I’ve been drawing a panel a day of my new comic. It’s going to be an online comic that comes out daily. Currently I’m trying to sort out a backlog so that if I can’t do a panel on a day it’s not the end of the world. This has been incredibly fun to do, as I’m seeing this world being built before my very eyes, in an incredible fast way. Is it as complex as my graphic novel? Of course not, it was never going to be that. This is a fun comic to read in the RSS reader on your way to work.

The special thing about it I guess is that it’s in full colour (or at least the limited pallete I’ve chosen) and was created on the iPhone. The reason I guess I’m doing it on the iPhone is part convenience and part novelty. The convenience is the fact that I can open my phone at any point and just doodle some more on a panel and then get back to whatever I was doing. The reason why this works rather than my using a Wacom pen, is the fact that the artwork is being created right underneath my ‘pen’ rather than infront on a screen. Closest to a digital sketchbook I’ve got, so I’m intrigued to see what opportunities an iPad will provide.

The creative process has been interesting, in so much as I’ve basically not written a script. The script get’s written as I draw. It gets updated and an idea will take another form, and I’ll end up drawing like 5 new panels or something taking the story in a completely different and interesting fun direction.

The thing about it all is that the world and the characters are becoming real very quickly. As with anything the more you do it the better you get at it, and it’s also interesting seeing how the look of the characters is evolving as I get more proficient at drawing them, with my current tools. There is a slow but constant evolution to the characters, which I’ve found to be very rewarding.

2 weeks ago I didn’t have anything, now I am looking at about two week’s worth of comics and several sketches and images of the various characters. The thing about this endevour is that once I hit play, I need to make sure that I create this thing in a timely fashion. I hit my daily deadline and if I don’t I have to make it up over the weekend. That gives me a two day buffer. I don’t want to share anything at the moment, but once I’ve got a month’s worth of stuff, I’ll be sure to start sharing and hoping you’ll share the love by telling others around you.

So yesterday I made to purchases. The first was the Pogo Sketch stylus. The second was Brushes. The obvious reasoning is to start making a comic on my iPhone. I know probably not the best medium for this thing. Maybe getting an iPad for that sort of thing would be better, but I’m not getting a first gen iPad (that’s another post for another time).

I’ve actually have several drawing applications on my iPhone, but I’ve found that Brushes is the best for actually creating, even if the icon sucks many many balls. Adobe Ideas doesn’t provide you with enough options for the brushes (you have one), and Sketch Pro (from Autodesk) I found to be incredibly annoying with it’s unresponsive zooming in and out. This is a major issue on a small screen as you’ll be doing that a lot to get the finer details. Also the layer system on Brushes just works nicely and five layers should be about enough to deal with things.

All of this is my attempt to create a daily comic from my iPhone. I’m going to try and build a few weeks worth of material (don’t even know what I’m going to be drawing at the moment) but hopefully it’ll be fun while I continue to toil away at my other comic book work (on the 7th page of my second draft, slowly but surely people, slowly but surely).

Earlier on in my sabbatical, my parents decided to sort out the house down in Lebanon, where I was going to be doing my creative drawing and writing. However, I did a couple of side projects as well. A couple of logos and decided to do my first large scale art project, a door of stained glass.

This was to fill a hole the size of a door into the living room in the house in Lebanon. The reason for filling it in is mainly to do with layout, but needless to say we’re not using that door so having something that represents the family is more than a welcome addition.

To understand what this image means you have to know a little bit about my family history. My parents and I were born in Lebanon. We all migrated to Greece shortly after I was born, and five years later my brother was born in Athens.

This history is represented by the cedar tree (Lebanon) at the bottom and the three fish swimming up towards an olive tree (Greece) where a little fish is waiting.

So once the guys got it, they printed out and then began carving it out.

And here is the finally finished stained glass family portrait installed:

And here are some details:

So what do I feel about the final product? I think the carving process was superb, second to none. I think however that the colouring could have been done in a better fashion. There are mistakes and the final colours were not exactly as I had imagined, or chosen. The thing is that no matter these minor quibbles, it’s nothing compared to the sheer joy I get when I look at it changing colours throughout the day, you forget everything else.

Cameron Stewart Drawing Catwoman - Love me some Cameron Stewart. Love these videos of comic professionals drawing characters.

If you’re subscribed to the site, then you’ve no doubt been bombarded this last day with 15 or so ‘new’ posts. These are all part of the illustration section which I’ve been putting together. Regulars of the site for a while will recognise a lot of these images, however there are several new ones and others that have never been shown in this way.

I kept thinking about the best way to put this section together, as there is a lot of stuff I’ve got on my harddisc that’s not seen the soft glow of the internet in years. Hopefully because of the general ease with which this section is maintained, I’ll be constantly uploading images to this section, because I’ve always believed that all art needs to be shown, because it gives you perspective on where you where artistically before and how much you’ve improved in the time passed.

Residency #139 - I will be applying for one of the residency positions. It fits PERFECTLY with what I’m doing at the moment. By the end of May, I should have the entire story properly roughed out with dialogue and hopefully a few pages and several (if not most of the character designs) for my graphic novel. It’s funny how things sometimes fall into place. Even if I don’t get the residency, this will still give me a deadline that MUST be met and create a package that can stand on it’s own two legs. If I’m not mistaken there are 24 positions available, 8 for Paul Pope, 8 for Craig Thompson and 8 for Svetlana Chmakova. The deadline is the 21st of May…much later than my sabbatical is over, so plenty of time to finish by then.

Of course if I do get one of the positions, it’ll be a pretty big battle to actually get another 3 weeks off from work so soon after my sabbatical…but we’ll cross that bridge if we really have to when we get there.

Following on from our previous post, we’ve now gotten our paragraph which breaks down the entire story into a few key sentences. So for example Star Wars could be quickly broken down into:

1. In a galaxy far far away, there Intergalactic War between the empire and the rebels.

2. We follow the path of Luke Skywalker who goes from galactic farmer to Jedi.

3. He looses his mentor along the way, but gains a series of friends.

4. He continues his training and proves himself in battle as the rebels try to thwart the evilness that is the empire.

Or something along those lines. So what’s the next step? Well the way I’ve currently been going about it (in this series dedicated just to documenting the creating of my own graphic novel) is expanding those few paragraphs into Acts. These Acts are basically very brief descriptions of the above sentences broken down into pages. It’s all meant to provide a skeleton of roughly what is going to happen within each page and roughly how many pages are going to be required in each Act.

This is useful for many reasons. It gives us a very loose frame from which we can either choose to expand or reduce, depending on which direction we choose to take it. In addition to this we also get a general feel for the number of pages that we’re going to need.

Currently as it stands ‘Aitus Moralis’ has a total of 9 Acts and requires around 65 pages for the first volume. The final page count might go up or down, but by and large it will hover around that number. This might not seem like a large number, but it’s actually a little bit larger than an European graphic novel or a 3 issue American mini series.

Now the last part that’s pretty important for me to disclose is that I’ve actually done all of the above by hand. I’ve not typed any of this up, it’s all hand doodles. I’ve found that this is a much more productive manner of creating than typing it on a screen. It feels more organic to me, which is weird since I’m not a technophobe and yet my most personal project I’m going COMPLETELY analogue (even planning to hand letter it as well).

Wow, can you believe it’s October already? Seriously where the hell has this year gone already? Yesterday we watched Godfather and ate chocolate santa. Seriously chocolate santas are already in the supermarkets, WTF? The countdown has begun before I move out of Golders Green after 7 years and go on walkabout. Loads of shit to sort out before then, which all basically starts this week as I order by boxes and self storage options and start getting rid of clothes and unwanted stuff that have accumulated over the last few years. It’s not too bad (yeah you might hear me complaining later on this week) but I know I’ve got my work cut out for me.

In other quick and dirty news, we went and saw Joe Sacco at the ICA this week, which was brilliant, since he met everyone later on and did some signings, which was really cool. His latest books sounds like it’s going to be amazing, so I can’t wait (Footnotes from Gaza). We saw a few images and it does look like it’s going to be a keeper.

On a completely separate note, I’m looking for a good font creator/editor for Mac. I’ve not found any that won’t break the bank (I’m looking in your general ugly direction Fontlab). Fontographer is no longer part of macromedia/Adobe, but surely there’s a nice indie developer out there who has made something that can be used to make a font? I refuse to believe there is nothing else out there.

A little over a year ago I wrote this, which basically explained what I wanted to do over the year that passed. What’s funny is that I completely forgot that I wrote that (having a blog for as many years as I do, does make events/posts blend into each other). Anyway 1 year later, I can report that I have definitely been moving in the right direction. The first thing I did was go to an art class at Central St.Martins. While the actual lessons taught me sweet fuck all, I learnt soo much from some of the peeps in the class (ok mainly from Mike) but most importantly I remembered what it was like to feel excited about making comics.

A couple of days ago I finally completed my first full comic book story. It’s a four pager for the Observer competition and it’s basically 2 months of my life. Is two months a lot of time to complete 4 pages? Well I was doing other things inbetween, like working, holidays (where I couldn’t take my art with me) etc. Also bearing in mind that some of the things that I did, I’ve either not done, or not done in a while.

This little experience taught me a lot about how difficult making comics can be, but also how amazing the feeling is when you’ve completed the story that was just a thought in your mind, as you built it, cultivated it, nurtured it, watered it, fed it and then ultimately moulded it.

I did need to take a few shortcuts to achieve the deadline. So I ended up computer colouring and lettering; even though I wanted to do both of these things by hand.

With this project firmly under my belt, it’s time to shift focus to actually start drawing more. However there has to be a deadline. A year deadline is not good enough. It’s too far away. It has to be broken down into smaller chunks. Where I do burn the midnight oil to achieve that goal. Could be 5-10 pages per month? Fully pencilled and inked. That’s a little over a page a week.

The thing is I also want to try my hand at some sci-fi as well. The only way I can think of is, to simply write and draw a panel to this other story every day. 1 small panel. The nice thing about that is that I will end up getting speed and it’ll help me try new styles and new ways of doing something different without it affecting a much larger project. It’s all building towards me having my own distinct voice and style and breaking away from influences.

Either way, it’s all exciting times, especially considering I go on sabbatical for 6 months so I have the chance to pursue all the above.

For those wondering why things have been generally pretty quiet around here, it’s due to the competition which I have been beavering away at. I still have some minor tweaks to make and some additional inking to do, but by and large all 4 pages are done. Just got post production to get on with now, special effects (colouring) and sound effects (lettering). Here are the first two pages inked.

The Observer and Random House Graphic Short Story Competition - Definitely going to be entering this year. The only, only thing I need is the story, four pages long.