Oddnik

Staying on Character

Brad — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:30:16 +0000

Wanted to share some more process work for Sector Four. One area in my artwork that I’m trying to improve and something that stood out to me in doing the prologue story was that I need to put more effort into what animators call “staying on character”. Making sure the proportions are correct and the characters look the same from image to image.

An exercise to help me out with this is to break the character down to basic shapes and look at how they relate to each other. This is a pretty easy task with adobe illustrator (I actually use illustrator for all of my drawing, but even you anti-illustrator folks would find this easy to do there).

In order to keep him symmetrical, I started just doing one half and then used the reflect tool to get the other half (see images below). It took a good bit of trial and error, after seeing how the reflected half threw off what I thought was good when only looking at the first half.

After that I filled in the base colors that I’ll be using. This will be handy to have around and reference when I’m working on the comic:

More Sector Four Stuff

Brad — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:39:34 +0000

Back in October during 24 hour comic day, I started working on a ten-page story I wrote up as practice for Sector Four, one of the new comics I’ve been working on. Well, I finally finished it. You can check it out on the official site for the comic: SectorFour.com (click the thumbnail below the main image).

The story is a prologue to the actual comic. It’s kind of a teaser for what Sector Four is all about. I was debating with myself whether I should even put this out there, since it’s really meant to get myself comfortable working in this style, but I figured why not. I’d love to hear what you think of it.

-Brad

Disposable Assassin

Brad — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:05:03 +0000

I was going to write a year-end review of 2011, but really, who cares. No one wants to read another one of those anyway. Instead, here’s a Scud drawing I did for my brother for his birthday. Colored with water color and copic markers. The background was done by my super talented wife who, unlike me, is actually good at this whole painting thing:

More Concept Art

Brad — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 04:08:06 +0000

Here’s some more concept art from the new comic. Just about ready to start working on actual pages.

Character for the new comic

Brad — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 03:34:08 +0000

Here’s an image of the main character of Sector Four. I’ll be posting more design artwork from the comic over the next month or so. Hoping to launch the comic early-ish next year.

Sketch: Rabbit Bodyguard

Brad — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 23:00:55 +0000

After the hellboy sketch, I figured I might as well just run through the list of my favorite comic book characters over the years. Top of the list is Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo. I’ve loved this comic for about 20 years now… consistently the best book being produced and the fact that it’s been going this long and is still this good is a testament to the talent of Mr. Sakai. If you’ve never read it, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Here’s my sketch (drawn with a prismacolor brush pen and copic markers) – click for a larger version:

Sketch: the boy from hell

Brad — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:59:38 +0000

I’m going to start doing more frequent “con-style” sketches. The goal of these is to practice up and get myself posting artwork more often. Since my comic work that I have going on right now is in more of a preliminary phase and I’m not posting it regularly, it feels weird to not have stuff out there on a regular basis. These sketches will all be done on 9×6 bristol with pens and copic markers. If anyone has an interest in owning these, you can hit the contact link above and we can work out the details. For now the drawings will be free but I might ask for a little cash for shipping – I reserve the right to change that in the future if the demand goes up

Anyway, first up is one of my favorite comics… Hellboy:

24 Hour Comic Page

Brad — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 02:14:57 +0000

last week was 24 hour comic day and while I didn’t finish 24 page (or last the entire 24 hours) I did have a lot of fun hanging out and drawing pages for my new comic I’m working on. Sort of. The pages I was working on aren’t actually a part of the upcoming comic. I may or may not even publish them on my site. The idea was that I wanted to draw at least 10 pages of the comic in the style I want to use to work out some kinks. I wrote a prologue story so that I could play around in this world before it actually counts. This story is a part of the overall story, but it’s not really essential information for readers to see. If you’re really interested in it and want to read it, I might post it in super top secret places so you can check it out. Anyway, here’s a page from it. Hopefully it piques enough interest for you to check out the comic when it starts posting (shooting for early next year)

24 Hour Comic Day

Brad — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:32:00 +0000

This saturday is 24hr comic day. If you’re not familiar with it, 24hr comic day is essentially a day when comic creators work on comics for 24 hours straight, with the intended outcome being a 24 page comic. This year, my friend Sean and I decided to participate (along with our friend Ben who will be popping in from time to time). We won’t, however, be producing a 24 page comic – after weighing my options, I figured I could try to make a 24 page comic that may or may not suck, or I could use this time to work on some of the other projects I have going on. I chose the latter. So from 10am Saturday (10/1) to 10am Sunday, we’ll be hanging out at Sean’s appartment slowly descending in a sleep-deprived madness. The best part is, you can watch us live by following this link.

Oh, almost forgot to talk about what we’ll be working on. I’m going to be drawing a 10 page prologue for my upcoming comic (that I mentioned here) and Sean will be working on his own comic that he plans to start soon. Should be a lot of fun.

-Brad

Fun with copic markers

Brad — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 02:09:21 +0000

I got some copic markers last week and finally made some time to play with them… here’s one of my sketches: