A Second Blog

I started a second blog to display the art from my old Top Cow days. All the stuff there is for sale. Even if you are not a collector it's still kind of cool to see original art in it's original state with all the blemishes and white-out and underdrawing all over it. This stuff has been in storage over the last couple of years. So it's been nice to see this stuff again-- interesting to see how much my art has changed.

Taris Cop

So, a while back before I got the script for KOTOR #3, I knew I had to come up with a design for a Taris Patrol Officers. I knew Zayne was going to run into these guys at some point. I spent some time and came up with this guy (nearly all of the characters in the comic are new so it's nothing out of the ordinary that I had to create him). Both Mike Atiyeh and I were so psyched by how he turned out. We couldn't wait to have a bunch of these guys running around-- they were kind of like the Clone Troopers in EP III, where they had different costume variations for the different planets they occupied. Mike came up with the idea to give them different colors and I thought about coming up with new helmets and gear-- it was going to be so much fun. Then the script came for #3-- great script from John Jackson Miller (as usual) but there is often so much story we are covering in each issue that it's hard to get to everything. Also, we introduced two new characters (Camper and Jarael) in #3. In the end there is only so much time and room to show all these characters. So I guess the message here is to not fall in love with your drawings... too much.

Anyway, these Taris Patrol guys appear in two tiny panels-- don't blink or you'll miss 'em.


-Brian

Poor Rakghouls and Gamorreans

Okay, here are the three versions of page 8-9 from KOTOR #3.

The first one-- the initial lineart is done. I send that one off to everyone for approval before coming back and finishing off all the rendering. Most important thing here is that I haven't left anything out of the script and that I haven't drawn anything inappropriate for print. You can see that I've done a little bit of the rendering on the Rakghoul and Raana Tay on the left. I work left to right anyways to help prevent smudges ( I guess lefties work right to left).

Once I get the okay from my editor, I render everything in a pseudo grayscale. The reason I call it pseudo is that I'm only going in to give it a little bit of form and contrast so that you can instantly tell what's going on at first glance. I can't do more than this on a deadline because a fully rendered page would take me a week to do and I just couldn't keep that up.

After that, I write up a bunch of notes for it (time of day, who's who, etc) and Mike Atiyeh colors the heck out of it. He really did a gorgeous job on this one.

My only regret here is that it is too short of a sequence. We seem to be running into that problem that we have too many good things going on with too many good characters. It's a good problem to have I know. It would be great if we could have more pages per issue.

-Brian