The notebook of illustrator and designer Mal Jones. It's got sketches, photos, news, reblogs... the usual stuff.
Spoilers are in the link, but it’s worth linking to anyway.
Kieron has been posting writer’s notes for his books (Iron Man, Young Avengers, I’m sure he’ll do Uber) and they’re great to see way behind the curtain of certain decisions and choices.
I’ve been absorbing as much as I can about structure, beats, rhythms, and other bits when it comics lately and these notes are just freaking fascinating.
I can’t believe I read Young Avengers. #noshame
Things I’m planning and/or actively working on in 2013/2014
I just needed to get the list out of my head
Voooop! Party Time!
This is how I amuse myself in Photoshop
It’s FAN ART FRIDAY! In which I post a warm-up sketch I’ve done of something I like.
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This week’s quick sketch is of Dr. Michael Ong, star of Doug Tennapel’s Creature Tech.
The first comic I bought with my own money: Excalibur #21, part of the Cross-Time Caper.
Bought just because I thought the main guy looked awesome (Mom is British so the Union Jack was intriguing) and there was a dragon laughing at him. A dragon! All my buddies were in to comics at this point so I wanted to hang with the cool kids.
Inside there were different dimensions (I think?), a teleporting elf, alternative universe daughters: Just super weird stuff that really made no sense when I think about and I didn’t have any back story about. But I just didn’t care one bit.
I wonder if Claremont’s dialogue is the reason I got right in to the action. After reading this I knew about: Jean Grey, The Summers Family line, hounds, Roma, Widget, etc, etc, etc. People give it a hard time these days, but it sure worked for me.
In an effort to streamline some of my processes I’ve picked up the sketching app Procreate and a Pogo Connect stylus for doing thumbnails. I still do a lot of my thinking in my sketchbooks, but I had to cut out scanning at this stage.
I want to be able to get layouts solved and off to whoever I’m working with (in the case of the thumbnails above it’s Marc) quickly and easily. When I get notes back, I can go in to the existing file, iterate on the design, and ping it back. Cutting out the scanning step saves a HUGE amount of time in the brainstorming process.
Procreate’s responsiveness to the stylus is what made me go with it and not Paper, by the way. I love Paper for it’s UI and it’s tools, but the lag was killing me when I tried to get a quick idea down.
Just another update. We are coming back!
It is December 3rd, but we aren’t quite ready for the second season of The Giant War. Rather then rush out some quick updates to meet the schedule (which we made up), we want to keep working on making the project stronger.
We’re looking at what worked (twice a week is the way to go), what didn’t…
Source: thegiantwar
The short I drew for Rafer is going to be in this collection.
A few pledge level previews of the upcoming Plastic Farm Kickstarter. (Launches 10.11.12)
PDF downloads are included at each of these levels for people who like that sort of thing.
Source: plasticfarm
Last week we decided to start updating The Giant War twice a week (which is apparently called semi-weekly).
I was already laying out pages that had a natural mid-page break for reading on screen, so why not fully commit and actually split the page in to two updates. It’s not like I’m not already doing the work for it and it ups the frequency of releases, which could (should… will hopefully) lead to more readers. We want to keep it simple (a goal of The Giant War is to stay out of our own way), so the page dimensions still are the same and eventually when it’s printed I won’t have to do a ton of reformatting.
I need to point out that Warren’s post on the Shape of Webcomics a few months back stuck this in the back of my mind. Since then I’ve just been looking for a natural place to make the change. As we shifted from the one-off strips to a more linear period of storytelling, the opportunity presented itself.
So now you can get your Giant War fix semi-weekly! Mondays and Thursdays at http://thegiantwar.com.
Yes we got an actual domain as well. I still can’t believe it was available.
Source: thegiantwar
