The Kickstarter went live yesterday for the campaign to print THRILLING TALES OF VISTAS UNKNOWN!

So far it is doing better than I could have hoped! Well, I hoped, but, you never can tell. As of noon today, the campaign has been live for 26 hours and I’m at 45 backers and 232% funded! I set the funding goal at a modest $800 Canadian, so I expected to fund easily enough, but not quite so fast! By comparison, the Wahoo Morris campaign had 15 backers on day one and took several days to hit 45 backers. It had a much higher goal, and I think a more niche market than my new comic.

Oh, I also got a “Project We Love” badge, which is nice in an ego affirming way, but it also places the project higher on the Kickstarter homepage which dramatically improves visibility from random people scrolling the comics category.

It is fun running a campaign, but it can be stressful and draining. I’m kind of exhausted and it’s only day two!

Like the headline says, the Prelaunch Page for my next Kickstarter for Thrilling Tales of Vistas Unknown is now live. Give it a follow to be notified when the campaign goes live!

New Pin-up finished.

I used some direct figure reference for this one which is something I don’t usually do.

I wanted one more new pin-up for the upcoming anthology and was drawing a blank for ideas or inspiration. I went to twitter and scrolled the Fantasy Art Pose reference feed and found a few poses I liked and incorporated two into a scene. The seated figure I drew from scratch.

I feel a little weird about using photo reference this blatantly. It wouldn’t be hard to find the source photos if you went looking for them.

In the handful of instances I’ve used direct reference in a published piece, I’ve either shot it myself, or transformed it dramatically from the source. I feel no guilt about grabbing a photo of a gun or guitar or car and dropping it into a page for a quick trace-off, but usually I’m looking at photos of environments, props, or people to figure out “how they work and look” and not copying them directly.

I had originally sketched out a background behind the figures, column with drapery etc., but decided to leave it here as this took a ridiculously long time as it is and don’t want to add another days work to something I feel vaguely like it’s plagiarism!
It was still a fun experiment in inking, lighting, shading and modelling with brush line work, more so than I usually do.

I’d be curious to hear how other artists use reference if the reference is what sparked the composition in the first place.

I’ve been on a cover/pin-up kick the past month, with a few finished to show and half a dozen in the works.

I’ve shown these three across my socials, but now I’m posting here for posterity!

I drew 3 original stories in ’93.

Story number 2 was a Gothic Vampire story (itself a redraw of an idea I developed and drew one page of 4 years earlier) that never made it past the layout loose pencil stage. I also stopped on page 13 without finishing the story and as I have no layouts or script in my files I imagine I was kind of making it up as I went along. I remember having fun doing it, but it was largely an exercise in doing single source lighting. Lots of extreme shadow and candle light!

I can only assume I moved on to “The Party” (story # 3 that I finished in December of this year) because I wanted samples to get work and figured a retro Gothic horror story wasn’t going to get me work at Marvel or DC, so on to the to the idea with super-hero action in it!

Anyway, I’ve pulled out “The Vampire Story” periodically with the intention of finishing it, most recently the intention was to draw it from scratch using the original as a springboard, but there were a handful of poses I still like even 30 years on. Having finished “The Party” and still not having anything definite to work on I decided to import the original pages into Clip Studio, quickly trace them off, then start moving, cutting and adding.

3 days later I have an expanded 18 page story roughed out, and surprisingly I’ve kept most of the original work though I had to move and resize a lot of it. Though, by the time I finish this will look like a new story even if the idea and some of the layouts/posing are 30 years old!

Next, I have to write a script and do rough lettering and solidifying of the layouts before diving into the full pencils.

More soon!