LIVE STREAM – Live-Drawing KickStarter Commissions

I’m live streaming TODAY! At 1 pm EDT, join me while I draw commissions for folks who backed The Legend of Jamie Roberts, volume 1 on KickStarter!

For the sake of some commissioners’ privacy, I’m not live-drawing any pieces that are super-personal for the commissioner. But there is still a lot of art to be made!

Got questions? I’ll answer them LIVE!

Can’t watch live? That’s ok – the stream will archive itself on YouTube once it ends.

Looking for more art? Folks who support me on Ko-Fi and Patreon get complimentary hi-resolution downloads of prints, mini-prints, and other art pieces.

That’s all for now. Thank you for watching!

You. Are. Awesome.

Fanart Friday – Janemba Expressions

On Tumblr and other places, I’ve been (inconsistently) posting Fanart on Fridays. I’ve posted this sheet before in other places, but I’m just so tickled every time I see this.

If you don’t know who this is, don’t worry. He’s niche, even in the cannon he’s from.

This is Janemba, the main antagonist of Dragonball Z movie 12: Fusion Reborn. Folks in the fandom like to say he’s a worse version of Buu, but I respectfully disagree. To me, Buu is a recent prison escapee with absolute freedom to do whatever he wants, so the world is his toy. I see Janemba not as that, but as a potential god of Chaos. In the movie, he’s supposed to be Evil Incarnate. But how can you say that about a teenage boy caught in a chemical explosion because he had his earbuds in?

Nah. Janemba’s just here for a good time and to make shit up as he goes along. It’s just that he doesn’t take criticism very well. Like, he literally cracks if you insult him.

The other thing about Janemba is: he never speaks. Yup, he’s a mute villain.

This makes some people think, “Oh, he doesn’t talk? Then he has no personality.”

And I saw that train of thought and went, “What if Janemba, mute as he is…had the same breadth of expressions as Crash Bandicoot?”

Both characters are mute! But that doesn’t stop them from having a personality! So I drew this character sheet as a proof of concept. Like, “Hey! Janemba can be expressive, too!”

He’s also just plain fun to draw for me. So if you want to see more of this guy, let me know and I will post more stuff.

That’s all for now. Thank you for checking this out!

You. Are. Awesome.

P.S. I’m live streaming on YouTube tomorrow at 1 pm EDT. Hope you can make it! I’ll be drawing commissions.

This Shading Hack Saved Me A Lot of Headaches

Here’s part of page 9 of my webcomic The Legend of Jamie Roberts.

Ever since I switched from PhotoShop to Clip Studio Paint, I have LOVED how much easier Clip Studio Paint is to use.

That said, on occasion it can be a bit of a headache. One specific way it can bother me is when I’m adding shading to a comic page.

See, I cheat a lot – I’ll trace a shape over where I want my shadows to be, and then I use my Bucket tool to fill in the blanks. When I do this I often have the bucket tool set to “Refer to other layers.”

Why? Because my line work is on a separate layer from my shades. I don’t do all of my art on the same layer, you fiend.

That said, sometimes CSP will have a brain-fart, especially if the shade color is very close to a color I’m painting over. So instead of only filling in where I want, sometimes CSP will be like, “color THE WHOLE THING? OK!”

But I figured out a way around this. And it’s made producing comics WAY easier.

The secret?

Well, I need to show how I do a comic page first.

I have the following layers to work with: the base drawing. The Edits (where I clean up lines and smudges). Colors. Shades. Letters.

The secret is: I turn the Color Layer off.

It’s super easy: just click the little eyeball on that layer and boom – it turns off.

This has made shading A LOT easier. My Bucket tool no longer tries to fill in a space that’s the same/similar color to the shade color.

Also – it has made looking at what I’m shading WAY easier.

I tend to include a lot of dark colors in my pages. That makes shading a thing pretty tricky to the naked eye. So turning the Color layer off has made it far easier to judge how far shadows need to go.

Another plus is if I wanted to make a black and white version of a color comic, this cheat makes it easy.

I hope this helps you in your creative process.

Thanks for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

Put-N-Play-Con: A Vlog with Some Swearing (Just FYI)

Ho dang, this one took a while to edit.

I don’t know why my creativity demanded I make this a video, but I did it. I hope you enjoy it.

In it, I talk about Put-N-Play (the last show I was at), the way conventions tend to promote their shows, and other behind-the-scenes convention secrets.

Here was my set up at Put-N-Play this year:

put n play con artist alley table layout

Sadly, as mentioned in the video, I barely made sales this last weekend. Which is a shame.

My next convention appearance is Kennywood Comicon on June 17th. Wear a nerdy shirt to get a discount on your admission ticket!

After that, I have quite a few more appearances: June 23rd I’ll be at The Big Idea Bookstore in Pittsburgh for Punk, Comics, and Feminism (a discussion group) at 5 pm. Then at 7 pm I’ll be at The Feminist Zine Fest Pittsburgh Zine Reading at the Irma Freeman Center. After that, on June 24th, is Feminist Zine Fest Pittsburgh!

That’s all for now. Thank you for watching and reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

YWCA Mini-Con 2018: The Best MiniCon (So Far)

ywca minicon artist alley table 2018

Saturday, May 26 was the second annual YWCA Mini-Con in Wheeling WV. And there were a couple of things I forgot from last year:

a) just like last year, this fell on the same day as a marathon happening in downtown. So my usual route to get to the YWCA was closed off. Oops.

b) there was AC, but the room we were set up to sell our wares in was large and didn’t circulate the air.

c) I had wall space!

I took full advantage of that wall space to hang up my clearance prints. I sold way more comics than prints, BUT I did sell two clearance prints. THAT helped.

In fact, a lot of my clearance stuff got sold out at this show. Thank you, peeps who bought those! You helped clear the way for new art and comics in the future.

If you’re interested in any clearance or limited edition things, here’s a link to my Storenvy shop. There’s TWO “Jamie and the Dragon” miniprints left! And FOUR “Faerie Queen” left!

faerie queen limited edition print

Back to the show, it was great to be there once more. Seeing all my repeat fans, getting to know peeps better, chatting with the pagans in attendance (Wheeling has a surprisingly large pagan contingent in the city). It was all fun!

By the end of the day, it was the most profitable one-day show I had done thus far. In fact, I made more than I made at last year’s show! I think the clearance items helped. So did having two new books and some new zines.

10/10. Would do again.

(Also there was pizza given to vendors. My “Smile! Pizza Loves You” shirt I wore that day was prophetic!)

And now, I’m going to rest before I restock and prep for the next show. I am, as the French would say, le pooped.

My next show is not until June 8 through 10, at Put-N-Play at Put-N-Bay. I have never been to this con. I’m only going because my buddy and Dance Around the Maypole collaborator Chloe talked me into it. Wish me luck!

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

P.S. River City Comic Con got cancelled. The organizer has fallen into ill health. Be sure to wish him well on the River City Facebook Page!