The Art Department
I’ve been chipping away at all the rewards for my Kickstarter project and am happy to announce that the books have been printed, paid for,m and are being shipped to my home! They should arrive in about 40 days.
Check out these advanced copies the printer sent out to me:
Front and back covers designs
Skull Chaser comic pages
Character design spread
Spaceships!
From the Office of Wheels
I've been thinking a lot about the cannonball run lately. It's an unsanctioned race to see who can get from a garage in New York to a hotel in Los Angeles. LINK
It’s on my mind because the record has been beat 6 times since the US lockdown. The fastest being 26 hours and 38 minutes. LINK
I've always had a proclivity toward cars and odd races like Dakar and Peking to Paris. I love that the enterprising spirit behind them. The logistics, the car mods, the personalities that take these things on are all so fun, and makes me want to do a racing comic some day.
-Jake
Little Alien Dudes, or L.A.D.s as I like to call them. I drew these guys several years ago, but I never stopped thinking about them. Something about them keeps them in the back of my head. Maybe they’re a part of the Skull Chaser universe? I’ve got some ideas.
-Jake
From the Fan Art Acquisitions Office:
A couple Sundays ago it was my birthday and I asked my kids for fan art drawings of my characters. They delivered, but what was strange was an unusual amount of other fan arts that popped up this week as well. Thought I'd share them all with you here.
Parker Kids: Calvin drew Little bot and Sparrow. Penny drew Skull Chaser and his new girlfriend.
Tate drew CC and Benson in a cool ballooncar:
And Miles drew a Skull Chaser Star Wars mashup:
My friend Aaron Painter surprised me with a Missile Mouse drawing!
Ilya Prosvirov and Kiel Figgins worked together to make an amazing Skull Chaser model and rig: LINK
Milo Galileo made a model, rig, and animation from a character I posted on Instagram: LINK
And Kyle Beaudette hand sculpted a beautifully wonky Skull Chaser maquette: LINK
I absolutely love getting fanart of my characters. It’s probably the highlight of my career, knowing that something I’ve made has impacted someone enough to spend their free time on making something with it.
-Jake
In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics there’s a section in chapter 4 on Time Frames about the “polyptych” in comics. I’ll let him do the explaining:
He then draws a nice example of how a single image works to tell a story and move us through time and space regardless of gutters and panels:
I wish comics artists (myself included) did a little more of this. It's something you can't do in film or prose. We artists have a ton of cool story telling tools unique to the art form of comics that we're neglecting in favor of animation style storyboarding techniques.
With that, here’s several examples of the polyptych in comics. From this twitter thread.
By @NickDerington, @Dragonmnky and @BRIANMBENDIS
Crazy Quilt: Scraps and Panels on the Way to Gasoline Alley LINK
Gasoline Alley by Frank King LINK
By Gianni de Luca
By Gianni de Luca
By Gianni de Luca
Lewis Trondheim's Les trois chemins
La Jeunesse de Mickey by Tebo LINK
From Mr. Invincible: LINK
Moon Knight
From These Savage Shores
Saving these here so I don’t forget about them. Really want to try this out in my next comic.
-Jake
Been drawing these guys a lot lately. Thinking of a story for them I want to do next year. For now, just exploring some ideas with them.
-Jake
I forget where I read this (maybe twitter?) but someone was saying that Louisa May Alcott established how four different personalities should be used together in a narrative with her novel Little Women, and it’s been used ever since from rock bands to the TMNT.
The personalities are summed up as:
The leader.
The passionate one.
The contemplative one.
And the outgoing/social one
I was talking about this with a friend and we got into how the personalities of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are also reflected in the four elements: Earth, Fire, Water, And Air respectively.
Earth can be grounded and practical. Fire can be passionate and emotional. Water can be fluid and excepting. Air can be idealistic and dreamy.
And it tracks from Little women, to the Beatles, to Seinfeld to the TMNT.
Earth: Meg, Harrison, Elaine, Leonardo
Fire: Jo, McCartney, George, Raphael
Air: Amy, Lennon, Jerry, Michaelangelo
Water: Beth, Ringo, Kramer, Donatello
What do you think? Can you come up with other characters this works with?
-Jake
Earlier this year I was contacted by Dungeons & Dragons to do the card art for their Dungeon Mayhem expansion pack. I had never done any art for D&D before, and I’ve always wanted to. Even better, they wanted the art done in my style, so how could I turn this down?!
If you haven’t played the game, it’s super fun. Great for all ages. I had fun playing it with my kids. Here’s a link to pick up a set on Amazon:
Dungeon Mayhem: LINK
Dungeon Mayhem: Battle for Baldur’s Gate: LINK
(Note: those are Amazon Affiliate links)
Here’s the initial character designs for Minsc, Boo, and Jaheira. Followed by a bunch of shots of the deck and a few of my favorite cards. If you want to see all the art, go buy the game!
Thanks,
Jake
I had the honor of working on this film with a bunch of cool people at Nickelodeon! When the call came asking if I wanted to design a bunch of ships for the show, I had to say yes. Here’s some of my favorites.
Part fo the job was taking old ship designs and giving them a slight update. But the best part was looking at the shape language of the original series and projecting forward what these ships might evolve into.
Below are the prison ships which offered a completely different design language than what I was used to. It was fun challenge to make brutalist ship designs.
I wanted to share this batch of early sketches as well. Though they were way off the mark of what was needed for the show, I had a lot of fun exploring shapes and seeing how unique I could make the designs.
The final designs (in color above) were a much more brutalist look than what I originally came up with. It was such a great idea from Jhonen to make them look like flying prison cells.
Lastly, here’s the capital ship called the “Super Massive.” I was tasked with keeping the original design, but making it more detailed and updated slightly.
Super fun project to work on! If you haven’t checked it out on Netflix yet, take the afternoon off and watch it!
-Jake
Last month I got to go to Spain with my oldest kid, Tate. La Galleria Roja invited me out to teach a weekend workshop and I decided to take a few extra days and turn it onto a post-gradutation drawing trip with my son.
The workshop was a lot of fun, with great students, and David from the gallery was a wonderful host. But what I really enjoyed was the handful of days we had with no agenda, no schedule, just following our interests roaming the city drawing things we thought were cool, only stopping to eat when we were hungry.
I won’t get into all the details of the trip, but I wanted to share some drawings and photos of the trip here.
Thanks,
Jake
This is Kellan. He’s in a battle against Leukemia right now. A friend of his commissioned me to do a drawing that “depicts Kellan as the hero and fighter that he is.”
Go check out this little warrior’s Instagram account, and offer some words of encouragement: @kellanhoihoang or throw a few bucks at his gofundme.
Part of the partnership I have with them is to sell some cases with my art on them included me promoting the collaboration online a bunch of different ways. One of the ideas we had was for me to take over their Instagram account and do a story on there.
For the story I did a look at my studio, the books I've made over the years, and a quick drawing demo. They've left it up and you can still watch it here:
My RhinoShield Instagram Story
And here's the drawing I made for them:
-Jake
I was only here in AZ a day before I saw a horny toad riding roadrunner down the street!
-Jake
Since a few people have asked me how this image was made, I thought I’d take a minute (a couple hours actually) and I write up an old school process blog post. I used to do these every so often back in pre-social media era. Nice to be back at it again.
Over the years I’ve refined my process as more tools have become available to me. I float between digital and traditional all along creation of a piece.
However, most of these fancy tools are just there to help speed up the process or make the work a little easier. You by no means have to have a $2000 scanner, a $1000 printer, and a $1300 iPad pro to accomplish what I did here. A cheap printer, an okay scanner, a lightbox, and a computer that runs photoshop are all that I had for years.
Okay, let’s get down to it:
Initial sketch done in my sketchbook.
The initial sketch was done early one morning in my sketchbook. You can see it’s loose, raw, and full of energy. At this stage I’m only really interested in getting a solid vibe of what I want to do for the final. The Underdrawing was done with a vermillion pencil, then inked with a standard technical pen.
Next I scanned my drawing and imported it into Procreate. I dropped the opacity down and did a more refined line drawing over the top of it.
I bought myself an iPad Pro a few months ago and found that it’s been a great tool for getting some drawing done outside of my studio. I also find myself preferring to draw on it than my Cintiq. Here’s the final line art from Procreate:
After getting the line drawing to a point where I felt good about it I brought into Photoshop to see how it looks on my computer monitor. What I realized was the samurai sword was straight, and I felt like making it curved would ad a nice graphic element to the piece as well as be more accurate to the nature of samurai swords.
Once the line drawing was finished I printed it out on a sheet of 11x17 card stock. I use an Epson P800 (another recent purchase) to make all my prints and to print artwork I’ll be inking on.
Note: If you’re going to buy any Epson printer I recommend buying from an official distributor, NOT amazon.com. Sometimes you might get a bad printer, or something might break on these intricate machines. If you bought it on Amazon you have little recourse for replacement or fixing. Buying from a distributor gives you more options if one breaks.
I print the artwork at a 40% opacity.
I inked this piece with a Copic Gasenfude brushpen. It’s a solid waterproof brushpen with springy bristles that make for smooth lines. Highly recommend it.
I ink my pages from left to right because I’m right handed and it means less smudging. I usually do all the contour lines first.
Then I’ll finish with adding all the hatching to define form, texture, and shadows.
About 6 years ago I got a big paycheck for a job and immediately bought an Epson 10000xl scanner. It’s been one of the best purchase I ever bought. I used to have an 8x11 inch scanner and becasue I’m always working at 11x17 I had to scan every comic page 3 times and stitch them together. The time spent doing all the photoshop stitching adds up and I decided that when I had the extra cash I’d get a scanner like this. Worth every penny.
I scan the artwork in at 400ppi as a jpeg file.
Once scanned, the art looks like this:
The reason I scan the image in at 400 is because of the threshold adjustment. What this does is it looks at your image and decides if each pixel is dark enough to be a black pixel or light enough to be a white pixel and it divides you image up into just black and white pixels. If you zoom in close the lines look crunchy because there’s zero anti-aliasing. I usually just OK the threshold at the default level:
Once it’s finished you have some crisp linework to color:
Color theory is hard. To hard to explain in this post. I can’t tell you how I arrived at these color choices, because my path there was messy, and fraught with indecision. Once I figure out the colors the rest is pretty easy. There’s 4 parts to this and I won’t go into too many details here. I’ll save that for an in depth color tutorial some day.
Part 1: Flat color
I set my linework to Multiply and do a flat color pass under the linework on a separate layer.
Part 2: Shadow pass
I use a dark purple and draw shadows over the color. I set these layers to Multiply and drop the opacity to 30%. Here’s the shadows without any linework or color:
Part 3: Light Pass
I have a few layers for different levels of light. These are set to either Overlay or Normal. Opacity differs depending on how much light I want. Here’s the light layers over black:
Part 4: Texture and line effects
I then add a texture and I usually make another line layer with a slight blur to it to make the lines richer.
And here it is all put together:
Close up:
Thanks for checking out this process post! Let me know if you have any questions, and please let me know if you want more stuff like this.
This print is available for a very limited time through Art Drop Club. You have until April 30th to join Art Drop Club in order to get this print along with a bunch of other Star Wars inspired artwork.
Thanks,
Jake
If I ever get a chance to pitch a Star Wars story to Marvel or Disney or Lucasfilm it’s going to go something like this:
The Empire has fallen.
Lawlessness spreads across the galaxy as the New Republic struggles to maintain order.
On a neglected planet, a former Scout Trooper has taken it upon himself to free his home world from a crime syndicate that threatens to control the entire planet.
He is: The TIE FIGHTER.
A picture of all the books going out from last September.
I’ve been thinking about SkyHeart a lot lately. I’m currently writing out new chapters to be drawn and formulating a plan as to how I’ll be distributing it.
First, though, I just wanted to touch base and thank everyone who believes in this project and has bought a book. Watching SkyHeart get made, printed, and shipped out has been one of the most stressful, but overall rewarding projects of my career. I'm really proud of SkyHeart and happy to have finished book I.
I wanted to talk a little bit about what I would do over, if I had a chance to do this again. The biggest mistake I made in this endeavor was launching a Kickstarter for a book that wasn't drawn yet. This caused a few problems. It meant that my delivery date was over a year away from the launch of the Kickstarter. A lot can happen in a year, and some major life events (health probs) interrupted production on this book which delayed the delivery for over a year.
This put me under considerable stress as I didn't want to let down my backers, yet needed the time to make a finished product I was proud of. When it came down to whether the book should suffer or the Kickstarter timeline, I chose the latter.
The vast majority of my backers have been so supportive of this entire project and that's what's kept me going through the end. A handful of them expressed concern over the delays, and I appreciated that too. They were the wolf at my door motivating me to work harder and faster.
Looking back at this project I think of my path to SkyHeart as a catch-22. I should've finished the book completely before launching the Kickstarter. However, I strongly believe that the only reason we have this book now is because I launched a Kickstarter for a book that wasn't drawn yet. This leads me to...
Over the next few years I'll be delivering this story in chapter installments on skyheartcomic.com. Every time I have enough chapters to make another volume, I'll launch a Kickstarter for that and get a book printed.
I've put a lot of thought into this, and I think this is the best way for SkyHeart to be produced. This means that SkyHeart fans will find out what happens to Wake and friends much sooner, and it means a much shorter delivery schedule between Kickstarter launch and actual book shipment.
Let me know what you think!
Thanks,
Jake
Last week it was Independence Day here in the United States. It's probably my favorite holiday. I usually spend way to much money on fireworks and put on a show for the neighborhood kids. Which would be good enough by itself to celebrate the holiday, but the city I've been living in for the past 7 years really knows how to do the 4th of July right. There's the Freedom Run first thing in the morning with thousands of participants, a hot air balloon launch, my neighborhood has a pancake breakfast in the church parking lot, there's a giant parade, and then a huge fireworks show at the stadium with an F-22 flyover.
Oh, and my neighbor has a replica revolutionary war canon that he fires off at 6 AM to wake everyone up.
In that spirit, for the last 5 years I've done a ridiculously over-the-top illustration staring Abe Washington Eagle, a character I made up that embodies the patriotic soul of my country. Here's the drawings from the last 5 years:
Hope your 4th was explosive!
-Jake
A couple weeks ago I went to the Denver Comic Con and here is my report:
1) I did ELEVEN commissions. I love doing these at shows because:
A - I always end up drawing something, or being exposed to something I never really new that much about (i.e Modok?!)
B - I love seeing people's faces when they see their commission.
C - It's a great way to make some extra cash at the show.
Here they are:
Hellboy Mech
MewTwo Mech
Hyper Light Drifter
Gordon Freeman
Kraven the Hunter
Invincible
Nightwing Mech
Howl and Calcifer from Howl's Moving Castle
The Roll Out Rangers
Modok
C'Thulhu Mech
2) I made about 20% less money at this show than the last time I went to Denver and I think it's because:
A - I went from selling $30 prints to small $20 prints
B - I had only one table instead of two. It seems like having two tables demands more attention and invites people to inspect your wares. Plus it displays your artwork a lot better. I have a friend that calls it the gauntlet. As people are walking by they see image after image, and if it's just one table they can easily get their attention pulled away by the next table. But two tables has a way of sucking them in by the time they get to the end of it and they have to stop and take a look.
C - Con-fatigue. I talked to a lot of other exhibitors and they said their numbers were down too. I think maybe the good people of Denver are spending less money on things they might not need, or their money is being spent somewhere else at the show. I don't know. Just a theory.
3) Recommended books
I went to an after-party for the book awards that the Denver Comic Con gave out. At the party I met a bunch of Librarians who were flown in to be judges for the award. So I asked them for book recommendations for summer reading. Here's what they said I should read:
The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World - This was the one that sounded the most interesting to me!
-Jake
I got the proofs back from the printer and the book is looking great!
I'll admit that when I delivered the files to the printer I was SO DONE. I didn't want to think about SkyHeart. But now, seeing these pages, leafing through them with my fingers, it's making me want to drop everything and start book 2.
With SkyHeart at the printers I've been thinking about doing a couple smaller comic stories before I start the second chapter of SkyHeart. One idea I had was to pair these two up. What do you think?
My intern did an incredible job updating my website the last few weeks. There's a few pages he made devoted just to these guys:
I really think I should do something with Missile Mouse. I've got two more great graphic novel ideas. I just need a couple of free years to draw them. haha.
