When Animals do Human-Like Things

So yeah, I'm not quite dead yet, despite my absence from the blogging. Been busy with work for QJ, some boooooring website design work for a travel agency, and some design work for a company that's making a videogame. All in all, fairly boring stuff.

However, I figured that even if I can't put up new pages of the Robot's Story just yet, I can at least put up some pics of home.

Page the third...

Inked mostly by candlelight and with the blood of a thousand soldier ants. It wasn't as bad as I thought, but now it's done I can move on to my FULL PAGE SPREAD! And yeah, I'm starting to get irritated drawing these on 8.5x11, I'll be doing Jonah on 11x17 for sure.

In other news, I'm about to head out on the town and pick up a tasty shawarma! We might be headed to go see Fantastic Four tomorrow, I have no expectations so... Still don't have my new laptop yet :(

Best Time Ever To Be a Conan Fan

I can't claim to be a long time fan, but my dad collected the old Marvel issues that were drawn by John Buscema (he never got the ones by Barry Windsor-Smith) when I was a kid. I hated and the Ahnolt movies though (The Beastmaster's where it's at for 80's sword and sorcery flicks). More recently though, I've begun reading Howard's original Conan stories and find myself unable to stop.

It seems now more than ever great Conan related media is crawling out of the wood-work, awesome work by Cary Nord, Kurt Busiek, Mike Mignola etc on the ongoing Dark Horse regular run, and gorgeous looking mini-series' like The Jewels of Gwahlur adapted by P. Craig Russel (seriously, I'm in love with this page). Of course there's also a really awesome looking game in development called Age of Conan, set across Aquilonia, Stygia and Cimmeria. It's a massively multiplayer online game that looks to stay true to the Hyborean age.

However, the jury's still out on Conan: Red Nails, an animated movie featuring some A-list voice actors, but with a questionable look. I almost feel as though they ought to forgo inks and extensive clean-up animation for the production, leave the lines rough and alive. I have to admit though, I'm not so sure how I feel about Ron Perlman as both the voice of Hellboy and Conan.

Like I said, great time to be a Conan fan.

Oh yeah, and page three of Robot's Story ain't done yet.

Oh yeah! I deliver!

Barely! I said I'd finish page two today (page 1 is right here) and despite having to attend a stuffy informal lunch (the kind with multiple knives and forks on the table) I managed to do just that. Don't hold your breath for page three though...

I'm not quite as pleased with this page, or maybe it just wasn't as much fun. The next page will be even worse because it comes before a page I really want to draw, so I'll have to take care not to rush through it. There are some things I like though, like the marks on the Robot's monitor (which weren't there in his previous incarnations).

I figure at some point I should decide where this story's going.

Yay, new stuff!

Fresh from the inkers, here's the first page of the Robot's Story, as promised. I hope to finish page two by tomorrow night.

OK, These Are Old...

But I like 'em. It's an interpretation of a (hauntingly beautiful) poem written by my ex-girlfriend, Ashley. It was drawn as a homework piece for a sequential narrative class I had with The Grand Nagus.

I actually still like it which is why it's getting air time here. There is another reason for its appearance though, I'm working on a short piece that includes this robot character right now as a warm up to The Adventures of Jupiter Jonah.

Avast there, ye scurvy landlubber!

In case you hadn't guessed already, I just came back (yesterday really) from seeing Pirates of the Caribbean with the whole family. I don't know if the movie was actually good, but I really enjoyed the experience. It was the first time we were all able to go see a movie together and it was wonderful to sit down and just soak it all in with the whole team.

In other news I should be getting a shiny new laptop shortly with some killer specs that should allow me to test run the latest games more efficiently (work related, of course).

And then there's internet access, which has been driving me up the wall - that and I've been dodging "old friends" as much as possible lately.