sketches

Maybe Catgirls can be Haibane too?

I drew this while sitting in a conference at the IBM IMPACT event in Las Vegas in 2008. I was worried about my flight the next day; the weather was horrible in Minneapolis and I feared a delay. I needed a little confidence booster, and this image (and the person who motivated it) helped me through.

The sketch is really messy since I only had one pen at the time. I tried to clean it up a bit -- remove the prep lines, fix some obvious errors -- but I could only fix so much without redoing the entire image. 

A really quick sketch of Tre'ana. While there's a number of things wrong with this image artistically, I really like the emotional intent of the piece.

This is just me playing around with character designs. These two are Rama and Rasa, brother and sister who's role in the story tends toward the comedic. The remainder of the scene that goes with this image involves the Strangers from the film Dark City and Kilngons. The argument being that had Kilngons the ability to Tune -- as the Strangers did -- it would result in "three quarters of the universe being converted to Blood Wine".

Obviously, the two spend far too much in geekery

I haven't drawn Tre'ana in quite some time. In recent years, I've had reason to ignore the spiritual in exchange for what my friends call "dark complexities". Recently, however, the character has become more interesting. In a new variant of the story, Tre'ana is a conflicted character, stubborn although selfless, and secretly addicted to Codeine.

This is from a scene in that story, where she is reading by the bedside of another character, who is currently recovering from battle injuries. She's reading an religious text, passed on to her from her grandmother. The pages have their own design, a sample can be found here. The term StarReader comes from the fact that the language the book is written uses star consellations as part of it's syntax.

I couldn't write software this evening, I effectively burned myself out. So, instead, I decided to draw for a while.

I was somewhat surprised when I found myself not only drawing Novella, but all three of the main characters in the same image: From left to right, Akisa, Novella, Miki.

The image is, unfinished. But I haven't finished a single piece of artwork in the last four months now.

An (almost) complete sketch of Akisa listening in to her minidisc player. I wanted to draw her listening to her music, which is somewhat an addicition for the character. The expression, however, is a bit atypical for her. It's almost as if she were caught off guard.

The big feature of this sketch is the background. I've never put so much work into one, and never with as much success as well.

The only thing it lacks before inking is a little touchup with a woodless graphite, and the conents of the panel/window in the center left.

Miki is in fact, one of the more normal characters in my story "Novella: College Journal Manga" (of which Akisa is a part). After thinking of a few scenes at work, I decided to draw her pondering what it was like to have suicidal depression.

"Is that all it takes?" she says, with nothing but her toes holding her back.

The physics of this drawing at a little wierd. The posture doesn't quite balance out the way that it should. However, it seems to look normal enough to pass.

Pure Junk Art©.

My friend Ratz and I had batted around the concept of casting Akisa as a character in The Matrix. Such abandon of morals and remorse seems appropiate for her character.