Ape Day 1!

An amazing time! Hopefully you enjoy my journal/sketches/watercolor comic depicting the moments I can remember from the show. The artists on the Personal Stories panel are all fantastic, go check out Shaenon Garrity, Gene Yang, Nate Powell, Dash Shaw, Dean Haspiel and Phoebe Gloeckner. Plus you simply must check out Kate Beaton andBarron Storey. I am grateful for all my friends, fans and con-goers who stopped by, chatted, and picked up my book. Here's a spoiler for day two: we sold out of copies. Yay!

Here's some supplemental photos. My friend Traci was gracious enough to attend my panels and take photos!











Sunday comic coming as soon as I catch up on work!

Weird Fishes and sketching

The Weird Fishes GN is now out in select comic shops! Here the lovely Amy A. shows off a copy at Atlantis Fantasyworld!



Here's my zombie girl halloween drawing featuring my lovely roommates, Ignacio the cat and myself. Yeah, living with a comic artist has perks like this.



Accidentally went shopping the other day. I'm starting to do more sketches in this style... little autobio moments with thought bubbles and paper doll elements :)

Only a few days until APE! Excited and nervous! Info in the post below.

October: APE, book release, signing!

I realize that I hate writing blog posts but I love writing in my sketchbook, so why not write my blog entry in my sketchbook! Then it's just a matter of getting it so people can read it.... oh here it comes!



Hurray! So here's the links: APE, Weird Fishes at SLG, Atlantis Fantasyworld.

Hope to see you all at the show! Please come say hi and buy my book! Very excited. I have a few artists I've recently gotten into to geek out over, like Kate Beaton and Dash Shaw, so when I'm not signing stuff I'll be trying to get them to sign stuff. Oh APE, my favorite show of the year...

Mini Canvases and Black Orchid

In preparation for APE, I started working on some TINY canvases that I got at the art store. They're like 2 inches wide. And they will be for sale at the con. I absolutely love working on them. (oh, NSFW!)



I've been working on some children-safe stuff lately, and then I realized how much fun I have drawing sexy ladies on those canvases. Luckily, this week on Warren Ellis' forum there was a thread to recreate the Black Orchid, and I came up with this:



Started a new painting, working on a few new illustrations, and sketching out a new comic! I also went to Dr. Sketchy's, and I gotta get those drawings scanned. Too much fun, that Dr Sketchy!

Sketching in Coffee Shops

I finally got myself back into the habit of bringing my sketchbooks around with me. In school this practice was strictly enforced, and it's no big surprise that I ended up going out with my school buddy Charlene, who is amazing at finding great spots to do drawings. Plus, this past week my computer's graphic card melted (uh huh!) so I got to spend even more time out drawing people rather than at home working on the laptop. Enjoy!








Oh AND, the Silicon Valley Metro did a big article about Slave Labor and they did a pretty cool interview with me. And they used my art on the cover! You can read the article here.

I'm very excited about October! It's just been announced that I'm going to be one of the special guests at APE this year, which is pretty amazing. APE has always been my favorite convention, I haven't missed a year since I was 16, and I've done almost every sort of promotion, from being on foot and handing out 'zines from my bookbag, to piggybacking at friend's tables, to various collaborations and table-sharings, but this year I'll be debuting my first graphic novel, be signing at the SLG table, and have a panel of my very own. Whew, it's been a fun journey so far!

Right now at SLG studios they have a jazz-themed gallery, and here's the finished piece I did for the show:



I haven't had much of a break since Comic-con, where I did some promotional work for Weird Fishes, met a bunch of great people that I'll hopefully get to work with in the near future, went to one or three great after-parties, attended Awesomecon and got to see The Mighty Boosh live, which was incredible. It was literally a day packed with Boosh: a great panel and a party that basically everyone who's anyone went to, where Bollo and Naboo DJ'd while Vince danced onstage wooing the girls down below. Ahh, good times.


And here's a kitty.

Weird Fishes Trailer

Slave Labor put together this amazing trailer for Weird Fishes. I'm really moved by it... you can only spend too much time living with your comic and going through the whole writing process before you forget what you've actually put together. This trailer lets me see the story in a completely new way... now I want to see it as a movie! Wow!

Comic-con!

Comic-con's arrived in a storm and I did some last-minute planning to get myself there. I'll be doing some promotion at Slave Labor for the upcoming Weird Fishes graphic novel, I am told there will be postcards and I'll bring a pen for sketches and goodies. So far, the times I'll be sitting at the SLG booth are:
Thurday 10-11:30, 5:30-7, and Friday 10-11:30.

I'll be jumping around a bunch of different tables, tracking down Noel and Julien, and trying to sit in on some animation panels.

Rock Poster

Got a call yesterday that I can do anything I want for the poster as long as it's for a rock show and has the information they need on it and gets done ASAP. So I scribbled up this girl and got to try out some new brushes in the inking and play around with lettering and adding color. Really quite happy with it, and super fun too! These are getting printed as posters and put all over Santa Cruz this week.

Here's another piece I did recently as well, based on some vintage cartoons my client liked. I think the end result was very whimsical, and I like how my hand-lettering turned out too.

Kitty Sketches

I'm thinking about doing a children's project with kitties, so I've been doing lots of sketches of the ones I have around here. Enjoy!

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