You remember Draw Force right?  It’s a drawing challenge blog created by myself and a few friends. Yeah, we kind of got too busy for it.  But the core members of the force had a meeting last week and decided to kick it back into gear.  A mission a month is what we decided.  Not a lot, but more that what we’ve been doing.  And so Mission 016 was born: Space man.

I decided to go with a movie poster approach.  Once I settled on that I had to come up with a tag line, which necessitated a story, albeit a vague one.  But now I keep finding myself thinking about all the possibilities of this story.  Who is this guy?  What was his mission? Who is he fighting? Lots of ideas.

This is how stories are born and why I need to make time for drawing challenges like Draw Force.

I can’t deny Leonardo is my favorite Ninja Turtle.  So when it came time to draw one I instinctively chose him.  Took a minute to bust out the brush pen again.  I’ve inked 115 Missile Mouse pages straight with my Pigma technical pens and just for sanity’s sake have been needing the variety and spontaneity that only a brush tip will give.

Showed it to my son and he got all hung up on the TV.

“Why did he smash his TV?”
“He didn’t smash it. It’s just a broken TV.”
“Who smashed it then?”
“I don’t know who smashed it. It broke and someone threw it away.”
“Why is he stepping on it?”
“You know how the Ninja Turtles live in the sewer and there’s all this garbage and stuff down there?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s down there and he’s just resting his foot on the TV.”
“Yeah, but I don’t see why someone would smash their TV like that.”

This drawing blew his little brain.  In his world people don’t smash TVs.  They are glowing givers of laughter and adventure.  The shamanistic storytellers of his generation. They are to be revered, not abused. I’m actually amazed he didn’t ask me what those knobs on the side are for.  I don’t think he’s ever seen a TV that wasn’t manufactured after 1998.

P.S. (Nerd hat on) For me the Turtles have been and will always be the ones from the comics.  Not the aberrations seen on TV and the big screen.  So that’s why I drew him with a red mask instead of a blue one.

Two items of business tonight folks. First and foremost:

Podcast Ep. 119: JAKE PARKER and Missile Mouse: The Star Crusher

The fine folks over at Sidebar Nation (Dwight and Swain) recently interviewed/chatted with me over the phone and put it up on their site.  I tweeted about this and neglected to post it here forgetting that not everyone reads my tweets and not everyone follows my blog.  There’s some overlap, but mostly it’s two different groups of people…I think.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun with these guys.  We cover a lot of stuff, including: How I combat laziness, the ins and outs of getting the Missile Mouse book deal, and where the handle Agent44 came from. Click here to listen to the show.

And secondly, SPACECAVE.  It’s my tumblr site and I’m making it my deep space storage unit for scraps found on Earth.  Artists are insatiable and need a good supply of inspiration to keep them going.  I come across a lot of cool stuff through out the day, either stumbled upon by myself or sent to me by others.  SPACECAVE is my repository for all of this and my way of passing it on to you. Whether it’s music, art, photography, film, animation, architecture, automobiles, or graphic design, if it’s good and it inspires I’m posting it.

I know I already have outlets in Delicious, Google Shared Items, Flickr, Dropular, Twitter, Vimeo, Facebook, and Youtube.  And that’s the point.  There’s too many of them.  Tumblr consolidates these into one.

I’m still trying to make heads or tails of all this social media stuff so bear with me.  Let me break it down easy like so I can understand it too.

AGENT44.com – The gallery.

AGENT44 BLOG – The studio.

SPACECAVE – The den.

Makes sense to me.  Okay, back to work.  Need to finish inking page 115.

Darren Rawlings, my friend that made the fantastic Missile Mouse book trailer, has a character named Agent Orange.  Perhaps you’re already familiar with him.  As a small token of my appreciation for his help and support I did this for him as payback.

Also, testing out tumblr. Just signed up for it and it was easy to post something.  Too easy.

And lastly, listening to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Really digging these guys and wishing I found them sooner.

How to fix an inking mistake with out using Photoshop (aka how comics use to be made).

You guys asked for more how to/process stuff so here you go.  While working on Missile Mouse Book 2 on Saturday the perfect opportunity presented itself to make a nice “how to.”

Ok, this has to have been one of the most hair-pullingly-frustrating pages I’ve done…ever.  Although there are several names I’ve thought to call this little devil it is simply known in the Parker house as “Page 86.” One reason the experience was so frustrating was it should have been a painlessly easy page to draw.

Get in, draw it, get out, on to the next page.

But I ended up spending a whole afternoon on it! Right now I’m averaging about 1.15 hours to ink a page, a little fast for my taste, but the deadline is looming.  It is important to note this whole thing could have been avoided if I was working at a more thoughtful leisurely pace. Right now the pace is “highly motivated to meet my deadline.” So, I’ve been using a little more white out than usual.

All right, lets get on to it.

The Set Up:

I started with my roughs.  After seeing MM’s robot partner destroyed by the cave monster he positions himself in front of the large pipe of explosive fuel. The monster charges, MM rockets out of the way and BOOM! the monster is toast.

Here’s the roughs. Pages 84-87:


I had a last minute impression to show Missile Mouse in the same shot with the explosion.  I thought it might be cool to show him getting thrown off balance by the force of the explosion.  So I inked it up, and upon finishing realized the whole sense of scale was off. The explosion looked like happened right under him. That, and MM just looked funny in that pose.  Like his head was dislocated.

I hate scrapping a finished page, but I couldn’t stand to look at this one. The errors were too glaring.  And I wasn’t going to let page 86 bring the book down. So I started over.

Here’s the new page. This time I made a better boom, and made it look like he was rocketing away from the splosion. Canned the idea of him getting thrown off, and kept him in control of the situation. And using perspective (which I learned in the seventh grade, but apparently it fell out of my head while drawing the last page) I made it look like the explosion was far behind him instead of in his lap.  Ah, much better.  Smooth sailing from here on out, right?

Wrong. You noticed the page isn’t finished though.  That’s because right around now I realized I had forgotten to draw his blaster in his hand. Gah! Closer look:

No blaster.

Also, I showed my wife and she asked what was going on with the smoke exhaust from MM’s rocket. I said he’s winding away from the explosion.  She said it looked stupid. Ok. She’s right.

At this point I’m contemplating packing up up and going home.  But no, I realize if I do that the page wins.  I’m going to bring this battle to the page and fight it on his turf.

Side note: Due to space constraints in my home right now, my computer is up on the second floor in my bedroom.  My drafting table and art space is down in the dank dusty unfinished basement. Nestled between the water meter and the furnace.  I like it this way because the computer can be a huge distraction.  And being down there where no kids like to set foot allows me to get into the “zone” easier.  It also has motivated me to keep things old school and fix it right on the page instead of saving it for Photoshop. I like doing it this way because at the end of the day I have a finished inked page, and not some random bits of drawings that need to be scanned in and pieced together.

The Process:

Ok, now to the process boys and girls.  This is how your grandfather fixed a mistake on a comic page:

Step 1: Draw!

Make a new layer…I mean, place a new sheet of paper over your drawing and, using a light box for proper placement and proportion, draw the hand holding the blaster how it should have been drawn in the first place.

Step 2: Cut!

Once it’s drawn you’ll use a thing called an X-Acto knife to cut it out.  It’s like the lasso tool, but real.  (You notice the correction tape on the circle area.  I’m even screwing up the drawing I’m fixing my drawing with.)

Step 3: Placement!

You’ll want to make sure it’s going to fit right on the page.  At this point mark where you’re going to put it so you know what other parts of the drawing to white out.

Like this. I use the Tombo correctional tape for all my mistakes.  Inking mistakes I mean. Glides on smooth and dry.

Step 4: Paste!

My wife had the perfect tool for this.  The Martha Stewart glue pen.  Worked like a charm! Thanks honey.

Pasted! But not done yet.

Step 5: Seamlesstify!

Ink around the edges of the paper and over the whited out areas to make the addition fit seamlessly with the rest of the drawing.

Also took care of the stupid looking smoke trail. Thanks honey!

Ink the rest and stick a fork in it ’cause it’s done!

Final note: After looking at it again, and rereading the roughs I think the original rough for 86 is right.  I should have just stuck to the original idea to have a huge explosion with no Missile Mouse.  I’ll come back to it after the whole book is inked and see how it flows with the rest of the book.