Part I: The Gathering Storm

Well, I didn't have to form a soccer team and resort to cannibalism this weekend. Thank goodness. But I found that I can in fact survive a bugger of an ice storm like the one that rocked Worcester County. And I do mean ROCKED!!

When I went to bed Thursday night, I thought it was just some jerk decided to go out driving and hit a telephone pole. I come to find out in the morning that Governor Patrick declared a State of Emergency.

I was kind of lucky. Yeah, I lost power but I didn't have to spend time at a shelter. I built a fire, conserved water, cooked dinner over a wood stove and by Saturday morning stunk like a goat.

But I made it through and now I've freshened up and started getting a few projects both started AND out of the way.

One of which was an idea given to me by the lovely Trina. She really liked a panel in my upcoming UCF story Monsters Do Not Frighten Me and thought it would look really great on a shirt.

So during the blackout, I spent some time drawing an idea using the panel of the giant woman standing over the fierce but rather diminutive monster. The result was this:



I put it on a few products on Horrid Collectibles if you would like to check it out at:
www.cafepress.com/horridclltbles

Well, I hope you are all surviving the elements!!

New illustration

I took some time off from comic art this morning to work on a new illustration. It's been a while since I've done some illustration work, so I figured I needed a breather from projects to work on something I was thinking about as I tried to get to sleep last night.

The piece is titled The Ghosts Can No Longer Harm Me and it was done on Canson Bristol Board with Deleter #3 black ink with crow quills of various sizes.

The never-ending battle...

Well, this graphic novel is shaping up to be my longest project to date. Most of my past project have been in between the range of 8 to 80 pages total. For me, my first big milestone was reaching page 24 of Diary of the Black Widow. Before that, I had the difficulty of getting past page 10 of a project before I started to lose steam.

I just started laying out page 87 of my Sherlock Holmes graphic novel. Which officially makes it my longest graphic novel project to date.

I suppose it's a milestone of sorts. It means I've reached a point in my career as a professional artist where I can do a project and see it through to the very end. And it's not something I've done alone. I have a lot of people in my professional life that have helped me along in my own maturity. Of sorts.

But I'm very happy with the progress and growing impatient at the same time. I tend to get like that nearing the end of a project anyways. But this one is probably moreso because I took on a pretty tall task.

And I've had a lot of good things happening in my life of late that have really inspired me and have pushed me to do even better work.

The most important being the lovely Trina who constantly inspires me and is the inspiration for many of my loveliest characters. And no. She is not the Black Widow. But she is Stone-Toe Maiden for those of you out there who are curious about just who she was based on. And she has appeared in countless other illustrations. You have to look closely.

And believe me. My paltry scribblings DO NOT do her justice. I could never capture just how pretty she is in person.

So, for those of you who see me on a daily basis and are wondering "What is he so happy about" and why I have such a spring in my step.

Well, she's the reason!!