I took last week completely off, and I’ll be honest, I still have a fair bit of work to do on Chapter 5 before I start posting again. In the meantime, I thought I would share some of the concepts I did for Chapter 4.
In the story, a good amount of time passes between Chapters 3 and 4. It was necessary to provide new costumes for each character. Here are there first sketches with there new outfits.
Stay tuned in the next few days with more concept art and a really cool new piece of fan art!
Patient 0 gets his revenge and the zombie infection begins! I wonder if everyone noticed his wife’s betrayal or not? Or more accurately, did I convey it well? Either way I hope you enjoyed this short story. I’d love your feedback, good or bad. I’ll be back Tuesday with a new Hominids page!
Here is the new page of “Patient 0″! Only one more page to go so make sure you stop by tomorrow as well!
So you’ve probably noticed my old color palette used in this series. I really wanted the story to feel like it came out in the 70′s or 80′s. It was a lot of fun limiting my color range. If you are ever interested in in playing around with the same idea here are the old printing press color plate:
I highly recommend trying it out sometime.
Patient 0 is fully realized! Or is he?…well, anyways, you’ll find out tomorrow.
I may like this page the most out of any of them. For whatever reason I feel a bit more sympathy for a zombie when you look through their eyes. Their world is skewed and distorted that everyone they see is a monster to them. It’s like an animal predator being more scared of us than we are of them. They don’t want our brains! They just want to survive in some perverted way.
The zombie looking at himself in the mirror was what sparked the story in the first place. I wanted to know what it was they saw when they looked at themselves.
Stay tuned for tomorrow when things get much much worse.
Here is page 2 of my Monsterpedia story “Patient 0″. I had help writing this story from my buddy, Jordan Gevers or “the Other Jordan”. We call each other by our last names so as not to confuse. So I’ll refer to him as Gevers here on out. Anyways, as a thank you for all the help I designed the character after him. He was really excited by the prospect of becoming not just a zombie but the first zombie!
This is page 1 in my short story called “Patient Zero” from the anthology book Monsterpedia 2! Teaming up with my fellow PopCap Artist, this is volume 2 in our series. You can read more about it at my earlier article about ECCC.
This week I’ll be posting a new page of this story every day, minus Tuesday’s usual “Hominids” update. If you’re in the Seattle area for ECCC you’ll be able to buy the whole book at booth 506!
Hope to see you all there and make sure to come back for page 2 on Wednesday!
My commissions have been few and far between, which honestly is fine since it gives me more time with ‘Hominids’. However I wanted to share a fun commission I did for a fan named Courtland Brugger Check out his Deviant Art page.These are his creations and they were really fun to draw.
I don’t usually work with traditional pencils. Most of the time I do pencils directly in Photoshop and then ink by hand. This was a welcome change. The features of the main character is really cool too and reminded me of my Hominids in alien form.
If anyone is ever interested in a commission feel free to leave a comment, email me or Facebook/Tweet me. It will all help fund Hominids and keep the comic alive.
I try to add at least one exotic new animal to each chapter of “Hominids”. In Chapter 1 it was that crazy razor blade fish, Chapter 2 we met Basse’s pet panther Serilda, and my personal favorite in Chapter 3 was the WildCoat Barking Toad! In Chapter 4, I was looking to add another bizarre animal to this strange world. It was also necessary for our heroes to get to their destination fairly quickly. I looked back to my old drawings from my childhood for inspiration. I was reminded that Keyli rode an Ostrich as his means of transportation. This was perfect! Although I didn’t want it to be an ostrich exactly. I had to “evolve” it, or “devolve” it in this case.
There was a couple things I knew I wanted to be present. The fact that they’re based on a non-flying birds was important to help make them a “one way” trip. If they flew then you’d wonder why in the world don’t they fly on these things everywhere. So I just made their wings larger for gliding, but not flying. From an evolutionary stand point this made sense to me. I couldn’t see a normal ostrich surviving in a world with giant skyscraper sized trees. They’d have to adapt a way to travel from tree to tree, not unlike a flying squirrel. It’s either that or die out.
Then I wanted an older species to base the bird on so that they weren’t just ostriches with a few minor adjustments. In October, I was in New York and we went to the American Natural History Museum. There is saw a skeleton that was exactly what I was looking for. A giant bird that existed in the Paleocene era 65 to 56 million years ago. It was called the Gastornis. So I created an intermediate bird between the Gastornis and Ostrich.
Below are some of my concept drawings. Check them out and let me know what you think.
My first pass had them looking much more Ostrich like.
I like the way they look here but it’s looks a little too much like a vulture.
The final design.
Original Hominids drawing from the early 90′s. At that time each character had their own animal.
The skeleton of Gastornis at the Natural History Museum.
A lot of people post their process online. I’m no exception. Take a look at how I did my newest page. There’s nothing new about the way I do it. However, it’s always fun to see a page go from beginning to end.
Greeting Hominerds (I’m playing with what to call my few fans. If you come up with any good ones, let me know)!
Process is an important part of making a comic. I wanted to share where I begin when drawing a new chapter. After I’ve finished my second or third draft of the script, I move onto the thumbnail stage.
I like having all my thumbnails on a single page. That way I can look at the whole story at once and see how it flows. Then it’s just a matter of easy cut and paste edits. You can also look at the design of panels page to page. I ask myself, is there enough variety from page to page or do they all look similar? What pages need to take a minute to breath? Do I need a big panel to really accentuate the drama that is going on?
It’s a really fun stage of the creative process, and can be done in just a few hours.
