Well, that happened. I’ve not, at least as I recollect, written a breakup letter before…until now. It had the usual “It’s not you it’s me…”, “we’ve grown apart…” sorts of phrases. And they were all well meant. This was written to my publisher, I hasten to add! Over the last … Click to continue reading this post
This might be one of my favourite sequences from the book so far*. (Click for larger view.) It’s a significant part of a page so I’ve watermarked it heavily. Sorry about that: It’s days of work to make these things. It is based on a location scouting trip I did last year around this time at the LA County Fair. So consider this a public service announcement if you’ve not yet done a Summer visit this year to a county fair near you… Go! They’re an excellent old-school kind of fun.
There’s a whole sequence in the book that involves such a visit and I’ve just […] Click to continue reading this post
Sorry to have kept you waiting for this one. You’ve been dying to know how it turned out, right? Here’s the final* form of the panel. (See the other two posts for earlier stages here and here. ) It’s a silent one. A pause in […] Click to continue reading this post
Ok. A Little over an hour and 15… With a slight interruption. (See previous post.) But I did the shade work too. Working to two primary light sources was fun. (Two sides of the bus).
Now for colour…
-cvj
Ok, challenge to myself: 
Let’s see how quickly I can do the fully pencilled/inked version of this panel for the book. This is the rough work. Assuming not too many distractions…
I think that the Apple Pencil is one of the best things the company has produced in a very long time. It’s good for both writing and sketching, and so is especially useful in all aspects of my work. I got one back in the Spring when the regular-sized iPad pro came out and it has been a joy to work with. I thought I’d share with you a video stroke by stroke logging of a quick sketch I did with it this morning on the subway on the way to work. The sketch itself is above and the video showing how I made it is embedded below. Yes, it’s another version of the people you saw here.
This is typically how I produce some of the rough work for the book, by the way. (I still also use good old fashioned pen and paper too.) Since some of you have asked, the answer to whether I […] Click to continue reading this post
Sometimes a sharpie and a bit of bristol are the best defense against getting lost in the digital world*… (Click for larger view.)
(Throwing down some additional faces for a story in the book. Just wasn’t feeling it in […] Click to continue reading this post
Ok all you Stranger Things fans. You were expecting a physicist to say a few things about the show weren’t you? Over at Screen Junkies, they’ve launched the first episode of a focus on TV Science (a companion to the Movie Science series you already know about)… and with the incomparable host Hal Rudnick, I talked about Stranger Things. There are spoilers. Enjoy.
(Embed and link after the fold:)
[…] Click to continue reading this post
Style change. For a story-within-a-story in the book, I’m changing styles, going to a looser, more cartoony style, which sort of fits tonally with the subject matter in the story. The other day on the subway I designed the characters in that style, and I share them with you here. It’s lots of fun to draw in this looser […] Click to continue reading this post
“The fact that certain bodies, after being rubbed, appear to attract other bodies, was known to the ancients.” Thus begins, rather awesomely, the preface to Maxwell’s massively important “Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism” (1873). -cvj
The other day, quite recently, I clicked “place your order” on… a toy New York MTA bus. I can’t pretend it was for the youngster of the house, it was for me. No, it is not a mid-life crisis (heh… I’m sure others might differ on this point), and I will happily declare that it is not out of nostalgia for my time in the city, especially back in the 90s.
It’s for the book. I’ve an entire story set on a bus in Manhattan and I neglected to location scout a bus when I was last there. I figured I could work from tourist photos and so forth. Turns out that you don’t get many good tourist photos of MTA bus interiors, and not the angles I want. Then I discovered various online bus-loving subcultures that go through all the details of every model of NYC bus, with endless shots of the buses in different parts of the city… but still not many good interiors and no good overheads and so forth. (See Transittalk, for example – I now know way more about buses in New york than I ever thought I’d want to know.) Then I accidentally had an Amazon link show up in my […] Click to continue reading this post
So two very important pieces of news have come my way and I must share them with you.
The first is big news for writer friends especially. The long-awaited version of Scrivener for iPad has finally arrived! And it is really great, from what I can tell so far after downloading it and playing around a bit. (See my earlier post on why I like Scrivener, and how I use it, here.) I’ve done all the intensive writing that I need for the current book project and so it is too late to café test the iPad app on this, but I’m sure I will for the next big writing project! Now I can at least carry a version of the book’s manuscript with me and make small adjustments on the move, mull over pages I’ll be preparing to do final art for, etc. [Just in case you are wondering, I used Scrivener with a comic scripting template (with slight modifications) to write the prose bits of the book (which is a graphic book – see here).]
The second is that THEY”RE MAKING NEW EPISODES OF SAMURAI JACK!!!!! Genndy Tartakovsky, whose work I love, is still in creative control of it, so that’s good. It’s old news to many, but I just heard last week and I’m excited. Cautiously. (And now in the mood to watch some of the old series…)
In addition to swearing off drawing scenes with lots of windows (at least while I’m doing them), I’ve added crowd scenes*…
This station should have at least double the amount of people in it but […] Click to continue reading this post
Sorry I’ve been quiet for a long stretch recently. I’ve been tied up with travel, physics research, numerous meetings of various sorts (from the standard bean-counting variety to the “here’s three awesome science-y things to put into your movie/TVshow” variety*), and other things, like helping my garden survive this heatwave.
I’ve lost some time on the book, but I’m back on it for a while, and have […] Click to continue reading this post
(Apparently I spent a lot of time cross-hatching, back in 2010-2012? More on this below. click for larger view.)
I’ve changed locations, have several physics research tasks to work on, and so my usual work flow is not going to be appropriate for the next couple of weeks, so I thought I’d work on a different aspect of the book project. I’m well into the “one full page per day for the rest of the year to stay on target” part of the calendar and there’s good news and bad news. On the good news side, I’ve refined my workflow a lot, and devised new ways of achieving various technical tasks too numerous (and probably boring) to mention, and so I’ve actually got […] Click to continue reading this post
