First of all, I realized that I've shown precious few previews of my next comic, so here are some in-progress-panels. The've gone through the first round of inking and may or may not be subjected to further ink passes. No washes here - just stark B&W, which is a whole different language than Coptopus.
This is one of the hundreds of self portraits.
And here are some pseudo-portraits that I as subjected to every day during class, as drawn by my students.
I have a few pages left to go, but I'm taking a very brief hiatus to remind myself what I'm doing and to flex my other art muscles. Hour after hour of staring and black and white ends up feeling a little like purgatory, even if I'm really enjoying Deep Space Nine DVDs in the background. I'd slowly bought the whole collection for this exact purpose - to half-watch them while I drew and painted stuff, someday. I decided to make that day NOW.
So, following divergent impulses, I started working on this customized Magic 8 Ball for my niece. She has a lot of faith in them and those symmetries of the universe that come with hope. I wanted to make her a special one.
Still need to work on details and spray fix it, but acrylic sticks to this thing fairly well without any priming. The plastic covering that it came in serves as an excellent stand for painting it.
I've been paying more attention to my resting schedule (and to a lesser degree, what I eat, because something about my guts is being very rebellious lately), my brain kinda exploded after looking at some James Jean work the other day and I grabbed the nearest thing (which just happened to be this goofy Domo sketchbook that my sister gave me, which contains paper of a surprisingly excellent quality) and DREW. Four pages later, I took a breath, and it truly revitalized my interest in art. Sometimes, I need a reminder when I become an art machine. It's okay to draw things and make things that don't have some grandiose, epic purpose attached to them.
First, I drew a medusa thing, and kinda lightly colored her later.
Then I drew Squidward. You know, if he was a person. Obviously.
And then I wanted to draw a hand, so I make it into a skelehand.
And then I drew a larger-scale picture of The Skeletron, a villainess I sketched out really tiny a long time ago.
Overall, good things, moving forward.
New computer on the way, and when that's paid off, I'm gettin' mahself a little Wacom tablet so I can work on my next comic. Aside from Coptopus 2, which is totally next.