I'm joining the anthology "Jump Tales" for a one shot!

Hey everyone, it's been a busy month and just as one Kickstarter I worked on has finished, another one is coming up in a few days! This KS is for a black and white comics anthology inspired by Shonen manga magazines like Shonen Jump, called Jump Tales! The Kickstarter is coming up, and you can pledge to receive 3 issues of this magazine, with 4 ongoing stories and a single one shot per issue. My one shot will be in issue 3, and it's called Illarys! I'll be joining a group of very talented comic artists and writers, so I hope you'll support the Kickstarter! 

Illarys is my first real attempt at a high fantasy story! I've been neck deep in fantasy novels, Dungeons and Dragons, Elder Scrolls, the Witcher, and more since the pandemic, and I'm excited to share my own fantasy world that should be fun for people who are fans of the aforementioned properties!

Illarys is a young half-elven girl in a cold land with an even colder regime. Her father attempts to flee their home nation to reunite with his elven wife, but their trip does not go as planned. It is up to Illarys to safely escort her younger brother across the lands as they are pursued by bounty hunters and other magical dangers!

Here is the promo image for Illarys, both in color and in black and white!

Final Gamble #1 is on Kickstarter!

 Hey everyone! So this has been under my hat for a bit, but there's a book that I'm working that is available for pre-order on Kickstarter! It's called the Final Gamble, and it's about 2 people trying to gamble their way out of a terrifying situation. If you'd like to see the pitch and video and maybe donate to receive your copy, here's the link: 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bandofbards/final-gamble-issue-1

TEAM:

Writer: Bobby Singer
Pencils & Inks: Me
Colors: Harry Saxon
Lettering: George Gant
Publisher: Band of Bards

I'll also include the process work for my cover of the first issue. So this one was tricky, so to make it easier on me, I created two separate pages for this cover: one was the characters and all of the money and pokerchips, and the other was just the slot machine background. After I inked them, I combined them in Photoshop and colored them.

The campaign starts today and goes for a month, so hopefully we'll meet our goal! 

This is the final version that you'll get if you preorder the book.

Without the type

Pencils where you can see the overlap of the two images.

American Bug Book Cover Illustration

 Hey everyone! I'm really bad about sharing my freelance work on here but I want to share the cool projects I get to work on! Nick Ulanowski is a journalist and poet and he's approached me to do covers and book design for his short stories and poetry books a few times before, and now I'm working on his newest book, American Bug! It's on Kickstarter now, here's a link so you can read about it and back it to secure your copy!

This was a really fun illustration! I penciled, inked, colored, and designed the type for it, putting that Graphic Design BFA to use. I hope you enjoy it!

Roxy Rewind pages 1-4

 Super late on taking advantage of this when it was online, but last year I worked David Pepose and Jim Campbell on a short story for Project Big Hype,  a comic anthology on Kickstarter! The funding was successful and I hope everyone enjoyed the comic! These pages were shared on Twitter and other places, so I'm sharing the first 4 of our story here! This is a different kind of book than I usually do, but it was a fun change of pace! I've never really drawn superheroes comics before, so this was fun!

These pages were drawn on Deleter B4 manga paper, which I haven't used in years! I used mostly G-pens and the Nihonji pen and used Photoshop to create the digital halftones. I'll include some pencils down below the inks!

 Story & Script: David Pepose https://twitter.com/Peposed

Lettering: Jim Campbell https://twitter.com/CampbellLetters

Pencils

Curse of the Eel Chapter 14

 Today I began posting chapter 14 of Curse of the Eel on Tapastic and Tumblr, and I'll be adding a link to my menu to those pages so people can read them. This chapter was a little hard for me, I was trying to draw it while being having my tank completely on empty. I just had little to no energy to do any real drawing, and anything I did draw didn't look right or just looked less than what I want or expect from my art. It's a sucky thought process, but that poisonous mindset really hobbled me in 2020.

 

Thankfully, new year brings new beginnings, and while I've never been as busy as I am now with projects, new jobs, and new energy, I'm finally feeling a bit like my younger self who just wanted to draw to make people smile or cry with my weird comics. Today Curse of the Eel returns after a short hiatus, and chapter 14 marks the beginning of the end; this comic that I thought would be 2 graphic novels is now half way through book 3, and I'm really proud of it. I've also learned how much these characters mean to people and that is an honor I can't even begin to comprehend, but one that I'm grateful for. If this comic can bring a smile to someone without one, then it was worth every second it took to dream up. I hope this new chapter finds you all well and that you have a great day, and if not, I hope Eel can lift your spirits if even for a bit.

My favorite works from 2020

 Hey all, 2020 was no joke, a complete nightmare. I wasn't really prepared for how much quarantine and the politics of last year would drive my mental health into the ground like a spike. I'm doing better this year, but I'm still finding it hard to make work with everything going on. Either way, I'll share some of my favorite works that I created last year, comics or otherwise.

Here's to a better 2021!