Weird Fishes page

Here's the latest page of "Weird Fishes" without letters. I got some new watercolor paper that's pretty nice, and the pad is just about the perfect size for comics. Here's some "in progress" work, I did some rough thumbnails before drawing the comic full-size, and using my lightbox to clean up the pencils. Enjoy!

Nightmare of the Wine Hobo

Go read the Wine Hobo story online! Thanks to Dark Horse for publishing my weird little story!

Ssssplendid!

The Happy Tree Friends Episode I worked on is online!



I cleaned up drawings for a lot of the Splendid and Splendont poses, as well as the exploding whale. It was a VERY surreal moment while cleaning up whale guts and thinking about all the years in animation school and how they never did mention the day you find yourself drawing cartoon animals exploding. I probably wouldn't have believed them anyway.

What a fun cartoon to work on! Thanks Ghostbot!

Wine Hobo / Show Posters

My latest project is a little comic for Dark Horse Myspace Presents! The story was part of my senior animation storyboarding project and it's pretty cool to see it as a comic... I'll link to it next month when it goes online!




This Esurance commercial is my first big project that I worked on at Ghostbot. A great deal of the drawings were given to me as line drawings, and I cleaned up and colored them in Flash. Crazy to see how the guys at Ghostbot animated the spot, I'm pretty happy with it.




Today I collaborated with RW to create this poster for her show in a couple weeks. She's one of the most talented people I know, an amazing musician, and we based this drawing off of a dream she had. We spend the evening posting these around Santa Cruz, it should be fun!



The Weird Fishes comic is going into second printing!


And in case you weren't there, here's our table at APE.

All the best,

Jamaica

RW's painting

A few weeks ago we were standing in the backyard with RW and her dog Chippy and the lighting was so perfect I knew I wanted to paint it. Some snapshots and a few weeks later, here we are! Acrylics on canvas.






I seem to be doing a lot of portraits lately! Along with a completely undocumented caricature session I did for Kid's Day downtown, here's some illustrations for new business cards I got commissioned to do:

Party Scene

Another look at some of the production stages for a panel of Weird Fishes. I did the panel as a loose sketch, lightboxed it to clean it up with ink and then laid down some color in Photoshop. One of my favorite panels that looks unlike any other pages in the comic and marks The Bunny Boy's entrance into a different world.

Freelance

Unconventional work habits.

Records

Here's the new painting I just finished up... SO MUCH FUN to dive into some acrylics! Based off a photo that my mom took while we were in the city last month. Working on some more paintings, finishing up the current comic story line, and working on a new project!

Comic: Process

I've been having a fantastic time working on my comic! I'm approaching every page with new ideas and materials, so the style is changing rapidly and I love it. I'm a little worried about how this is going to look when it's printed in a book, but as a webcomic it works great to experiment with each page. When I started, I was all about pencilling the pages on printer paper and doing all the coloring digitally, but now that I've been lightboxing on watercolor paper and using watercolors and gouache, it's only in a few instances I find myself going back.

I've been meaning to show some sketches and pencil-to-finished panel scans with the webcomic, so here's a few.







The film noir page is one of the few times that i drew the comic small and ended up scanning and blowing it up for the finished page. I love to be intuitive with this stuff and dive into the finished pages with a bit of fear that I'll mess it up.

The current storyline is wrapping up... then I'll be concentrating on producing it as a book in time for APE. Now that, my faithful artists, is going to be a show not to miss!

The Koi Painting

Okay, I like fish. A lot. I know I draw/paint/comic them too much as it is. But I got this idea for a drawing and it didn't go away, so I'm doing a koi painting.


It started as a scribbly sketch which lead to this clearer drawing...


And then I lightboxed it and made a watercolor. But it wasn't enough...


And now I'm doing an acrylic painting, shown here in progress.

It's been super fun to dive in with paints again, the precision and effect that's possible is so much better than computer. I think it's getting close to completion, and I'll have a nice scan of it when it is!

See you later, space cowboy.

Making of a comic page

I love seeing the process other artists go through in creating an illustration or comic page, and wanted to share the various stages I go through when creating a comic. The page I'm showing you here is page 8 of Weird Fishes:



I'm not even sure if I thumbnailed out the page, but I had several reference photos for the location and a clear idea of how I wanted the panels to look, so I dove right into drawing the page on 11x17 printer paper with a blueline pencil. Once I got it roughed in, I went in with my sharpened HB pencil (image 1). After scanning, I go into the blue alphachannel, copy it, and paste it onto a new document (pretty sure there's a better way to do this) and mess with the channels and clean up with the eraser to "ink" the page (image 2). Then I start coloring in Photoshop, I like to start off with a base color (image 3).




These last three look pretty similar, but I spend a lot of my time on the coloring, possibly more than actually drawing. (1) I set in the base colors, and this time I felt like it needed something to add texture in a different, more disorienting way. (2) I took some photos of the sky, did a filter on it and laid it over my colors. (3) fiddled with everything until I got it to a happy point. The day before posting it I am sick of it and change the colors again for the final page.

If you notice, the title for this new chapter changed before I finished, the storyline taking a turn as I scripted out the next dozen pages.

Also, I love the way it looks when I take away the linework, and you get this:

BFA Gallery Show

My graduating class has put together a juried BFA show, and a handful of Weird Fishes comic pages are going to be on the walls! Printed at 11×17, they look pretty awesome, and they’ll also be playing my “Wine Hobo” storyboards, so definitely try to make it if you’re in the Bay Area. Also: there are so me pretty wicked artists in my class.

Tuesday, May 6th at 6PM.

Art Building, First Floor, San Jose State University.

If you need directions, check out the SJSU website.

Wine Hobo Storyboards

Here are the storyboards for a project I lovingly call "Wine Hobo." As part of our senior portfolio, we each had to develop a short story based in 1800 Vienna and encompassing the feeling of Beethoven. So, naturally, I did a short fantasy story about a hobo who has a scandalous adventure with a giant bottle of wine. Proclaimed "truly bizarre" by my instructors, I think it's one of my better accomplishments.

Radiohead Music Video Contest: Vote!

I just finished with my storyboard treatment for a music video for Radiohead's new animated music video contest! It's online, and I'm asking that you please go and take a look at it, and, if you love me, sign up at aniboom so you can vote for it and help me win! (if I win, I'll get funding to fully produce the video!)

Aniboom : Radiohead

Thanks for your help!

CD Cover Design

Here is a CD package design I did for Birds Fled From Me. It was drawn from Rachel's concept of stylized drawings spreading outwards from the polaroid, and her love for owls. Unfortunately, the design wasn't used for the final product, but it's a fantastic album, available on myspace.

New Online Comic - 'Weird Fishes'

I've been showing you frames from my new comic lately, and now, with the power of the mighty internet, i'm publishing it on my website in weekly updates. Page 0 and 1 are now online, take a look at http://jamaicad.com/comic/ . I'll be updating with a new page every Tuesday, so please bookmark or rss the page. I have enough material to get us to summer, and there's a lot more on the way.

Thanks for looking! I'll post some 'making of' artwork in the upcoming weeks.

http://jamaicad.com/comic/

Flash Cleanup- Artemis

Working on cleaning up some animation in Flash this weekend. It's my first time cleaning up pencil tests frame-by-frame, and it's a strange combination of compelling/exciting and excruciating. To keep myself going, I colored one of the frames and composited in the background, and I'm pretty pleased:


Of course, it's at this stage in the game that I wonder: Did I design her too whorish?

It's going to be a long next couple weeks to get our whole short film cleaned up and colored, but the final product will be so worth it. It's super neat to see my character designs go through storyboards, animation, and now to get my hands dirty in the final stages.

As for now, with all the layers turned on, this is the sort of thing I'm looking at:


Wish me luck!

Redrawing old comics and NEWS

There's always that feeling when you look at your old work and imagine how different/better it would look if you redrew it now. I feel that, especially, with my old comics. Today I actually got a chance to redraw one of my old strips and wanted to share it. This is Dee and The Boy in the Bunny Suit, they appeared in my college newspaper three years ago, and they're the stars of my new book I'm working on. I wanted to start off the book with this original strip where they met, but, looking back at it, I knew I had to make it better. The kids are a little younger, and cleaned up and colored to fit in with the rest of the book. And after our brief flashback, we go to six years later...




This is a panel from a comic page that has been accepted in the Society of Illustrators 2008 Student Show. I'm extremely honored to have been accepted into the show, and I'm double-excited since the piece is a comic page. Comics as art, yeah!

Flash storyboards & cleanup

I've been working on storyboards lately, drawing them out in flash. Here are a few shots from the Beethoven-inspired ballroom scene we're doing in class.



I'm really finding a love for Flash, and I'm learning about the clean-up process. Here I have my initial sketch, line drawing in flash, and non-line.



And here, a panel from my upcoming comic. I'm thinking of making b/w stickers out of this image, eh?

Dee and The Boy in the Bunny Suit

Over winter I worked on a painting and began a new comic/graphic novel. Above you can see the painting, an image that captures the overall feeling of this new project. Dee, a girl who sees imaginary things, and The Boy in the Bunny suit, her best friend and companion. This piece is done in Photoshop, using layers of sketches, linework, painting and digital color.

The comic book pages I'm working on are in color, and it's my favorite project so far. I'll start posting frames in the upcoming weeks.

Also, for those of you in the Bay Area, the movie I helped with last winter, "Glory Boy Days", just came back from Slamdance and is going to be showing at San Jose's Cinequest in early March! I helped work on almost every set/location in the film, and /may/ make a brief appearance with my fellow art department, so definitely take a look. I'll be there Friday night March 7th, and you can buy your tickets here.