Days of Yore

I didn't get to update the blog yesterday... and for that I apologize (all four viewers). Today's offering is a couple of teaser panels from the upcoming short Days of Yore.

As you can see Dragonslaying is Serious Business.

MOAR DAGRONSLAYERZ

I reapplied the grays and rescanned. Then I did a couple quick tests on the post-processing side of things. The results...

I imagine the darker grays will print better but I really like the ethereal quality of the lighter gray silhouette.

What a Dragon Slayer Might Look Like

Here are the first two panels of my redone first page. I'm happier than I was with the first render but I'd be lying if I said I was completely sold on it. I decided to do the gray tones by hand because I wanted it to have a natural look but I can't decide if I think the marker looks cheap at the end of the day.

I'm deeply envious of artists like Ashley Wood and Scottie Young who can make "raw" look professional.

Project:WSDS101

I spent most of last night working on the Dragon Slayer comic. This is the second time I've drawn the first page as the first time through I hated the result. I am my own worst enemy sometimes when it comes to art. But so far I like this second pass more.

 Project:PDTA100

Just a quick glimpse at where the Ran reference sheet is headed...

Tonight will be mostly Dragon Slaying and maybe some Storyboards for a friend's Kickstarter campaign. See you tomorrow!

Introductions...

Since I'm in the process of making a banner for each sister I thought I'd go through the most recent "headshot" of each. Probably a good idea since this is the relative beginning of this blog and there's a high likelihood that most readers know very little about the project.

Ran
-The Saint-

 I've already discussed Ran in this blog since I'm presently working on her reference sheet. She's the gang's moral compass and effective leader. From a writing perspective I've found her the easiest to find. Her story practically wrote itself and she has such gravitas that I find myself having tremendous respect for her character.

ChooWol
-The Woodcutter's Wife-

 If I have the most respect for Ran I have the most affection for ChooWol. She's brutally strong and simple to the point of being dangerously innocent. She fills the roll of the group's "tank". To put it in the words of Officer Yoo JinWon of the Amhaengeosa "That one... strong as an ox. Maybe two."

DalNim
-The Sword Collector-

If I'm going to continue on this "I have the most" theme then I have to say it's DalNim I have the most sympathy for. Of anyone on the list she's decidedly the most tragic. Her criminal past wasn't caused by poor judgement it was deliberately manufactured. She more than anyone else in the gang is truly a victim. She also might be the most lethal, but I suspect SolHwa would give her a run for her money.

SolHwa
-The Albino-

When I've done informal polls on which sister interests people the most SolHwa always scores high. Often eclipsing the other sisters considerably. I find her the most creepy personally. She's got ice in her veins. You never really know where you stand with a blind assassin.

MaeHyaeng
-The Trickster-

One of these days I might take you through the process I went through trying to find Mae visually. With the other 4 sisters I had a pretty good idea from inception where I wanted to go visually with a character. But not with Mae. She eluded me for almost a year until I finally decided on this look. Keeping with the theme I'll say she's the most difficult for me to trust. But then she is a con-artist so it kind of goes with the territory.

 

Facebooked

Social media is the currency of the day for artists and writers it seems. And as such I've put down the skeleton for Studio Doggebi's FB presence.

Project:WSDS101

I don't have a lot more "Sisters..." related news today. A big chunk of yesterday went to interviewing for software development firm downtown. The whole experience felt rather discouraging, I'm not expecting to hear back in the positive. So I nursed my wounds by finishing this up for Hitechminiatures.com after the kids finally went down last night.

PROJECT:PDTA100

One thing I'm chewing on right now is what day of the week to publish The Legendary Sisters of the Laughing Doggebi. Wednesday is the most common web-comic day it seems. Friday seems a close second. I kind of like Monday as it doesn't seem an overly common selection and if I could help start off the week... well then that'd be cool.

Of Saints, Dragonslayers, Kitchens and Chilidog Laden Trains.

This wasn't an art friendly weekend. Saturday was an early start to meet friends for breakfast, followed by replacing the kitchen ceiling and then playing single dad so the wife could go out with girlfriends for dinner. And it goes without saying that when Mom is out for the evening it's time for a trip to 2-Toots Train Whistle Grill, a magical land where-in chili-dogs are delivered by toy train.

When at last the kids were bathed, brushed, pajama-ed and down for the night. I took in the serene quiet of my home, lay my head for but a moment and slept like the dead.

Sunday wasn't as active but it did take an unusually long time to get the smallest of the rug-rats to sleep and that meant less time to draw before inevitably succumbing to sleep myself.

Project:WSDS101

I've got two commissions going right now. One is of a miniature for hitechminiatures.com the other is a 5 page comic for Scott R. Schmidt starring this guy...

PROJECT:PDTA100

As mentioned previously I'm in the process of finding the reference sheet for Saint Ran. I did actually find time to sketch several faces this weekend as part of this process and I'm homing in on her face. The more I sketch the more I realize I  wasn't too far off the mark when I did this sketch two years ago...

Though since I did that particular version of Ran I've decided to update the hair-style to braids (as seen in Friday's blog post).

Here's to a more fruitful week!

Saint Ran

Project:WSDS101

I'm working on several illustrations right now as part of project: Whoring for Studio Doggebi Startup Capital (WSDS101). I'll share some of those with you as they relate to the creation of  The Legendary Sisters of the Laughing Doggebi indirectly but at the moment I want to focus on the latter.

Table Building

Before I started doing homework on the Creator Owned Comics industry I hatched a scheme of how I thought I could blitzkrieg the market. That now abandoned strategy went something like this:

• Take my first comic to a con
• ???
• Profit

Ok, it was a little more involved than that but not much. My initial plan was to hit SDCC2012 as a guest with a backpack full of ashcan printings of my book to hand out. The idea being that I'd drive traffic to the web comic with these little freebies. It hadn't occurred to me at this point to actually talk to people who go to cons regularly so I'm grateful that Wally Ostlie chimed in on my DA page suggesting that a free comic is a discarded comic and that even if I were to take a loss charging something, anything at all would give the book value psychologically and hopefully fewer would end up as landfill.

This made sense. But as a guest and not a contributor I'd have a tough time selling a book. Thankfully SDCC sold out before I managed to actually looking into buying my pass. I wasn't grateful at the time mind you. My poorly thought out vision was in jeopardy! How could I brilliantly dash onto the comic scene if I couldn't go to the biggest comic con of the year!!!

Then I stumbled onto the notion of going to Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle. From everything I was hearing and reading it was the new artist con of choice thanks to SDCC's non comic bloat. What's more I could afford a table there. I checked the website... tables generally were available in past cons up until October. All looked good. I was going to do this. I started raising my table/hotel/airfair money via WSDS101.

Fortunately my house started falling apart. Yes. I said fortunately. I'll explain in a minute. Ejector pump failed, a bathroom floor needed replacing, a kitchen ceiling started to leak like something out of Poltergeist. In short it took me longer to raise the money than I expected and come August when I was ready to finally book my table... I found out ECCC2012 sold out of artist alley tables in record time. Another door closed.

So I wallowed in self pity for a while. I was too discouraged to draw Sisters. I did a lot of WSDS101 commissions and not much else. Then I was sharing my frustrations with writer Scott R. Schmidt and he came up with a pretty damn effective plan: he commissioned me to draw 5 comic pages for an anthology he was working on. What's more he made me aware of an upcoming con in Saint Louis where he'd be hocking the book.

So suddenly I got wide eyed again. I could DRIVE to Saint Louis from Chicago! I'd need no airfair. The con was really affordable. I could book a table... I'd have the deadline to light a fire under my arse on Sisters again... fortunately... Wally Ostlie slapped some reality into me. He showed me a picture of his convention table.

I took one look at his awesome table and realized that even if I had no full time I.T. job, my wife and kids went to visit in-laws in Korea for 6 months, and an angel investor dropped out of the sky to fund me doing nothing but printing books, prints, posters, banners and letterhead there wasn't a chance I'd have a convention table ready in time for St. Louis.

The Slow Burn

Not terribly long ago I had an epiphany. It came from realizing that my week was punctuated by the days my favorite web comics release. Free Mars, Dealers, Oglaf (warning absolutely NSFW). What these had in common was a weekly micro update schedule. And then it hit me: web comics don't explode onto the scene. They burn into it slowly.

This theory has been pretty strongly confirmed for me via the Making Comics podcast which I highly recommend to any aspiring comickers. My new strategy was born:
 

• Fund Project: Get My Freaking Table Ready (GMFTR102) by WSDS101 commissions one table component at a time.
• In the meantime micro publish The Legendary Sisters of the Laughing Doggebi so that fans can trickle in we'll call this Project: Publish the Damn Thing Already (PDTA100)
• When the table is finally ready and a fan base has started to form around Sisters... start going to cons.

 PDTA100

And now we finally get to the title of today's blog entry. Saint Ran. Ran is arguably one of the most important characters in The Legendary Sisters of the Laughing Doggebi I say arguably because when your book is about an ensemble of 5 warrior women it's somewhat dismissive of the rest of the crew to suggest that one is more imporant than the others.  But let's be fair: she's called The Saint because it is her epiphany that put the lot on the road to atonement. She is for better or worse the linchpin that holds the team together.

So I've decided that one thing my table needs is 5 flashy full color banners, one of each sister. And I'm starting with Ran. This means locking in the render on her by coming up with a final reference sheet. And that means: Stealing Faces.

Stealing Faces is what I call the process by which I refine my characters. I start by asking myself: if I had to cast the movie and was choosing the actor to play this character whom would I pick. Then I spend a few weeks googling images of that person and drawing them over and over and over. When I feel like I've got an intimate knowledge of that persons face I put the drawings away. Open to a fresh sketchbook page and start drawing. What happens next is something that looks nothing like the photo reference but still has a vague (for lack of a better expression) spiritual inference of that actor's persona.

And that's what I'm doing these days. I've picked Ran's actor and I've been googling and drawing like a mad man in preparation for doing her reference sheet. I won't tell you whose face I'm using (actually it might be fun to hear people's theories over time, who knows... maybe I'll make a contest of it some day.)

In the beginning...

Onward to midlife...

Not too long ago... around the time I realized I'm closer to 40 than I am 35 it hit me: I've been saying "Some day I'll be working in comics." for a pretty long time. Suddenly my career in I.T. became a crushing yoke, every line of code felt like another bar on a creativity crushing prison. In short: I've entered my mid-life crisis.

A lot has happened since I had that epiphany. But not nearly enough. And that's the point of this blog. I'm here to document the complicated process of moving from my software developer existence to a career telling stories and drawing pretty pictures. All the while trying to balance mortgages, a wife and kids, and debates on use of the oxford comma.

Of Doggebi and Sisters

Everything I'm doing art wise right now is aimed at launching a web comic called The Legendary Sisters of the Laughing Doggebi. Sometimes that means selling illustrations or working on other comics that actually put capital into the Studio Doggebi brand.