Captain V Spacedog Volume 2

And so I've now begun drawing and coloring the webcomic.  I hope to get about 6 pages ahead before beginning the comic.  I'm going to start at one page a week till I have my schedule down and can add additional time in my schedule to create more.  Here is a print of the first page I made today.  A few minor changes may occur before it gets posted but for the most part this is the finished product.

Looking forward to telling the back story to Captain V and Drogo Blekk as well as creating my first full color and properly executed webcomic!  And a squid holding a pumpkin for the road...

Adventures in Digital Painting

For a number of years I have tried to teach myself how to digitally paint.  I've read quite a few number of blogs and watched countless process and how to videos put up by established artists.  It certainly helped my photography in post production but my digital painting and coloring was just too pedestrian to help self inspire.  So I took the plunge last month and signed up for Chris Oatley's Magic Box... and its been wonderful.  Of course I'm on the first assignment of 18 but I've already learned more in this exercise than in the last handful of years combined.  Its going to be tough finding the time to execute the assignments but if feels good to be exploring drawing and painting again.  This is the first assignment.  Choose a classical painting with atmospheric lighting rip off the head and place it with an animal of your liking.  I choose a bat (Vampire bat to be exact).  We draw studies and then apply the study to line art then put together color comps.  Next assignment deals with brush techniques so these are rough and more of a map to help find the direction of the piece.

Dusting things off...

It has been a while since posting here.  Photography and a move from Albuquerque to DC has taken up much of my time.  But things are starting to settle and I've started coming up for air.  I've begun embarking on volume 2 of Captain V Space Dog.  This time I'm taking a more traditional approach and writing a script, thumb nailing my pages and panels and possibly coloring (Gray shading at least).  I've been posting pages from Volume 1: The Heist on a seperate site - Captain V Web Series - Its a free webcomic site hosted my Comic Fury.  Its very functional but my lack of coding skills keeps my web presence from being a little more polished.  Volume 1 was meant to be a coloring book for my nephews and at the same time an executable story that I could see to the end.  Its very simple but my nephews loved it.  Now they are a few years older and I feel I can draw better and tell a little more complex story.  Volume 2 will explore Captain V's roots and relationship with Drogo Blekk when they met on Mars during the second Terraforming War.  I've been working on retooling Captain V so she is more feminine and younger.  Those drawing are more exercises for consistency once I'm ready to draw but I can't help but get pulled into drawing a little more complete pictures.  First is my cast of Martian Marauders and the following two are some ideas from a mining sequence outside of Junction City on Mars.  They are both works in progress but I'm exploring different ideas as I go.