The cover of issue 1 of High School Romance. AKA known as the pink issue.
Over the past few weeks I have been working hard on my creator owned project. That project is High School Romance. A story that I came up with around mid last year, I decided whilst on holiday in Mauritius that I was going to commit to it this year.
If you follow this blog regularly you might have realised that the male character on the cover looks mighty familiar. If you look at the banner of this website you'll notice he's just casually sitting there drinking some soft drink! But if you dig even deeper you'll notice he looks remarkably alot like one of the characters I drew in the very first post of this blog. And it all comes together...
Anyways I don't really want to give too much away at this point in time as it is still extremely early days. So I'll give you one panel of the comic to whet your appetites.
Hmmmm... I wonder what's going on in that panel....
So here is the final version of the image I showed you in my last post. As you can see I am experimenting with how I present the final works. This one was hugely inspired by T-Wei. He likes to take photos of his sketches in his sketchbook and finish them in photoshop, instead of scanning it. So I copied him. I love it. It's so much fun and inherently gives it a bit more awesome. I'll probably keep doing these. =D
Starting with this picture I am trying to move away from doing too much fan art. You will probably still see some fanart from me but I will be dialling it back heaps.
For a blog called "the artistic flavours of jin and juice" I haven't really shown much "art" on here. That's going to change. I go on DeviantArt everyday. It might not look like it since I haven't updated that bad boy in like forever, but I do. Everyday I go on my inbox is full of inspirational art. stuff that I believe that I never come close to. So I'm going to start bettering myself when it comes to my art.
Something that I am working on.
Since I have been working very hard on my new creator owned comic, the whole process of creating art has been reinvigorated ten fold. I want to draw, draw, draw, draw. And so I'm going to. Since I have started with this forward momentum I'm going to keep it going. I'm going to draw at least one picture everyday. That sounds huge, but in the grand scheme of things, it isn't. If this was my career this is exactly what I would be doing so why not get into that mindset now.
Let's see how long I keep this up for. Usually I promise these things and then I don't follow through.
Oh and noticed how I changed the blog layout again. I think I am 100% happy with this one this time so I shouldn't be changing it up anytime soon.
So it seems that my family and I have gone over our download limit for the month. This leaves a bored Jin who can barely search the net and can not actually play DC Universe Online at all. So I thought that I would take some time to talk about something that has been on my mind a lot lately.
Comics and the digital world.
When it comes to comics it would seem that I have nearly gone 100% digital in every way possible. In both the consumption of comics and the creation of comics.
With the huge rise in popularity of tablets and smart phones comics now have never been as easy to purchase and read as they are today. In fact now that all the major publishers are pushing for day-and-date digital comics I have dropped most of my comics that I pick up from local comic book store and and now get them digitally. Which ends up being much cheaper for me since I live in Australia and comics are here priced a bit higher than the American cover price. But digital comics haven't won me over on price, they have won me over on convenience. I am starting to get to the point where I have nowhere to put all my comics. Now that I have my entire digital library on any tablet device or PC in the world I couldn't be happier.
On the creation front though, things get even more exciting for me. I used to do everything the "old school way" using blue pencil on an art board, then pencils, then ink followed by scanning in 3 parts... The whole process is time consuming and since I do everything by myself in most of the comics I work on, everything becomes tedious and I just get sick of working on that page. Ever since the last page of Sonic the Comic Online #256 I have pretty much been doing my comic art on my computer with a tablet exclusively. What a difference it makes. Being able to play around with layers, move things around as I see fit, the whole process of making a comic has become super fun and most importantly fast. Since I am cutting out so many elements like the scanning and the touch ups more than half the time to finish a page has already been cut out. I actually can't believe I did it any other way now.
As you can probably tell I am super excited about the digital future of comics. Especially with what Graphicly is now doing for creators with their digital distribution platform, it would only seem that the world of comics is about to explode with awesomeness. We are now going to see more great independent books come out that just couldn't before because of logistics, and we are going to see the art in comics taken to new heights as other artist also start experimenting with what can be done on a computer now days.
Since I have been going on about digital one of the other cool things I can do is show you the process on how I work digitally. Check out the video below!
Thanks for taking the time to have a read and watch, until next time stay safe!
