Tag: work in progress

monsters, Workbench

the Lionfish

I was working on a mermaid concept for the mythology book last night, and realized that I didn’t want your standard fish lady to represent the Undersea Realms. So, I looked up a bunch of different fish and got really into the lionfish. They are pretty amazing to look at, and have some really neat spines, patterns, and colors. I decided that the lionfish would be the basis of my mermaid design, and here she is:

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I still need to work out a background image for her, it’ll probably be a shipwreck of some sort or another. My grandfather loved old sailing ships, and I inherited a little of that. I love the haunted mystique of a wrecked ship on the sea floor.

Uncategorized

The Lemonade Stand is Open

Well, that was a thing.

On October 9th, 2016, at approximately 10:16 am, my wife took a spill and fell hard on her left arm. She was in terrible pain, and didn’t even hesitate when I suggested we go to the clinic to get it checked out. My wife is tough. Seriously. So, if she says she’s willing to see a doctor, I know it’s serious.

Two hours later, we knew she had broken her ulna, right about where it connects to the wrist. A few days later, yet another doctor informed us that she had a spiral fracture at the impact, so the bone had a lot of mending to do.

We own a restaurant. We run it together, and between the two of us we manage to keep a vegan diner running in a town known for meat and potatoes. With her unable to use her left arm and hand, it was up to me to make sure our tiny little kingdom didn’t sink. Well, seven weeks later, we haven’t sunk. Her arm is healing, and she’s just now able to help out around the restaurant. Life is returning to normal, and I have a little time to spare for my passion project again.

Many apologies to those of you who follow this page, it was never my intention to go Full Houdini… but life has its ways of keeping you humble, and I return to you humbled in many ways.

mollsandbruiser-card

 

 

 

Workbench

Making a Splash

Water is hard. I don’t mean in the jump-from-too-high-go-splat sort of way, either. It’s hard to draw. Fluid, in general, doesn’t like to be constrained to two dimensions.

The latest pages from the Miller’s Daughters see the ultimate demise of poor Ophie, and that meant some water needed to find its way to paper. It turned out pretty nicely, and will be even better when I add shading later this week!

The second page shown is the Rake, sauntering off out of the woods, his murderous mischief quite managed.

Morbid Tales

The Angel

As I was proofing earlier pages of the Miller’s Daughters, I realized I had made a pretty big mistake. I had missed an introduction of the Miller himself, and went from a nice scenery page to a page detailing the family dynamic of the Miller and his children. Oops. Over the weekend I put together a new page to introduce the poor old chap, and thought I would share. Here are the finished inks for the page, followed by the same art with shading.

death

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I’ll be adding text to the bottom of the page, and amending the text that was on the original second page of the story!

Morbid Tales

Sweets

I’ve been trying to get a page a week finished on the Miller’s Daughters, but it’s not going quite as assertively as I would like. No bother, really, progress is still progress. Here is the newest page:

md-page-24-tapastic

The whole series can be found here… There are still some edits that need to be done to the long-form story, but it’s still a pretty entertaining read!

 

Uncategorized, Workbench

Monsters and Luchadores! Monsters! AND! LUCHADORES!

I get these horrific creative blocks from time to time, and nothing that I am working on has the power to move my pen. When times like these come up, I draw monsters. This week, though, luchadores worked themselves into the mix, because, well, luchadores.

Luckily for me, these little drawings got me fired up about the Night Circus, so I designed the background monsters for the circus:

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the Night Circus artwork ©2016 L. G. Kade

I got lucky this week, too. The next page for the Miller’s Daughters decided to stop being such a brat, and I was able to get the inks done for that one, too. I should have the fully finished page up tomorrow!

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I have a few friends that extol the virtues of warming up with “meaningless” doodles before a drawing session, and I am really beginning to understand why. That practice not only loosens up your wrist and fingers, it also loosens up the creative faculties in your mind, making you a better conduit to express your thoughts!

Morbid Tales

Breakdown: the Miller’s Daughters, page 24

Page 24 and 25 and probably the hardest for me, because I really held out hope that I would change my mind on the outcome. On the other hand, I already wrote the ending of the story back in November of 2015, and the outcome of these two pages are crucial to the story’s resolution.

Several different drafts of the page breakdown have come and gone, with the conclusion that the long-form, single panel page works best for this part of the story. Here is the script for page 24:

PAGE 24

Full page panel: A waterfall takes up most of the page, with little Ophie perched in her tree on the left. Foam and spray from the river below take up the bottom of the page. Text takes up the middle portion of the page.

The Rake slowly, reverently unwrapped the package, he took extra care not to spill the small cakes and pastry (he had an infamous sweet-tooth, and cavities to match) that had been wrapped up within. He licked his lips, gathered his sling, and began to fling the sugary treats at the poor girl in the tree. Being as he was an excellent shot, the branches surrounding our poor, doomed child were quite liberally spattered with sweets.

The Rake opened his pack and prodded the excitable badgers within to action. The poor little creatures had been left in an intentional state of constant hunger, and smelling sweets nearby, the badgers furiously scrambled up into the tree, climbing in a most chaotic fashion towards the increasingly panicked girl above.

Ophie lost her nerves, and began to shuffle slowly away from the safety of her perch. She lost her footing on a patch of sugar-coated bark, and tumbled out of the tree.

He really is a despicable character; I have omitted several pages of his backstory just because he is so rotten… but I might bring them back in, those pages would be a lot of fun to draw!

Here is the original concept art for the Rake, from late 2015:

Rake Concept Art

monsters, Workbench

The State of My Union, part One

It’s been a roller-coaster of a month. Sales on Grimmleigh’s Beastly Oddities are still clocking in at a better than (I) anticipated rate, which is really super exciting. The down side? Well, I really need to get more work done on the follow-up book, Grimmleigh’s Classic Monsters.

I have two completed pages, and I am applying lessons learned from the first book to these images. First off, I’m drawing the backgrounds separately, which is allowing me to experiment with the sizing of the characters on the finished page. This should cut down on characters getting clipped during the print process, since I am going for a full bleed on the layout.

Here’s the background for a daycare center:

Messy Room

Now, with the Vampire Brides from last week:

Vampire Brides

Concept sketches are done for another 8 monsters, so I will be spending the next few weeks getting those ironed out, backgrounds rendered, then layouts. I aim for 23 coloring pages in each book, plus stories, so it’s a bit of a process!

Progress on Grimmleigh’s Morbid Stories for Dreadful Children is coming along nicely, with page 23 posting to Tapastic last night, and pencils for page 24 and 25 in the rough stage. I am hoping to get back to a weekly posting schedule with that story!

Going back through previous pages, I realized that I need to go back and re-work a number of pages. Some of the previous pages are formatted differently, and I need to get a unified font size in place. Luckily, that will just make everything flow better, so I am happy about that. I also realized that I forgot to even introduce the Miller, which is probably just a smidge confusing.

The real challenge for this next week is going to be Salt Lake Comic Con. I have a ton of panels, three live recording sessions of Geekshow, and a role playing game scenario to create. That being said, I’m setting a personal goal to keep daily posts going here!