These new guys were a lot of fun to design and draw.  I picture the little one speaking with a gruff Australian accent, while the larger one mostly grunts and snorts.  I haven’t named ’em yet though.  Check out the Facebook Fan Page to leave your suggestion of what they should be named.

Tried doing the lasso then gradient technique here with the fire highlights and shadows.  I’m happy with how it turned out for the most part, though I’d like to perfect my technique.  I think the lighting turned out pretty good overall though.

I’ve been playing a lot of Assassins Creed 3 lately, and today’s comic was somewhat born out of that.  In the game, when traveling from point A to point B, you can rather simply face that direction and press forward whilst holding a trigger.  This causes your player to climb over nearly any obstacle with relative ease, scaling buildings, trees, cliffs, or whatever may come in his way.  Paths are rarely taken.  Why walk around, when you can simply go over?  The shortest distance between two points is a line, yes?

On a side note, astute readers may know that the Deep Crow is a reference to a Penny Arcade creation, a truly marvelous (and important) webcomic.

This week’s comic was a lot of fun to write and draw.  I got to pick out disgusting words and keep the art simple while focusing on expression.  I’m sad that the eye guts had to be so small… here’s a slightly closer look:

The little tree kitty (kittree?) will be joining them for the next little while.  It’s a cutie, and more interesting to draw then just rounded blobs.  Proud with how this page turned out, and glad I went dialogue free.  I think it stands better without it.

In other news, I’m in another art show next week.  I did a piece based on an H. P. Lovecraft short story, Dagon for a monster themed show.  Check it out below.

Check it out, along with several other pieces by awesome local artists, at Blonde Grizzly’s monster show next Friday.

Blonde Grizzly
213 East 300 South
SLC, UT
Friday, October 19th, 2012
6:00 PM – 9:00 PM 

This week’s comic was a lot of fun to do, especially considering how long it’s been since I’ve done a full page comic.  Here’s hoping I can keep up the pace.

Wanted to do a transitionary piece to bring us back outdoors and continuing onward.  Also I couldn’t think of what to write, and I wanted a new desktop background.  Here’s the high rez if you wants it, and I’m considering selling prints of it:

This comic is a not-so-subtle nod to World of Warcraft.  I played a bit of this back when it first came out, but found it to be far too much like a second job. I tend to agree with Jonathan Blow on the matter.

The tree baby with Jasper is very much inspired by Jolie, one of my many cats.  I know it looks like none of the tree babies I drew in the last comic, but I had an idea and we’re rolling with it.  If I ever get time, I’ll retroactively fix the last comic to fit this redesign in.  So probably never.

 

Man it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

But as Bo said, it was not without purpose.  The majority of my time as of late was spent finishing up this bad boy.  I’m super excited with how it turned out, and even more excited that I’m going to be selling prints!  I’ve already had a few people interested in purchasing, but for those of you out of my neighborhood, I’ve set up an Etsy shop for you to purchase through!  I’m not sure what the demand will be, so the first print run is small, but if there’s enough demand I’ll look in to printing more.

Enough business though, let’s talk about the art.  I spent well over 40 hours on this piece.  It’s an 11 by 17 inch image at 500 DPI, making it 5500 by 8500 pixels.  It was inspired by Samurai Jack, particularly the pilot episode.  I remember watching the premiere (and taping it on VHS, which I would study later frame by frame) and seeing this epic battle between Jack and hundreds of these metallic bugs.  Each bug he sliced into would erupt in sparks and squirt out a black oil, filling the screen and coating Jack himself.  I remember watching in awe at the sheer “coolness” of it all.  My take here is to take off the family friendly filter of robotic enemies and create a more organic vibe.  Plus drawing blood and guts is killer fun.

Here it is sans advertisements:

 

Here it is hung up in the gallery:

 

And if you’re curious here’s how it looks just inks:

 

And here it is with flat colors, no shade:

 

 

I feel like today’s comic worked better on paper.  It was originally a bit more explicit (though nothing close to the Evil Dead tree), but I tried to make it classy.  It’s not classy.  For those of you who don’t follow what is happening off screen in panel five, ask your mommy or daddy what happens when two trees love each other very much.  Yes, this is where baby trees come from*, and apparently very quickly.

*Note: This is not actually where baby trees come from.

As I plan things out with this comic, I tend to have a loose thread of how things will end up, and I knew these dudes were cuties from the start.