Hey ya’ll, I’m getting married a week from tomorrow so I’m gonna take a little breaky-break from this here bloggity until Tuesday, March 1st. When I get back, I’ll start posting pages from a short, seven-page comic called Glade and Mark in: Rocky Mountain Chomp twice a week.
Here’s some sketches that I did for that comic to tide y’all over until then:
Sketches of my future wife, Glade Hensel.
Sketches of mini monsters who live on mini monster world.
It’s less than two weeks before my wedding, so of course I’ve become addicted to an ever-changing fantasy action RPG with a massive online community. I’m not talking about World of Warcraft – I’m talking about the free, cross-platform, and open-source roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup title screen
While looking at Stanislaw Lem books covers to illustrate my previous blog post, I came across Peter Haars’ work. He’s a Norwegian graphic designer who did book covers, comics, and other artwork. I couldn’t find any of his comics, which is a shame, because if they’re anything like his book covers, I’m sure they’re amazing.
He’s got several interesting themes running through his covers. Here you can see the eye-in-landscape theme:
via svenneven’s flickr.
He’s also got a nice theme of human faces melting into inanimate objects:
via svenneven’s flickr.
In the past two months I finished Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch epic fantasy tetralogy and then burned through his other, earlier epic fantasy tetralogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn for the third or fourth time.
Michael Whelan’s cover for Stone of Farewell, book two of Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn fantasy series
What I dig about Williams, besides his excellent (albiet sometimes slow-paced) prose and efforts to re-upholster standard fantasy tropes, is his attempts to depict truly inhuman beings and cultures in his stories. Science fiction and fantasy authors have always grappled with these kinds of depictions. Some question if it’s even possible for us human beings, with our mental biases, to truly imagine the thoughts and cultures of some other type of intelligence. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss several attempts, how they succeed or fail, and how this relates to my own artistic practice. Be warned, this essay is long.
Click here to read the rest
I drew another Hypermorph in pencil (you can see my previous ones here):
This Hypermorph’s name is Bathanklyopod. Over ten thousand years ago, on a nameless planet in the Hyperverse, a bat was dying in a cave near where two powerful Hyperbeings were battling. In a desperate move, the Hyperbeing Kygargz dropped a twenty gigaton transmutation bomb to distract its opponent so that it could escape. The bat was caught up in the resulting mutation wave and Bathanklyopod was born. She’s wearing armor she pieced together from parts of other Hypermorphs that she has killed in battle.
I like drawing Hypermorphs. I just start at the top and let my pencil wander.
I drew the cover for Volume 12 of the comics anthology Candy or Medicine, check it out:
The anthology is 14 black-and-white 4.25×5.5″ pages and features comics by Willard Herman, Sam Spina, Tori Holder, Kyle Nolan, Steven Myers, Ray N, and Brandon Lehmann. I think that Nolan’s comic is particularly awesome because it name checks VALIS and stars PKD.
If you want to get yourself a copy of Candy or Medicine Volume 12, you can order it here (direct) or here (etsy) for $1 plus $0.50 shipping or pick up a copy for $1 at Domy Austin.
I’ve been thinking about the landscapes in my comics and paintings a lot, about how I really need to push their otherworldliness to the next plane. Mati Klarwein’s landscapes, which I saw on Brenna Murphy’s tumblr, have definitely given me some forms that I can riff on.
I think this first one is my favorite. There’s just something really appealing to me about terraced landscapes (which this guy paints a lot of).
This next one is less striking because, as Glade said, it’s all details and no central image, but man I could get lost in those details:
Cropped because of watermark. Original enclosure.
This last one has a ton of stuff going on. I really like how some prominent features (glowing golden figure, cube) are hidden or obscured by all the lush vegetation. Also, what about that sky?
Hey y’all, I’ve been dropping off a bevy of GCPM books and some other goodness at Domy Books in Austin over the last month.
I’ve been thinking a lot about comic book coloring processes recently, just letting myself brainstorm how I would print a so-far imaginary color epic. As part of this, I’ve been researching older methods for getting a lot of colors out of a few different inks. So, I was particularly struck by this Four Color Process site that Dan Nadel linked to at the end of December. Here are a few images and a quote from their manifesto (written by John Hilgart):
…in [a] decisive, paradoxical twist, [the] four-color process created a form of depth even as it fought against illustrative realism. Whereas contemporary reproductions of mid-century comic art are truly closed and flat, old comic books are visually leaky and deep. Four-color dots perforate the flat surface of the universe, opening onto nowhere – some uncharted cosmos.
Now that I’ve done the looking forward post, it’s time for the looking backward post. Rather than recap my own year, which y’all have already heard about in realtime on this blog, I decided to present four cartoonists that really inspired me in 2010, in no particular order: Brandon Graham, James Stokoe, Michael DeForge, and Angie Wang.
