Preparring for the Artist's Alley

Today is the day. It's Saturday, May 19, and this afternoon is the Shoujo Phonebook Artists' Alley at SCAD's student center. I've put together a bunch of stuff from various compatriots. I'll be selling the mini-comic, again, and I'm going to have buttons this time to deal with the collaborative nature of me and the classmates that I'm helping to sell things today. On top of my mini-comic, I'll also have some digital coloring prints for people to poke through. For example:




















I don't consider the digital work I do to be "digital painting" per se. I think the people who do that sort of stuff are massively talented and way more focused on it than I am. Plus, Photoshop, while amazingly wonderful, is not always what I'd consider to be a painting tool. Fear not, for soon I will make the venture into Corel Painter (I've been meaning to for quite a while, actually,) and then I will bump up the rating of "coloring" to painting.

It still kind of feels like being a very sophisticated kindergarten student. Tablet pens, while functional, are also pretty buff in comparison to other stuff. My pencil is waaaay smaller than that. Even my mechanical ones.

Both of these images are from my sketchbook.

The first image is an emotive illustration that may, at some point, end up on a tarot card or something. I'm still debating finishing up an entire deck of those. I still haven't decided if it needs texture on it or not, if it were a tarot card from that deck, it would have to have some, as that's part of the theme. But either way, I really like this image.

The second image is one that I finished on the tail end of a long period of UN-productivity. My only wish about that one is that I had done the linework more cleanly. I'm still experimenting with penciling as a finished product, and I'm wondering if that image needs some ink on it to make it... um... creme brulee? (My Best Friend's Wedding reference. It's green, and it's jello... ^_~)


For anyone in town, I hope to see you in a couple of hours. For those that aren't, wish me luck!

Editor's Day 2007

So the past two days has been the Spring Sequential Art Event, as I like to call it, I think SSAE is really close to SASE, and we all know how much that goes with the publishing / book world. Every spring, SCAD's SEQA department hosts "Editor's Day" in which we get a group of editors from the industry to come in, have a panel discussion, and review portfolios.

I was fortunate enough to get in to see three different editors: Tim Beedle (Tokyopop), Chris Duffy (Nickelodeon Magazine), and James Lucas Jones (Oni).

First off, I'd like to point out how cruel it is to ship people across the country and give them an am meeting session. I will say that both Tim and JLJ were wonderful to converse with. (Tim had a harder morning of it than JLJ, apparently, but everyone is different.) I got good feedback and made some new contacts.

Also, I'd like to applaud the overall feeling of this year's ED (ah how my boarding school acronym-izing returns to me). There seemed to be a real sense of community throughout the building. Everyone seemed to come together in a way I felt was absent during last year's ED. There seemed to be much less confusion and much more talking. There was a lot of waiting around (but then there always is, it's the way of things), but overall I found the day to be much like any formalized portfolio review.

As a final Postscript on my review of ED-07, I want to note something that perhaps not even everyone present at the event will be aware of. James Lucas Jones stayed through lunch and saw people. I think that was a very grand gesture, and so I applaud him for it.