Journal

So what could you do in the times which exist
You can’t fake moves on your brother or your sis
But if your sis is a —, brother is a jerk
Leave ‘em both alone and continue with your work

- Excursions, A Tribe Called Quest

This has become my mantra for work, goals and life… lyrical wisdom from Q-Tip. It’s been bouncing around in my head since junior high. Hear that deep bass tone floating against the steady drum beat?

When faced with conflicts, pressure, or adversity, it’s important to remember this- no matter what burden is brought upon you by another person or situation, the negativity will take root in your mind if you let it work it’s way inside. Acknowledge it, seek out a way to deal with it, but don’t invite that burden in. You can’t control everything, but you can control your own path. Continue with your work…

They carry the earthly possessions of their late husbands wherever they go.

Here’s a five page mini-comic, in color! This is the first part of a story called Standard Procedure that I am looking to publish in the near tomorrows. There will be much ridiculous madness going on within the pages of this comic, and a little misguided romance as well. Plus, you don’t even have to really know how to read! It’s like show-and-tell, minus all the tell.

…two bodies satiated.
Two souls find their distance…

I had this scene in mind a few months ago, and was able to return to it and work on the drawing. It’s a view of a riot from above (seen from God’s eye, or a news helicopter). I wanted to create a disturbing image that captured the chaotic, explosive violence that people can inflict on one another. I also wanted to achieve this by freezing the moment of impact, rather than portraying graphic depictions of the horrendous and gory result.

This tutorial is pretty much extracted from an email I wrote to a friend of mine, but I thought it might be a useful for any reader who is new to Photoshop. It contains the very basics of what you need to do to get started in Photoshop, and to prepare your work for coloring. Keep in mind that there are many different ways to go about working in PS, and what I’ve written below is only one way of doing it. You’ll quickly develop your own methods as you get familiar with PS. For this tutorial, I’ll assume the reader knows how to scan and open their image in PS. I’ll also assume that the reader has tinkered with PS at least a tiny bit to understand how to move around the interface and select tools and such.
Ok, on with the show.

A good friend of mine is learning photoshop and began color experiments with a sketchbook doodle he made of Thor, the oldschool musclebound Marvel superhero/god. Omar is the doodler, and Chris worked the inks. Here’s their creation.

To help him get started I wrote a short tutorial on the very basics in coloring with Photoshop. If you’re absolutely new to PS, the tutorial just might be useful for you, too. You can see it here.

Well, I won’t be showing Omar’s coloring progress here, but I can show what the results of about two hours of notdoingworkthatI’msupposedtobedoing looks like. Here’s my take on colors for this image. I don’t keep up with comics much so this was like revisiting the days of longlongtimeago.

I’ve always been fond of studying people’s works-in-progresses. Not only is it interesting to learn how they go about drawing an apple or a nekkid figure, it reveals how their thoughts are processed into a visual form. The most insightful part of it is in witnessing the revisional stages of the process, when you get to see all the scribbling and erasing, all the miss-steps, and the editing that is realized through the artist’s judgement (or the art director’s orders).
That said, here’s my own work-in-progress. I don’t guarantee that it’ll give my unlucky reader as much delicious insight as I mentioned above, but it should be fun nonetheless.

She visits the dead and the dying in the form of their lovers…

A blog is a mysterious organism. As soon as it’s born, it sucks all your thoughts and opinions and spits it out to the public. Like a drunken leech that drinks your blood and vomits it out, drinking and vomiting, drinking and…

OK, so I have a blog now. I’ll have some works up here, random things that I’ve done and will do. Stay tuned.