Persona 3 Girls

I've been geeking out over the video game "Persona 3" lately. It's a Japanese fighting game/role playing dating sim where you get engaged in going to school, building up your friendships, developing your traits, and hitting on girls, then you go into the Dark Hour at midnight and fight monsters. Everything about it is so well designed. So the other day while sketching, I drew a bunch of the characaters, and then I had to ink them. Enjoy!

Covers!

I finished the cover for Weird Fishes! It took me several weeks to get to this image, after several attempts and lots of planning and sketching. I had to consider how to convey the story in the book with one image, along with the style of art that you'd see inside, along with using color in a compelling way along with an image that would draw in the reader. I think this one does all of that pretty well...






Here are two earlier attempts at the cover. The first one became too labored and not interesting enough, while the second one not well-enough planned to be the cover of the book. I like the second one quite a bit and hope to do some small postcards or something!

Also, I did a portfolio over at Krop that I really like!

Cocktail Lounge Illustrations

I've been working on some menu illustrations for Red and 515, two fabulous cocktail lounge/restaurants in Santa Cruz. Just yesterday they made their way into the advertising in the SC Metro newspaper! Here they are:


For this illustration for 515, I was asked to do something gothic and whimsical like a lot of the sketches they've seen me do at the bar (I can be found there sometimes, yes). This one was extremely fun and I used some stock textures to bring out the time period.


For the Red Cocktail Lounge, they asked for something just like a particular illustration in my portfolio, but with drinks. So I tried to stick to a similar composition and finishing texture but I customized it with the couches and decor you'll find at Red. Inkwashes, paper textures and photoshop coloring brought it to completion.

Here's the sketch for this piece:



Also, separate from this commission but connected to Red nonetheless, I did this postcard for the event my boyfriend and our friend Addison put on each monday, this was a quick ink drawing I did on the spot one evening, and now it's on postcards floating around our town:



I'm happy that I got to contribute work to local establishments that I'm close to, and I'll be sure to take pictures of the menus once they're printed!

Painting Comics for Ages

So what have I been doing for the past few weeks? Painting my comic. It's been a rapid change from 1-page a week to doing about 15 a week to finish for my book's deadline. I had a couple weeks off to concentrate on the finish of the storyline and planning some new stuff. I've even done a double-page spread! All of this is stuff I can't really share with you until they go up on the site, but I did get a bunch of great making-of shots of one of the pages, and got some help on it, take a look!





Attack of the killer kitties!

Yes, I know, they are hilarious!

*grumble*

Your Music Magazine Interview

Here's a spread I got in Your Music Magazine #65 about Weird Fishes. It turned out nicely, and copies of the book are floating around the Bay Area. Not bad!

Skiing

While I may not have had a chance to see snow this winter, I did get to work on this action-packed skiing episode of Esurance! Lots of fun characters in this one, and I really like how the backgrounds and animation turned out.

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!