Opinformers: Revenge of the Fangirl

So this past Tuesday night, I decided to go “get my ubernerd on” (unlike Bruno, I have no umlaut, but somehow I’m channeling Megan Fox in her recent Entertainment Weekly interview, where I think she almost overdosed on the injection of large amounts of the word “uber”) and watch “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”. It was more like “Transformers: I’ve Fallen Asleep and I Can’t Get Up” (and yes, myself and another person in my party did start dozing off during the 144 minute film – but to be honest, that could be because we’re getting to be a couple of fogeys). While I blame myself for expecting characters to be developed and storylines to get better in a Michael Bay sequel (I love the dude, but damn), I guess I wasn’t expecting to walk out of the theater saying “WTF?!” ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

Hey STCommunity. Below is a fairly straight forward sketch of Devon. This time around I thought I’d try something I haven’t done before. A few posts back, I did some drawings in pen. At the time I wanted to see if I could render and was happy with the results. Well, this piece of our favorite alcoholic was originally done with a .5mm Penstix (which you can make out if you just look at the outlines). Well, while in class, I got a little bored of looking at it that way and decided to try my hand at rendering it with my pen. Below are the results.

I kind of like how it turned out, and feel that if I ever went to jail, I’d have something fun to do with my free time. Plus I’d make a killing off tattoos.

-C.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently in the middle of training for my new job. While I’m enjoying the experience, there are times that tend to get slow. During those times, I tend to sketch a little. About 3 or so weeks ago I made a post to show the results of those sketches. While I’ve been drawing a decent bit there, there hasn’t been much for me to take home that would be worthy of posting to STC…until today. One of the young ladies in the class was nice enough to bring a picture that I thought looked cool (composition and pose) so I drew it. Below are the results.

By the way, I’ve been considering opening up my business model for commissions. Considering I do work in pencil, ink, color, portraits, comic stuff, cartoons, and caricature, I think my style can be pretty diverse. I just finished up a commission and will be showing the results of that off in the next week. Anyway, let me know if any of you feel that might be a successful avenue to travel. Considering how busy I am with STC, school, work, and family, it probably won’t kick off for a little while, but I’d like to get some feelers in the mean-time. Also, I’m considering designing custom avatars that’ll be available in different styles. Your feedback on that would be appreciated. And thanks for bearing with me during these busy days.

-C.

With a weekend to ourselves, the Mrs. and I went to see a movie. We saw the hangover, and if you actually think STC is a funny comic, then this movie is right down your alley. The name alone is probably a key word I need to add in order to find my comic. As a comic creator, I personally appreciated that the plot was so unpredictable. I won’t go quite as far as to say that this was SuperBad funny…but it was close. And anyone that’s see it already, or Old School, can appreciate the following.

-C.

Many of you already know of Dawn Griffin, creator of ZF Comics. I’ve recently come across extremely busy times with a new job, school, STC (of course) and a couple of new commissions that I’m having a hard time providing the added content to the site that you’ve gotten used to. So I put the call out to a couple of my comic buddies. Below is a write up of something Dawn’s been working on for the last several months.

Adventures in Kid’s Book Publishing

If you’re a cartoonist, you have probably thought about illustrating a children’s book. I took 2 kids book classes in art school that I loved. A decent writer/cartoonist can create a kids book, it’s just getting a publisher to pick you that’s the pain. That, or knowing you will have a long, rocky & expensive road of self-promoting, while trying to draw/write NEW books for your series. It’s tricky.

Well, about 3 years ago, my mom approached me with a script from a coworker of hers who wrote some stories, but needed an artist. I figured, what the heck. The story was cute, it had a moral, and was relevant to little girls today, plus she had a good 3 or 4 other ideas for future books. The writer & I tooled away with character designs and over a couple months, I hammered out the first book, “Abby’s Adventures: Picture Day”. Abby loses her tooth the morning of her school picture day, and innocent cute hilarity ensues as she tries to find ways to hid her gaping hole in her smile (including sticking a mini marshmallow in there, lol). We were both very happy with the final piece and packaged it up for publishers, optimistic and probably naively so.

Then reality sunk in. Big publishers do not want a “package deal”. Publishers want writers to send in their work, and illustrators send their samples, & then they get to play puppeteer and match ‘em all up. This of course leads to some writers not being very happy with how an illustrator depicted their character, but at that point, the writer has no say. The old “You want it published or not?” deal. (My writer has friends in the business with this very issue- 8 of 11 books she’s not happy with). It’s very similar to some of the headaches that comes with being picked up by a syndicate. “You want to play in the big leagues, you gotta play by our rules– we know best, not you”.

Fast forward 2.5 years, and out of the blue, my writer stumbles on a small publisher who loves the book, the series. She has 2 girls, who adore Abby and want MORE! Just from 1 book! A flurry of reformatting the book, size adjustments, logo changes, and other revisions.. And POOF. It’s on amazon.com and target.com, and listed with Barnes & Noble. And I have a pile of stories to illustrate, haunting my every spare moment. The thing with a series is, you cannot leave people wanting more for too long, or they lose interest. So, these next books in the series need to be cranked out ASAP. All I have to say is thank goodness for coffee, red bulls, and my flex-time work schedule. Oh, yeah, and my love for cartooning!

“Abby’s Adventures” is still in it’s baby phase. It could take off with the right promotions and advertising… And if I can friggin’ get these new books done quickly enough. We’re finding some promotional ideas will only work once we have a fanbase, and others are simply too expensive and time-consuming. It’s all about baby steps, and word-of-mouth at this point. But it’s a start, and there’s nothing more flattering than a rave review from a 5 year old who wishes Abby were her best friend!