blog.maljones.com

• 2013-05-05

  

  Pip pip! Righty-o! I say!

• 2013-05-01

  Kieron Gillen's notes on Young Avengers

  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

• 2013-03-10

  

  Voooop! Party Time!

  This is how I amuse myself in Photoshop

• 2012-12-26

  

  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.

• 2012-09-06

  

  I’ve never drawn a proper drag out fight in a comic. This shit is tricky. That’s reference material over on the right: Earthboy Jacobus, Casanova, and Jack Staff…

• 2012-09-03

  

  I’m working on setting my portfolio up at Cargo Collective. Why would a web designer use a theme service?

  For the same reason I use Tumblr to blog: I need that structure and back-end already set up for me so I can focus on getting work out there. BUT I can still give the site a little bit of my personality and style.

  I tend to get lost in the pointless details of things if I’m not careful, and using a templated service helps keeps my eyes on the prize.

  Now if I only had an intern to make thumbnails for me.

• 2012-07-05

  

  First up: A call for support (and I don’t mean money).

  We’ve been going strong for 15 weeks now, and are planning to keep on going for at least a full year. I hear from folks that you’re reading and enjoying it, but we’d love to see those numbers in notes, tweets, reblogs, and some general internet support.

  The internet is made up of connections and we need to make more.

  • Enjoying The Giant War and have Tumblr account? Follow us and tell your followers by reblogging the latest episode..
  • Enjoying the episodes when I post them on Twitter? Tweet about the comic (with a link of course) with the hashtag #thegiantwar
  • Enjoying it in general and don’t want do any of those things? Drop us a line and let us know. 

  Thanks and we appreciate it everyone.

  And now! On to the notes:

  Episode Notes

  • The Weathered Man returns! I think that just leaves the Nomad in need of an update. 
  • Note to Future Jones: I think I need to tighten up the line height in the lettering going forward.
  • Giants aren’t the only bad guys in the world. Fact.

  Source: thegiantwar

• 2012-06-08

  Creative Tally: 60

  • Sketched, pencilled, inked, and started coloring next week’s episode of Giant War.

• →

  

  Episode Notes

  • He made it out of his troublesome spot thanks to the Nomad.
  • I redrew the Solider for each panel. Past Jones would’ve just drawn him once and photoshopped him into each panel. Good job Current Jones!

  Source: thegiantwar

• 2012-06-07

  Creative Tally: 59

  • Figured out how to parse RSS feeds, compare their dates, and edit HTML accordingly.