astropowered

I should stop staying up till dawn.

2010-09-19T04:18:00.000-07:00

rakugaki robo

2010-08-25T22:54:00.000-07:00

Some designs for an old style giant robo. I want it to be inspired by the generation of robots that came before the super robot in 70s. Tough to balance a look that at once recalls the simplicity of Tetsujin 28, the power of Giant Robo and the grandeur of Big O.

so this is rakugaki power

2010-07-31T22:35:00.000-07:00

Just another dumpdate! Had an idea for a paper delivery comic. It'd be like mad max/intial d on bikes with lots of painful bruising crashes! I think I drew the last page while listening to Muse's Exogenesis, the finale in particular. It spurred me to draw the finale of one comic. I drew the creatures on the right after reading Yukinobu Hoshino's 2001 Nights, a masterpiece of science fiction comics.

rakugaki returns

2010-07-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

I guess in order to make up for lost time I'll just start updating semi- daily?
The 2nd rakugaki book I started didn't really have anything great... a lot of it was rut-ridden, but some interesting ideas still managed to poke through.

My favorites in these pictures are probably the thugs. Mean, ugly thuggy thug-thugs. Thugs with faces that would make their mothers want to punch them. Maybe I should just make a book with nothing but thug fodder in it.

coming back

2010-07-27T00:40:00.000-07:00

HAPPY NEW YEARS!

2010-01-01T23:38:00.000-08:00

GRAH! Missed it by a few hours! Dammit Josh!

Oh, well... let's make it a good one! Or rather, Let's make it GRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEAAAT!

alright, now this is more like it

2009-10-30T12:22:00.001-07:00

I've spent the past few nights working on a new coloring style and here's the progession, in chronological order. The drawings themselves are pretty old, but I'm still going to work off of them for consistency's sake. I think that even with their multiple errors and levels of unfinish in the drawing stage, if I were to draw them now, they'd be very different.

yeah, i don't know either

2009-10-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

On the left: watercolor on moleskine.
On the right: digital colors.

The one on the left was done after the one on the right. A lot of people couldn't figure out exactly what was happening when I was working on this, and to be honest, now I can see why. It was intended to be a final rendering for a conceptual illustration class last year; and this scene tried to capture the climax of the story I had come up with at the time.

End result: meh.

I did learn some nifty tricks in the digital version, however.

watercolor candy

2009-10-26T19:55:00.000-07:00

These pictures were drawn and colored listening to lots of pumpin disco and Midnight Juggernauts.

They're all watercolor and ink with slight digital touchups, mainly on the skin.

On the right here, we take a sneak peek into Jenny's everyday going ons, and on top we sail straight through the sun on a cosmic disco train. :D

...

I wonder if I pick these Fruit Loopsy Starburst Trix colors because I'm slightly colorblind.

Digital Love

2009-10-25T16:52:00.000-07:00

So I was hard-drive rummaging this past weekend and I found two unfinished digital coloring sketches that gave me painting bug. One of them became the new header for the blog... do you like it?

I put up the old header here for nostalgia's sake.
There's also this really old rendering of Jett fighting some weird insect rock monsters or something. I don't know.
Slapped on some color and well.. that's it.

CRASH rakugaki

2009-10-19T18:27:00.001-07:00

And with this my first rakugaki sketchbook comes to a close!

ALRIGHT I CAN DO THIS

2009-10-14T19:34:00.000-07:00

You know, it's been getting hectic recently. Juggling around a lot of work, ideas, and problems.
The lack of internet at home has made it possible to focus on the work that needs to be done, comics wise. Ideas always come and go and the future's troubles are always the clouds on the horizon... which draw closer every day.

Thats a fancy way of saying that I've fallen of the boat in updating this blog.

The One Piece fanart is set to be done at the end of the month while I finish up some other things and prep myself for a one-shot story.

I'll post the teaser pages when all is said and done, but in the mean time, here's the continuation of the RAKUGAKI BEAT.

more haikus- i mean hiatuses- i mean

2009-10-05T16:04:00.000-07:00

Hey there fellers! It's been a busy month of work and also work. I blame my sudden rush of productivity on the lack of available (unlocked) internet in my homestead and THUS I am forced to channel my boredom into horrible jokes drawn on paper.

I'll leave that for another blog post, however.
This one's just to touch base and display something you won't find anywhere else: the workings of a secret project!

watercolor splash!

2009-09-02T10:18:00.001-07:00

So! After finally picking up the watercolor sketchbook and dabbling in color after a summer-long hiatus, I also ended up scanning the thing and much to my dismay this is all I have... it's not even one picture for each month I've had the sketchbook! In order to rectify this, I'm gonna... start drawing in the watercolor book!

The oldest picture is last with the most recent one right below.

rakugaki re-imagining

2009-08-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

So if you've been keeping track of my blog posts, I've been trying to "re-find" my self and style.
Seeing the New Getter Robo OVAs helped put me back on track as Bandai's interpretation of of the Getter Robo mythos provided me with the energy needed to evolve!

Here's a link to the first 10 minutes of the show; watch to the end to see some sweet fighting animation!

I also ended up drawing a little Cutey Honey fanart before going back to freesketching.

The last picture is an idea for an short animation music video set to Radiohead's Lurgee.

That's all for now, thanks for stopping by!

shin rakugaki restsuken!

2009-08-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

So here I've got some more interesting pictures... I hope.
Some old villains redrawn along with some philosopers on the right hand side.
The second picture is something I thought up while listening to Mew's Snow Brigade.
The third picture came about as I was riding home one night. For some reason I thought this was how the universe came to be.
Man I have a headache.

rakugaki gawker

2009-08-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

This next sequence of pictures is going to be rather boring...
I kinda hit a funk, so I tried drawing through it, and this was the result.
Still feeling inept at drawing clothes on... women... Hmm..
Oh well, back to drawing!

shin rakugaki mangaka

2009-08-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

For today's rakugaki installment... well I wish I'd not post the trashy sketches (it only gets trashier from here) but a post is a post!

The Zangief drawing is a copy of Bengus's MVC2 art and most of the SF characters there are copies as well. Man.. drawing the gief was tough... since I try not to do any underdrawings in this sketchbook and just sight everything, copying Bengus's fantastic proportions was quite the ordeal.

There's something that's been bothering me as of late. I've been reading a lot of One Piece lately. And I do mean a lot. I've managed to see 1200 dpi scans of some pages and the amount of detail in it is astounding. I know it sounds wierd but seeing a stroke as big as my finger on the monitor makes me feel like I'm understanding Oda's process better. With seeing how he constructs his characters and world, I've taken in some of his stylistic choices to see how they would work out.
The one thing I have an IMMENSE respect and admiration for is Oda's ability to take a stock emotion/face such as shock and implement it into ANY character. The characters emotion is not only clear but one can recognize the character even though there might be up to 5 people exhibiting the same emotion. Or his animals! The all have the same face, but they all read as individual! I guess this is what you call... mastery.

Oda's ability to model the human body from any direction is also astounding. I've started leaning more towards his approach to character creation, both in face and body, but I feel as though its made me lose whatever originality I had. I feel like I can't create women anymore, or work off whatever ideas I might have had in the past.

I guess what I'm trying to communicate here are my feelings of ineptitude and the experience I'm gaining as I work towards a cohesive drawing style. I feel like it's time to start settling into something. It's time... TO HENSHIN!!!! FLLAAAAASSSSH~!!!! GYAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH~!!!!!!!

YOU PUNK TRASH RAKUGAKI BULLY!

2009-08-01T13:52:00.001-07:00

EEHHHH!? WOT'S THAT?!
MOAR?!
YE WANT SOME... MOAR?!

Start reading Hajime no Ippo recently and... its definitely a great shounen. It took me 73 chapters but I cried. It also features some classic punk bullying. I want to have Alex's story play out like a bully boxing arc.

The two pages of dogs there was from this one dog I saw while I was eating at Zunzis. It was this really unique mix and it had the biggest diamond head and the cutest snout. The giants name was Buddy Roe, and it wouldn't let me sketch him. I think he was scared of me :(

rakugaki with robots!

2009-07-23T11:43:00.000-07:00

Today we've got some sketching around of Kung-Fu Ramone, Jett's heroic idol and to-be mentor. He's based off a good friend of mine, one who has picked me up from the depths of despair twice already, and it just all seems to fit together and feel right.

I also downloaded the soundtrack to Giant Robo and spent about a day listening to it and the Big- O Soundtracks as well. The fruits of that labor are obvious. Some girls, and a mini portrait of my girlfriend when I took her out for our anniversary. She wasn't really looking that angry.. just... looking at some bread.

rakugaki update

2009-07-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

So here's an update on the Rakugaki sketchbook. I've actually got more than these scanned and stuff, but I figure I'll just spread the wealth throughout the posts.

Rakugaki BEAT

2009-07-11T00:54:00.000-07:00

Whoa... it's been a long time....

Everything is like spiral for me. If I don't draw one day... my ability to put pencil to paper weakens and then before I know it, a month goes by without a single sketch getting drawn.

That'll be put to an end hopefully now that I've got my Rakugaki BEAT sketchbook.
In reality, it's just an ordinary moleskine, but with the flame of spontaneously combusting imagination, it becomes my tool of drawing destruction!
My aim was to do 2 pages a day, but I've been getting ahead of that, so I'll stick to drawing 2 pages as a minimum.

Here's what I've gotten scanned so far.

MURDER ALLEY DEATHRAIN

2009-06-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

BBTTRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Jenny Deathrain doing some up-the-wall gymnastics. I drew this towards the beginning of the quarter but wasn't quite satisfied with the version I had inked, so I redrew and inked it, but this time adding in some tone. Pretty cool, huh?

In real life news, I just finished up classes about a week ago. Now I have allll the time in the world (for 3 months and in between work) to draw! I'm work on 4 Asphalt Graze teaser pages to show in my portfolio along with a crossover oneshot using a character from my good friend, James Stanley. You can check out his crispy deep fried art at beefykunoichi!

PS- I bought Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 and it's destroying my life. 11 hours in one day... what is wrong with me.

watercolor dabbles

2009-05-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

So, lately I've been a bad student and I've been trying to build up my watercolor sketchbook instead of doing eh... scientific illustration. But that's between us. (I still did some sci-illust.)

These were all done on a two pager spread and are about 3-4 inches in size. I resized them for the web. Jett (leftmost) was actually drawn the smallest, probably since I can draw him in any angle. There's more stuff I'm drawing, and it will probably be all Asphalt Graze concept stuff.
Well, that's all for now!

Oh yeah I study at the college here and I'm a .... comic book artist.

2009-05-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

It's a funny thing when you're talking to random people.
I've been working at the local Gap in Savannah's main street for a few weeks now and every now and then I get someone asking me if study at the college here.

It's almost expected to for the reply to be "yes," but when I mention that I'm studying Sequential Art, the response is always a mix of slight confusion. Once I mention that it's another term for comics and that I'm a comic book artist, the confusion gives way to some interest.

I find these reactions to be incredibly interesting, as I gauge my converastional partner's exposure to the comics culture.

Some of the responses I've gotten are:
"Oh cool, so what's that like?"
"Can you DRAW?!"
"Oh so you draw superheroes?"
"Do you do like an American thing or more of a Japanese thing? Like anime?"

That usually describes the range of acknowledgement that I get from people.
It varies with age groups.. older people tend to ask the superhero question, while younger people are kinda just suprised that it's my major (maybe I look like a film major?).

I think it is pretty surprising that people know what anime is at all. It just goes to show how much of it has permeated through American entertainment culture and reached a point of acknowledgement to people who one might think would not know about such things.
That might just be my own bias, however, since I tend to think of the Gap's target audience to be more into I dunno... sports, tv and more popular fields of education such as business and marketing.

So after the questions been asked, I do the, "Well... I don't exactly draw superhero comics... I do more of a Japanese comic book thing." To which I then get, "Oh! Anime?" "Yeah, something like that."

I tend to leave it at that and not really correct them on how... anime is for stuff that's animated while manga refers to comics. That just makes me sound like the nyyyrrrrhhh comic book nerd that I'm trying not to portray. For some reason I just have this idea of people imaginging me drawing Lucky Star in a room full of schoolgirl models.

Of course, this isn't something recent: I remember when I was still in highschool and just doodling in my sketchbook, some businessman came up to me and looked at what I was drawing and innocently asked me if it was hentai (it was some fanart or something). He didn't know the difference between anime and hentai and thought they were the same thing. Of course once I cleared up his misunderstanding, he promptly thanked me and walked off.

The other day while I was talking to some customers and we got to the "I draw anime" stage of the conversation, one customer actually corrected the other and said, "He draws manga, it's a Japanese *hand gesture* art ." Needless to say, I was taken back. This person actually knew what I was talking about it.

So what's the point of all this? I know America is a verrry big place, but comics have been on the upswing in popularity, obviously due in part by all these comics movie adaptations. Soon enough we'll be getting a influx of manga movie adaptions by Hollywood, but will this prompt people to read more manga? Or will it negatively skew their perceptions of it. Dragonball is fairly established here in the US, I'd say. There wasn't a kid in my generation who didn't watch it, so we all knew that the Dragonball movie was going to be shit.

But what about for people who've never read a Naoki Urasawa book? Or Yukito Kishiro? Or even Katsushiro Otomo? When the live action movie adaptations of these author's stories come out... how will the public see them?

In any case, I've heard people talk about the limitless boundaries of manga and the fact that anything can be manga. Western comics with manga influences are usually noted as such. "A mix of western and eastern storytelling."

On the more positive side, I've read some reviews or comments where its said that the author has taken the manga style of storytelling and made it their own. To be so fluent in the eastern language of storytelling that you can be mistaken for a native speaker... that is my goal.

I don't just want to be a comic book artist. I want to be a mangaka. The best mangaka of the west!

[edit- Lemme throw in a picture here.]

AAAAAAGGYYYAAAAHHHHHHHH~!!!!

2009-05-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

I saw Godzilla: Final Wars yesterday. What started as a perverted joke snowballed into watching Gozilla clips on youtube and then stumbling upon one of Godzilla destroying American Zilla in under a minute flat. After that..... I kinda knew I had to see this damn movie. Which I did.
And now I can't stop pretending to be Godzilla! THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE FORCE ON EARTH!!!!!
I would like to do a finished version (or 2) of this on a 3 foot watercolor paper in black ink, and make it look like a proganda poster. One in plain black and white and the other in inkwash. I might just do the plain black and white one on a smaller size paper, however, haha.

The movie itself was entertaing, as expected of a Ryuhei Kitamura film. Don't go expecting serious character development or whatever. It's just campy fun with some kickass monster fight scenes. That said, I wish there were more kaiju fights than human fights.

AAAAAAGGYYYAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!

Bloop

2009-04-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

Time for another update I guess.

Nothing great, just a patchwork of lifedrawing, sketchs and a Tezuka homage pic that I did for advanced inking. The Tezuka pic (hereafter referred to as failpic) came out kinda lame. Hopefully I'll be able to do something similar one day, but with an actual composition.

Next up is some life drawing I've did mostly this past Friday during a model session. I used a regular brush and ink. For the other pics I used a Pilot Hi-Tech C pen.Next up are some various sketches doing some problem solving and fleshing out.
I really want to try and use the kid in the left for something, but he's kinda hard to draw. Time to study some Dragonball...

Editor's day is coming up soon, and I'm kind of at loss for material (pages). I need more time than luck, so wish me some time!

Finished assignment

2009-04-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

Just finished up some stuff for Advanced Inking, it's a fun class with assignments that really challenge you. I guess that challenge comes from within as everything is left up to you. Most other classes are like that in Norris but maybe it's because I actually care about this class that I find myself doing a lot of work.

I drew this one out first, to get it out of the way. The theme for this picture was dancing, and all I could think about was judo.

I wanted to draw the everyone in an outside field/forest, with some hijinx going on in the background and maybe showing some more animals in the line, but there wasn't enough room (and I was working pretty big, 16x8).

This was done mostly in brush and inkwash. I used a round flat brush, made sure it was carryind diluted ink and then split the hairs to create the wood texture. That worked really well for the bottom floor as you can see. By lining them up horizontally and vertically you can get a cool natural cross hatch going on, which would look good on huts or weaves.

This was done while reading some good ol Hirohiko Araki (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure).
If you've never read it, I highly suggest doing so. IMMEDIATELY.

Anyway, compositionally, It was kind of a cool idea. I wish I could have made the background lights better, but the razor blade method I was working with... well it wasn't working.

The dude on the right is like a cross of a Jojo character, Alex from Street Fighter 3 and this one John Bauer painting (or was it Arthur Rackham). ~~Could this be Bronze O'Hara?~~ Think I'm gonna call him Rocky Bronze. (as in Bronze A'Rachi)

Contour lines were all brush, and the hatching was all nib, save for the feathering on the spot blacks in the wrestler's muscles.

On the right you've got Alexander McCarthur Bullet wondering exactly how he's gonna be able to punch that guy.

What powers you?

2009-04-17T17:48:00.000-07:00

Let's say you wake up one morning.

You know it's gonna be a bad day just by looking at your bedsheets. Just as palm readers divine the secrets of fate from the wrinkles in your hand, the creases in your bedfabric tell you that your day is going to suck. You don't know how or why you know, but you just do.

If you take one step outside that door, the world, the ENTIRE. INFINITE. UNIVERSE. is going to bend backwards and roar at your insolence; the fact that you have the gall to live. And because of this, the world is going to do everything it can to make sure that this error is corrected. That you do NOT get through the day alive.

So what are you going to do? Stay in bed and let time erode the fabric that ties you to reality?
Or are you going to kick the universe outta the way and scream like the human you are because dammit you are alive and you are NOT gonna die?!

Well, those are some pretty dramatic conclusions... but what I would like is to know what it is that keeps YOU (yes, you) living from day to day.

For me (and everyone else in my comic), it is the drive to make my dream a reality; to become a comic book artist. Not just any artist, but the best damn shonen manga artist in the west. That drive is what I call "astropower."

So... are you astropowered?