Arendelle's Coolest Fashions

Never get tired of that pun B)

So it's likely well-known at this point how obsessed I am with Frozen haha.  Well in any case, I completely adore the costuming, literally every costume in the movie is wonderful.  I love the colors, the patterns, everything.  My top favorite?  It'd be a very, very close tie between Elsa's coronation gown and Anna's traveling outfit, with Elsa's ice gown in second place.  I guess I have a thing for capes!

On top of inspiring so many other things in my own art, Frozen has made me think about my own character's costumes a LOT more.  I re-read/re-watched all the stuff about the research that the team did to create these outfits and I was crazy inspired.  Costuming says a lot about a character so it should be given a lot of consideration!  I never mindlessly threw clothes on characters, but I certainly do a lot more research and decide on details much more intricately than ever before!  Thank you Frozen and everyone involved for your wonderfully amazing and inspiring film!!

Also, I drew Elsa and Anna separately, so I now think it's rather amusing that it looks like Anna's about to nail Elsa with a snowball haha!

Process of a Ritzkrieg Page

Step 1 - Thumbnailing

Step 2 - Pencil sketch

Step 3 - Transfer of sketch to printed template (still a pencil sketch)

Step 4 - Lineart

Step 5 - Shades

This is pretty much how I've been doing Ritzkrieg pages since day 1 a little over a year ago, roughly 100 pages ago too.  Inks are a rather unpredictable medium... some days my hands are shakier with the lines and often the markers will bleed where I don't expect. Still, I love working traditionally, I feel like I have so much more control over what I'm drawing than if I were working digitally, even though digital would be much cleaner (and it would be easier to fix mistakes @w@ )

Compared to the earlier pages of Ritzkrieg, I think improvement is coming very slowly, but surely!  At least I can say I've learned a lot since then and I'm just gradually learning to apply things I read about and see in other comics.  There is so much to making a successful comic, it makes my head spin, so I take it slow!  Luckily this is a nice long comic that I have to work with, so by the end I should be leagues ahead of where I was when I started.  It's truly a hands-on learning experience!

Kids Read Comics

Courtney and I were at Kids Reads Comics this past weekend and we had a BLAST!!  We brought copies of Podunk to sell and our own individual mini-comics (I had Benny Bantam and Boocha's Perfect Plan).  I also brought a variety of buttons, stickers, and bookmarks to sell along with commissions!  For the first time ever, bookmarks and buttons sold remarkably well, what a surprise!  I guess we were in a library, so bookmarks make sense haha!

Anyway, I met tons of wonderful amazing people!  Check 'em the heck out:

Jennifer Rose Evans

Gregg Schigiel

Rachel Polk

Chris Ludden

Lee Cherolis

Emma Capps

Dani Jones

And so many, many more!!

There was a great vibe to this con and a lot of excitement in the air.  The crowds were great and the artist community was top notch.  All I can say is... I can't wait to go back next year!!!

A post of commissions and trades from the show is  coming next!

Princess Power!

Some Disney ladies who have some fabulous attire!  All doodles from the past couple of weeks/months.  I just adore Giselle!  As a bonus, here's another fantastic Disney lady... Lady!

Sparkly New Ritzkrieg References

I was supposed to start chapter 6 of my webcomic Ritzkrieg today but can't be at home til next week and I have no way to scan them in til then unfortunately... I decided to update the character references, which were now a little over a year old.  I've learned a lot about my characters and how to draw them through doing the comic, updating the refs was a lot more fun than the initial stuff!

Fredrich has pretty much always been the same, I've only had to work on improving my ability to actually draw him.  A friend and I originally wrote the story together and he was her creation, she did a fabulous job.  Eva, on the other hand, has gone through a lot of changes.  I didn't really know a lot about the time period when I first started, but now that I do it's been tricky getting Eva to look like "herself" when changing hair and clothes.  I purposefully make her clothes more youthful than her age, a personality quirk, and while bangs were generally pinned back in this time, Eva's sort of got a Jean Arthur thing going on.  I dunno, it's a lot of fun to work with these characters and this story, I hope I redo these again next year and make 'em look even better!

Benny's Coop

My comic pages for Technicolor OCT are basically done so now I can move into my big assignment for the summer, which is to learn about depth and environments.  The first two are my attempt at a home for my character Benny Bantam (which come from many, many sketches if you can believe it!).  It's a simple home with its roots in a perfect, rounded, musical 1920s rubberhose style (That was Benny's original era afterall!).  Benny's wife, Bebe Bantam, tends to the landscaping and gardening, which is also simple.  She likes to keep their home neat, but they're still chickens so they can't help but have hay strewn about.  They live in the countryside, allowing for sprawling fields of corn and other vegetation, which mostly belongs to other farmers in the area.  Very midwestern!

Anyway, I got a critique from my professor and so the bottom image is the result of that.  I didn't even think about my canvas size, which went from 800x800 to 1200x800 (writing this here mostly for my own reference).  I'm also starting to understand how to actually create depth by taking advantage of all the grounds (foreground, midground, background).  A few days ago he gave me Hans Bacher's Dream Worlds to study, which I have only just begun to delve into but I'm already learning a lot! I'll be practicing environments a TON of the summer so expect to see much, much more!

Appleseed Photos

Photos courtesy of Appleseed Comic Con

They had two pictures of our table so I thought I'd share! Mostly because I'm not in them... too much.  I'm the doof in the sailor outfit!  We'll be hitting Kids Read Comics soon too!  I don't think I'll be producing any new art for that but if I do I'll keep ya posted!