visual project concept and Colour tests

It’s been a while since I posted any work relating to my developing negotiated project partly because of the size of the idea and scale of research.

I essentially want to produce a comic that combines a roger Rabbit, Cool world vibe. Where reality and cartoons meet but my universe would be visually unique, animated, surreal, and geeky, while maintaining a sense of real life culture and people its quite ambitious to be honest.
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Cool world had such a haunting creepy atmosphere that works for its crazy cartoonly inhabitants sort of like Tex Averys work. Almost each animated back drop has a hidden face and twisted sky scrapper in it which 

Inspires me in the architecture aspect of the project. 

The idea of cartoons and reality blending together in a separate society really seems like an interesting angle to go with my developing practice could make for great comics if my narrative I choose is strong. But unlike Roger Rabbit my setting will be either present day or universal. Because i want a wider range of characters and environments then just the classics of the golden age era.

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My beauty and the beast comic and RVJs are working on this style as well.

here are some of my best thought colour tests and drawings so far from over the break 

i got one sped up recording of my working progress on one of the pieces. 

I found the interiors to be much more tricky to portray so i will use secondary resources like books and photos to improve upon this experiment and area of the visual language.  

I will post up my finished thumbnails and colour tests later on.

Josh

Zombies Don't Love

This was sort of like a side piece I was working on, tho I am working on a picture book (to be uploaded) for the Picture book blog.

I am messing around with textures digitally, but also going to try and continue some vector ones and overall keep up a similar style of work that I produced last year but definitely try and improve.

blublu

Hey guys, most of you probably now this website already. Still wanted to share the link.

http://www.blublu.org/ Some of the wall art can be found in Berlin :).

Junji Ito

I love this gruesome shit (read right to left cos it's Japanese)
http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2010/12/junji-ito-thing-that-drifted-ashore.html

The same guy has done one called Gyo that's even more crazy - I'm saying walking fish, gas powered corpse robots, the lot.

Beauty and the Beast/ BUTTON PHOBIA

Hey Guys, for my Beauty and the Beast project I had more than one story I would like to tell. The first idea was about the hairiest man alive, suffering in a circus. He gets saved by a kind clown woman. I will continue with the freak show idea when i'm done with the button phobia one.

For those of you who haven't been to the meetings, I thought of things that could be the beast, so I thought about a documentary I saw about strange phobias. One of them was button phobia which really effected people in their daily lifes.  They screamed, jumped up and down and started crying because of buttons. The phobia is the beast!

My story is about a woman that is terrified of buttons and I tell how her phobia developed.
I started all over again with my character design and focused on facial expressions. Also what expressive traits each character will have and which style suits my story. (Scott Mc Cloud's Making Comics)

I did some research for my character. the button phobia woman is either disgusted, or absolutly horrified of buttons.  Fotos by Hitchcocks films helped me to work on the facial expressions.

Marijpol inspired me for the style. She uses strong contrast through her shadings. (The shadings follow the object or the figure which creates dynamic). 

As you can see above I used strong shadings for my story. The character itself was way too "cartoony" so I changed to a more realistic style. Still I felt like something was missing and I disliked the neat and stiff look of my character. To break out of my comfort zone I continued to work with pencil. I haven't done anything in pencil in ages, but figured it will help me to get more lose and create a different style. The artist below uses pencil for his story. Also the unusual style for a graphic novel inspires me a lot.

I kept the hair in strict lines which is another contrast in style. It also stands for her compulsive way/ fear of buttons.

I will post more this week. Don't want to bomb you with my work. Thanks for your time and I'm always thankful for feedback.

Mmmmm pretty..

nice elegant storytelling and art work by Sarah Mensinga

thought peeps might enjoy

always find this site useful, thought i'd share

http://meathaus.com/

Help! - i need contacts / my new portfolio

Hey guys,

I am looking for professional contacts (writers, Illustrators, and publishers/ editors) to send out my beauty & the beast pages to.

I am struggling to build a good list of contacts, though i have a few, I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts and tips on finding contacts? any good resources for finding email/ post addresses, or even just names that i can start from?

Maybe it would be good to do some of this as a group? maybe build a shared database/ list of contacts? Dunno if peeps are precious about sharing this stuff?

On a separate note i have finally sorted out a couple of online portfolios, only on carbonmade and behance but its a start! There is a set of recent commissioned corporate/editorial pieces i did a couple of weeks ago on there. Would love some feedback on the portfolio - Not sure if it is too varied/ not specialist enough?

Cheers folks :)

Observer Cape Graphic Short Story Prize

I sketched these out for the Observer comp, having hit a bit of a wall with the Beauty and the Beast project, and actually like these more... So much so i'm tempted to work in another page and use it for the Beauty and the Beast brief.

They're a bit sketchy, didn't really want to devote too much time to it, and i'm already looking at better producing some frames, or sourcing reference for certain poses in certain frames.

Beauty and the Beast

Hey here's a concept illustration for Beauty and the Beast done using black ink and tippex and watercolour.

Enjoy!