I know i say this a lot but, illustrating comics is the most demanding thing I have ever tried to do. Hands down.

Doing studies for the location design of the comic project. Since we’ve relocated the story to the Pacific Northwest, The University of Washington seemed like the perfect school for our characters to attend. This shot is based off of the Astronomy, Physics building at the university.

The second batch of character designs for Withholding agent is complete. (You can see the first set here.) They include Jo, Andie and Adam. These came out fairly well- I think I still have to do some tweaking in terms of the height differences between respective characters, but hopefully that will get ironed out in the actual panels of the comics. First one up is Jo- best friend of the main character June and a research assistant at a chem lab, seen here in normal clothes and work attire. Yes, those are crocs she is wearing and YES, I am very proud of them.

Andie is a h4x0r, and naturally has a set of goggles and laptop on her person at all times. Her hair also seems to defy the laws of physics, and is my favorite to draw out of all the characters so far.

Last of all is Adam. He’s June’s older brother, considerably older than the rest of the characters. He’s ridiculously good looking, (at least i hope he is), and somewhat overconfident. I will never get tired of drawing men in suits.

Finally managed to free up time to get back into Withholding Agent, the comic I am collaborating on with Mary Flanagan. After going through the old chapter sketches and re-evaluating the characters I realized two things: 1) my character designs were way too complex and 2) I was drawing the characters differently in every panel. As a result, I’ve gone back and revised my designs and tried to take a more traditional approach with the whole process. The results are below. I think I still have a bit of learning to do in terms of drawing male proportions without reference, however in all I’m pretty pleased with the direction things are heading. 2 more characters to re-design and then new honest-to-god actual pages!

Some new sketches I just completed for my comic project. The problem for me in drawing a average characters in a contemporary  setting is deciding on what type of clothes to put them in. I want to stay away from identifying them too heavily with any type of subculture, but i still want their personalities to be reflected in what they wear. I’ve kind of started  dressing them in variations of my own clothes… or clothes i wish i had. have been told i have questionable taste in clothing and that eventually I’m going to have to start drawing male characters, so this strategy probably won’t work so well in the future. Oh well…

This is a character design and a test page from a graphic novel project I’m working on with Mary Flanagan. The book is about a group of college students who discover a murder. It’s kind of a forensic science angle that attempts to get girls interested in the sciences. So far I’m struggling with the shading of the comic. I’m not sure that the dark style I’ve chosen will be appropriate for the storyline.