Following up on two previous installments (which you can check out here and here), let's check out a few more page layouts from the great Frank Thorne (of Red Sonja fame)!
The horror-comic wrap-up page below is a particularly innovative example; while the L-shaped pa...
2019-12-13 14:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post<Note: You can check out I Am Empowered's previous installment here.
And now, back to Emp's first-person narration, taking place roughly around the beginning of Empowered vol.1: >
I AM EMPOWERED
Chapter 2: W...
2019-12-12 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
From 2003 or thereabouts, here are the first 4 pages of a commissioned DiD story featuring Dirty Pair's Yuri winding up in a distressing situation. Had a li'l more direction than usual with this one, as the commissioner in question wanted something featuring, well, a tight skirt, after a recent con sketch along those lines had caught his eye.
So, time for a tale of Yuri undercover, only for her disguise to land her in peril! Notes below: 2019-12-11 14:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Here are the final colors by my buddy Ryan Kinnaird for an upcoming Udon Street Fighter Swimsuit Special, this time featuring the somewhat infamous Poison from Final Fight, who apparently rocks the whimsical "police bikini" seen above as an unlockable dealie in SF 5.
You can see the earlier work stages, from roughs through initial colors, in 2019-12-10 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Yet again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains prodigious.) First above is a recent-ish set from March 2019, while the second is an example from January 2017, very early on in the effort.
Below, enjoy the higher-res, raw and untweaked grayscale scans as PSD attachments.
TOMORROW: Patrons of the $3+ tiers can look for...
2019-12-09 14:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The great mangaka Tatsuya Egawa is probably best known in the West for Golden Boy and (to a lesser degree) Tokyo University Story, but for me his towering achievement was his breakout manga Be Free!, a wild, absurdist, narratively adventurous high-school comedy that blew my g-d mind when I stumbled across it in the Bay Area back in 1...
2019-12-06 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post<Note: You can check out I Am Empowered's previous installment here.
As we head into the second half of this ultimately abortive prose experiment's first chapter, prepare for a bunch of interesting factoids about Emp's supersuit that I never quite got around to mentioning in the comic proper. The "sui...
2019-12-05 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Part one of this commissioned DiD story can be seen here.
Whoops! I really thought there were at least a few more pages to this story fragment, but danged if I can find 'em; these first three images were all I could dig up on short notice. On the other hand, they do feature a bit of nudity (which I have to admit I'd entirely forgotten about), so maybe that makes up for the briefness of the c...
2019-12-04 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's one final dump of Clip Studio Paint sketches, based on late-breaking November art requests from various Patreon tiers. Note: I'm probably gonna go back and start deleting old art-request posts soliciting your requests, to clean up the archives a bit; the posts containing the actual sketches based on those requests will remain, howeva.
And now, a few notes. First off, no comments on the first few images... (Lip bites are tricky to pull off, though; gotta work on t...
2019-12-03 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Yet again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains prodigious.) First above is a recent-ish set from March 2019, while the second is an example from January 2017, very early on in the effort; yes, folks, 35 weeks into this Patreon, we've finally left 2016's sketch sets behind!
Below, enjoy the higher-res, raw and untweaked grayscale scans as PSD att...
2019-12-02 14:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post<A quick introduction from the — ahem — author: So, anyway.
Six or seven years ago, I picked up a superhero-related prose novel that seemed to have a premise ominously similar to Empowered; false alarm, luckily, as the similarities were superficial at best. Howeva, what did startle me about the nov...
2019-11-29 14:16:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Following up on an earlier post showing work stages for the variant cover I drew for January's Venom: The End one-shot, above are the final colors for the piece, courtesy of the fine folks at the coloring studio Guru eFX. Heck, might as well paste the colors in below, so I can comment on the sad fact that the version that went public yesterday was missing the TIME'S ARROW lettering, due to...
2019-11-28 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostWellp, took care of all the art requests from the $10 and $20 tiers, so now it's time for the $5 tier! As usual, feel free to post your suggestions for characters, situations (could be DiD, I suppose) or the like that I can try to tackle during my messing-with-Clip-Studio-Paint digital sketching sessions. I have a bunch of day-job work to crank out through the weekend, but I'll try to hit up at least a few of these at the same time.
Art requests are gonna get a lot trickier sta...
2019-11-28 03:17:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Short version: Folks, check out the first part of an incomplete commissioned “Dirty Pair as damsels in distress” story I drew for a generous friend (and pre-Patreon patron, of a sort), cranked out in a pencil-based, proto-Empowered format only a few years before I realized this could be a viable way to produce “real” comics.
Obviously never intended to see print, these DiD pages dial up the cheesecake level a f...
2019-11-27 14:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Running short on posting time today, so here's a quick dump of a few Clip Studio Paint sketch sets, based in part on art requests from the Big Spenders of the higher tiers and in part on general-purpose life drawing from photoreference.
Some notes:
First set above is mainly life drawings, with the requested Widowmaker/Tracer image referenced off a well-photographed cosplay recreation of t...
2019-11-26 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Yet again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains prodigious.) First above is a recent-ish set from March 2019, while the second is an example from December 2016, very early on in the effort; I'm happy to report, folks, that we have now reached the final life drawing from 2016, a mere 34 weeks into this Patreon. Huzzah!...
2019-11-25 14:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In Tetsuro Ueyama's awesome but hyper-obscure 2000-era manga Solevision Mitsuyoshi (never translated, alas), every chapter of the series kicks off in the same manner; and this is an "opening pages" technique I've long adored and used myself.
First off, we start with a page of slightly cryptic panels, usually without a clear view of the character(s) involved. Here, in the first page of the first Mitsuyoshi chapter, a mysterious girl is ...
2019-11-22 14:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Check out pt. 1 here, and pt.2 here. Note that the page above (from a Dirty Pair: SimHell Remastered backup story) features outfits that appeared as con sketches in our previous installment's "title page illo" dealie.
To repeat the previous essays' ...
2019-11-21 14:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
So, last week, I posted a loosely drawn commissioned sketch set dating back to the late 90s, featuring a vague scenario of Dirty Pair's Yuri victimized by hotel-suite laundry drones controlled by villanous superagent Shasti.
Wellp, after being contacted by the fellow who commissioned the original sketch set, a few years ago I revisited the premise, and redrew it with a somewhat different, more contemporary approach. (Also, being pressed for time I went "s...
2019-11-20 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Am massively swamped with work at the moment, but I thought I might as well show all you fine Patrons what's been doing most of the swamping: Namely, January's Venom: The End one-shot from Marvel, which I wrote and laid out—and drew a variant cover for, as seen in the work stages above! Yay!
The coloring of the piece hasn't happened yet, but I'll be sure to preview it here first when I do see that stuff.
Just spent most of four days(!) doing elabo...
2019-11-19 15:08:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Yet again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains prodigious.) First above is a recent-ish set from March 2019, while the second is an example from very early on in the effort (December 2016).
Note: In case these text intros seem repetitive, I should tell you that I schedule a month worth of these life drawing posts at a time, and copy/paste ...
2019-11-18 14:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
So! The acclaimed mangaka Inio Asano (Solanin, Goodnight Punpun, A Girl on the Shore) has a really interesting approach to using so-called "bleeds," which are comic pages in which the artwork extends all the way out to the edges of the printed paper, as seen in the images gallery above. (And below, too!)
Now, a "full bleed" is a comic page in which the artwork ex...
2019-11-15 14:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Above are my thumbnails for the second half of issue #6 of 2018's Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell, a six-part miniseries written by me, drawn by Carla Speed McNeil, and colored by Jenn Manley Lee. Previous roughs from issue #6 are 2019-11-14 14:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
For this week's DiD post, I'd originally intended to show two different versions of the same commissioned sketch set, drawn 20 years apart; however, I'm having a helluva tough time piecing together the scans for the recent follow-up version in my very narrow timeframe for setting up today's post. So the second version of this sketch set will have to wait until next week, folks!
Anyhoo, back in the late 90s, several of my regular DiD commissioners at the time were cool with loos...
2019-11-13 15:20:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Am presently swamped with "day job" responsibilities, so this hasty "grab-bag" post is all I got today. First off is a Clip Studio Paint life-drawing set, with the pic at upper left based on an art request from the $20 tier: namely, Empowered's Ninjette cosplaying as Rock Howard from King of Fighters! (Both characters have extremely dire relationships with their stern, abusive fathers, I gather.)
2019-11-12 14:01:00 +0000 UTC
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Yet again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains prodigious.) First above is a recent-ish set from March 2019, while the second is an example from very early on in the effort (December 2016).
Note: In case these text intros seem repetitive, I should tell you that I schedule a month worth of these life drawing posts at a time, and copy/paste ...
2019-11-11 14:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Following up from last week's COMICS RIFFS installment highlighting Frank Thorne's unusual use of L-shaped comics panels in Red Sonja, here are s'more examples of the technique I dug up online, plus a few pages showing my own use of the layout riff.
As seen in the p...
2019-11-08 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Above are my thumbnails for the first half of issue #6 of 2018's Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell, a six-part miniseries written by me, drawn by Carla Speed McNeil, and colored by Jenn Manley Lee. Previous roughs from issue #5 are 2019-11-07 14:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Following up on last week's DiD post about the genesis of Dirty Pair's tape drones (which went on to be a ubiquitous bondage trope after being popularized by other artists), here's another example of DP ultra-tech gear—likewise created by me for a series of unpublished commissions—that went on to a second life.
Anyhoo, sometime in the late 90s (...
2019-11-06 15:00:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Behold, a trio of Clip Studio Paint sketch sets of photoref-based life drawings, once again using the "Rough Pencil" brush to kinda-sorta emulate the look of my analog 5B pencils.
The first (and best) one happened because I was browsing the Internet Movie Firearms Database for some reason—hat site is an absolute rabbit hole for the gun aficionado, to put it mildly—and stumbled across a few shading-inte...
2019-11-05 15:11:08 +0000 UTC View Post