I think a comic drawn like this would be kinda pretty freakin’ sweet. This story is currently rolled up like a fussy hedgehog, uncooperative and prickly and encouraging me to go work on other things. It still likes to get worried over and doodled, though.

Directly after I last posted, I went and started shooting a liveaction short film on the weekends. We’ve been continuing to shoot for the past month, mostly from 10 pm to 3 am on weekends. It’s pretty neat that I have to draw all day at work, because the only time outside of work that I’ve put pencil to paper in the past month has been to note down what we need to reshoot and to diagram out camera and light setups. Shooting is now done and we’re editing the short together. It’s nothing spectacular, but for something powered completely on enthusiasm and inexperience, it’s remarkably coherent. There’s a production blog here: Meat Love. If you’re curious, the short will be about 7 minutes long and tells the story of a butcher who falls hard for a vegan girl.

Unfortunately, sacrifices must be made. I figured I could massively restructure & redraw my Afterworks comic while making a short and working regular hours, and that was maybe a bit optimistic. The deadline came and went while I was working on this short film. I won’t have a story in Afterworks 3, but many awesome talented guys and girls will. The anthology will be out for Comicon this year.

After the short film I’ll get back to the short comic. James (my comrade in deadline-missing) and I are considering self-publishing our Afterworks shorts as a double feature, titled perhaps Afterworks: The B Team or Overachieving Slackers or something like that.

Filed under: sketches, comics — Emma @ 8:54 pm

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Right, so thanks for all the feedback. As per overwhelming request, here are some drawings. I’m actually storyboarding a liveaction short film on the side, so I’ll post some panels from that and talk about boarding/pitching soon.

A couple more from our privateering game, starring the extremely photogenic and disagreeable Berry brothers.

Here Sean is being untruthful about the gifts God endowed him with. Finn, full of brotherly love, is ready to set him back on the path of righteousness. For more deckhand action, check out Austin’s sketches of the boys.

Sean decided to engage the resident Maori warrior pirate in some antagonistic conversation, and when the big guy happened to kind of suggest Sean was of less than average height, Sean took a swing with the butt of his pistol. Aio didn’t think that was a great idea, so he shoved the boy, sending him sprawling across the deck. Finn leapt to his brother’s aid (and also onto the back of the pirate).

Not related to gaming - related to a comic idea which is brewing.

Again, that comic idea. Trying to figure out some specific faces for girls.

Filed under: gaming, comics, sketching — Emma @ 7:23 pm

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Not much happens in December, so it pretty much only warrants one post for the whole month.

(today’s progress - notice the shortening of the yellow pencil. I need to go and get another one…)

Filed under: animals, comic, comics — Emma @ 5:38 pm

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I don’t know exactly what t minus comes from, but everyone says it in movies when they’re looking forward to something (or dreading it), although it’s usually something more technical than a herd of comic book and entertainment industry geeks descending upon San Diego.

I thought I would try for a post every day this week, talking about something awesome that will be at Comicon, which you maybe don’t know about or if you do you’ll be like “WOO! I AM GOING TO DO THAT ALREADY!”

And a drawing.

But anyway! Tonight I am talking about Eville Press, which is going to be booth #1534, and will have Pixar story guys Ted Mathot with his Rose and Isabel books and Derek Thompson with, I assume, his 365 Monsters 2007 book. They’ll also have Afterworks 1 and 2. I am definitely stopping there.
Derek’s monster books are awesome, he goes from cute to freaky to what-the-hell-is-that, and there are 365 drawings in them, so there’s always something to find and get inspired by when I open it up. Anyway.

Here’s a drawing.

Filed under: promises to post that are then reneged upon, Comicon, comics, armor — Emma @ 11:05 pm

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Kind of scribbly, but if you consider that they were done on a rocking train, they’re not bad. Designs for my project thingy - photographed and resized by a completely leet haxxor using only command-line wizardry. You realize how much you take Photoshop for granted when someone goes digging around in linux typing stuff like resize 620×480 instead of using the little pie slice to drag the image to the size you want.

I am, unfortunately, not the leet haxxor mentioned here. It is Joshua, who could pretty much give all three of the Lone Gunmen a run for their money and bandwidth.

Flight has just released their fourth volume of comics! Apparently they’re available at chain bookstores but not comic stores yet - I went and read it at Borders, so I can gush about the art but actually buy my copy from the table at Comicon. The best of both worlds! Reagan Lodge did a page spread in the front, and on the inside are of course wonderful comics. The slick Little Trouble in the Big Top by Vera Brosgol and the sketchy Binny by Lark Pien were my favorites - and the tree-head igloo-head guys (go buy the comic to see what I’m talking about!).

Definitely something to pick up and get inspired by.

Is anyone else looking forward to Comicon this much? It’s like the yearly refill at the pumps of comic and illustration inspiration and enthusiasm.

Filed under: artists, comics, sketching — Emma @ 11:00 pm

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Was meaning to print up a sketchbook for Comicon this year, but didn’t have a definite direction until a couple of weeks ago… and now I think it’s a little too late. I’ll plan on one for next year. I’m looking forward to the con - catching up with awesome artists and cramming into a hotel room with awesome artists and buying the books of awesome artists at their booths (or through a bookstore for awesome artists who are overseas).

But I scanned some sketchbook stuff. There!

I am completely blown away by the drawings of Gipi. He’s an Italian comic artist, but as far as I know his only book that’s been translated is Garage Band, about a garage band and the four guys who are in it. His drawings are simple and complicated, and the eyes always jump out, completely alive. The above drawings were me trying to figure out what it is he does to the eyes to make them so catching…

Filed under: Comicon, comics, sketching — Emma @ 10:55 pm

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I stopped at a coffeeshop on my way home from work this evening, to draw the unsuspecting customers. There was a girl sitting and flirting with her conversation partner, very animated, a lot of fun to draw. She switched poses every three seconds, always tilting her head around and making these great broad expressions. I tried to capture some of them… I’ve found that drawing people talking is a really good exercise, because there are very specific ways that they look at the person they’re talking to. Really expressive attitudes. I’ve been listening to the radio and drawing the characters on the radio talking, which is another thing that’s been helping.

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Figured out this morning that drawing the head and neck at the same time, in a kind of gourd-shape, really helps the overall gesture and expression. Gives me an idea of what the area is I have to work with, where the ear will go in relation to the face, where the hairline will be. Usually I draw the head and then when I’m done with that I tack on the neck… this works way better.

<p class=”centered”><img src=”http://www.emmacoats.com/blog/island.jpg”></p>

<p class=”centered”><img src=”http://www.emmacoats.com/blog/seja.jpg”>
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Filed under: comics, sketching, coffeeshop drawing — Emma @ 10:43 pm

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Ha, so I’ve been busy. Lots of work, supplemented by random projects that I continue to try to make time for. Here’s one of the side projects, the 100 Gestures Thunderdome over at Conceptart.org - completed on Sunday. If you want to play but missed out on the 100, there’s a 200 going on now - gestures due by Tuesday next.

Also working on a comic book - I don’t know how long it’s going to be, but I’m trying to keep it simple and to the point, and balancing that with, you know, being interesting and consistent and worth looking at is going to be a challenge. Already I’ve got to go back and re-ink the first page, since I did it without actually figuring out what any of the characters looked like… it’s below, anyway.

AND. Kind of tied to work, I really suck at painting into Photoshop and the production designer on the project I’m on is amazingly GOOD at painting into Photoshop, so I was practicing. Below.

Click for bigger version.

Filed under: inking, conceptart.org, comics, photoshop — Emma @ 7:01 pm

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I can’t imagine it makes much sense except that it’s obviously about some people getting killed by other people riding horses. Maybe that’s not clear - but there are plainly some people with weapons, and some horses.

These are my favorite subjects to draw - besides my two stinky cats, and they don’t do anything worthy of immortalizing in graphic novel form.

The second panel, the top right, is the one I was complaining about in the last post. After stepping away for a couple of hours and coming back to it, I felt a lot better about it… it’s still a little confusing. I so wanted it to be an accurate pose, but I also wanted it framed a certain way, which I couldn’t DO if it was an accurate pose.

Oh well.

Filed under: comics, layout, sketching, portfolio stuff — Emma @ 6:03 pm

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I’ve got four days to pull together 32 pages of storyboards, comics, and sketches. I’ve been really getting into the comics bit… it’s a lot of fun, figuring out the layout and doing the little storyboard sketches for it.

I ran into one panel, though, that I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out. Either the composition was messy, or the action and characters read. If I straightened out the composition, it turned into random shapes and you couldn’t tell what was going on; if I redid it so you could tell what was going on, you couldn’t tell what was going on because it was too confusing and all over the place.

Ergh. Learning curves: they’re all over the place.

Filed under: comics, layout, sketching, portfolio stuff — Emma @ 6:00 pm

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