of the first half of my animation. Just so no one worries about this (I'm looking at you, parents), I'll just give some spoilers and let you know that this is not suicide and the character ends up much happier at the end of the piece than at the start. I just reviewed the animation a few times and I realized that the start looks pretty dark for A.E. here. But he'll be okay. I promise.

Self Portrait WIP

This is a painting assignment I decided to keep going on, still not finished. Forgive the terrible webcam photo...

spoiler: this will be a gift for my lovely mother! :)

Ready to start animating!

I've got my basic building model put together, and that's enough for me to start the bare bones animation. I can put in the rest of the environment later, so I'm really psyched to start seeing some movement in the mean time.

A note on the character: He is not an alien or a skeleton man or anything, he is just a character that emerged fully formed from my brain a few months back. He has no name, save for the initials A.E. He is often seen with another character of mine, Y.A., although A.E. is generally the protagonist in their adventures/interactions.

I thought about posting the storyboard for my animation, but I'd rather keep it a secret for surprise purposes. Also I may change my idea a bit in production so I don't want to show something that may not be realized. For now, here's two more images from the process! Expect more soon...

Determining scale for the primary environment

Lighting/posing experiment to test my rig

HE LIVES

Had to redo the skin weighting twice due to my own ineptitude, but here he moves and breathes now.


Movement Test from Maddy Trower on Vimeo.

Textured!

I promise some time I will post something other than my CGI homework.

Ready for texturing and skeleton!

Did some quick stitching together of head and body and made a few revisions. This guy is ready to get his textures and skeleton.

with a body to match

Prelim stages of my character model for my CGI final project. More on that soon...