You Can Lead A Horticulture…

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I apologize for that.

(click for full size)

With two suns, Lisa thinks the shadows should be more severe, but I don’t want to paint black all over her.  Twi’leks don’t exist, so I feel okay about taking certain astronomical licenses.  How can we know how Tatooine’s suns look?  We cannot.

I’ve inked my previous alien princess sketch as a Twi’Lek slave girl.  Not Oola: I don’t like green, and her leg-warmers were so 80s.  I have antipathy for Oola.  Rancor, you might say.

I’ve already started colouring her.  (Blue.)  She’s one of three new prints I hope to have ready for the Expo.

Lisa, Kyle and I have run out of the convention totebags that we’d gone in together on and printed through Lisa’s work. They come in damn handy to protect the comics and prints people buy. This time, we’re each doing our own bags.

“My own,” in this case, means “art from everyone who is drawing comics Twogargs publishes.”

From upper left: Hawkstone and Riverdale, drawn by me; Thunder, drawn by Dean Meek; Sleepers and Diaperman, drawn by Jeremy Thew, and the Black Whip, drawn by Lisa Redfern.

We received the proof copy today and it’s good to go! Except for one or two small things that you will never notice. Find them! Fun party game.

I can’t say enough good things about Kablam. Their prices are much more reasonable than Lulu’s, and there’s a lot less setup goofiness. Lots of that is from their insistence that each page be its own flattened TIFF file, which kind of throws off my Indesign groove. Still! Can’t argue with the results.

The best thing about Kablam is that their price for a 24-page full-colour comic is dramatically less than Lulu’s price for a 24-page black and white comic.  So we’ve already resized Diaperman #13 (slightly more wide, you’ll never notice that either) and we’ll put it up in the Kablam store as soon as we approve the proof copy of that.

So!  Diaperman #14!  Written by Michael McAdam, drawn by Jeremy Thew, coloured by me.  Five bucks!  You can buy it online, or from us directly at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo, which is the centre point of awesome for western Canada and possibly the world.

Uncommon has reasonably-priced iPhone cases that you can have your own art imprinted onto–not with stickers, which is an old idea, but with an ink transfer process that embeds the imprint into the polycarbonate.  And I don’t know any more about it because they’ve invented their own word for it, which is something companies do to sound impressive but tell you nothing.

Or, if a permanently-imprinted case is too much commitment, check out Trexta’s drawable recyclable cases, just announced at Macworld Expo.  They will come in packs in case you do a Kyle and want to start over.  I wonder if they’re erasable?  And I wonder how they take to having art fixative sprayed on them.

It’s been a long time since I did an art battle.  This time it was with Michael’s seven-year-old son, Peter.

Who started it by drawing his father and my wife being devoured by sea creatures.  The medium is Red Crayola, on brown paper tablecloth at Montana’s Steakhouse.

That must not stand, so I fired a return salvo.  This would be a very small shark, taken in scale with Peter’s seven-year-old feet, but I only had so much tablecloth to work with, especially since my Ponderosa Grillburger was already occupying precious work area.

Peter refused to compromise on the necessities of scale, spreading his next sea monster as far across the table as he could reach–much larger than the iPhone’s camera can capture.

Even though I was assured that a seven-year-old-boy-sized sea monster was much, much worse than a bear, I went with my instincts anyway.  Art battles must come from the gut.

I’m hard at work on my entry for the 2010 CCEE Artbook, which I can’t show you anything about because they’ve asked us not to.

But I can show you what I decided not to do.  The topic is “Sci Fi Adventures” and my initial plan was to have a cyborg-alien-wizardy looking dude and his alien girlfriend (the standard sci-fi villains) being menaced by a monstrously giant blond-haired raygun-toting son of a bitch with an atom printed on his belt buckle (the standard Flash Gordony hero).  I remember lots of those sci-fi magazine stories were about reversal.

Here’s the blueline I did of the girl.  I did the blueline for all of it but it didn’t look as good.

The artbook entry I am doing is also about reversal but it’s funnier.

My art blog has been quiet lately!  That’s because all of my art time has been taken up colouring Diaperman issue 14, but as of last night that’s all finished.

Michael has a few pages to letter still, but it’s close!  And it’ll be available at our table at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo.  And our table number?  D14.  I know right.

Now I can work on other things: first up is my Comic Expo artbook submission, then a couple of new prints for this year, then a TDA ashcan, then TDA issue 1.

Then, once all that is finished, I’ll be doing a project all on my own!  That’s a thing, hey.

I need ideas for a “sci-fi adventures” print for this year’s Expo artbook. I’m thinking a Calgary tie-in, but that makes it a space western, and “space western” has been really sort of done in the previous years. I’m also thinking of Isaac Asimov’s work, since I grew up on that and I’ve been reminded of it a lot recently, but I don’t really have a VISUAL sense that goes along with that, if that makes sense.

I usually just default to drawing girls. Fans like that. But I don’t want to cop out, either.

Page one!

Aaaand cue the Doctor Who theme.  reeeeeeeeeeeeee dun da dun! dun da dun! dun da dun! DUN da dun!

Now I’m working on two comics on the same time, which, not my first plan.  Still!