Trick or Treat?

Happy Halloween all! Tonight you get the treat! Livestream is on all night (with small breaks for handing out candy to the little beggars.)

http://www.livestream.com/alkeneartlive

Inspiration: Grace O'Malley

One of my larger interests when creating the story is Grace O'Malley. When designing Mikala, I wanted to give her a common Irish look--bright red hair, milky skin, deep green eyes. I was originally going to name the comic "The Pirate Queen", but when I looked into making sure no one else was using the name, I stumbled across the musical with the same name. This introduced me to Grace, who is actually "black Irish" (like I half am). I read the book Grania recently and can't have made a better choice. 

There will be some major differences, but I am definitely inspired. Both with be a noble blood type, but Mikala is a southern belle, giving her more comforts and more people to help her. I do like Grace's affinity for continuing when in pain--something that I will be pushing through to Mikala. Mikala's father is a merchant, and I really enjoyed the secret pirating. As much as I love the brandished, wave my Jolly Roger flag pirates, there's something about the secrecy I love more...You'll definitely be seeing that.

Here's a link, since we all know how accurate Wikipedia is...:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_O%27Malley

And here's a link to the book: http://www.amazon.com/Grania-She-King-Irish-Morgan-Llywelyn/dp/0765318083/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351725549&sr=8-1&keywords=grania

Progress! Page One complete!

So here she is! Page one! Pencils are finished. There will be some textures added when I do the inks, but this will give you a pretty good idea of what you'll be seeing. See you all tomorrow!

Character Spotlight: Jonas

So, since I've already showed her in another post, I figured it'd be alright to go ahead and talk about her. Jonas is a deity whom I base loosely on a Catholic Mary. In my mind, she's the original goddess other religions across the universe base their primary religious figure off of. I don't have a ton of history for Jonas, except that she is a main disciple figure for some higher power, who sits at his right hand and serves as the catalyst for many important religious lessons.

At one point, I thought of making her similar to Isis or Nu Wa, who are the mothers to the human race. I'm not going to say why I didn't use that angle--it comes up later in the story.

In the first page I had a lot of fun destroying the temple, but wanted to make sure the statue of Jonas was mostly untouched. There is a reverence about her in the culture--or perhaps just a fear--that when there is war, her alters are left out of respect. Like I said, religion doesn't play a huge role in the story, but it's important to have a little background. See you tomorrow!

Love hurts for Sunday October 29

Not cheating, find out my phone left this as a draft, so here's what you missed. Sometimes you just have to start over. Got some pictures of my model for the character Caden. Looking at a panel, it just looked bad. His legs were too short, he looked young as hell. With reference pics, i erased his whole damn body and started over. Best choice. Some times it's best not to fall in love. (luckily i was just in love with the time lost.) Here are some before and after shots...still have to draw those hands. Ha

Update for Saturday

So Saturdays are my work/wrestling days--guess I need to do these posts earlier in the day. Here's some progress shots. See you tonight.

This is thefinished pencils for page two panel three and an in progress shot for page one panel two...oh, bricks....

Week in Review 10/27

Took a few minutes to upload to Youtube, but not nearly as long as the last video. Phew! See you all tomorrow with a progress sneak peak, and likely the look at a whole page somewhere in this weekend's updates!

Progress on page one

So its progress day. About 70% done with the pencils on page one. enjoy.

so I got a little ahead of myself posting the progress shots.

Wednesday is inspiration day. One of my biggest inspirations for the first page is Byzantine art. The first panel has a statue of Jonas, who is a religious figure in the book. Getting ready to do this panel and as I thought a lot about what I wanted it to look like, I started thinking about early Greek statues. There's just something that's really endearing to me about the lack of skill yet the dedication the statues. In the end I decided to go with more of the Byzantine look where they haven't really grasped a lot of the facial expressions, and eyes were really big and creepy. While religion doesn't play a big part in a story, it does play a lot into some of the societies that I picked out for settings. The Statue doesn't really look exactly Byzantine. I did take a little bit from the Renaissance era were the bodies were a lot closer to the actual proportions... But things like the hands being very large appeals to me somehow. I looked at statues such is David by Michelangelo as well as some of his paintings on the Sistine Chapel. It's obvious he understood anatomy, but didn't understand the female body. In a sculpture in a ruin of an older civilization, I feel like those kind of things would be something that you would find.

First progress shot

At the moment I'm working on pages 1 and 2, and a promo page. the promo is standard size 10 by 15 and the pages are 14 by 21. A little bit larger than usual. more to come. Check out the live stream from time to time to see a little more.

Day 1, The Big Kick Off

Had a bit of trouble uploading at Wordpress, so Blogger it is!

Here's the information for future updates, the plan for the next year or so, and what to expect from the blog. Will be working to get these up a little early, since I did have problems last night.

No schedule on the Livestream yet, but you can check out the old videos here, or by chance catch me working live! http://www.livestream.com/alkeneartlive

PS, it's Wednesday! Be watching for some progress pics!