Wheee Dark Knight. ♥ I was disappointed there weren’t more people wearing Batman shirts (like me), but at least it wasn’t sold out when we went. The showing after ours had a nice long line, though—buahaha.

I loved it. Of course, I loved the first one, too. Where Batman Begins was focused on Bruce/Batman, Dark Knight focused more on everyone else. And the new cowl doesn’t make his chin look fat (+points for that). Heath Ledger was very much not like Jack Nicholson (+more points), a fact which I had been concerned about in early trailers.
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The inking’s fairly crap (as are some of the shadow shapes), but psh. Practice makes perfect.

Still playing with blacks. I dunno, they don’t feel quite me yet. They look a bit like I’ve been reading too much BPRD lately, which I have. Eh, I’ll keep poking at em.

EDIT: So originally I had her fully colored, and then I turned off the color layer and realized it looked better without. Added skin color at 100% and a few 30% tints of the original colors, and now I’m better pleased with the blacks. (I guess I was channeling Dave Stewart for colors? o.o Far less BPRD now.) Sort of Ashley Wood-ish* palette currently, but oh well.

* I have also lately been reading things of his. Speaking of which, Zombies vs. Robots and its sequel, Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons (nsfw, that latter one) are quite good.

Having absolutely despised working in Photoshop (compared to Painter) in my digital painting class a couple of years ago,* I’ve pretty much been a Painter addict ever since, believing that it’s shinier in about 80 different texture- and brush-related ways. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been playing with Photoshop since high school, and I use it a lot for image editing, but for actual image creation? Not so much.

That being said, I’ve noticed a lot of artists I admire swear by Photoshop, and after having seen some gorgeous one-hour “warm-up”** paintings done in Photoshop earlier today, I began to wonder if I shouldn’t give Photoshop another go. So, after poking around the exceedingly unfriendly brush palette for a few minutes (really, would it be so difficult to make the brush list like it is in Painter?), I was pleasantly surprised to discover a) a brush I like very much*** and b) that Photoshop painting feels surprisingly effortless compared to Painter. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m just really “on” today, but I didn’t feel like I was struggling with the program at all. Also, I randomly became friends with a 1pt brush eraser.

The black hatching is actually me erasing to the background layer. The blue was added last, which is why none of her face shadows are blue.

Each of these were done in about an hour (give or take).

In other news, I started reading semi-old (circa 2002) issues of 2000 AD. It makes me happy. Some day, when I’m rich and famous and have finally acquired the drive to devote myself to comic-making, I’d like to be published in it.

* We had to do at least one project in each program. Though, truth be told, I pretty much hated that class and what I made in it, so maybe it’s not a very good measure to go by. Even with my great bias towards it, I still suck at making pretty pictures in Painter, although fiddling with it lately has taught me quite a bit about the types of brushes I like and the look I want to achieve.
** Seriously, their so-called warm-up paintings look better than my several-day attempts at final pieces. <oozes jealousy>
*** 28pt charcoal flat, in case anyone was wondering

Finally I get confirmation from my advisor (after emailing back and forth several times last week, and then me prodding her today after not hearing anything further): I am indeed on the recently graduated list, though for some reason diplomas aren’t being printed out for another couple of weeks. That’s just silly.

I’m forging ahead on things like the gloomday.com redesign, updating my resume, that sort of thing.

Also, I sped through Enki Bilal’s Nikopol trilogy, which was random but the art’s gorgeous. At first I thought it was watercolor, but I’m pretty sure it’s more like oil or something. Anyway. I’ve been trying to get through Hellblazer, especially having just seen Constantine in its entirety (and liking it), but I dunno. So far, it’s not thrilling me much.

So… I started reading Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse today, by that one guy who did 30 Days of Night. And I read issue 0, and I liked it (though the artwork reminded me just a touch of Mignola if he did fancy Photoshopped things). And then I got to issue 1, and BAM, there’s Rae’s identical twin sister. Like, seriously, if you squinted your eyes, you wouldn’t know it wasn’t something I’d drawn (apart from the fancy Photoshopping). Yes, her eyes are a different color, and yes, she has a giant bird tattoo on her chest (ironically enough, I had considered putting a giant bird tattoo on Rae’s back), and yes, as my roomie pointed out, she has bigger boobs. BUT her hair cut and color are practically the same, she wears ribbon tapes on her arms (much like Rae with stripe-y gloves), and she even has a big(-gish) nose. Even her tank top is something Rae would wear. Like, wtf. >.<

I… guess I have good taste in character design?

Colors are a little washed out because she was on a gray background until I tweaked the levels in Photoshop. I have this strange tendency to draw random girls from above when I’m group online drawing.

One of the various things I’ve been working on lately* involves getting wardrobes for my comic chars squared away, and since most of their clothing is modified from readily available military gear (in their world), I figured I should get the actual uniforms figured out. Had already scribbled these on paper, but they were still on my mind.

This one is pretty much crap. Pretty much. I have another strange tendency of drawing people’s close shoulders way farther out than is humanly possible, so I had to move it in Photoshop. Then again, it was like 1 in the morning, so I think I’m allowed.

* Other things being figure drawing, doodling aliens, and trying to bring myself to work on backgrounds and architecture.

Mm, let’s see. Finals ended last week, and I have since turned into a giant lazy blob. This is not a singular occurrence: I do it after finals every semester. Of course, the next big question is, did my advisor get my graduation petition in and am I, therefore, graduated now (and have to get my giant lazy blob ass in gear to find a job)? Or do I have to wait another semester (and get to take fun things like prepress and comics 2)?

In the meantime (while I procrastinate about calling the aforesaid advisor), I think I’m gonna be rewriting that script I did at the beginning of summer. It’s technically fine, and it would work, I guess, but… it’s pretty blah. The problem, of course, is that I don’t know how this new one’s gonna go. Well, that and I have some new ideas for the world buzzing around in the back of my brain, which I haven’t really been fast enough to catch yet and take outside. (The other day? Three separate flies magically appeared in my room and tried futilely to fit through the holes in my window screen.) One of these ideas involves a comic based on things/people/places/imagery in Smashing Pumpkins songs, which I am not going to do, but can’t help being intrigued by nonetheless.

I am halfway through doing a test page, though, which, once inked and scanned, will allow me to try a number of coloring methods.

In other news, I finally finished Watchmen, which is indeed quite awesome, though somewhat in the way that Tale of Two Cities or Catcher in the Rye make the great books of literature list.

And I saw Stardust on Sunday. I do think it was quite good, and funny, and a faithful adaptation of the book, but I also think it was missing a little something—like it could have been the greatest movie of all time, but woke up late the day the professor was going over that topic in class. It might just be that I need to see it again. :3

These two were my final project. The theme we had to work with was borders and boundaries.

Been meaning to hype this for a while, but my roommate’s been writing random weekly articles for his friends’ site, Ten Car Train, for a few weeks. The site’s kind of a mishmash of subjects, but that’s sort of to be expected when there’s ten or so very different contributors. A lot of it is Bay Area-related, but even if you don’t live around here, you can still take something away from it, which is nice. And you never know what the next article will be about, so it’s hard to get bored.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I’ll soon have a shiny video game illustration posted over there to go with his latest article, either. Which you should go see. <cough> There’s just a placeholder console image up right now (which is making me want a black Wii) cuz I hadn’t finished when he decided to post it, but tomorrow morning it should be up. Hopefully he’ll remember to credit me. :X

Unrelatedly, I’ve started on my “You say you like comics but you’ve never read…” list. I read through V for Vendetta this weekend, and started The Watchmen. …Basically, if you’ve seen the movie of V for Vendetta, that’s the comic. They stayed exceedingly true to it, apart from the color of Evey’s hair and adding *SPOILER* the whole “send masks to the entire populace and have the crowd wear them later” thing *END SPOILER* at the end. The only really good thing about actually reading it, apart from refreshing my memory of the story (since I saw the movie first), was the lovely style in which it was inked.

Watchmen seems good so far, very meaty. I get the impression that around hardcore superhero genre geeks, if you hold up a copy of it, they all get on their knees and worship, due to its immense groundbreakingness when first published. This immediately raises my skepticism level, but so far it’s holding its own. And now there’s a movie in the works; it’s going to be directed by the guy who did 300, so that’s something?

I also restarted Sandman, since I never got through the whole thing the first time round and that was several years ago. And I’m officially completely caught up on Fables, which is depressing. I’d been holding back the last few issues to start stockpiling them again, but I needed a fix, and now I have only 1001 Nights of Snowfall left to get through. I am, however, very much looking forward to Aaron A.’s () issue (next month, I think! Hooray!).

And did I mention I suck at screenprinting?