Moon Prince Page 119: The Groos




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Goggles

The Rough Pearl is still on hiatus while I obsessively rework the first thirty pages (it'll be back in early September) but in the meantime here's another digital piece from the same body of work that I've been basing Adam's "art" on. This one is from 2002 and it's called "Goggles". There's more of this type of thing HERE.


Moon Prince Page 118: Insidias Facent!




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Mermaids!

This Saturday is Coney Island's annual Mermaid Parade and the Mutches will be out in full force! Here's the poster I did for it back in 2004, featuring Bambi the Mermaid:


Moon Prince Page 117: Look Out the Window!





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Rough Pearl Summer Vacation

For those of you who have been following The Rough Pearl (thousands of you, right? No, millions!) I have the sad, sad duty to announce that it will be taking the summer off.

A few weeks ago I switched from drawing this story on Bristol board with pencil to drawing it straight into Photoshop from a scanned page of "thumbnails". As much as I like the loosey-goosey look and rich texture of the pencil drawings, I much prefer the speed and flexibility of drawing digitally, as well as the punch of the thicker line weights I can use for outside edges (what some inkers refer to as the "contention" line).

So, to make the story consistent visually, I'm going to go back and obsessive-compulsively re-work the first twenty-eight pages. Funnily enough, this is exactly what happened to me when I was starting Fantastic Life, except that time I was almost fifty pages in when I decided to re-do it all, and it took me six months!

The Rough Pearl will be back in September (by the way, since it won't be "in roughs" anymore, I may change the title. I'm thinking of calling it The Double Slit. Whaddaya think?). In the meantime, The Moon Prince will still be coming out every Friday and I'll continue to post various art pieces and "process" stuff.

In fact, here's a quick process animation for the most recent page of The Rough Pearl, showing my new workflow: scribbly thumbnails on typing paper, followed by a loose first pass in Photoshop, and then a second "tighter" version on a new layer, topped off by some blue color:


The Ripped Off Face of Art

I used to love watching Chris Elliot on David Letterman back in the 80's, so I'm enjoying the no doubt purely coincidental relationship between a sequence from my 2009 graphic novel Fantastic Life and an episode of Elliot's show Eagleheart which just aired on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

Here's a screen grab from cliqueclack.com showing a still from the episode in question. It's the aftermath of a shooting at an art auction, where bloody drippings on the wall are seen as a work of art by the appreciative audience. Below it is a panel from the similar scene from Fantastic Life, where bloody drippings on the wall in the aftermath of a shooting are seen as a work of art by an appreciative audience.


(Here's the whole 3 page sequence from Fantastic Life, just for context - click 'em to enlarge)

Moon Prince Page 116: A Bad Example




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Elvgren.jpg

Back around 2000-2001 I made a lot of digital work by writing little Photoshop actions which would subject images to a series of filters and color manipulations at high settings - enough to degrade the image almost past recognition. I would run the actions as "batches" on large sets of images I'd vacuumed up from the internet (I used software that grabbed every jpeg on a site - something that might not work as easily nowadays) and then pick out the ones I liked best.

This image is from a series I called "Nice Drawings" because they looked like colored chalk drawings on black paper. It's based on an old Gil Elvgren pinup painting from the 1950's. There's more of them HERE.


Rough Pearl Page 30: Nothing Touristy






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Moon Prince Page 115: Betrayed!




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