'Meetings & Greetings' now available through Etsy

The Ballad of Toby & Sara: Meetings & Greetings is now available for purchase in my Etsy store. $10 + shipping and handling. The store will only be open for a few more days before the Christmas holiday, so make sure to pick it up soon!

Illustration Experimentation-Book Illustration and Copic Markers

So, ever since Fall Con I've been wanting to give the Copic markers a more serious shot. But I also thought it would be a good opportunity to try out some book illustration. So I worked up some spots for a favorite story of mine, Neil Gaiman's 'October in the Chair,' and here are a couple of the results.

The story involves the months of the year gathering to tell each other stories. Since it is October's month, he is presiding, but Gaiman gives the remaining months intriguing and unique characteristics. Above is an illustration of May, who bears a slight resemblance to Desire from Gaiman's 'Sandman' comics. The description of the character in 'October' matched Desire fairly well, so I wasn't afraid of the influence.

From here I took a sheet of layout bond paper, and working over the inks, I created layers of tones using the Copic markers. I was using a combination of cool gray, neutral gray, and warm gray.

In Photoshop, I lay the inks over the tone layer. Just one problem: I'm not satisfied with the color. It feels lifeless to me.So, I pulled the tone layer into another layer, grayscaled it, then switched it to a duotone setting, and after some messing around, brought it back to the original document. Much better! I chose some autumnal colors in the duotone setting since this is October's story, and it created a much better atmosphere for the image, and a palette to use for the other images.

Now let's see this with another spot illustration, this time for June (who I loosely based on one of my former grad school colleagues). June is described as a little shy, and fearful of the woods, hence the overpowering nature of the environment.


Here's the tone layer, prior to duotone shading.


And here's the final June image. I narrowed the image to give more emphasis on the trees, and to draw the eye to June a little more.

Hope you enjoyed the process breakdown! There will be more of these down the road.

You Walk into a Comic Store...

Imagine, you walk into a bookstore, let's say a Barnes & Noble or Borders, just your run of the mill big box bookstore. You don't have anything in particular in mind to buy, you just want to browse, and if you're lucky, you'll leave with a book or two in hand. But as you walk through the store, you notice something odd. The genre titles have been removed, you don't know where fiction is from mystery or Civil War history. Instead, all you see signs are for the different publishers, Penguin-Putnam, Random House, etc. And any small press publishers are lumped into a general section called 'Independents.' You're confused, frustrated, and you leave the store disappointed and empty handed.

Welcome to the shopping experience of the modern day comic book reader.

As things stand today, based upon my experiences of going to comics stores in various cities across the country, this is how a comic book store will typically be divided, a system still set upon the precedent that Marvel and DC, along with Image and Dark Horse, are the dominant publishers, and everything else is lumped together without any organization or categorization except title or artist. In some cases, the books of the four publishers listed above will be shelved together, but this in some ways compounds the problem even more. A Dark Horse superhero title will be slightly different from a DC super hero title, and now the comics browser only has title to rely on.

So why am I pointing this out? This observation comes about from the search to another question; how do we as a comics community branch out to more people? And as shown above, it is clear that the experience of looking for comics is almost diametrically opposed to the experience of browsing for books. In a bookstore, if I'm looking for a science fiction title, I know where to look. If I'm looking for the latest Lewis Black book, I go check the Humor section. But what if I went to a comics store, and I wanted to find a romance title, or a book about paranormal investigators? Where would I go if I wanted to find the latest collection of 'Krazy Kat'? Here is where the dilemma enters the picture for those who haven't tested the waters of comics.

Let me be clear right now, I'm not throwing stones. I've never owned, run, or worked in a comic book store. Marvel and DC ARE the major players in the comic book market, and so comic store owners have to push their titles. And I believe comic book stores are the best ambassadors of the medium, more than any comic based movie or a convention can be. But is it in the interest of the comic community to expect people to conform to a different paradigm when looking for a book to read? If we really believe in the diversity of our medium, is there a better way for us to show it?