How I spend/spent my spring break

 Prismacolor and Faber-Castell pens over a regular #2 pencil. Three pages, with A LOT more background detail than I usually do. I think it’s just to get the itch of using pens out of me and to take a bit of a break from all the brushwork that goes into OVERWHELMED and AWESOME TALES.

I’m indulging myself in some adventure/humor/sword-n-sorcery stuff, just to see if I can really. It’s my first love. I really loved superhero comics and humor strips as a kid, but what held my attention most of all were fantasy novels like Raymond E. Feist’s “Riftwar” novels and sword-heavy action comic stories like TMNT, CONAN and SOLOMON KANE and KULL THE CONQUEROR. Finding comics later on like USAGI YOJIMBO and GROO THE WANDERER really take me back and make me wish I’d discovered them when I was younger. I wish more people did stuff like that. I know kids’ TV in the past decade has been more oriented towards action that doesn’t involve superheroes (stuff like “Ben 10″ for example or “The Last Airbender”), and it always does great.

Sorry, going off on a rant about unrelated stuff…

Anyway, I took this a bit into the start, I think I put about 4 hours into inking and lettering, I wrote and penciled the whole thing yesterday. I really do miss working just with technical/art pens, I really do love the consistency of the line at times compared to the effect of varying thickness that you get with a brush. All you need is a light touch and a few pens with varying size tips, and you can get a really good look with just cross-hatching and solid blacks and whites.

I was going to do this as a recent addition to the backups for AWESOME TALES #1, but I think it’ll just be free on here to view.

Autobio comics are for suckers, and lettering with a brush

I did this one-pager as a joke to relax in between working on some larger projects a few nights ago, and lettered it with a Zebra disposable brushpen, something I haven’t done outside of my sketchbook a few times.

I have to say, I really like it, the lettering looks nice for something I threw together in an hour.

Lettering…

…right now, it is the hardest part of comics and my least favorite. Doing it all by hand sometimes gets frustrating. I tried out a nib-tipped pen on an upcoming OVERWHELMED strip;

It’s a disposable pen but I got it because it was cheap and a good way to learn how to use a pen tipped like this. I’ve been using it to ink stuff in strips and pages, nothing major really but a few lines and cross-hatching patches here and there. Normally I use technical pens, but I like to mess around sometimes and challenge myself.

No reason in particular…

A panel from an upcoming OVERWHELMED

Some lettering/sound FX as I ink and letter AWESOME TALES #1

I wish I knew how to do this sort of stuff on the computer at times, because man, doing all the lettering and grays and minute detail by hand gets painful and tedious, but I have zero confidence in my own abilities to have too much blank space in the background of my panels and overall pages.

Late-night cartooning…

Spent a good chunk of last night working on comics. I tend to work a lot and best (it seems) at night…

I am 1/5 of the way into lettering and inking AWESOME TALES! #1, and it is getting easier and easier. I really love working on this project, and I really feel like I’m learning a lot about comics as I work on this. I’ve never really worked with grayscale markers this much before, but it’s definitely adding a lot to the pages.

I’m gonna try to scan and officially post a page or so in the upcoming future. These’ll be rough unedited pages, but hey, gotta hustle when you’re DIY.

Just a little panel from the OVERWHELMED strip I did last night as well. I’m moving away from single-shot gags into a bit more of multi-strip storyarcs, mostly to accommodate the new (as-of-now) upcoming character. Grandma was out-of-panel introduced recently, but will definitely be making a few appearances in the upcoming weeks.