It’s hard to show my process, as I tend to build pages in stages, starting inking figures before all the elements have been drawn.

I took a snapshot of my progress every few hours, and I thought it would be fun to create a gallery of the steps so you could see a page build from my layouts to finished page.

In general, once the layout is tight enough, I ink the panel borders and do a first draft of the lettering before I start inking.

In the case of this page, I inked the main figures before starting to build the backgrounds, so pencils tighten up halfway through, and the first inset panel didn’t get tightened up in pencil until the rest of the page was inked and toned. If you look closely, you’ll see the size of the ship get scaled up about halfway through!

I’ve been working on this short story off and on since getting back to work after finishing up my run inking the Books Of Magic for DC/Black Label and it’s slowly starting to take shape.

It’s another older piece of sorts. 

Back in 2007 I was nominated for a Harvey Award for my work on The Chelation Kid (with Robert Tinnell) and made a last minute decision to attend the Baltimore Comic Con for the Awards ceremony. At the time I was inking the daily Mighty Motor Sapiens and producing a page a week of Wahoo Morris. I was looking for more comics work and wanted something a little more mainstream for my portfolio so I came up with this idea, did a bunch of rough thumbnail concept sketches, then managed to rough out three pages tightening up one before deadlines got to me.

The story sat without anymore work until many years later after I had switched to working digitally. At some point in time I scanned in the 3 pages and the thumbnails and cut them up into a 7 page Manga Studio file. 

It again sat untouched until 2018 when I finished up Wahoo Morris and started finishing up old pin-ups and then the 4 page Lady Of The Lake story. I imported the file into Clip Studio, then re-cut the sketches into a 12 page file, then had to drop it again as I started another year long run storyboarding.

I did pick away at tightening up the pencils on a few pages while whiling away time at conventions, and was intending to dive back into it when the storyboarding gig ended, but the the Books Of Magic inking gig fell into my lap and it got put on hold again. I did manage to solidify the layouts and letter the story (which also involved finally writing a script) during brief downtime this spring and summer. 

Anyway, I’m back to mostly working full time on my own comics for the time being, and I should be finishing this up in the next week or two. It’s taking a ridiculously long time, but I blame the penciller (Me) for leaving so much work for the inker to do.

Once it is done it will be the lead story in an expanded (48 pages) print version of my sci-fi anthology Vistas Unknown.

Here’s an overview of the work in progress.

Here’s some in-progress art!

I started this piece a few months back but it got put on hold while I worked on Books Of Magic.

I need a new convention banner, so this started out with that in mind but I expanded the canvas dimensions so it could do double duty as a print for the next Kickstarter campaign or an eventual cover.

With conventions on hold, the urgency of finishing disappeared so the piece is also on hold for the moment. I’ll finish it eventually, but I’ve got other things I want to get done first.

I’m not ready to show anything from the short story I’m inking right now so, here’s something to look at in the meantime!

My “refreshing” of the portfolio section of the website sent me down the OCD rabbit hole again, and a week later I have tweaked almost every page and filled in holes and fleshed out skeletons of pages that have been sitting unfinished since I designed this site in 2007.

I’m getting close to being done, but one thing that is endlessly frustrating me is the alignment of the site.

The theme I based it off of was a fixed width theme, which I kept, but like Wahoo Morris DotCom it floated in the center of the browser.

For some strange reason I wanted this site to fix to the left of the browser, but I’ve wanted to change it to a center floating design for a long time.

The problem is, I took a deep dive into css back in 2007 when I designed the theme, but I haven’t done anything other than some basic HTML code if I’m not satisfied with the layout options in WordPress, and I have no clue how I did it or how to reverse it. I’ve been able to get the site to move to right side of the browser, but nothing I do will get it to float in the center.

It is maddening.

I’m going to have to give up until I can get some help, because when it comes down to it, it really isn’t that important and I have better things to do.

Like draw some comics.

***EDIT*** And… a friend was able to help and it is now centered! Hopefully the fix will play nice with all the other elements of the theme.

I’m back at the desk this week after a few weeks off.

As I have no work lined up, I guess it’s time to update the portfolio for the inevitable job hunt.

So… that is what I have been doing today.

I’ve recently seen multiple people saying a good portfolio should have only a few of your best and most recent pieces, and that it should be representative of the job you are going after. I’m not really sure what kind of job I’m going after other than “comic book work” at the moment, but my old portfolio was an overload dump of work going back over twenty years. I still think most of it is good, and fairly representative of what I can do, but I’m not above taking advice and paring it down to just the essentials!

So, I’ve basically started from scratch.

As I am no longer looking for work in the animation industry I’ve removed that category all together.

I’ve put together three galleries, one for inking samples, one for sequential samples, and one for covers and pin-ups, and I’ve only posted fairly recent work in each gallery.

So, the idea is to swap out samples as I do new ones, and to tailor each category for whatever job I’m hoping to land whatever that will be. I’m kind of hoping to land another inking gig for the immediate future, which is why Inks & Finishes has got top billing at the moment.

We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, check out the new portfolio page and let me know if I’m moving in the right direction.