A major "life transition"

Recently I've had to start coping with one of the most difficult "life transitions" I've ever known. It came unexpectedly and I wasn't at all prepared for it, but so far I'm coping fairly well. I am of course referring to the fact that the "confirm" command on my new Asian PlayStation 3 is mapped to the circle button instead of the Western standard "X", which in turn is mapped to cancel out... jarring stuff.

For some this means nothing, but to me it's been a major change, one that's difficult to adjust to after more than a decade and a half of doing things the other way round. Commands I once performed using muscle memory alone have become labored exercises forcing me to stop-think-execute. It would be great to be able to carry this philosophy into my day to day. As Obadiah Stane put it, "no more of this ready, fire, aim nonsense".

I'm stealing time out from my lunch hour to post, I must confess I really feel like firing up my PS3 (brand new, courtesy of the bro) to play some Mass Effect 2, but I think I'll settle for preparing a ham sandwich and some music.

PS. Is the background of my blog a tiled image of a frog for anyone else?

The Magic of Moonlighting

Moonlighting is an amazing show. A fast talking, pre-Die Hard Bruce Willis, a gorgeous post-Last Picture Show Cybill Shepherd, both engaging in private eye hijinks backed by awesome 80's music and a fist full o' cheese.

I loved the show as a kid, but I haven't really been able to watch reruns since then as pretty much no one seems interested in syndicating it (surprising since Bruce Willis was the male lead and the show was a hit at the time).

Anyway, I recently managed to pick up all five seasons on Amazon for under $50, and am quickly making my way through seasons 1 and 2, loving every minute of it.

What I hadn't realised back then was just how tight the writing on the show was, sure the cases don't really matter, but they're always interesting, and are almost always great ways to put Maddie and David in unexpected situations.

Willis' comic timing in particular is excellent, and I truly wish more directors would cast him in comedic roles, the Fifth Element was a great showcase, but see the criminally forgotten and underrated Hudson Hawk if you don't believe the man has an eye for comedy.

Now, on to dinner.

Visions of the Gods.

I'm not entirely sure when this became an "art only" blog, it was never intended as such, it's always been my intention to write about the things that interest me day in and day out, so I'm going back to that.

That said, this new post is in fact, art related.

A little while back I decided that if I wanted to finish a project I've been thinking about for the past 12 years, then I'd have to actually start working on it (shock, awe). As such I've recently started work again on a project that I've called, for a long time now, Visions of the Gods, a name which barely seems appropriate these days as the story and tone have changed quite a bit, but a name which I'll probably end up keeping just because I'm too lazy to think of anything else.

Visions of the Gods or "Visions" for short, started out as something of an African take on Lord of the Rings, of course, this was before I decided I wasn't smart enough to attempt that. Over the years Visions has changed multiple times as I tried to figure out what sort of representation African comics and Nigerian comics needed.

There was a lot of stopping and starting along the way, and I've finally come to the decision that instead of working on what I thought was needed, I should just work the way I wanted (what a novel idea!). The result is hopefully something that mixes pulp and whimsy in equal measure, my two favorite things you see, I'm also hoping to make it an ongoing web series, posting pages sporadically as I finish them.

I've got an old script from about 2 or 3 years ago that I'm using as a spine, but I'm kind of winging it, and I'm trying to enjoy the process and learn from it.

From this point on, I'm going to be posting as much as I can about the process of writing and drawing Visions, in an attempt to chronicle the difficulty of creating a comic for any other artists struggling with similar endeavours. I'll also be talking about the decisions I make with my art and writing, why I make them, and it'll hopefully also be a cool little visual log of how my art changes over the course of the project.

Here's a panel from the page I'm currently working on.

Today, Nigeria turns 50. Here's some Jupiter Jonah.

So here's something Shof and I whipped up in time to post on Nigeria's 50th anniversary of independence. As you can see, it features almost the entire main cast of Jupiter Jonah and the Eye of Oduduwa (lovingly rendered by my good brother). From left to right, there's the pirate trio of Denarii, Blass and Rashidi, and then the scourge of the seven systems, Captain Stein, Jonah himself, Prospero the gladiator, and Funlola, the renegade.

As a bonus, it's even tricked out in green, white and green! Be sure to check out Shof's blog, he's got another wallpaper he put together to commemorate today :)

A mural for Greensprings

Greensprings, for those that don't know, is my old high school. I have fond memories of Greensprings, mostly involving games of frantic football in the classrooms... with Fashionable Fashionate's bunched up socks...

Anyway, a couple of weeks back, my dad was asked to do a mural for a brand new kids library in the schools currently-under-construction new wing, and I took a stab at designing it myself, here's what I came up with.

Section 1 -

Section 2 -

Section 3 -

The whole piece -

It was an interesting experience because I had to take into account things like windows, corners and furniture which will be present in the physical location. I'm not painting the mural on the wall myself, but I'll post pictures of the end product once everything's done.

The thing about blogs...

is that the longer you leave them alone, the less likely you're ever to return to them. Shocking, I know.

What you see here are a pair of renders based on a design I worked on for my dad. We're building a children's library in a new school here in Lagos, and we thought it would be cool if the library had a really impressive Vernesque centerpiece that the kids could go up into and read for a bit. Hey! How about a bathysphere coming to rest in a docking station at some underwater city?

Construction is gearing up on the room, the bathysphere itself is going to be made out of fiberglass and wood, and the four walls and ceiling of the room are going to be fully painted so that the kids can "see outside" and have a great view of giant squid, schools of fish, a coral reef, and a massive city in the distance. At least that's the plan.

Jupiter Jonah Script 1 is done!

Not that it needed an announcement or anything, and there have been false dawns before, but this time, for real, the script is finally done.

Now we wait for Shof to have the time to start on some layouts, (not rushing you Shof).

In other news I've been working with Yegwa Ukpo at Spaceboy Nigeria on some other comic related projects. I don't know how much I can talk about or show right now, so I'll just point you in this direction, and this one.

Lastly, I'm thinking of picking up an old project from a couple of years ago that I put aside based on the mythology of Nigerian Orishas. I had done some preliminary work on the project with a friend, Bolaji Alausa a few years back, but it didn't really come to anything. I think now might be the right time to pick it up again and finish the project myself.

I think the script might need a polish though...