My trip to France went well. Despite the 22 hour flight, getting sick half way through, and realising that signing books is actual work :)) fun was had. Shoutouts to everyone I met over there. It was nice to catch up with all the people at (and around) Editions Delcourt who I have been working with remotely for so long . I probably sketched-in/dedicated about 200 books by the end of the trip. Constantly reminded how much of a newbie I was at it by my signing buddy Jerome (Artist of 7 Voleurs and storyboarder for 7 Pirates) who continued to draw and ink large pictures of people fighting dragons and riding horses etc in 10 minutes... Anyway, the above pic is another character design for my planned untitled fantasy comic. (I have mostly abandoned the idea of flat color for now)

I am off to France this week to sign copies of 7 Pirates. If anyone wants to check the adgenda for where I am going I think the Delcourt Site has locations and dates. The first one is on the 29th (at a Virgin store in Paris), and the last one on 9th of November (at a store called Brüsel in Bruxelles). With lots more sprinkled in between. The first time I have done anything like this and I am looking forward to it :) Here is another small thumbnail creature design I did last week:

 

 

 

Some more designs for my next project. I have been doing concept design for other people over the last few weeks so no chance to do more on this. I got my copies of 7 Pirates in the mail today though :)) kind of scary and fun at the same time...I still can't wipe the stupid grin off my face every time I look at it.

 

Same as the last post, only smaller thumbnail size sketches.

Quick update with a few early character ideas for my next project, which I hope to get going after 7 Pirates is finished.

This first one was done more recently, I was playing around with using simpler coloring techniques and doing more work at the drawing stage. I'm somewhat attracted to the idea of this look, with very simple flat coloring. Of course because it's less time consuming but I also like the way it forces a focus on good design. and I have tended in the past to rely on doing a lot of rendering and painting instead of solid drawing, which I want to focus more on in the future. Getting it to work on actual pages might be another story altogether.

This one is kind of the same thing but worked up a little bit more. Pencils a bit sketchier. I've wanted to update this site more often but it looks like once a month so far. I am penciling the last 4 or so pages of 7Pirates and they are quite panel heavy, so I'e been a bit snowed under. Mostly the book has been about 8 panels a page which is light for a French book, but a few of the last ones are 10 or 11 I realise now, despite getting a week to do a page, doing a whole album with 12 panels a page would definitely be a a lot of work! I have had it easy so far :) More respect for French artists. Not as easy as it looks.

Here's another warmup sketch (you can maybe see the transition from 'how do I draw again??' to moderate functionality...) I'm updating this wordpress install so things could get screwy. I've become more and more unhappy with the look of my site and it's usability. typically I tried for a wholesale custom redesign of everything but hit a brick wall when it came to the code. I'm not really a big fan of the standard two column blog, preferring something a lot more direct (my folio http://www.timmcburnie.com/ is probably a good example of what I mean) but it's hard to put the extra functionality in there at the same time (basic blog archive/links etc) without knowing a lot of code. Anyway, I think I'll have to keep it simple this time. I'm planning to post a bunch of 7 pirates pages btw, there is no NDA on any of it. I'm just trying to figure out what to show.

Yes, I haven't updated in months... But i have an excuse, kinda. I got an offer earlier in the year to do a French graphic novel/album for Editions Delcourt which was hard to refuse because it deals with pirates! It's a once shot that should come out late 2007 (and probably wont be translated into english I'm guessing). so I've been trying to keep my head above water with that. lots of unfamilar ground, but I'm getting used to it now. I'll post some stuff for it soon, but the action parts of the story are not til a bit later and I haven't gotten to those pages yet, so not a lot of spectacular scenes to show off. Here is another concept for the story I talked about in the last post I'm thinking about working it into a longer piece, but I'm not sure if the story will hold up so I'm reconsidering the whole thing. Anyway I'll post more later, I have a bunch of other sketches that are unfinished, but I wanted to post some kind of update now.

Here are some early stage concepts for one of the story ideas I'm messing around with. it's only 20 pages, mostly to help me refine my process. So nothing huge, I'm still not sure how i want to go about it. a lot of what I'm interested in at the moment, is developing more visual writing/layout methods, cos I'm not much of a writer. These are mostly quite small drawings. 4-6 inches high. which I do a lot of, and then pick the interesting ones to work up in photoshop. painting in more details and playing with different costume ideas as they occur to me. the idea is to just generate a lot of character or scenes and then see what happens. I have only just started down this track, so no idea if it will prove useful. but it does suit my patience level :>