Writing Madness and Living Brushes

So for the past week, I’ve been neck-deep in writing and plotting a few different projects. Some are for fun while some are for business. One is an updated version of my short wordless comic (the original can be found here), which I’m remaking for fun/practice and to really see how I’ve developed in the last 2 years. One is a short story I’m developing  called Pagoda, about a soldier who gets trapped in a legendary tower in a search for a great power (more on that soon). The last and most pressing comics project is my senior thesis comic, called Limit Break: Breaching Insular Cultural Representations in Comics. The point of the thesis is to examine traits commonly associated with with different ethnicities and challenge them. What I am against is restrictive expectations triggered by how the reader responds to a character’s racial identity. For instance, character A should be this way because they’re -insert race here-. I think these expectations need to be discussed, and what we accept expanded to include a wider range of identities. To read more about this project, I refer you to this post here. That one is a year-long project and is meant to cap off my college experience. 

A note about some of these links and links on previous posts: for those who don’t know, I interned at Elephant Eater Comics this summer and actually started my Friday posts on that website, and all of my posts have been collected on this one. I was lookin a little rough in that photo, though…

Also, all this scripting and planning has my drawing hand ache for something to do, so I decided to try traditional brush inking for the first time at the behest of my friend Lorraine. Here is the results of my first brush ink sketch:

I think I love brush inking. I think this sketch of Cloud from Final Fantasy VII does as well.

…so I think i’m going to be brush inking a whole lot more. I try to keep dynamic and energetic pencils, and I think using the brush will activate those pencil lines greatly and push my work further. It just feels so alive, I love it! It’s a difficult art to master, but it’ll be worth it and a lot more effective than my use of pens, in my opinion. We’ll see. I’ll be testing my brush against another recent sketch:

Started getting into Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike so…yeah. Ryu, naturally.

So I’m feeling pretty good about my progress and productivity as of late.

One last thing: A shout out to my boy Chaz Ortega for spotlighting me on his artist collective site, Robot Empire. I compel you to check out the talent and the awesome  contained within that page.

Peace.