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Rhinosferatu Complete.

Here are all of the pages to Secret Files from the World Wildlife Federation of Justice: The Ominous Origin of Rhinosferatu, including the newly uploaded Page 4. In print there will be titles and credits, but this comic is designed with no words.

Notes on page 4:
Panels 1-3: Another decision made from drawings defying comic panel conformity, but I think this comes across as three things happening virtually simultaneously. I had to look up photo references for splitting wood on google. I really like the hand grabbing the bat – it’s very Bruce Timm.
Panel 4: Look at all that flying pointy wooden debris. What could it mean?
Panel 6: This is the submitted version. I am on the fence about whether to keep that white blob in the middle of the panel or just have it 100% black. Vote!
Panels 7-9: I’m happy with how the dead bat turned out, even if this panel, like many of them, has shitty crosshatching which is something I’m trying to get away from. I’d like to gravitate toward the Steve Rude/Mike Mignola style of inking – flat blocks with tight, abrupt feathering where necessary. This last panel is one I struggled with a bit – this is supposed to be really the end frame. The stop. The period. Rest here. The end. So I tried to pull out a bit for a long shot that makes that sort of statement. Really the problem is pages 3 and 4 should have been stretched out to three pages not two.
Panel 10. The epilogue. I think that rabbit is hilarious. He’s such a prick!
THE END. Hope you enjoyed. Buy the “Historyonics” issue of CLOUDSCAPE COMICS – from me! – when it comes out.

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Rhinosferatu Page 3

Notes:
Panel 1: I cannot draw parallel lines it seems.
Panel 2: This is supposed to portray the climbing of the stairs and the nervousness of the rhino, more or less at the same moment, I’m not sure if I pulled that off. I thought the stairs would be a cool graphical divide between the two images but it might come across as if there are two rhinos in the same shot?
Panel 3: This turned out better than I thought it would, with all the cross hatching. I always save the perspective until last.
Panels 5-7: These are four panels. Does it look like there are four panels here?
Panel 8: Probably my favourite panel of the comic. Definitely my fave of the page.
Panel 9-11: Just realized I forgot to put a white border between panels 9 and 10. Oops.

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Rhinosferatu Page 2

Notes:

Panel 3: I had hoped to make the croc darker to better illustrate the torch went out, but I decided that would be overworking the art.
Panel 4: I like the swoosh and splat supercede the panel border. I was unhappy with my inking technique on the croc here.
Panels 5-8: I did a little Mignolaesque trick of throwing in bits of stuff to take up unused space, since originally this was two side by side shots of Rhino face getting splattered, but I couldn’t get them to fit in the space here until I broke it up and put in the sword and splortch.
Panel 9: I thought this was going to look awful, but I kind of like it. I pretty much traced the pillars from some random jpeg on google.
Panel 10: I hemmed and hawwed about putting that ‘ouch’ star in. You’ll notice there is absolutely no sound effects or word balloons in this story. This is the closest thing to one.

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Rhinosferatu Roughs – Please Critique for Readability

If you comment on every single panel I’ll be happy. I’m having a few problems with this but the biggest is that for authenticity, since this is supposed to happen during the Third Crusade, the house and the furniture should be uh..Palestinian, or Holy Landish, or Jerusalemish, or Israeli…or whatever (history is my worst subject after sports), and I can’t find anything on google.

Uh…spoilers!

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Outnumbered Phase 4

I took the original art to Kinko’s and copied it onto some regular paper and also some cardstock so that I could do some colour tests. Colouring is not my strong suit but I’d still rather screw around on paper than on the computer, though the latter seems to be the way the wind is blowing with comics these days. Personally I find computer colouring to be unattractive, but I guess like acting, the best colouring jobs are the ones you don’t notice.

First pass:

Some revisions on target areas:

Here’s the final version. For some reason my scanner is pretty unfaithful to colour so I did way more Photoshop fudging than I expected. I knew that I’d do the background yellow/orange digitally.

Oh and I found a couple of sketches for abandoned cover ideas:

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Outnumbered 6 preview

You’ll recall I did the back cover for Outnumbered #5. Kevin has commissioned me to do another drawing for Outnumbered #6.

We had a meeting about all the different ideas – I won’t bore you with sketches especially since most have been thrown away – and settle on a duel between Orphan and Scoracle over the dead body of Lord Scratch.

Here are some of the photo references. Special thanks to Kolja.