Zub Tales

More experimentation with lighting, color mixing and creating mood. This time out I used a familar subject- Blake from the Makeshift Miracle. It was fun to exaggerate his design a bit to make it feel more cartoony. Comparing it to my old comic pages, I can see better flow in the lines and more solid construction.

Coloring-wise I’m trying to get more bold with my application of light and shadow, leaving brushstrokes and rougher bits there to add some texture instead of over rendering the heck out of them and sucking the life out of it. In time I hope to find a happy medium between sketchiness/energy/gesture and a strong quality of rendering. As with the other Mini Paintings, the whole thing took between half an hour and forty minutes, from idea through to posting here as I noodled away at it.

Otherwise, my weekend:
I caught a matinee of X-Men 3 on Friday afternoon with the-caveat and his lovely lady. The movie was actually better than I thought it would be. It definitely goes all over the map in terms of X-Men comic canon and doesn’t leave much time for character development, but it’s entertaining and keeps things moving at a good clip. Not deep and meaningful, just action-y and bombastic, which seemed to fit the mood I was in when I saw it.

Anime North went well. I only attended the show on Saturday, which thankfully gave me more time to get other work stuff done today. The full spread of costumed fans, full blown anime junkies, gawkers and more were in attendance. Keith Burgess was working at the Manga Entertainment booth right next to us. I’ve met Keith several times but this time we really got a chance to talk, chatting and laughing like crazy. He had a little speaker system set up with a mic to make announcements about free Manga Video giveaways and stuff, but within 15 minutes we’d turned it into our personal PA system, doing little routines and funny voices. Keith also does voice acting for Manga, which made things even more hilarious as he did impressions of Akuma from the Street Fighter anime (which he voiced) ordering fast food, getting a stomach ache and begging people for a cookie.

Last night was the book launch party for Scott Pilgrim volume 3 and the Dinosaur Comics first collection. After the autographing session and general social hanging out, I grabbed a bunch of artists who weren’t wiped out from the day at the con and we engaged the might of karaoke. After wrecking our voices and minds once again, music_slut thankfully drove me home. Apparently classic Van Halen is a damn fine driving home in the middle of the night soundtrack. Finally crashing after 4am, I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to be up early for the con today.

Today was both work productive and apartment cleaning productive but not at any sort of brutal pace. It didn’t feel like a difficult or tiring day even though I got a bunch done, which is always nice.