My experiences with the Jr. Thesis class.

Back in September the Junior thesis class "Pictoral Problems" began. The class is every Tuesday from 9 a.m. till 12 p.m. and is taught by cartooning coordinator Keith Mayerson. The purpose of the class, as stated by Keith, was to help us "create the best comic we have ever made." The project was a boigraphy of someone with the theme of "Kings and Queens" and was to be 21 pages, and complete by sometime in March, in hopes of getting us into the Junior Thesis show, where there will be a lot of editors and publishers attending. I think Keith's speeches at the beginning of the semester got to me. The first few weeks he talked a lot about how much this project depended on reference and how much we needed to make this thing absolutely, 100% perfect. The first few months of this project were really greuling. I have done projects that required tight deadlines, and a lot of work before. I think the thing that really killed me this time was the level of cleaness, perfection and extensive use of reference I needed to use to get some sort of good result. Now it's one week before the project is due and I will say that I think all that struggling helped me discover some new principals for my comics and a new way to work. At first I was so strict with the locations and actual look of everything, it kept getting in the way of things and made the comic even boring in spots. After working through the first seven pages something clicked in my head and I found a balance between good reference and making the comic attractive. In the last few weeks i have had time to go back and begin to repair many of the earlier pages. I am now quite proud of this book and the work put into it. It might not be perfect, but I believe it has helped me jump in my comic quality. My pencilling has become more exact, I have found the use of reference (especially photographing people) and I have found how to improve my layouts quite a bit without spending exorberant amounts of time doing it. I will say I safely have learned to draw building interiors and such very well. After 15 pages of mostly inside settings, I think I am confident in drawing this stuff :P My figures have improved as well, and I can understand the human body a bit easier (thank the photos for this). Now that i'm coming up on page 16, the project is ending, and i'm relieved. The rest of the semester will be any sort of assignment we want. Right now I have no idea what to do but we shall see what happens. I'm so glad this thing is almost done.

First Post and Planet Lovecraft

Hello everyone.
Well this is the first post. I figured this place might provide a nice alternative to Deviantart and it's un-needed drama and popularity contests. Plus the layouts here give a bit of personality to this site, not the usual gray on gray on gray DA layouts.

Planet Lovecraft Magazine has kindly allowed me to do a second story for them, to appear in their April issue. I decided to adapt a (very) short Lovecraft story titled "Memory" to comic form. Here is the first page from the 5 page story. I'm also working on an adaptation of another short story "The White Ship" for the July (maybe?) issue.