Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Waiter, there's a head in my soup!

Alright,
Just a quick one while I'm away. I'm currently working like a god, I mean dog, on funnybook projects. After a long drought, then a steady increase of attention and proposals I am now absolutely buried in 11x17" sheets of paper begging for more lead, more ink and more time. The money has yet to flow like spice, but it is in the pipe and heading my way to make these moments of illustrating ecstasy last longer than one should expect it to. One project is the aforementioned S.O.A.R., with Patrick Sessoms, due out this August through an as-yet-undisclosed publisher, then "Dawn", with Dan Fleming, for Dan's own premier seasonal comic anthology publication "Warrior Twenty-Seven", and finally a page for IDW's upcoming "Beast Wars" story. Then there's all the prospective opportunities brewing in th wings, which I'l refrain from commenting on until they've been tasted for quality dispersal among the people. So there's that.
In other news, I'm gearing up for yet another move at the end of the month. Heading out to Berlin, Maryland to hang tough with my sisters for a couple of months before expatriating to the land of cheese and stationary drifters: Austria. More specifically: Vienna. How, you may ask?
A good question to be sure. Glad you brought it up. I think about it and get back to you.
Oh also, kidbits on what the hell I'm doing as an artist being an artist:
Here's what Ive found to help me do what I'm doing with maximum bad-assedness.
I have effectively left my mechanical pencil in the drawer to rust in lieu of Cretacolor's Monolith woodless pencils. I was always one to naysay the 'specialized' tools of artists, denouncing them as profit-making trickery, that an artist should tune themselves to work their best with whatever they may have at hand, and I still do for the most part, but sometimes an accoutrement will rise above mere nicety. Such as these pencils. I recommend the HB, the 2B and the 6B for all yer graphite needs. I'm still sticking with the Blue Line Pro art boards for comic pages. Even the cheap, single ply boards hold the ink and ink wash with integrity befitting a pulpy samurai. And simple India ink is my vice for laying down such lines. Windsor Newton brushes, though I can't really comment on those since I'm not terribly experienced in any other kind of brush. And lastly: the Staedtler Lumocolor permanent black pens in "F" and "B". The F is a fine tip and the B is a wedge. The black is frackin' black black. A serial killer's soul kina black. I've actually dropped my addiction to Sharpies over these pens. And they cover a suprising amount of space with ink. I have yet to run one dry, and being a huge fan of heavy shadows, and inking about 7 pages with them with no thinness in the coverage so far, I think they're worth the money.
So there's all that.
I'll get back to this again soon once there's more to report from the bunker.
Until then,
R-