This is a piece I did for the upcoming Nucleus show: Curiouser and Curiouser: Inspired by ‘Alice In Wonderland’.  It’s pencil, ink, and watercolor. I was worried I wouldn’t have time to do a piece for the show with me giving every extra minute to finishing up Missile Mouse: Book 2, but my computer was giving me problems Friday night, so I worked on this instead.

This is a piece I did for the Brownstones to Red Dirt benefit auction being held online next month.  You can see the other cards posted here: http://btorpostcards.blogspot.com/

A couple friends of mine from Blue Sky made this fantastic documentary about a pen pal program set up between kids in the Bronx and kids in Sierra Leone.  For my piece I was compelled to draw a portrait of one of the Sierra Leone kids.  His parents were murdered in front of him by rebels.  Orphaned, he was picked up by the head teacher of a small school and taken in as one of her own.  He is an artist who wants nothing more than to work in the big city and be paid to draw pictures.  However, he’s extremely conflicted and in the documentary he says that some days he wants to join the military so he can get a gun and find the men who murdered his parents and kill them.  With my postcard I wanted to show the duality of this child.  He has a tremendous choice in front of him and I honestly don’t know which path he’ll take.

The funds raised from this auction will pay for an actual school building for the kids in Sierra Leone, who are now meeting in this shack type thing with tarps substituting for walls.  If you have the means bid on a postcard, every little bit helps.

This was for Draw Force.  With the mission being Motorcycle Man there were several paths I wanted to take, but ultimately decided on sticking with this astronaut motif I’ve been dealing with.  What if there was an astronaut with an ultra rad moonbike exploring strange planets?  Like Easy Rider meets the Apollo program.  Might be a good graphic novel.  Don’t steal this idea, ’cause I want to do it someday.  Thanks.

Wanted to show a little behind the scenes process here.  It all starts with a thumbnail.  And this one literally was not much bigger than a thumbnail.  You can see the actual size there in the inset.

I then scanned that and brought it into Photoshop blew it up to 11×17 size and refined the sketch on the Cintiq.

After printing it out, I used a light box to ink it on a separate piece of paper.  Inked with my trusty brush pen on laser printer paper.

Then it was on to photoshop where I refined some of the line work and threw in this photo in the back ground.  I altered it a bit to suit the image better, then drew on top of it to integrate it a little more with the final piece.

And there you have it. Done.

Last night I finished inking my second graphic novel which also happens to be my second Missile Mouse book.  At 146 pages it’s a good 26 pages less than my first book, but it was no less daunting.  I tried to push the action, explore the environments, and expand the characters more than in the first one. And so far I’m extremely happy with it.  I can’t wait to dig into coloring this thing.  Deadline is in March so there’s a lot of work to do fast.

And these are the casualties of the war in graphic novel making.  Each of these brave little soldiers fought valiantly for the cause giving all that they could give. Being all they could be.  They actually still have a little ink left in them, it’s just the tips wear out before the ink does.  Maybe I’m pushing too hard.

And here’s a little sneak peak at the first three pages: