'The Ballad of Toby & Sara: Meetings and Greetings' - now in print!

Earlier this week, I returned home to find 3 boxes of these waiting for me...

The Ballad of Toby & Sara: Meetings and Greetings is the result of the Kickstarter campaign that finished up a month ago. It includes Track 5 of the ongoing series, plus two stories that I'm calling 'B-Sides,' stories which focus on the supporting cast of the story, but which aren't part of the main narrative. The previous four chapters made their debut back in 2008, and for a while I was in doubt that the continuation would see the light of day. But I really and truly persevered this year and made a valiant effort to finish Track 5, and well, here we are today.

And I must tip my hat to the people at Bookmobile in Minneapolis, Minnesota who printed this book. I've used them in the past, but they really and truly outdid themselves this time around. The blacks are rich and crisp, the grey tones look excellent, and there are even some full page bleeds in the book. It's well done and well crafted, and I'm a fiend for that sort of thing.

I'll be sending the books to those who pledged to the Kickstarter campaign over the weekend, and then I'll post the book in my Etsy shop on Monday. Stay tuned.

City Pages Illustrations

I made these illustrations for City Pages, a Minneapolis-St. Paul newsweekly, a month ago. All three were for an article about bad bus drivers. At first, I was going to have a unique bus driver for each illustration, but I decided to develop one character to use for all three, to bring some continuity to the illustrations.

Minneapolis Buildings

One of my recent endeavors has involved doing superhero drawings for FallCon coming up here in a couple weeks. One of them involves Batman and Catwoman in Gotham City, and so skyscrapers and buildings play a prominent role. However, my initial drawings were unsatisfying, the buildings seem bland, unappealing, and just not...real enough. So I'm now having to go and work around the problems within the illustration digitally. (I'll eventually post the drawing once I work through said issues)

But as I was driving near downtown one day, it occurred to me that the best way to work around this problem is to actually draw skyscrapers, and fortunately for me, Minneapolis is blessed with a wide variety of these. So I went out with a sketchbook and came back with these:

The point of this exercise wasn't to draw a refined architectural drawing. It was to capture the form and shape of these buildings, to construct them within my own style. They aren't about details or accuracy, but about impressions.
The drawing on the right was done first, and you can tell I ran into some problems. The building has a combination of curved and sharp lines, and from my vantage, these blended together. The drawing on the left has a similar building, and draw out the combination more explicitly.
These sketches are really a form of note-taking, a reference for future work. In the drawing above, the right side had a pattern of windows that repeated itself row after row. I drew the first 3 rows, and decided that was all I needed. If this was a finished drawing, all the rows would be drawn, but it's an observational sketch, so it was a matter of capturing the essentials, and then moving on to the next drawing.
The last one I drew, and my favorite. The front of the building has this amazing cacophony of blocks upon one another, with half cylinder layers going up the center. Definitely a building that I'll give a second look at down the road.

More to come. Stay tuned.

FallCon Sketch Cards

If you're one of the attendees at FallCon this year, you'll be the lucky recipient of an original sketch card! The organizers have asked a slew of artists to each make five sketch cards for the show in October, and these are my contributions. I normally don't draw superheroes, but since this convention is primarily superhero driven, I included a couple drawings of the good ole' Webhead.

'The Ballad of Toby & Sara'

Well, after months of drawing, inking, printing, and preparation, it's finally here (well, almost). If you're in the Minneapolis area, stop by the SooVac to get a look at the first two issues of 'The Ballad of Toby & Sara.'

'The Ballad of Toby & Sara'
Comic Release Show
Soo Visual Arts Center
2640 Lyndale Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN
April 23-May 11
Reception May 9, 6-9 PM