Punching Pandas

A couple months ago I was helping with lettering a graphic novel for a manga series called TimeFlyz.  Lettering is where I have to take the dialog from the script and arrange them in the word bubbles.  It was my first time doing this and I learned a few things here and there about how a graphic novel is made.  Anyways, the book was published and look what’s on the second page…

Here’s official site and the book link on Amazon.

So there you have it, my first professional credit.  Big thanks goes to Scott for the opportunity!

It’s been a while since I posted any artwork.  I’ve been busy with a couple other side projects that I haven’t been able to post yet.  Once they’re published, I’ll post them on this site.

My sister asked me to do another drawing of her friends.  I guess art majors are hard to come by at a liberal arts college, :P.  (They ‘d probably do a better job too!)  Below is the result of my chicken scratch.  At first I wanted to do a pencil sketch with flat color.  Then I wanted to do a silly sketch with shaded painting.  Then I wanted to do a more shaded painting without lines.  Then I realized that it was 3:00 AM, my wrist was sore, and eyes were feelin’ buggy.

Anyways, this was the reference photo of two brothers…

…and here’s the drawing. 

Hmmm…

I can’t say I’m entirely happy with it since I started out with cartoon lines and tried to jam them back into realism which made this pseudo-caricature that looks awkward: the proportions aren’t crazy way off base like a caricature, nor are they tight and accurate like a Bargue drawing.  It just makes the whole thing look kind of silly.  The colors are ok, but they seem a little on the bland side and should have more red in them.  At least one encouraging thing was that it didn’t take me as long as other drawings: 3 1/2 hours from pencil to final, but the quality still suffered.

Of course, me being a perfectionist, I get super-bugged when I notice stuff like this…

…which probably means I’ve been up too late and need to get to bed.

I would’ve had this up earlier, but I accidentally left my camera at a friend’s place over the weekend.  Last week, Dave filled me in on a special event in promotion of next week’s 2D or Not 2D Animation Festival held at the Digipen Institute of Technology.  It was a talk given by legendary animation whiz, Richard Williams.  The guy wrote the book on animation, literally!  Pardon my geeking-out, for those who aren’t familiar with him, he is one of the best animators in the biz.  Some of his best known can be seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (director of animation), intros for The Pink Panther, and The Thief and the Cobbler, etc.

(more…)