I Launched My First Comic Of The New Year, Friend Mold! It’s Been In The Works Awhile, This Comic,
I launched my first comic of the new year, Friend Mold! It’s been in the works awhile, this comic, and I’m extremely excited to get it out in the world. It was a lot of work, but it has me anxious to get working on another (which I have begun but is still too early to be showing anything. SneakHear: it has a goat). During the process, the toughest design decision was the cover, and it kept changing. I ended up with something quite different from my initial design, which isn’t all that uncommon in the design process, but most of the book’s illustrations were set from the get go. The Friend Mold idea all came from a thought I’d had coming out of sleep one winter morning. I won’t bore you with dream-details, but the thought spawned a concept, a rough script and definite look within a few hours. Here is a look at two alternate cover designs.
The one on the right is closest to my original concept, which had a rubber like pour-mold with swappable head, chest, and crotch pieces. It just never read as well as it should have and the shadowed relief look didn’t fit the interior illustrations. And that always bothers me (pardon to any comic artists out there), where the cover illustration style has little to do with the interior art. The design on the left was just a bit too morbid when I polled some folks about it. While I did like the face down look, it did slowly give me the creeps when working on it. Made me feel very claustrophobic - which also isn’t the point of the book’s content.
So, check it out, and see the book as it is released, a page a day with the final interior on Feb 14th!
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Double Business
Working on an identity for DJ Lani Love, who also happens to be half of the fashion blog Sugar Rock Catwalk. For the upcoming NY Fashion Week, she needed something that could do double duty, as she will be DJing the Independent Fashion Bloggers event and there as a representative for the blog. Information overload on business cards is a tough thing to deal with. I tried to keep it clean with a lean font and simple graphics. As with nearly all projects, there ended up being a designer’s pick and a client’s pick. On the internet, you get to see both!
Download the AE Luxury Scorecards here.
I've recently been turned on to scoring baseball games. It involves intricate note-taking, pens and attention to detail (i.e. just the right thing for me.) I was a bit stressed though, having to use the provided scoresheet in the program. It was too small to allow for any flourishes of the pen whatsoever and did not keep track of how many hot dogs and beer I consumed or how many high-fives I gave out or got. This is why I chose to make my own.
Not to mince words - this is the Cadillac of scoresheets. Each team has two 8.5x11 sheets of luxurious score-keeping real estate. I've added in special marks too, like whether a pitcher is a lefty or righty, an icon for pitcher change (oh so important to note to keep accurate pitcher stats), and most importantly, a wonderfully large at-bat cell, with room to draw hit trajectories and cleanly label out sequences. If you don't really care about size, you can always look to the wonderful Eephus League package, but I needed a bit more room and details.
You can download the AE Luxury Scorecards here. Hope you like 'em. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions, concerns or suggestions on the set.
Another "Hey, Koo!" haiku comic, worded by Kalia Armbruster, arted by me. This one got a bit intricate, what with all the lazers, although I am getting a lot quicker with the pencil art sketches that are used mostly wholesale for these panels - scanned in and digitally inked. Kalia and I have been working on some backstory stuff for Koo and are going to start doing "artist inserts" every fifth release which should hopefully flesh out the character and the world. More soon!
GIF from an animation project for a mobile service carrier. Video chats, voice calls and live streams.
Five Deadly Venoms
Pupil #2: The Snake from Chang Cheh’s (much more) story-driven martial arts film Five Deadly Venoms. One hand represents the snake’s head, the other the tail. Trying to keep the warmup game going.
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Another "Hey, Koo!" to add to the soon-to-be collection of haiku comics written by Kalia Armbruster and arted by me. Still settling into this line-art style with flat color. It's a great exercise and I'm having fun working within the restraints. More to come, ya'll.
Some unused style tests for a Sesame Street segment, The Letter D.
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M&M Wedding
Meg & Mike, the sweetest couple, asked me to work up a whole graphical package for their summer wedding. It was a real pleasure figuring out which elements represented each of them separately then worked together as a whole package.
The main double-sided wedding invite contained a mixture of flora from the bride's and groom's respective region mixed with some from their wedding location, Ithaca NY.
The back of the invite was maybe the funnest part of the project. This hand-written font I worked up really seemed to fit the style of the couple and the mood of their farmer's market, DIY wedding.
Many of the elements I used in the main invite were then used for name and table cards. Here's a good portion of them all laid out above.
Meg & Mike chose passages (sometimes lyrics) to accompany my illustrations on the table cards.
The illustrations made their way onto name cards the guests could match up with their assigned table. *Photo courtesy Anna Simonak.
The groom and I even brewed up a special champagne-style beer for the wedding and I hand-cut a stencil and painted the bottles with its fitting batch name.
Aurora Vs Coil
Reading the second installment of Aurora West's story in the Battling Boy universe. Love the art and monster-world. My only gripe (more a disappointment) is the printing quality. Kinda cruddy newsprint makes the greyscale coloring pretty muddy. Wanted to draw Aurora taking on her nemesis baddy Coil (in that sweet Paul Pope color).
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