Comic Glitch Pictures

I discovered something interesting as I was going through some of the art I'd put on my dropbox: most of the images looked fine and dandy when previewed on there, but the .PSD photoshop files for each of the pages of the comic I created showed previews that looked all weird and glitchy (don't worry, I checked and once downloaded the files themselves were fine and undamaged). I thought they were actually kinda interesting and pretty in a surreal, so I took & saved some screenshots of them. I might even have to try uploading some more of my layer-heavy digital art photoshop files to dropbox and see what previews they generate. Anyways, check them out below!

Graphic Novel Creation

 This spring I took my first 3-week May term course, which was a class in graphic novel/comic-making that was taught by the two talented and awesome Pope Brothers, Rowan and Bly. It was set to start just after I wrapped up finals and set up my art gallery, and even though I knew it would be very intense and would mean I'd have to wait to begin unwinding from the many stresses of my spring semester, I just had to take it. The University of Minnesota doesn't offer any comic-making courses normally and therefore this was a rare opportunity, and also it would be taught by the two fabulous Pope bros and one of my fellow classmates would be my good friend Brooke.

The class was exactly what I expected in that it was both very fun and very difficult. Coming into the class as a comic-making newbie and having to come up with an idea for a comic, and write, draw, scan and color even a few pages of it within 3 weeks is incredibly challenging. However, it was a really good experience to not only rise to the occasion and try to make the best comic I could in that time frame, but also to work alongside other students as they made their own comics and see how differently everyone worked and how their comics turned out. Overall, I'm glad I did it because I was able to learn, have fun and prove to myself that I am capable of making a half-decent comic.

I'll be sharing the comic I created below, but if you'd like to check it out on the class website or see some of the work that the other students made (like Brooke's awesome mini story about a shape-changing lawyer), go check out the class website!


Okay, so because I'm a big fan of the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and I didn't really have an idea for a comic otherwise, I decided to make mine about it. Because there are no adaptations that I've seen that focus purely on the story of Edward Hyde and his perspective on the events that occur, I chose to do that. My comic covers the backstory of Hyde and his creation, initial birth and the events that shortly follow. It pretty much follows the original story exactly. It gets a bit--okay, a LOT--wordy, because I got into the spirit of the writing style of the original novella, but the whole point of this was to give Hyde's account of things and I thought the narration would be fitting. I apologize if the writing isn't fantastic, as I wrote everything all in one night, and I didn't have a lot of time or energy to put into editing it.

Although most of my classmates were drawing their comics on paper and the scanning them later to color them and touch them up, I felt like trying to set my comic apart by making it entirely on the computer. It was easier in some ways and much harder in others, but it was a very good challenge and forced me to learn how to use masks very well, which I hadn't had experience with before.

Everything was done using vector masks, because I'm insane that way. My colored pages especially involved so many layers of masks it wasn't even funny. Page one definitely had over 150 layers. I used photographic reference as much as possible, and a couple panels were actually modeled for by my brother, since I needed to capture certain poses at odd angles that couldn't be found in reference images online.

Okay, done with my prattling now. On to the comic itself! I hope you enjoy it.

Digital Art: Sedimentary Storybook

I just finished creating this for a geology-themed class of mine. It was a group project, and since we couldn't think of anything else we decided to make a childrens book about sedimentary rocks, conveying information about the creation and transportation of sediment and the eventual formation of sedimentary rock in such a way that a kid could read it and not know they're being educated.  I ended up doing most of the work for the project, but I kind of set myself up for it and took it as a challenge, so I can't blame it on my teammates (who were also very nice people and would've probably taken on more of it themselves if I hadn't taken over everything).

 Over the process of making this, I came to realize some things about myself. First, I may not be so totally hopeless at storyboarding and storytelling with images as I believed before. I also discovered that I'm much more at ease with working on big comic-like art projects if they don't involve humans or animals, since it gets rid of a lot of feelings of worry about proportions and realistic potrayal. Give me an inanimate object like a rock, however, and I'm fine.

Anyways, here it is! I created it entirely in photoshop, and it's pretty much entirely vector masks and gradients. I hope you like it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Commission: Logo for Village Players Community Theatre

Sorry for neglecting this blog for such extended periods of time, but as always I've been incredibly busy working on school and art for my upcoming gallery show, which I plan to blog about soon.

But anyways, that's not what I'm planning on talking about in this post. This post is going to be about a commission I did for the Village Players Community Theatre earlier in the spring. They needed a nice logo to go with their new, revamped website, and I ended up getting notified about it and I decided to try coming up with some ideas. They liked one of the ideas, and within two weeks I'd completed the logo. They said they were very happy with it, I got compensated nicely, and overall it was a very pleasant experience. Below is the finished version of the logo:

And here's a link to their new website, which features it: http://villageplayerscommunitytheatre.com/  Go check it out!

iPod Doodles and Sketches from Early Fall

Sorry I haven't been updating much lately, but school's in full swing and I've got a lot of irons on the fire all the time now. However, despite all the busy hustle and bustle I have been able to keep myself doing art regularly, with the help of my new iPod touch and an app called "Artstudio", which is pretty much like a basic version of Photoshop, and it's just brilliant. I've been sketching and doodling on it during my classes, instead of a on notebook like I was before. It took a bit of getting used to, but it's really fun to work with.

So here are some of the little works I've made on my iPod. There are some silly little low-quality brainfart pieces, and also some sketches of random classmates.