I'm Back!

So I have been neglecting my poor little blog as of late, so to make up for it I am going to post a lot of stuff this week and maybe the next! First up are the phone sketches. I bought an iPhone 5s (which is a huge upgrade from my 4 year old droid) and with it I downloaded a sketch app and bought a stylus (because drawing with your finger sucks). It is taking a bit to get used to but so far it’s been fun and convenient. The guy with the beard is my good friend Shashank who I drew at a get-together this Friday. This was the first drawing I did with the stylus, I just bought it that day and was dying to try it out. I drew a couple of people wearing hats I saw at the Westfield mall in San Francisco this Saturday. Then later on, I went to what was supposed to be some boring lecture at the Sudo Room in Oakland and there was this dude with crazy hair there that I just had to draw.

Writer's Block...

Sooooo... at first I was going to make a blog post about my interview with Eblisun Grun over at Outside the Cube (that you can find here), but I felt that was too self congratulatory. Then I considered talking about the Man of Steel movie, but everyone seems to be doing that and there are still those who have not seen it. Friday, I got my new fancy schmancy business cards in the mail (that you can see the artwork for above) and I thoughts to myself “that would be a good topic”, but it would be rather dull and short, so that wasn’t an option.

Really it’s strange for me to not have anything to talk about because I’m usually so chatty. I talked to someone for two whole hours on Sunday about the innovative way I am going to show what Carla is thinking in my comic that I came up with this weekend and yet I am drawing a blank for my blog! Now I am starting to worry if this is what writer’s block feels like?! Maybe I have that now!! I hope it doesn’t carry over to artist’s block, that would be horrible as I have so many drawings and pages I want to finish. I was hoping to start inking my pages in the next couple of weeks, so I really can’t afford that!

All right, I’m going to go try and cure my writer’s block and hopefully I will be back on later with something cool and/or profound to say. Until that time I just want to welcome any new readers to my blog and let them know that this usually never happens and I will try and come up with something for later in the week. Until then here is the art from my business cards :)

Derby de los Muertos!

Welcome to my newest blog post! I am probably going to get yelled at for this drawing by my friend Jill, who was on my ass to draw up a roller derby poster for her league a couple of years ago and I never really did. I had an idea for a zombie marathon issue of Carla Calaveras, where Carla has to basically run an entire marathon while killing all the zombies participating but then those jerkwads killed and injured all those people in the Boston Marathon and then my idea wasn’t as funny. One of the appeals of horror is that we can laugh at our own mortality and it helps us cope with tragedy and death in the real world but unfortunately, the line between reality and horror blurs.

Enough with the soapbox! I really like how this piece turned out, I have an opportunity to display some art at a coffee shop and I think this will be one of them. I put it in Spanish because I thought it looked cooler but I did make a mistake on it, “1ra” (primera) should be “1ro” (primero). I plan on coloring and relettering it, so I will fix it then. I think I will sell the colored version as prints for $10 or $15. The original will be for sale at the coffee shop for $100 (sorry but the typo is pretty much on there for good).

Here are some more character designs from my comic book. Clockwise from left is Carla's Aunt Ana Maria, then her Uncle Miguel (Tio Feo), Tia Sofia (Tio Frio's wife) and finally Carla's Grandfather (Abuelo).

The design for Aunt Ana Maria is a bit of a funny one. I was having a bit of a block on her design and put her on a back burner. The other day I went to lunch, opened my sketchbook to draw and found a post-it note with a drawing of her on it. I suddenly remembered that I had a dream about a girl wearing a hat with big curly hair underneath it. I woke up and drew it onto a post-it, put it into my sketchbook, then put the sketchbook into my bag and went to sleep. Love it when that happens!

Anyways, enjoy!

A Perfect Storm

Here is a post about acting! Portraying drama in art, comics, film etc... I am not posting a drawing of mine this time but a screen cap that was released for the new Superman movie coming out soon. I really got all giddy when I saw this photo and I will tell you why: look at Michael Shannon’s hand that I have circled, do you see it? Michael Shannon can say more with one hand than some people can say using their entire bodies their whole careers (I’m looking at you January Jones)!

The positioning of this hand conveys strength and rage, what sort of hell is General Zod preparing to unleash?! The back of the hand lined up with the wrist and forearm gives us a stoic strength. The splayed, clenched fingers give us the rage and a sense of danger. The fingers are like a wolf’s teeth being bared in the shape they form. This is a classic villain pose that is often attempted but most often never achieved to this level. I really think that because it is the trailing hand doing this pose that makes it even more effective, it’s not in front of his face grabbing some imaginary squishy stress relief ball like most people draw or perform with. I mean really, the main focus is on Michael Shannon’s face in this picture, but that hand is what really caught my attention, subtle yet effective.

Actors, directors, comic artists, and anyone else who is trying to communicate emotion and drama need to study things like this. Not just rage, but the full gamut of emotion and the other parts and shapes of the body other than the face. Just the other day I was working on a panel where one of the character was afraid and I thought that it was a bit over-the-top, but then I realized that I was using not only the character’s facial expression, but his posture and body language as well as the camera angle, it was like a “perfect storm” of emotion and it made the panel a lot more powerful than the rest of the page (even though the character was just standing there). I decided to rework some of the rest of the page to make the other panels more dramatic so that the panel in question won’t look so over-dramatic.

Well, got to say that the picture below has already made Man of Steel earn my ten bucks, so I will definitely go see it. Michael Shannon has become a draw actor for me (as in “his presence draws me to watch what ever he is in”), same with Dinklage.

I will post soon with some more art and another rant about stuff in a couple of days! See ya all soon!

Feets!

Here are some pages out of my sketchbook. The first one is a study for Carla’s feet, with and without shoes. Feet are weird and fun to draw, they have to ground the character and can be expressive as well. I love drawing shoes as well, the variations and character are very fun and can add quite a lot to the drawing. As with all my characters I am making a style guide that will determine the range of wardrobe the characters wear.

The other page is a variation of lighting styles for Carla. I plan on using a variety of dramatic lighting and colors for my comic to help better tell the story. I want a cinematic feel to my stories, like the reader is watching a scary movie. I have noticed that the new Scooby Doo cartoon does this and it is quite effective (even though the whole color palette is a bit over-saturated for my tastes).

A rose by any other name...

I am still rather giggly on the inside over the BigWow comic convention. There were some huge names there (Adam Hughes, Frank Cho, Humberto Ramos, Terry and Rachel Dodson) and I got some very positive feedback on my art and more importantly my comic idea and business model on how I am going to pitch it to the publishers.

I sat in on a panel for Latinos in comics and while the panel focused on artists talking about what it was like to work in comics as Latinos, it was taken over midway by the question of a lack of representation that Latino comic fans feel in superhero comics. Sergio Aragones (Creator of Groo the Wanderer and Mad Magazine cartoonist) said that the wide diversity of Latinos all over the world makes this difficult, Latinos in Los Angeles have different problems than Latinos in Mexico City and Latinos in Mexico City have different problems in Bolivia, etc... He went on to talk about the importance of good writing versus just pandering to Latino comic fans. The audience seemed a little disheartened at his answer but I thought it was right on the money.

I want my comic to have a broad appeal not because she happens to be Latino or a girl, but because she is an awesome character with compelling and fun stories that people want to read. More importantly, stories that I want to read and make. The idea that there is a huge desire for superheroes that the Latino population can call their own was exciting for me. I would be an idiot to not bring this up when I pitch my comic but marketing towards a demographic is for the ad-wizards, I want to make awesome comics.

Francisco Herrera and Humberto Ramos (the artist for Spider-Man) both seemed to really like my designs and the overall concept of my comic, but I was also encouraged by the number of others that showed great interest from the audience of the panel. One guy said to me “this is exactly what I am looking for”. He had this look of gratitude and excitement on his face and that inspired me more so than anything else I think. This comic has developed a life of it’s own and it feels now that  the story is telling itself.

Anyhow, below is a drawing out of my sketchbook of Carla that I will probably use in some form or another for a cover. I will eventually play around with angles and poses to come up with the most exciting version.