I finished up a promo image for the new comic series I submitted to Zuda in November.

If you like teenagers, angsty ghosts, and cyber mysteries, it’s time for you to get hyped about Mourning Electric! Go check out the production blog over at http://mourningelectric.tumblr.com!

Mourning Electric – Coming April 2010

Lindsey and I have been working on a comic story for a while now involving a couple of raunchy girls and their ass-kicking gangland antics. It started with a minicomic Lindsey’s been working on and today I get to show it to you! We’ve got a few more projects to get going before we can start this as a weekly, but this fall should mark the continuing adventures of Pins N Needles!!

Until then, slate your thirst with this technocolor awesomeness.

CLICK FOR READING!

Not really, it’s mostly just the stupid things that caught my attention today. But that’s the best kind of day in my opinion.

Enjoy a day in the life.

Hourly Comics Day 2010 comes to a close

This week’s installment deals with some wonderful new turns of phrase that have infested our television programs like some sort of really prolific STD. They’re like the AIDS of stupid phrases.

So next time you watch your show about 16 moderately attractive “real” people being assholes over a million bucks, please think of our little metal buddy.

Murderbot, tossin ladies.

It’s filling my need for really silly quick thing to knock out while I work on bigger projects and that’s always welcome.

After some soul-searching and lots of floundering, Lindsey and I came up with a good plan for this year’s comic-making. I’m revisiting some old stories and turning out some new ideas. We’ll see where the road takes me.

For now, enjoy a momentary adventure into the mind of a killer.

The human neck, broken with the ease of a fresh biscotti

Last night it was Ghost Hunters International’s big GHOST OF HITLER episode. Rob and the crew taunted, cajoled, and bragged to the nonexistent Ghost Hitler. Of course they didn’t find him because they are retarded and the show is really fake, but at least their nerd-courage in the face of absolutely nothing dangerous made me laugh a few times.

Lindsey and I have a game we play during any of the Ghost Hunting shows, I would recommend you do the same. Every time someone says “What the hell was that?” you try to say it in as many different inflections as possible. It’s a surprisingly long-running game.

So that’s the GHI crew down there, Rob on the left, Joe Chin and his epic fuzzy cockroach chin ornament, and Brandy the goblin. Oh and the ghost of Adolf Hitler

What the HELL was THAT?

I’m also sketching some stuff for a short I’d like to do as an anthology submission. If you know anybody that is looking for an anthology submission, this one is a doozy. Promise.

Hey look people! These guys will be doing some serious comic talkin.

I’m hard at work on scripting out stuff for my In-Submission Zuda entry Operation Electric Eel Fighter. Wait now I wish that was really the title. Let’s all hope it gets in so I can finally stop teasing you about it.

I’m also at the drawing board trying to work through some materials for publisher submissions. This is a new process to me and looking through my existing stories has given me some clarity as to what I need to be working on in the moment. You see, most of my stories are long. I believe this is a good thing for when somebody is willing to give me a shot, because I have a large back catalog of compelling stuff to work from. However, as a newbie in this game, I’m pretty sure nobody’s going to hand me a deal for some 60 issue series.

So I work, and brainstorm. It’s my least favorite part of the process, but I stumbled onto some old piece of a short story and it looks like a decent foundation. Pillage your own memories for today’s victories.

In the meantime, I decided to amuse myself with some sketching and some Fist of the North Star on Hulu last night. This happened.

North Star Cross-Stepping Five Finger Smash, A Dining Room In Hell’s Servant Quarters Awaits You

One of those is the consumption of absolutely every single piece of Christmas media I can get my hands on for pretty much the entire month of December. This month hulu, my dear sweet hulu, has pretty much dumped a truckload of Christmas cheer into my heart crevasse. DVDs and my favorite website on the planet have made this tradition just right. Alf, Elf, Santa Claus with Muscles. All is well.

I <3 you Christmas. I <3 you so much. I'm already remembering how great you were this year. BECAUSE I EXIST IN THE FUTURE.

I would also throw rocks at the Polar Express except it’s too fake to even seem corporeal

Last night marked the completion of the script for Goodbye Blue Monday’s first ever Christmas special. We’re hoping to have it up for free download on December 21st. So mark your calendars for extra spiritude.

My good friend Sierra requested a piece of fanart of the cagey cajun, Gambit. So I drew her one last night so she would shut her yap hole. Here it is!

Hey look it’s Gambit! How did he get in here?

To some MF’in FANART! I’ve done a whoole lot of drawing over the last couple of months, but nothing I can post right now. So this weekend I decided to put together some fanart for my favorite new obsession: Muramasa! I decided on Kisuke, since I haven’t finished Momohime’s story yet. I promise I’ll draw pretty ninja girls too.

As an added bonus and an apology for being away so long, I’ll walk you through some process. Since I am, however, entirely into instant gratification, here’s the finished piece first. You can hit the jump below if you want to see how I put things together.

Kisuke from Muramasa, lookin all stabby. Click for big!

Yay now for some self indulgence!

First off, I scanned the pencils since I always forget to do that before I go in with the ink. I keep mine pretty tight to the finished product so that I can remember what it is i was trying to get across when I started drawing. Red Prismacolor Colorerase are way better than those nasty old light blues and that is a fact.

I started with my nib pen and realized that the paper i was using bled when ink so much as got near it. So I switched over to a Prismacolor ink pen and just tried to vary my line weights. The nice thing about the red pencil is that once you’ve got your lineart scanned, you can play with Levels to make the black and white standout, then use Channel Mixer on the Black/White w/ Red Filter setting. It’ll pull the pencils out entirely and leave you with clean art.

After that I flatted in some colors. I actually flatted Kisuke in purple but I guess I merged his skintone layer onto the flat layer before I could save it so you’ll notice his skin actually has some detail on it. I wanted to keep his gi or whatever a single color so it’s all based on the same purple except for the stripe on the front. All his other colors are pretty much just the ones from his original game art. I threw a simple circle gradient in the background.

I did all the shadow in a blue that I made from the snow color and then Hue/Saturated down since it needed to be a little darker. It’s all done with a paintbrush tip with Opacity Jitter control turned on. I set that layer to Multiply and shadows appear! I started with Kisuke because I wanted him to be darker than his surroundings. Then I did a separate layer for the background.

Next I worked on the highlights and ground texture. The colors are pulled directly from the sky, drawn in with the same opacity-jitter paintbrush tip. I then went over with a very low opacity light grey to add some extra ambient light. Finally I stuck in a spotty texture on the ground in its own separate Color Burn layer so it would look a little more icy.

The final act was changing the outline layer to a dark purplish-blue because it looked radical. Throw all that stuff together and you got a ninja! bam.