I’m slowly working my way through the final 70 pages of Wahoo Morris. I roughed them out in a space of a few weeks, and I’m now in the process of cleaning them up. My original plan was to just get the basic construction done digitally, then print them out, slap them on the light table, and do the clean drawing on the final Strathmore before lettering and inking.

My ‘roughs’ are turning out pretty close to finished pencils, so I’m thinking, instead of wasting time tracing them on the the light table I might buy myself a large format printer and just print them out in blue line and ink directly over that after the odd touch up with pencil.

Anyhoo, that’s still a decision for a few weeks at least into the future. In the mean time, here’s a random page of digital pencils.

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.

Like the title says, another quick digital sketch. This one is is likely to end up as the cover to the next collected volume of Wahoo Morris – assuming that it turns out the way I want it to, that is.

I got an idea for a Wahoo Morris poster, print, or wrap-around-cover the other day and did a quick sketch. It was inspired by a classic photo of the Beatles that was in the newspaper which I thought I could adapt for my purposes. It will be a while before I have the time to finish this, but I thought I would post the sketch now.

This is a piece I drew as a potential cover for Wahoo Morris, back before I decided to stop publishing singles and go with a direct to trade paperback publishing model.

I was a little frustrated with a Work For Hire project I was working on, and got some bad news about another job I was waiting on, so i decided to to sit down and ink this to clear my head. It took about 2 hours in one sitting.

I might end up using it as spot art in the next Wahoo Morris book.