New Frontiers

I've decided. I'm going to be posting essays on this blog and making a video essay version to upload to youtube. I just need to find a way to decently record the video segments... I'll find a way. I already have a topic outline of the essay. I might have it by next week but the video part might be awhile from now. Such is life....

New horizons!

Small Update on the Public Domain Book Project

I'm around two-thirds of the way done adapting the book I've been dealing with lately, adapting it to a comics format from its prosaic origins. It currently stands at twenty-one pages so far, including the small segment of the last section that is yet to be adapted. My estimates of it reaching thirty-one to thirty-three pages long is still true and strong. This is only with the first chapter though, I don't particularly plan on drawing the rest of the book as I think of this project as more of an exercise in how well I can adapt things from one medium to another and honing my storytelling abilities as an illustrator within the Comics-bande-dessine, or the Ninth Art as it is sometimes called, tradition of the Fine Arts.

An interesting thing to note is how my paneling style has changed with my adoption of a new technique*. There was a constant appearance of these styles of comics paneling, in part or in whole:

 

 

2X3

3X3

There was also a significant presence of a Howard Chaykin-esque panel style, I could not find any passable examples online so this sketch by myself must do to make the point.

It's a mix between the 3X3 and 2X3 panel styles in the number of panels per row, the rows themselves coming closer to the 2X2 panel style. One of my favorites was the mix of the 2X2 + one row from the 3X3, becoming much like what you see just above this paragraph but with another set of the two panels.

Intersped in all this I also have those little panels within panels that Mike Mignola and Howard Chaykin use so well and interestingly.

It's just interesting to see this constant pattern appearing in the thumbnails of the comics adaptation.

*Said technique being similar to Chester Brown's technique. I would draw each individual panel as its own entity before arranging them in pages, but my own technique is different from Brown's in that I still punctuate things by beats and significant events that I feel could mark the end of a page/ the start of a new page. Chester Brown, from what I know, just draws each panel as he writes and only arranges them into pages once done drawing them all.

Public Domain, I Thank Thee

So, the one project that I've set aside years ago is back on again. The book is apparently on public domain, I had verified it mainly by searching said book on Gutenberg and Librivox, two book services that offer public domain books with the latter offering community-made audiobooks.

Updates when they come.

Some Things I've Been up to Lately a.k.a Other projects

The Chronicles of the Late Great Timothy Dexter, Felosofer Extraordinaire! or A Few Pickles More for the Knowing and now Seeing Ones (Tentative Title) with myself as artist and writer both

One day, in one of my frequent (or daily to be honest with myself) excursions into the wild world of the internet, I came across this glorious man. I want to draw this man's life, at least as far as I am able to based on the various documents I've already found on him the primary evidences of life in that late 18th century and early 19th century America period Lord Timothy Dexter lived.

The Great Lord and Felosofer himself.

Why do I want to do this? I can't say why. All I know is that I must do it, even if it takes some time. It shall happen.

Some of the sketches and the like that I've made so far.

To be true, I have other projects where I'm the writer or the scripter, assuming I'm adapting a work into a comic, and the artist both but these two projects are the ones that I have had the most recent progress in. One of them even has a first draft of the script done already. Soon. Soon.

References:
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1324303464/Timothy_Dexter_400x400.jpg

Dart with Destiny Tenth (and Last) Page

Dart with Destiny with Deftbeck (writer) and myself (the artist)

After much time, I've finally done it. I finally finished this comic that I've been working on for awhile now with Deftbeck. I forgot when I started but it's been at least one academic year and a couple months at the very least but damn it, it's finally done. I can move on to other projects now, which I've actually kinda started. In all honesty, I'm not done with Deft's thing. I still have to redo a few panels that are too off or update the style deviation to the later pages or even out the style of the comic with the first few pages. Yet, that is all secondary for the illustration proper is done. That's the important bit.

The tenth and final page. Note the heavy usage of opaque white ink. My backgrounds have also degraded. Where I once had a decent grasp of single-point perspective and two-point perspective, I'm barely even managing to do flat, 2D backgrounds. Mignola was, of course, my muse and my rescue.

Scripts

Just finished writing my first comic script. There were other attempts but this is the first one that I actually finished and was at least a smidgen happy with the turn out.

Never been the best with names...

I made the language bilingual, leaning on English but with frequent touches of Tagalog. I'd set up a phrase or sentence in Tagalog then directly answer it or set up a direct (as possible) translation in the next line. Hopefully it gives it an extra bit of liveliness.

I wrote this while I was off on my "Uzamaki" high. Uzamaki being the magnum opus of the horror legend Junji Ito. I've been doing it on and off for at least nine months. Then comes the harder bit... refining and then drawing it. That comes later. For now, I rest and think my storytelling choices through.

A good many months to write one thing is a good amount of time to learn and drop things. Creatively, this is a Frankenstein of my different phases. The skeleton though, for the most part, was maintained from the first few versions of it. It's only my interpretation into its more comic-friendly format that's changed.

Pictures of the characters and some of the beasties tomorrow.

A few things

I've gone back to writing something that isn't a school paper. Mostly a dream journal and a script for a comic I'm making. My friend also enlisted me to do breakdowns and layouts for her comic and pencil it as well. Oh well. More projects to do and I'm spreading my creative wings.

Hooray.

Also, have some sketches.

A lil sketch.

A sketch of my uni

The dream journal and my usual hand writing.

As it says, it's a sketch of Madrid.