deadwinter

Art Journal 033: Contrast

I’ve been thinking for a while on how I can approach the subject of color theory as an artist who works primarily in black & white. I know how to work in color as well, and I choose to work in monochrome for the benefits it gives, but no matter what your artistic intentions are you operate under the same governing rules of creating illusions of depth and form.  So this week I’m going to explain the number one most foundational element of painting- or any form of visual art ...

Year-End Thanks

Hello! It's been a busy holiday week for me and this is actually the last post of the year so I wanted to just take a moment to say thank you to everyone who has been supporting me in this endeavor. You mean so very much and I try my hardest every month to return on your support. Thanks for sticking with me through the ups and downs! Here's hoping 2015 is a good year for all of us.

Art Journal 032: The Scratch Paint Method

I like to make very painterly comics, as you may have noticed, and I like to draw backgrounds in all of my panels.  I also write a story which can call for lots and lots of people to show up in the background, and since I’m not just doing lineart and simple tonework for all of my art all those background figures can really add up to lots of extra time spent fleshing out my pages.  Fortunately, over the past several years I’ve developed a couple tools to help expedite this ...

Art Journal 031b: Comic Progress

Here is the weekly progress I've made on the comic since last week's post. As you can see I'm very nearly done with it, I just need to knock out some backgrounds and put my patented hand-lettering technique over the dummy font. I'm expecting this page will be done by the end of the weekend, since the panels I finished were easy against-the-wall shots but the remaining bunch are long depth-of-field shots across the crowded diner with all the junk going on in the background, that's going to take m...

Art Journal 031: The Cutting Room Floor

Whenever we start telling a story we have thousands of ideas in our heads we want to fit into the narrative.  We often think up tons of details and little side-stories we want to include in our comics, and we only think up more as we push forward in our work.  It’s a natural part of the creative process, but if left unchecked it can derail a good narrative with needless meandering. This week I’d like to write about editing, or specifically on the process of cutting ideas t...

Art Journal 030: Writing On The Fly

When planning the overarching story arcs of my comics I know where I want them to end up, but the details in between I tend to iron out organically as I come to them.  I never thumbnail too far ahead, usually only a few pages at a time, and by the time I burn through those thumbnails I’ll knock out some more, and in the time between thumbnail sessions I’ll think about how I want the next batch of pages to pan out.  This week I’m drawing the next comic and it’s the last...

Art Journal 029: On Writing, Regrets and Repair

If there is one major thing I learned from making a webcomic it’s how much things can change the longer you work on something.  Writing a story comic is a long-term endeavor whose length isn’t readily apparent from the start, or even at the halfway point, especially if you’re writing a single narrative as opposed to a daily strip.  And when you work on something for that long, inevitably you grow, your vision changes and your ideas change, and after a point you’re no l...

Art Journal 028: Faking Perspective

When I was younger I had the privilege of going to a formal art school and one of the foundational things they teach us is perspective.  We learned about horizon lines, vanishing points and the geometric formulas to accurately scale same-sized objects (in our case telephone poles) at the correct positions in a line leading into the horizon.  This was very useful and extremely important but at the same time it was unrelentingly tedious and my brain hated doing it. Plotting all ...

Art Journal 027: Page Process, Part 2

Last week I did an overview of my comicmaking process up to the point where I had my sketches done.  This week I’m going to continue the series for this page just to push it along as quick as possible.  Over the years I’ve developed a somewhat-efficient system of making comic- “somewhat” being that these things still take me like forty hours of work to finish- so every step of the way has something worth talking about!  Last week was the sketch, so this week I ink...

Art Journal 026: Page Process Overview

For this week’s art journal I’d like to do something a little different from normal.  Over the past few weeks I’ve been very busy working on things I wasn’t allowed to share- which makes it terrible journal material- so I’ve been digging into lesson-style conceptual breakdowns with big sheets of drawn references to keep things bright and meaningful here on the Patreon journal blog.  I’m happy to report, however, that I’ve gotten a break from work I can’t show y...

Art Journal 025b: Comic Update

It's been a while since I've been able to work on my comic, since I was working on game stuff for SPX. I started the comic page once I got back but some freelance work fell in my lap and that took me the better part of the month to do. I started it up again on Sunday and I was hoping to have it done for today but the background got the better of me so I'm ridiculously close to being done, but its a Friday and I made progress so here it is. I'm trying a new approach with the backgrounds. Normally...

Art Journal 025: Letters

I’ve been thinking about doing a writeup about letters for a while.  There are a lot of areas to explore about them and I like to keep these journals organized, following some sort of internal rhythm to help all the words make sense, and I haven’t been sure how to capture that rhythm until recently, so this week I’d like to take a look at the fun and wonderful world of words!

When we’re young we learn to read and write, we’re introduced to letters as sounds captured...

Art Journal 024: Style

I haven’t been able to work on my comic recently but it wasn’t by laziness or disinterest. As you may have heard I was hired last month to draw a full seven-page comic in another artist’s style, which was a very interesting challenge to tackle so naturally I jumped on the opportunity.  I had to draw a comic that evoked the visual style of Junji Ito’s work while also being about Homestuck trolls, a sentence I never imagined I’d ever write, so the concept of styles and what...

Art Journal 023: Cars

Cars are probably one of the more intimidating elements of a modern or semi-modern story setting that you can’t really always get away without ever drawing. What probably makes them really intimidating from a design perspective is that they’re made up of so many facets which themselves are often -curved- so if you were to look at one you have to do an extra bit of unravelling to figure out how one shape fits with another.  It doesn’t help that the actual physical car itself a...

Art Journal 022: Firearms

I was thinking about what I could write about for this next article and I thought about machines, since that’s a sort of thing people tend to have trouble drawing. The first machine I thought about was firearms, and then I started breaking the article apart in my head: classical handguns, modern firearms, so on and so forth; different mechanical functions for different points in time and different scales of firearms. I was also going to write about cars but the more I thought about it...

Art Journal 021b: Comic Progress

It's been a bit since I posted a comic page. I've been busy splitting my time among other projects but I budgeted a couple hours and started fleshing out the thumbnails I'd plotted. This page is a very social back-and-forth between the town's mayor and the sheriff so I did a lot of camera-turning and panel-siding to capture the ebb and flow of the discourse, to make it feel weighty and important. Because when there's words in there it'll be exactly that. I've still got some other work I need to ...

Art Journal 021: Motion

I know I say a lot of things are my “favorite part” of making comics but for serious, motion is probably my most-favoritest part of making comics.  It’s an illusion; a magic trick where you simulate motion in a motionless format.  This week I’d like to talk about how I approach motion in my comics, so without further ado I’m going to jump right into it.

The first and most importing thing to remember about motion is that you are not capturing a snapshot in time,...

Art Journal 020: Clothing Wrinkles

From the very beginning of my comic-making career I’ve experimented with how to draw clothing and I can freely report that it’s actually pretty tricky to master!  It’s a case of layers, where bones move flesh which is encased in fabric and different tightness, thickness and qualities of fabric react in different ways to being bent at rigid mechanical joints.  It’s like skin, but looser and less elastic, and over the years I’ve figured out a couple ways to help me dra...

Art Journal 019: The Light Orbs

I’m finally home from SPX and I’m completely burnt from traveling so I decided to give myself something light to work on that I can type up quickly and get some rest (next week is going to be a big lesson post about drawing clothing folds and wrinkles, by the way), so I decided to expand on something I touched on in Art Journal 014: Lighting.  When I work on my comics I have a phase where I incorporate a light orb into my work and then use this to plot out where my light source...

Art Journal 018: Plotting More Thumbnails

This week is SPX and I’m cutting down to the wire preparing for a big trip but I don’t want to do a “we won’t update this week” sort of thing because that would not be responsible of me, so I’m going to share something interesting instead.  I’d like to keep doing longer lesson-style posts but for easy sake I’m gonna do something simpler for now.

These are my thumbnails for the next three pages.  I scratch them out in Photoshop and I’ll put little notes ...

Art Journal 017: Hands

Hands are, hands down, the hardest parts of the human body to draw in handsome illustrations. It can be a real white-knuckle affair trying to handle that sort of curving, overlapping topography but there are a handful of handy tricks you can thumb through to get a better grasp on what it is you’re trying to draw. I’ve done my best to make a little handout of thumbnails in hope that it might give you a hand with your past or future drawings.

Sorry.

It’s important to get...

Art Journal 016: Drawing Heads in Perspective

This week I’d like to continue the art lesson-oriented journal entries and write a little bit about how to draw a human head, and by “draw” I don’t mean a technical lesson on how to actually -draw- a head.  My aim in writing these types of journal posts is to provide insight another artist can incorporate into his or her own style without saying “this is the Right way to do it” or “you should do it how I do it”, I want people to discover their own voice and hone the...

Art Journal 015b: The Comic

Here's the current state of the comic. I've been tangled up with other things this week so I couldn't put as much time into it as I'd have liked to, but I'm nearly out of the foreground stage. I should have it backgrounded and out the door this weekend, but one way or another I promise you this is the last time you're going to see this page as an in-progress Patreon post. The next time you see it it'll be finished and up on the site.

Art Journal 015: Weightiness

Everyone knows having a reasonable understanding of anatomy is important to drawing people.  Even if you choose to bend the rules and draw cartoony it behooves you to have a working knowledge of how the human body is built so your abstraction into cartoon is informed and makes sense.  It’s a story we’ve heard time and again, but there is an important distinction which I feel gets overlooked quite often:  anatomy does not exist in a vacuum!  No!  In fact, mor...

Art Journal 014b: Light Spheres

Here is a progress on the page so far, I got hung up on other work all week and I just got the inks and some painting done, but this page also illustrates a couple points I was making in my post about Lighting, namely how I try to facet my subjects in terms of where I want the light to come from and how I place my little circles in the page to block in my primary light sources. I'm hoping to have the finished page done by next week so I can have something new to show you!

Art Journal 014: Lighting

As anyone who has followed the development of my art over the past seven years can tell, lighting is one of my absolute favorite parts of painting.  Light and shadow have such an incredible power to affect depth, space, perspective, reader attention, mood and every artistic element under the sun, and it’s a big reason why I’ve pushed my comic’s aesthetic further into painterly tones than otherwise.  Lighting is a tremendous presence in our everyday lives, as well as the ...

Art Journal 013: Writer's Block

This week I’d like to talk about an abstract concept, one which is often spoken of but hard to define and even harder to measure or quantify.  It’s an inseparable part of the creative process known as either Artist’s or Writer’s Block and it’s been the accused in the deaths of many creative ventures, but few people actually define it beyond claiming that they have it, so I’m going to attempt to explore it as best I can.  This is going to be a fairly stern article, ...

Art Journal 012: Blocking In Panels

I used to stream my workspace while I made comics, but I’d only ever broadcast the inking or painting phases, the latter being so slow-crawling a process that I am convinced no one actually wants to watch it.  Painting backgrounds is usually more engaging because more obvious things happen more often but when I’m painting my figures it’s a lot of subtle work all over the place that it is legitimately hard to follow, and I acknowledge this.  There’s one phase of my comi...

Art Journal 011: Writing Part 3: Connecting the Dots

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking less about the mechanical process of drawing comics and more about the methods of writing them (mostly because it’s interesting but partly because I’ve been focusing on game development and non-comic freelance work lately).  I talked about creating characters and personalities, as well as building spaces for them to live in, so this week I’m going to wrap up this brief segment on writing and talk about how all the pieces fit togethe...

Art Journal 010: Writing Part 2: Places

Last week I talked about writing and creating characters and the evolving process of turning a general idea into a flawed and multi-faceted human being with goals, ambitions, hangups and social connections.  This week I’d like to continue talking about the writing process and go into how I like to build worlds for those characters to live in.  Like writing characters this has been an evolving process for me, something I’ve learned by trying over the years, and as time goes...