New Comic – Navy Ink

Those of you who follow me on various platforms around the Internet will doubtless know that I drew a little silent, supernatural story for Cloudscape Comics last month. Their full, ocean-themed anthology won’t be out till next year (boo), but they’ve been kind enough to let me share the story with you here on my site (yay!). The drawings are by yours truly and the story was penned by Shannon Campbell, the brains behind VanCAF (where, incidentally, I’ll be exhibiting again next year!). But enough talk. On with the comics!

Melville & The Peking

I recently had the pleasure of doing some illustrations for my friend Justin Hocking, whose forthcoming memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, will be released next September from Graywolf Press. Justin is the Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center, where I got my Certificate in Comics and Independent Publishing. If any of you Portland folk don’t already know about this fantastic resource, I highly encourage you to check it out. While the book goes through final revisions, Justin was kind enough to let me post these here on the blog for y’all to enjoy before they appear in print. So here’s some boaty goodness!

Still Truckin’

Slogging ever onward through the deluge of orders. Custom prints wrapped up today, limited posters signed and numbered, offset print run in the works…it never ends! Just put in orders for t-shirts this morning as well, so if you’re excited to get some True Believer swag you’re in for a treat. To keep the blog active in the meantime, here’s the latest commission I churned out for a backer who happens to be both a doctor and violinist! What strange and wonderful times we live in.

Live Wire! Radio & Other Escapades

Busy times, everyone! I’ve got a recap of the last couple weeks (including the awesomeness that was VanCAF) up over on the Kickstarter blog, and since I’ll be bum deep in fulfilling rewards for the next lifetime I’m going to let that speak for itself for now.

In the meantime I’ve been buzzing around Portland getting my draw on — most recently with the excellent folks at Live Wire! Radio, who were kind enough to invite me over to live sketch one of their shows. For those of you unfamiliar with Live Wire!, they make audio-based delights to enrich the mind and tickle the fancy of any discerning radio listener. I strongly suggest you check them out. This particular taping featured rock star guests like Lizz Winstead, Ted Rall, Daniel H. Wilson, Mike Russell, Star Anna, and Kasey Anderson, as well as Faces For Radio Theater, the house team of actors and entertainers responsible for keeping things real on stage. And here, in all their messy glory from my much-the-worse-for-wear sketchbook, they are!

Sadly, this was the last show of the season, but I’m looking forward to more of these in September. Keep an eye out!

I’ll leave you all with a couple Vancouver-themed pages from my sketchbook…

Until next time!

True Believer: The Final Countdown!

Oh man, dudes. Things are heating up.

In the final few weeks before True Believer hits the printers, I’ll be coloring up a storm, making buttons, designing business cards, investigating screen printing, and also trying to format that other weird written thesis thing I was supposed to have written by now. Just kidding. I wrote it. Mostly. But that guy needs to go into LaTeX and boy howdy I do not know how to work that program yet. Still, baby steps.

I thought I’d drop a few images in here from the next stage in the process. You can see the whole beast on the wall here:

Which I will now proceed to color using this completely delightful Indigo I picked up at the art store this week.

Here are a few tests:

And here’s a page of ink lines printed at 10% grey with watercolor shading:

I’ll be scanning these in and merging them with the digitized line art to create the final images, which should look something like this:

I can’t tell you how excited I am to pull all this stuff together. The coloring will go much MUCH faster than the inking (thank God), so hopefully I’ll blow through 31 pages in the next week and get this thing printed! In the meantime, I’ve got a few illustrations to stick up in the coming days, as well as a requested post about my perspective on the art/writing divide in comics.

Stay tuned!