Rough stuff!

It's funny: every time I let this blog go a while without posting anything, you'd think it was because I haven't been working on anything. Au contraire. It's when I get busiest with projects that I forget to update! But not this time! This time: I update.

I often get asked about my process for working on things. I've always been someone who prefers to keep my rough ideas hidden, and who waits for the finished product before I'll let people take a look. I'm the person doodling stuff in the coffee shop or on the bus who will snap the sketchbook shut if you get too close. But I'm trying not to be!

So, for the moment, I'm going to post some of what I've been working away at over the weekend. These are for a comics project that just got underway a couple of weeks ago. I'll stay mum on the details for the moment, but it's shaping up to be something really exciting, and is so far a pretty amazing collaborative effort by a large number of contributors.

Anyhow, back to my process. My process is itself a work in process. These layouts were figured out, first, as individual panels sketched out and repeatedly drawn and redrawn in pencil before I decided I was happy enough with them to sketch them into a layout template. I then scanned them and did some resizing and redrawing using photoshop and my wacom tablet. Many many... many... hours later, and they still look mostly like an indecipherable sloppy mess, but from this indecipherable mess will come finished pencils, inks, toning, lettering... and a comic is born.

Here are just a couple of the seven pages I roughed out this weekend: