The colour of charity.

I've been toying with the idea of doing my, up till now completely black-and-white, comic in full colour. Here is a test I did for the cover of chapter 4. Yes, I can't believe that I've survived this long but chapter 3 is a third of the way through and number 4 is looming scarily closer. Anyway, regular readers will recognise some familiarity in the image but may also be miffed over why it looks so different to the DAMbots. You'll need to read the comic to find out...

In related news, I'm finally getting around to printing the comic. I've ordered my proof of Issue 1 of DAM, collecting chapter 1 and the Blood and Gorebot mini-episode in lovely hi-definition, and made the decision that I'll not make a single penny (or cent now that I'm in Canada) from the sales. Not only will it be at a super low price but I'll be donating all profits I make from it to a Leukemia charity, which hopefully should come to about 70c per copy. If this proves successful then I'll do the same for all future issues of DAM.

I'll let you folks now about it further down the line, but as always any feedback on the art or my unusual benevolence, or even just to say 'hi' is always welcome.

Black, white and red all over.

So, it's a new year both in my calendar and in the Chinese one. Well, thanks for all the comments and sorry for the huuuuuge delay between posts but as you can see I've been a bit busy...

The pic on the left, which I managed to somehow pull together this evening, I'm going to use as a banner-type thing on my comic when I plaster the finished thing up on the interweb. So I can paint in colour after all!

As well as that I (think I) finished the cover, which is a lot simpler as I really want to go for a pulpy minimalist look for the issue one print. For those friends who helped me out in my previous post, thanks for all the comments and I did take them on board. You can see I took the second idea and jazzed it up slightly. I'd love to do something more colourful, like the banner, but I'm still not too confident with colours and I'd be a bit worried it'd betray the black and white of the comic book inside. This stays truer to the contents. Hope you agree! It probably still needs the odd tweak here and there, but I'd say it's 95% done now.

What say you all to these 2 pieces of graphic design?

I've also already started doing the pages for chapter 2!! My plan is to get a website set up and start posting chapter 1 asap. My other plan is to try and post some more non-comic stuff on here again as I'm sure you're all getting bored of this... I really should have drawn a timely picture of an ox now that I think about it.

Happy New Year(s) to everyone! I'm really excited about this one, even if it is the last full year I ever have in my twenties!

Fubar - cover sketch

Firstly, happy Boxing Day everybody! Hope Christmas was loads of fun.

I finally finished all the pages of the first issue of Deadly Alien Microbots. Woohoo! Fully inked, scanned and cleaned up until I decide they need more work.

Unfortunately, now I need to start thinking about a cover (Urngghh!) so here is a sketchy first attempt with Fooba's looming tendrills approaching the hapless trio of microscopic robots. I really don't know much about comic book cover design so I tried to get all the elements of the comic in without revealing too much (i.e. what Fooba looks like). I imagine the whole thing to be mostly silhouette-esque black and white with the red of the blood providing a nice backdrop. I might make the heroes' stances a bit stronger, especially Ballistik.

So, is this any good? It's DAM hard (pun intended, hehe!) to come up with something eye-catching for all the peeps who have no idea what they'll be letting themselves in for if they ever pick up a copy. Being such a noob, I've got my work cut out...

-- UPDATE --

I've considered saving the window opening into a view of blood cells for a later issue's cover (yes, I am planning on this being a long running thing, if people choose to buy it, of course!), so I hastily drew some alternative ideas with some colour. This is all very rough, I might add!

I'm favouring the last one with all the characters in white, though I'll probably make the robots nice and metallic looking. But the first one with the bloodied background does seem to give off the unintentional image of a Western, which is also quite cool. Decisions, decisions...

Please let me know what you all think. Which one catches your eye the most?
Which would make you part with your pennies/dollars/euros...? :)