Heeeeroes!

:| I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to Comic Conventions yet, and it bugs the hell out of me. I hate to say it, but I have to give my personal experience at HeroesCon this year a great big ol' D for Disappointing, Discouraging, and Depressing. Not due to the company I kept, mind you. The best part about the con this year is what made it so awesome last year: I went with my best friends, and met a lot of really incredible people.
Last year, I think, was really great for me because it was a new experience, and my first time really seeing how people in the industry interact and network with each other, both casually and professionally. I got to meet a lot of great artists as a student, and didn't really feel any sort of pressure and it was pretty awesome.
And this is going to sound silly because I still have a LONG way to go, but I just felt so out of my element in the artists alley this year. There's probably a number of reasons for this including:
-I've still got such an anime/manga influenced style compared to 90% of the artists there. The people at the con aren't there to look at Manga art. It was sorta weird to be sandwiched between Pat Quinn and Pat Bolin, both amazing artists with a much more main stream super hero type of style. The whole weekend was spent watching people stop to go through either of their portfolios, pause at mine for a second before going "oh wait... this is... not what I was expecting..." and moving on to the next Pat. Not that I didn't get a good number of people looking at my stuff. I was really popular with the Teen Age girls and 10 year old boys at least *lol*.
-I'm listed as a professional guest and trying my best to represent SCAD at the mojo table, but it was getting sort of hard to sell myself when people asked what I was doing and could only be like "Uh, well... I'm working on such and such! It will be out .... uh... eventually! Look, I did these pages for school!" It just didn't feel very professional and I felt very awkward.
-I snafuu'd basically everything I wanted to have for the table. My cards arrived at my apartment while I was at the con (they look awesome, BTW. Too bad I didn't have them all weekend). I only finished about a third of the 15 page mini comic I wanted to have printed up just for the con, and then forgot to even put the finished pages in my portfolio at all. I tried to put together a new sketchbook at the last minute, just to have SOMETHING new, and realized I just haven't been sketching much over the last year, and could only come up with like, 4 pages worth of character designs.
-My medication has me not only looking all swollen and puffy, but it's got me terribly moody and self conscious anyway, so I wasn't really in the mood to be the social, drinking butterfly I was last year.

This all sounds really horrible and negative, and the con sort of did burn me out, but I also feel like I did when I finished my first contracted comic job and started getting the horrible reviews from it... I feel pretty crappy, like I could have done 100% better if I had just tried harder and put more into it, but I learned a lot from the experience, and I'm gonna use this to push myself forward.
Like I said, I met some really incredible people, and have been flipping through the books and minis I picked up, and a lot of them have got me really inspired to really kick ass this summer. I want the pages I do for my first graphic novel to be freaking phenomenal. I want my inks to tighten up and look amazing. I want to get back into doing painting and illustrating every week so I'm exploring new mediums. I want to start sketching as much as possible so I'm not feeling stagnant for ideas. I want to start being an artist again.

On that note, sorry there's no art to go with this post :( Hopefully my motivation will carry over and allow me to post art here more often! Also my day job has been crazy busy! If you're a food geek like me, make sure you buy a copy of this months Food and Wine! My Boss is on the cover ;D

I do things and stuff!

I just forget to update this thing D:

This has been a rather up and down quarter. On the plus side, I've used this quarter to really iron out some stuff with my one baby project that's been in development for years. I've pitched it around before and got some interest in it, but now that I've re-worked a bunch of it, I think it's really got a lot of potential to be something awesome, so I'm excited to see where it keeps going.
I've also started working on pages for a really awesome book, though I'm not really sure how much I can say about the project. I'm meeting with one of the amazingly awesome editors today though, so I'll find out so I can like, brag and shit.

Also, hey! I've probably gotten some amount of traffic over here since Heroescon put me up on their guest list, so thanks to everyone that's stopped by! I tell you, I'm incredibly humbled, but mostly intimidated to even be on that list. Mind boggling, really. But I'm gonna be at a table with an incredibly talented group of guys (Doug Dabbs, Pat Bollin, and Allen Spetnagel) and hopefully we'll do our best to give SCAD Atlanta students a good name ;) If you can, be sure to stop in Charlotte this summer and say hi!

In the meantime, I suppose a quick peek at some designs I've been working on wouldn't hurt ;) Though once the quarter's over, I'm gonna bust ass and try to do some pin-up work before con season. I need to get my illustration chops back in shape!

Final Projects!

It's that time again....

my final project for Props and Environments, a three page short story, turned out to be the most girly thing I've done in quite a while. And I still can't get the hang of digitally adding gray scale. It's inexplicable. But this was a fun project regardless. :D

For Shawn's Visual Story Telling II class, I decided to do the backstory of a couple of under-developed characters from a book I pitched Oni a while back. I'm crunched for time on this one, and yeah, still not sure what I'm doing with my inks, so I just sorta decided to go a little far out and crazy with at least this part of the story. XD; I LOVE COLOR :O!

BACK TO FINALS WORK. NO SLEEP FOR CARA FOR A WHILE :(

Calvin and Hobbes!

I love these guys. I've got all the collected books. I grew up not just reading them, but down right scrutinizing each panel. I adore Wattersons whimsical watercolors (I also win at alliteration), and his ability to artistically shake up his style from strip to strip. The guy just rocks.

So I figure I made a good decision to go sit in on Shawn's Speed Sketching Session (again with the alliteration. I'm on a roll.) and this was the first 90 minute finished drawing challenge. The class produced some really amazing stuff, and I totally had a blast drawing this. I'll most likely be back next week X)

I've been known to draw comics every so often

For whatever insane reason, I've decided I want to do a webcomic, mostly so I'll have more sequential pages to show editors. I've got the first few pages drawn out and now I'm going to play around with some different inking styles before I start posting weekly.

Inspriationableythingywhatsit.

:X No art to post here, I just want to take a minute to geek about what I've been following over the break, since I don't really talk much about what my influences are.
One of the perks of working in a bookstore and being a comic geek is the management is generally happy to let me take tender loving care of the graphic novel section, meaning I get to see/read all the cool new stuff, and always discover things I probably would have otherwise overlooked. So even though I spent the majority of my "vacation" working, I was still able to pick up and read a lot of things.

-I think back in October or November, Shawn had let me borrow the sweet new collected edition of Local, which totally blew me away. I've always been somewhat hesitant about using the brush, because I didn't think I could get away with pulling off what I wanted to with it, but Ryan Kelly's amazing line quality really opened my eyes, and really allowed me to relax and go crazy with my pages a bit. So yeah, after reading Local and flipping through New York Four and Northlanders, I'm just in love with his style. Have you SEEN the Northlanders covers? I think I was also feeling conflicted that using a brush to ink would mean sacrificing the line quality I wanted in illustrations, but good lord, look at what he does with color! I really think I just need to learn how to distinguish what tool to use when.

-Truthfully, I mostly used the break to try to take a break from American comics (which I pretty much exclusively read all Fall Quarter) to re-energize my manga mojo. I completely indulged myself at onemanga.com, and read about 20 different series all the way through. I still check obsessively for updates to Bakuman, Reborn, Special A, and Kaichou Wa Maid-sama, and Papillion (mostly all girly "shoujo" love stories) but also re-read to read a lot of the old school titles that got me into the genre in the first place--Red River, Fushigi Yuugi, HanaKimi, etc.
The diversity of subjects and styles in manga just amazes me.

-Okay, I'd read an issue or two of Sky Doll before and was like "eeeeh, okay, this is pretty... and kinda weird... and like... a little too 'trying to be anime/manga because the character has giant sparkly eyes and a pointy nose'" so I didn't pursue it much further. But just recently I stumbled across Barbara Canepa's blog and was completely blown away by her illustrations, and the work she's posted for Lacrima Christi. I adore that soft, whimsical and feminine style that's characteristic of her and artists like Audrey Kawasaki. I'd love to be able to explore this type of coloring style with my own art this year.
Also, I would basically become the slave to anyone that presented me with this. I have become somewhat obsessed with Qee's/Kid Robot Toys in general lately.

-Other artists I have recently taken to watching/reading include Marguerite Sauvage, Ted Naife, Joshua Middleton, aaaand Matthew Woodson. Also my mom got me Watching the Watchmen which is aaaaawesome for the loads and loads of breakdowns, if nothing else. And I bought myself a copy of James Jean's Process Recess book with my Amazon Giftcard *_*

Happy Holidays!

I'm always late for this stuff :[ Better late than never then I guess!

Some finished pages!

Did I say last time I was looking forward to this break? Because it doesn't feel like a break at all. I transferred to a much bigger, much busier book store, and now I'm just crazy exhausted from finding books for people all the time x_x

Whenever I get a chance though I'm working on comic stuff--got a few character sheets for one project that I need to hurry up and scan (still need to hook up my scanner here!), and I started doing a random comic project for myself, mostly just for practice. I'm thinking I may make it a webcomic type of thing.

If nothing else though, I'm trying to follow the example of Eric Canete and now Professor Shawn Crystal and do one inked drawing each day. I started the beginning of December and have missed three days already, but really, 6 ink drawings in less than two weeks is pretty damn good for me. But yeah, I really need to get a working scanner here 8D;;;

Anyway, here're the finished pages, from the roughs I posted last time X)

Someday I'll be cool...

Man, once I get started I just can't stop, can I?
Seems like all the cool kids are posting pencils these days, so in an effort to be hip, here're the roughs for my final project ;P

(I'm going to eliminate panel two--the empty one-- and just extend panel three, other wise the pacing is all wonky)

So, I gotta finish inking these suckers, use Illustrator to throw some word balloons on some OTHER pages I just finished coloring with Photoshop, rough out an eight page western, and wrap up a break down and finish up character designs for another project I'm working on.

I gotta tell ya, I'm glad I get to go home for vacation next week @_@ Hopefully I wont be going home to yet another debacle where my parents threaten to not let me return. Again. If they do, you all have permission to call them and leave angry voicemails. I'm more confident this time, at least, since now I have an apartment here, and, you know, I cant leave all my shit here >8[

Bleeeeh.

I dont think it quite captures my current ennui, but it's trying.