No Inktober challenge for me this year.

I was planning on participating, going so far as organizing a themed prompt list for myself and planning  a chapbook/sketchbook to publish the results.

Then on Friday I signed on to storyboard on a new (to me ) TV show. It starts the second week of November, I’m guaranteed two episodes and if I get the style of the show to their satisfaction it will run until April. So the next 5 months I will be working 14 hour days 7 days a week with minimal down time.

Which means I have 5 weeks left to get Wahoo Morris Book 2 and my short story anthology book print ready, or I won’t have them for next years convention circuit. And I need to get the Kickstarter for Wahoo Morris prepped and ready for launch. And…. I was planning on starting my next comic project today as well, the inks of which I was going to use as a few of my Inktober pieces.

Now reality has set in, and instead of multi-tasking and doing a little bit every day of a bunch of projects,  I need to rank them in order of importance and get each one done before moving on to the next.

So, for this years Inktober, I’ll post art with the #Inktober hashtag if I get any done, but I won’t be attempting to hit it daily.

Maybe next year I’ll be able to commit to it.

In the meantime, here are all 14 of my pieces from 2016 in one place.

If you liken my blogging to a rolling stone… well… it’s covered in moss and ground deep into the dirt.

It’s not like I haven’t been busy or had anything to say; I’ve just gotten out of the habit of writing about what I’m doing or showing what I’m working on, and getting that stone rolling again has been a struggle.

Part of what stopped the stone rolling in the first place was the nature of what I was working on last year. In May of ’08 I started storyboarding on TOTAL DRAMA ACTION and I was under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. There really wasn’t anything I could show, and I’m not even sure I was allowed to talk about it. The show is on the air now, but until the final episode airs I’m still a little iffy what I can and cannot show/talk about. I also worked on an Australian production called SUMO MOUSE, which was kind of fun, but I have no idea when or where it will be airing.

All in all I was kept pretty busy through to February which I took off to get Married. So life was pretty busy until the beginning of March, but by then the blogging momentum was totally shot.

I’ve been off since I got back from the honeymoon, though I spent most of March and early April job hunting as well as trying to get the house and life back into shape after the blur of the previous 10 months. I spent a few weeks in April writing, finishing off the script for the second half of Wahoo Morris and breaking down the outline and script for the project I plan to follow up Wahoo Morris with. And since late April I’ve been working on the pencils for Wahoo Morris.

I roughed out the layouts for the remaining part of the second half (about 70 pages, bringing up the total page count to 197 pages) and I’m now tightening them up into inkable pencils. I’m doing them digitally (a new method, at least for WM) and the plan is to print them out in blue line for inking. I don’t have a large format printer at the moment so I’ll probably finish penciling the whole book before I can afford to buy a printer so I can start inking.

I’m supposed to be starting storyboarding on a new show in a few weeks (which will help pay for a new printer) so we’ll see how far I get with the pencils before I can start inking.

I’ll pop some pencils up this week to show my new method.

It’s a wet and gray first day of October. Which is on par for the rest of the non-summer we have had here in Ottawa. Not that I would have had time to take advantage any nice weather had we had it, mind you. The hammock hung empty, and the garden lay untended for much of the summer.

Since early May I’ve been drawing storyboards for TV cartoons, which has kept me pretty busy. I took a two week road trip/ vacation in July, but I didn’t reduce my workload so I ended up working compressed hours for three weeks before and three weeks after to allow me the time off.

Storyboards is a new-ish venture for me. I did a handful at the beginning of my time in animation, but shifted into key animation and then character design. I honestly didn’t think I had what it took to do them, but I was looking around for work in animation over the winter, and there wasn’t much available I was qualified for, so when the opportunity to do boards came up I took the plunge. It’s not the easiest work I’ve ever done, but I really enjoyed the first show I worked on, and I’m beginning to get the hang of it, slowly but surely.

The end result is that I haven’t had the time for any comic work for the past five months. I’ve spent the odd hour here or there, when I needed a break, working on pencils for Chapter 7 of Wahoo Morris, though the final pages of Chapter 6 still need a few odds and ends before they are finished.

I finish up my current storyboard in two weeks, then, who knows? I have a few leads, and a few potential projects, but nothing definite for a few months. If I can, I will finish up what I can of Wahoo Morris before the next contract starts, whatever and whenever that will be.

Busy, busy, busy!

Things have definitely ramped up this month. I’ve been working pretty much 7 days a week since well before Christmas routinely from 9 A.M. until well after 10 or 11 P.M.

So, what have I been working on?

The weekend before Christmas I began to pencil The Mighty Motor-Sapiens from Matt Plog’s layouts, but with week 22, on January 7th I began pencilling the daily strip from scratch. I finished up week 23 on Friday morning only to dive into a last minute rush job doing pencils and inks on three days of a new daily webcomic for Microsoft. After a few rounds of revisions I finished that up late last night and dove back into week 24 of the Mighty Motor-Sapiens.

That contract wraps up in less than 5 weeks with the completion of week 28, so I’ve been on the lookout for more work. I might have something as an animation studio contacted me last night about doing a test for a storyboard position. I don’t know when the production would start or how long it would last, but I get the test tomorrow, so the rest of the week and weekend is going to be filled up with Mighty Motor-Sapiens and doing the test.

Oh yeah, I’m also drawing a 5 page story (written by Jim Bricker) for inclusion in Comic Book Tatoo, an anthology of stories inspired by the songs of Tori Amos coming from Image Comics this summer, and the rough pencils are due on the 1st of February. I’ve got to shoot some reference photos tomorrow and start solidifying the doodles I’ve done into something a little more visually pleasing. The final coloured art is due the beginning of April, so things aren’t likely to let up any time soon.

And, of course I’ve continued to work on Wahoo Morris, cleaning up the roughs into pencils, lettering, and inking a page a week. Though, Wahoo Morris is suffering at the moment. With the animation test this week I just couldn’t afford to put anymore time into this week’s page after getting it lettered and cleaned up. I’ll be posting pencils only tomorrow, and probably next week too. Hopefully inks should return on the 6th of February.

I’ll be going skiing on the second, which will end up being my first full day off since Christmas day! Then back to work!!

Busy, busy, busy

I didn’t expect to have it finished quite so soon, but the new store is now open.

I built it using a separate WordPress install, so items are added as posts and are organized by product category. Once the theme had been adapted for the store’s look and functionality, it only took the addition of an item in each major category to test it out. At the moment I still have a lot of items to add, and several years worth of original art to catalogue and price, but everything available in the TooHipGottaGo Graphics.com store is available here.

It’s fully searchable and I think fairly intuitively organized. We’ll see how functional it is when I’ve got several hundred pieces of original artwork added to the database!

Check it out and let me know what you think.