Friday, November 30, 2012

Lily Inked

 The Lily piece is all inked up and ready for a bit of color.

Here are a few photos I took from my art desk. The first one is the inked piece before I erased the pencils, filled in the blacks, and touched her up with some white-out. The second is Lily all finished up and ready for scanning into the computer for color.

Alright, off to coloring. I need to finish this piece by tomorrow to get the new December header up in time.

Back to work!

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Lily Pencils

For the December header of the blog I know I usually do something a bit more festive and in the holiday spirit. But, this year, since I've been having so much fun drawing the characters from OilCan Drive, I've decided to ignore the holidays and keep drawing the fun the images in my head.

So, in keeping with the OilCan Drive theme, I took another shot at drawing Lily, a girl from Ryan's past. I did a head shot of her earlier this year and she came out looking older and more world-wise than is called for in the story. This time I tried to make her look a bit more naive, cute, and sexy.

I think I've succeeded. This pencil sketch looks much more like the Lily in my head. And I really like the pose with the, "smile, it'll all be alright," attitude.

So, the pencils are done and now it's on to the inks. I have two days to finish her up before December 1st.

Wish me luck!

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Where I've Been

I can't believe that November is already almost over. This month has really flown by and the blog has taken a hit because of how busy I've been. But, I have started a new piece of art to put up on the December header so I figured it was about time to start writing again.

When I went to Maine in October I made sure I had room in my luggage to bring some of my old artwork from high school and college back to Colorado with me. I found a lot of pieces I had done of Keith Howard and Exit 6. Getting those pieces back to Colorado and scanning them into the computer got me back on track to really finish up the collected Exit 6 book.

As I've said in the blog before, the collected book will not only feature the Exit 6 comic books I originally published in the late nineties but will also have a lot of production art and work I was doing on the idea back in college. If the Exit 6 story did end it would have been easy to put all the books under one cover and simply put it out as a collectection. But, because I only got half of the story done when I first self published I am looking at the collected book as not only a collection of the art but also a story of how I came up with Exit 6, what I did to publish the book, and what happened when I had to stop production.

In the end, it will be an interesting story of what I went through to self publish a comic book in the late nineties.

So, I've been writing this last month and getting the text for the book finished. I wrote a quick, messy, first draft last year and have let it sit for far too long. Since being back I've been going through that draft, filling in stories, and making sure everything is grammatically correct. Right now I'm a little more than seventy five percent done with an official first draft. And, right now the text alone is about ninety pages. I figure once I format it the text pages will be about a hundred and twenty pages long.

And, the art for the book?

I printed out all the art I have scanned for the book so far and put it into a three ring binder so I could move pages around when I start laying out the book. Right now the art alone is about two inches thick.

When all is said and done the collected book should be between 350-400 pages long. I am hoping to get it all done and printed before the next Denver Comicon in June.

So, working on this has taken away a lot of my need to write anywhere else this month. And that is why the blog has been a bit barren. That, and, once you stop writing a blog, it's so hard to get back into the groove again. Unfortunately, I've also stopped doing the "Back To The Drawing Board" podcast for a bit. I'm not sure if I'll ever do another one but I'd like to try and get it back up and running at some point. It was becoming a job trying to get one done every week when I was doing it all myself.

But, the OilCan Drive webcomic is still going strong and, thankfully, I've set it up so, even if I fall off the face of the Earth, it should update itself three times a week until some time in April of 2013. So, if you ever miss me, head on over there and see what new pages show up.

I hope you all are doing great and had a great month. I'll see you soon with some new art for December's header. With all the client work and writing I've been doing it's really been nice to draw something for myself again.

Have a good one!

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Keep Your Panties On!

For a while I had a Blogger driven OilCan Drive Blog up and running kind of like a Twitter feed where the band would, from time to time, post comments and updates.

When I moved all of the OilCan Drive work over to the official OCD site the original blog kind of just sat there.

Because my Blogger profile lists OilCan Drive on my list of blogs I figured it might be best to recode some of it so it would forward viewers to the new webcomic site. The problem was that the new webcomic site can run a bit slow from time to time so I wanted to create a  place holder so people knew they were being redirected.

So, using one of my favorite images of Ryan Burke, I came up with this.

One more thing checked off this huge list of Things To Do I keep creating. It's not much, but I'm glad it's finally done. It'd been bugging me for too long.

You can check out the redirected blog link HERE.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Happy November

 OK, this is a day or two late but, honestly, I have a good reason.

As I said in the last few blog posts, I took a quick trip to Maine a week or so ago to see my family. Unfortunately, when I made my travel plans more than a month ago, no one told me a hurricane super storm named Sandy would be on its way up the East Coast as I was trying to get out of Maine.

I was supposed to leave Maine on Sunday and be back home for a week of work. But, when I woke up on Sunday morning I found an email saying my flights had changed. I could fly from Maine down to my connecting flight in Washington DC but, if I did, I couldn't get a flight out of DC until Wednesday. Deciding I'd rather spend some time with my parents than sitting in an airport terminal for three days I called to change my tickets.

I spent almost an hour on hold before I finally got someone on the phone. I tried to get a connecting flight from Maine to Chicago to see if I could beat the storm but, unless I was willing to pay two thousand dollars, that wasn't going to happen. So I was booked on a flight for Tuesday. Knowing that the storm was going to hit New York and New Jersey on Monday night I had doubts this would happen. But, the man all the way over in India assured me I'd be on a plane on Tuesday.

On Monday night the storm hit. While it didn't directly hit Maine in the same way it hit New York or New Jersey being on an island off the coast of Maine in the midst of the storm wasn't all sunshine and roses. The wind blew, the rain fell, the house shook, and the roof even leaked a bit. But, the power stayed on and I was with people I loved. By Tuesday morning the worst was over for us.

But, my flight had been pushed back to Thursday night.

So, my original plans to get home on Sunday turned into me getting home around 1am on Friday morning.

But, I am glad to be home, glad my family is safe, and hoping all my friends in both New York, New Jersey, and all along the East Coast are doing well.

As for the new blog header this month, here is the finished Henry doodle I did and the new header.

I hope you all are well and have a great month!