From the Conductor's Office: Finally, as promised, some art...

Yeah, yeah, I know, I've been promising to put up some stuff for a while. Not having a working connection at home has not been helpful, I admit; but neither has the massive creative block I've been suffering from. Hopefully, these issues will be resolved soon. After all, it's only some 48 days, or so until I'm supposed to re-launch Neverland Transit Authority.

At any rate, and with a little commentary, I give you some goodies from my sketchbook...

First off is a title page. Yeah, I know it seems a little weird, but I usually add a title page to my sketch books. It gives it a complete kind of feeling; like this is a professional at work. (So, it's basically self delusional, I guess.)

But, yes, there's a theme; and this one is my role as the "Conductor" of NTA, and its first title; Galactic Gun:The Adventures of Justin Bailey. (Big surprise, most of my sketching is based around the comic, too.)

Okay, so it's not probably my best work, but this is a sketch book, so there is some give, right? Anyway, a lot of the world of the Galactic Gun (Which will, hopefully, someday encompass several titles.) is built up from, in some odd way, Metroid, the old Nintendo game.

Well, not directly, no. Think of it as more "inspired by" then really taken from. Astute readers, who know their stuff, will, on occasion, find little bits and pieces of the game through out the comic. Heck, you may have already seen the first one.

So, it's natural, I guess, that from time to time, I may drop out a Samus Aran sketch here or there. This one was done at 33,000 feet over Nevada, in case you're interested.

Speaking of flying...

Recently I had a job that had me traveling a lot. And do I mean a lot. I found the best way to calm my mind - because I do so love to fly - was to do mock pages.

There's no real rhyme or reason with these; and they don't fit into any particular place. In fact, they really don't fit anywhere. I just sort of dream them up and then rough them out. And, even though you see places for word balloons, I don't even know what the dialog is.

Sometimes I do these to get the juices flowing, or to work out a look for a character. Other times it's to try out a whole new art style.

Here's a good example of changing looks.

Last year I was plunking around with something of a more cartoony look for the group; smooth with easy lines and more apparent and easy geometric styling. I was going for something more visually stylized, yet very easy to do, based off of my, at the time, shrinking free time to work on the comic.

Ultimately, though, I just didn't like the look of it. Mostly it's in the face. I mean, their bodies are expressive enough, for sure. But, the faces and the hair leave a lot to be desired.

Truth told, I'm still struggling with the look of the comic. I'm using an base line trace style, as I call it. It's minimal, but still can give expressive results. Though, it does tend to be too simple, lending to limited results. For one, the main characters both have a hairstyle derivited of each other. Some of that style can be seen in the page layout sketch, above.

Anyway, that's all for now. I'll drop some more sketches later.