Here are some images that I cut from issue #4 of December Sun.  I’ll try to post a bunch of these over the week, if for no other reason than the fact that they are just taking up space on my hard drive.

Two panels today were some experimentation that I did on newsprint.  I used a LOT of newsprint paper in college, as its an excellent medium for charcoal and conte chalk.  In terms of sequential comic pages, though, I wasn’t crazy about it.  Here are some panels from a page I started and quickly lost interest in.

One of several blogs that I follow with Entrecard is a site called “Robot Armageddon”.  I really enjoy the content as it basically talks all about current developments in robotics and in a tongue-in-cheek manner describes how these advances will eventually lead to robots taking over and/or destroying humanity.  The site ranges from the factual and informative to the downright creepy, which is why I find it so fascinating.

Anyhow, I was honored to get to write a guest post the other day, and I wrote up a review of the disturbing Sico II robot that appeared in a number of films and TV shows in the past, most notably as Pauly’s robot in ‘Rocky IV’.  I gave a write up about this particular robot, noted some of its appearances, linked to the site that developed this machine, and discussed the implications of Rocky traveling to Soviet Russia to train in the mountains while a maniacal robot was left at home alone with his unprotected family.  It was fun to branch into something new and write about robotics, even if done in a silly way.

I’ve been toying around with what approach I’ll be taking with issue #7 of December Sun.  #5 is almost finished, #6 is… well, needs a lot of work, and #7 I’m pondering now.  Issues 5-6 are all brush, as I love windsor/newton sable brushes and just can’t use pen (I will use Photoshop for tweaking images and doing borders though.)  But for issue #7 I’m debating doing this all in pencil, then modifying the contrast so that it prints.  I just can’t make up my mind if I want to do clean pencils like this, or just leave the pencils sloppy and continue with inks.

Here’s a panel that may or may not appear in issue #7.  Should I try pencilling it, or just stick with inks?

Look like for some reason out of the blue the images on my site are all getting scrambled up. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I had 300+ spam emails in my spam folder?

Yet another mystery to try and figure out. Great…

I’m pleased to announce that issue #1 of December Sun is now posted on Wowio. The entirety of the first issue can be read free online via Wowio. It took me awhile to get this together, because the original pages of this were a big, scrambled mess. When I first started working on DS, I saved EVERYTHING, in terms of early/mid/late stages of progression on the pages, so the folder with the original file needed to be cleaned up, and then I needed to reformat the pages for Wowio. I also had to reformat the jpg files into a massive PDF file, and for that, I’m using a trial of Adobe Acrobat 9 (not sure what I’ll use after the trial has run out, though…)

I think it’s great to get a chance to add December Sun to Wowio, and if I get the chance, I’d like to start adding the rest of the titles to Wowio as they are completed.

I’ve been cleaning up the C: drive lately and came across this gem. This is a one-page proposal for the ‘December Sun Pharmaceutical Sell-Out Issue’! Tongue planted firmly in cheek, I wondered what tactic I would take to craft an absolutely soul-less issue of December Sun designed to market FDA-approved drugs. I would completely lose what little integrity I possess, but on the positive side, I bet I could get December Sun published as a serial within Readers Digest!

Of course this was all just an exercise in jest, although I think this does have some potential…

I wanted to share this page from one of my old notebooks. I have two systems that I use to creating notebooks of December Sun ideas. Some are just straight written text, with few random illustrations. I’ve got quite a few notebooks stacked around that describe characters, story ideas and concepts, locations, etc. Then some notebooks are all built around visuals and sequential narrative. The page included here is an example: with battles and fight scenes, I draw most all of these out with minimal dialog in notebooks, to get an idea of pacing and breakdown of how the scenes will unfold.

In it’s most elemental form, these visual notebooks are the kind of thing that I used to draw when I was young, but the creation process was a lot different: back then, I drew first and just let the story unfold from the artwork. It was a much more interesting process, but the stories often left something to be desired.

These days though, time is so limited that I often just resort to keeping notebooks of written ideas, and I’ll just down themes and ideas that I want to pursue. I’ve also noticed that, even if I write out an elaborate path in some of these notebooks, whether or not I use the ideas if a completely different matter. I was taking the train home from Chicago once, about 5 years ago, and I had written out a detailed tapestry of story ideas that would take place. But looking back now, I skipped most of the ideas, or bypassed them for a future run (I had an arc of stories set to a tight 12-issue run, but I gave that idea up.)

Anyhow, just rambling about some of the creation process.