SDCC 08

It's July, so that means the San Diego Comic Con 2008 is right around the corner.

Derek Thompson and I will be listed under the name E-Ville Press again this year, located at Booth #1534. The first installment of CORA will make its debut this year, and Rose and Isabel parts 1 and 2 will be available as well. Derek will have an ALL NEW Monster Annual chock full of his awesome designs (365 of them!) as well as original art. We'll also have the AFTERWORKS 2 anthology for sale, which contains short stories by Derek, myself and many others.

I'll be updating this post with other booth/table locations and info, so check back often!

UPDATE: If you are a regular visitor to this blog and are going to be exhibiting at the con, feel free to post your booth/table location in the comments section (or email me). Thanks

Exhibitor locations:

SCOTT MORSE/JEFF PIDGEON/BILL PRESING [RED WINDOW]: #4800
LOUIE DEL CARMEN: # G4
SHO MURASE: #1830
BOBBY RUBIO: #1943
BOSCO NG/SERGIO PAEZ: #1329
BOBBY CHIU/KEI ACEDERA: #G6 and G7



click the map for the large version

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CORA is done

Well, part one is. The files get uploaded to the printer tomorrow. I'm sure there will be tweaks and changes that I still have to make. They somehow become glaringly apparent once the book has left the nest (so to speak). With Rose and Isabel I had about a week or so to mull the thing over and make last minute changes.

Anyhow, Derek Thompson (who just finished his latest Monster Annual and shipped it off yesterday) and I are very excited that we will both have a 2-day weekend to unwind.
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1 week to go

One week left before delivery of book one to the printer. Part one of Cora will have a print run of 1000 books. It'll be 64 pages, full color, and cost $15 (this is because it's being self-published at a relatively low print run). The book (if everything goes according to schedule - hope hope) will debut at the San Diego Comic-Con in July, and will be available for sale online via this blog and Paypal after Comic-Con finishes on July 27th. Details on Comic-Con will be coming soon.



Thanks to all for coming by and leaving comments. I appreciate your support and feedback.

-T

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CORA almost done...

Two weeks to press time and I have to say this has been a lot more difficult than I predicted (and this is only book one...). Well, "if it isn't a challenge, it isn't worth doing" is a motto I remind myself of often. These kind of ventures shouldn't be easy; they're learning experiences that prepare us for what comes next, essential in a creative person's development (there's nothing wrong with taking an easy gig sometimes to pay the bills...I'm talking about artistic expression).



The color has been a lot of fun but very trying at times; color decisions I make one day sometimes look awful the next. If I make a color change earlier in the book, chances are it will affect a color choice further ahead. Everything is in a state of flux but now that all the pages are cleaned up, I can work all the color at once.

Crafting a story in color like this in multiple parts is tricky because each volume has its own color arc as opposed to the whole story having one single arc. I'm trying to think in those terms, but I don't want the first book to be entirely desaturated to set up the rest of the story. The books need to stand on their own as well.



There will be much more story to tell in the upcoming books; this first volume is essentially the set-up to the larger story, much the way part one of R&I was. It's the first fifteen minutes in film terms; the exposition.
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Blog of Note

I just realized that Rose and Isabel has been posted as a blog of note on the Blogger home page!

For those of you who have dropped in via the Blogger link, Rose and Isabel is a 2 part graphic novel that I wrote, illustrated and self-published in 2006. Below is a synopsis and some previews (ordering information is on the right hand side of the blog in the side bar as well as a list of shops that carry the books). I'm currently working on a sequel to the story, which is called Cora.

Synopsis:

Rose and Isabel is an American Civil War story about the Callaghan family of West Virginia whose three sons have left home to fight for the Union army. When letters from the brothers stop arriving, the two Callaghan sisters Rose and Isabel take it upon themselves to don the uniforms of union soldiers and leave in search of their missing brothers. The twist to the story is revealed that Rose and Isabel are direct descendants of the Amazons and have been gifted with extraordinary skill in combat.

Some reviews can be found here:

Boing Boing
KQED
Indie Spinner Rack (Best of 2006 list)
Indie Spinner Rack (podcast)
Nashville City Paper
The Fourth Rail



Rose and Isabel Part 1 ($8)
64 pages, B&W
preview


Rose and Isabel Part 2 ($15)
160 pages, B&W
Mature readers (contains graphic violence)
preview

Thanks to the folks at Blogger for choosing Rose and Isabel!
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Cora update: May 12

Press time has been booked in June for Cora, which has given me an extra week or two to continue working (phew!). The book is shaping up, with about 6 pages left to clean up, some dialogue to write and a color pass to be done. I haven't been as diligent in sticking to deadlines as in the past, so the extra time will be crucial to get the book done on time.

As with R&I I am learning a lot from the experience of a tighter clean up style as well as using color. I'm more confident about the pages I'm doing now than the earlier ones. Luckily I'm working out of continuity so it won't look too different front to back.


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What is CORA?

Since the first book of Cora is due to come out about 2 1/2 months from now, here's a little background of the story.

Cora is the follow-up to a story I wrote and drew called Rose and Isabel, that follows two sisters (Rose and Isabel Callaghan) during the American Civil War. The three brothers of the Callaghan family go missing during the fighting so Rose and Isabel leave their home in Virginia to find them and bring them back safely. What is revealed in the story is that the female side of the Callaghan family has descended from a long line of women warriors of the past. The sisters have some knowledge of their lineage, but it remains mostly hazy to them.

CORA takes place 18 years after the story that began in Rose and Isabel. Isabel and her family live a peaceful existence in the American West around the time of the closing of the western frontier (1888). Her daughter Cora is an 18 year old who knows nothing of her family's ancestry, and lives a simple frontier life with her mother, father and brother. The whereabouts of Rose remain unknown after her mysterious disappearance from the family home in Virginia 20 years earlier.



The book I'm working on now is the first book of four (or more) and will be the set up for a much larger story that will take place throughout the American West. The story will mainly follow Cora, but will jump around throughout Rose and Isabel's past, starting from their birth in 1842. At this stage I've already roughed a number of pages for book two that will deal with Rose's troubled childhood as her innate abilities unfold. All of the characters' stories (and some new ones too) will eventually collide in what I'm planning to be a cataclysmic finale somewhere in the New Mexico desert.
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CORA update: April 21

Things are progressing slowly but still moving forward...I had to take a few days off to unwind a bit. I also needed to take some time to clear my head to draw up a piece for an art auction.

There are 21 pages to go on Cora, then I have to do color on about 1/3 of the book, write and re-write a bunch of dialogue, and tie down the cover and do individual page fixes. I added a few new pages to fill out the story, which took a bit of additional time, but the story is better for it (I hope). 28 days to go to hit the deadline, give or take a few days...
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Battling technology :: process

At the beginning of this year, I decided it was time to have a dedicated space and new, updated equipment to work on the new book, so I rented studio space, bought a brand new Mac Pro and Wacom Cintiq, and upgraded to Photoshop CS3. When everything arrived, I set it all up in the new studio space only to discover that the Photoshop brushes looked like absolute crap. Unusable. What was the reason for this? I still have not figured it out after hours and hours of settings manipulation, systems admin testing, posts on various message boards and forums and phone conversations with tech advisors at Adobe and Wacom (too see more of what I'm talking about you can look at this thread on the Adobe forums).

It may be the new higher quality Cintiq is showing how bad Photoshop is as a drawing program....or maybe it's Apple's Leopard OS (which is the ONLY OS that can be installed on new macs, BTW - not backwards compatible with older OSes. Incredibly frustrating)...or maybe it's a bug in CS3...or a combination of any of the two or three, etc etc.

But I soldier on. All the new equipment is back in its respective box, and I am back on old equipment until a solution is found.

So that said, I'm working to find new ways to make Cora's linework look better than R&I without spending a gajillion hours feathering every line at 200% actual size. The standard hard round brush wasn't working for me anymore, and what I've found is the opacity jitter setting in the brush dynamics menu. The images below show that brush (top image) vs. the hard brush (bottom image).


opacity jitter on, set to 1% jitter and affected by pen pressure


standard hard round brush

The opacity brush is more like a pencil and the closest thing I can get to a pressure sensitive line in Photoshop. It's been really great cleaning up hair and facial expressions with the brush. It allows for a looser style yet still looks relatively clean.

Here are some process shots:


layout (first phase), done at 200dpi, with a standard hard round brush (this is done very fast to keep things moving)


rough (second phase), done at 400 dpi, 25-50% of actual size and hard round brush, to help me get closer to actual poses and facial expressions (except in this panel, I lost a bit on Cora's pose in the background, which was better in the layout)


final line (third phase) done at 400dpi, 50-100% of actual size and hard round brush with the opacity brush described above.
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Cora update: April 7

Not much to report. 42 days and 28 pages to go.

roseandisabel.com

I've registered the above address in the hopes of more and bigger things to come. I had actually done this a YEAR AGO (!) after the link on Boing Boing and Cory's admonishment that I had no home page or landing place with information about the books.

For the time being, the blog should link to the website and vice versa, so if you encounter any problems getting to the site through a link or otherwise, please let me know.

I hope to get some sort of site up before Comic-Con in July...
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Cora update: March 31

Update for this week: Trying to find energy and time to work outside of the daily schedule at the studio has been difficult and taxing. I'm trying to mix it up by working a morning one day and an evening the next, then a lunchtime, a Saturday one week and a Sunday the next, etc, etc...anything that will keep me from burnout. The weather has been especially nice too, so that doesn't help.


Anyhow, the book is coming along well & I shouldn't have too many problems making the deadline. I have a bunch of ideas for new, more exciting posts about film and storyboarding and I look forward to posting those as soon as the book is done. But onward for now -- 33 pages to go.
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Cora update: March 24

Trying to move forward at a regular pace...My goal at the moment is 6 pages a week with a 2-week contingency at the end before the book goes to print in mid-May. 26 pages are done and 38 to go.

Cora Update: March 17

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone -- there are 21 pages finished on Cora and 43 to go. Not bad considering mid-May is the estimated ship date to the printer. I'm giving myself 2 weeks before the ship date to fix things: change drawings, re-write dialogue, make color changes and work on the cover which only needs to be tied down a bit.

The American release will most likely be a limited edition of 200 or so and each will be numbered and have a drawing inside. The limited print run may be cost-prohibitive, so that idea isn't set in stone yet but I'll keep you posted. There is also a possibility that the first installment of Cora will have a French release this fall as well.


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Update

An image for the week...I'll continue to update on a weekly basis as I make my way through the book. The clean up has been a battle so far due to lots of technical issues, mostly with new equipment and software that don't work together (not to mention all the style issues I've had). I had to revert back to an older computer, older OS, and older version of Photoshop and it has been very frustrating. Sometimes I feel like I should just go back to the traditional method of pen and paper.

It's all about overcoming obstacles in getting these kinds of projects done, whether it's artist's block, loss of inspiration, time constraints, or style or technical issues. But it will get done. That's the imporatnt thing to remember; keep an eye on the finish line...I'm adding pages and re-working the story even though it was laid out months ago, and it's keeping the flame burning. New ideas, new inspiration.

CORA update

Here are some of the most recent panels. I feel that I've finally gotten my feet under me regarding the style of the book. I had to move away from trying to reinvent myself while inking the book. I've gone back to the way I was comfortable before, and just trying to tighten the line work a little more. Flat color wasn't jiving with this kind of inking too well for me so I tried to incorporate some texture in the paint.

One of the influences for this was the way that Dave Stewart colors Mike Mignola vs. Guy Davis. He uses flat colors and gradients for Mignola and more blending and texture for Davis. Both methods complement the artists' styles beautifully, so while my stuff is rougher, I think the textured color is the way to go for me.

There is a learning curve here and I'm discovering a lot as I go. Ronnie del Carmen told me when I started the first R&I that I shouldn't worry about the style and that I'll find it and settle in as I go. And he's right again. I'm enjoying drawing the book very much right now, I feel I can focus on the storytelling now without worrying about the style too much.
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Cora WIP

A panel from page 20...still in progress with the color, but I think I've settled into a style for inking the book where I'm most comfortable. It's similar to R&I, maybe a little tighter, and I'm playing around with some texture in the coloring. More to come soon.
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CORA look test

I'm still trying to put together a look for the Cora book, and now that I'm seriously behind schedule (due to new computer problems at the studio space), I'm trying out styles that will allow me to move fast but still retain a level of quality in the pages.

Below is a panel that will (most likely) be indicative of the style of the book. I'm trying to keep the drawings loose and spontaneous as well as to have a better balance of black and white than R&I did, while being a bit more refined than R&I in the linework.

This was drawn in photoshop with an elliptical brush that has a rotation on it. It feels more like an ink brush which I like because it makes calligraphic marks and gives me more thicks and thins in the lines.



More:

Back to Boogie

Now that the Angoulême trip and Annies have passed, it's time to hunker down and finish the first CORA book. I'm already behind schedule and unfortunately may have to make some adjustments to get the book done on time. Below are a couple of rough panels from the intro of the book (that bridges the end of Rose and Isabel to the Cora story). The intro will include bits of R&I's escape from Andersonville, as well as events leading up to Rose's disappearance at the end of R&I. These are still in progress and I haven't found the proper intro yet, but I'm getting there.


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French edition Preview

For those who haven't seen the Akileos edition yet, there is a 12 page preview at BDGest.

And a few more images from Angoulême:


Many many talented artists and writers at the Akileos booth.


Bill and Dean signing away...


Main thoroughfare through the festival