Last year I spent several months working on the first ten pages of a comic called Madland. The concept of this story is a little too complex to explain concisely, but suffice it to say that at first glance it involves a desert, tribes of murderous children, an abandoned theme park and a war. You can read the first pages here. (They’re not very good; I was trying to develop a style that I could pump out as quickly as I needed to, and I didn’t do a lot of planning, script or story-wise.)

It’s been a while since this attempt and I can’t seem to get the story out of my head, so I’ve begun to do all the planning I meant to do before and I intend to start over from scratch. I can’t possibly tackle another project right now, but I can do some prep work for when I eventually do have the time. Right this moment I’m working on the first draft of the outline (yes, my high school English teachers would be proud!) and I’ve done some new concept art for some of the characters. These designs are still in their early stages and I have a lot of work to do solidifying the style I want to work in, but I’m not unhappy so far.

Regarding the style, I want to try something a little different this time. I’m going to attempt total block-color, without any of the airbrush or blending I used before. I realized I was trying too hard to emulate an animated movie and it ended up looking cheap and rushed. I think block colors will allow me to focus much more on contrast and value. The difference is the brush I decided on.. I made myself a nice custom brush that’s soft around the edges, and it’s perfect for distinct areas of color that don’t look too artificial. I haven’t decided if I’m going to use paper textures or not. Might do some test panels and upload them here.

Apart from Madland, I’m also working on another small project called Nodr. This is just a sneak peek…I probably won’t get to work on this much until next year. I’ve got too much going on right now. But darnitall if I’m not a sucker for cute stuff. Everything I write ends up being so dark and cynical and grimy…this story is a little less so.

In other news, I just finished another illustration, and I’ve uploaded that and some other new work to my gallery. That’s all for now!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 12:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.