I have a NEW ART BOOK in this series now on Kickstarter!
This is the cover art for my NEW BENIGN KINGDOM ART BOOK. We just launched the Kickstarter for the first Benign Kingdom publication in a few years: a set of 32-page art books by Meredith Gran, Dustin Harbin, Becky Dreistadt, and myself. (Becky and I did Benign Kingdom art books back in 2012, too)
Thank you for having a look and spreading the word!! we back baby
The end times are upon us, so I’ve added 50 more pages to my sketchbook ebook collection on Gumroad, the SKETCHBOOK ESCHATON.
It now includes 40 pages of Vattu development, and over 300 pages of landscapes, monsters, figure drawing, character design, headache drawings, explorations, stream-of-consciousness noise from the past 2 years or so.
(if you’ve bought this thing before, you will have gotten an email with a link to the new edition)
eschaton is a word i like a lot that means the end of the world, kind of. can we all agree to use this word more please
Hey I’ve put up a bunch of original art in the Etsy shop! Pages from comics spanning the past 9 years, and some other things too.
I’m going to try to do this more! I have a lot of this stuff.
The four travelers walked up to the great gate of Emerald City and rang the bell. After ringing several times, it was opened by the same Guardian of the Gates they had met before.
"What! are you back again?" he asked, in surprise.
And we’re back! I just finished the first half of my webcomic Vattu and I’m taking a break on updating that for a month; one of the (several) things I’ll be working on in that time is the Wizard of Oz project! Halfway done; expect more soon.
I skipped ahead for this one because I wanted to draw more Emerald City stuff (previously). This is Chapter 15, when Dorothy and friends return to the City from Winkie-land.
Got some fun ones coming up.
excited to be working on this thing again! It’s the biggest ‘side project’ I’ve done so naturally I underestimated how hard it would be to keep going at a consistent speed
Finished the inks for my screenprinted poster! Now I have to figure out how to scan something so huge, and color color color. I’ve been working on another huge drawing at the same time! Fun/stressful.
An update on Becky’s image will be coming soon, too. You can see all of our process right here.
with love,
evan
A book goblin. I’m one goblin behind my one-a-day goal for goblin week!!! I will try to get another done today.
I am THRILLED at how many spectacular submissions have already been received for the GOBLIN WEEK ZINE. Thank you everyone so far for submitting your words and pictures! I would love to have a pretty wide range of different works, so if you are apprehensive about submitting something I think you should probably… go for it….?
All I ever want to say about goblin week is that I am super excited about how well goblin week is going. Thank you everyone and I’m glad you’re having fun. 60 hours remain, how many goblins can we fit in that time!!!
more gblns
My second goblin for GOBLINWEEK2014!!! A Polyhedron Goblin.
Here’s what’s going on for Goblin Week this year so far:
Thank you everyone for participating in what is already THE MOST SUCCESSFUL GOBLIN WEEK EVER!
i am very into goblin week
The Jack of Fauna.
I did the art for two cards of a fairy-themed playing card deck! There is a Kickstarter for it running right now!
The first page of Book 2 of Vattu went online today! Now might be a good time to check out this comic, if you haven’t read any of it before…
Above and throughout this post, preliminary artwork for Vattu.
Where do you get your ideas? is the question I have heard more than any other question, and other comic people I’ve talked to about it have gotten it a lot too. After writing the following I sort of realized it is the best I can do at an answer:
So finishing OoT, and gearing up to start drawing Vattu, and trying to solidify several nebulous ideas for another project into something workable, have got me thinking about ideas and how they work.
Between Rice Boy and Order of Tales I think I’ve gotten a sense for the process by which I work from idea to product, wide to tight. The experience of finishing the actual Work (years-long, grueling and usually boring, at the very least) and seeing it line up well with the Idea (easy, fun, and completely untainted by reality) is kind of interesting, and has only really happened for me with Order of Tales I think.
The little idea-seeds that start everything aren’t often very clear or very detailed, and if I try to articulate them to anybody else I realize they’re usually uninteresting outside of my own head. It’s a vague sense of the way that a story or a character or setting should seem: not specific enough to record straight to paper faithfully, but specific enough to know a direction, and to know when you’re off track. I think the major bottleneck for people asking the HowDoYouGetYourIdeas question is this: realizing that anything is fair game, and essentially training yourself to funnel your observation of the world into idea-generation. I do not know if that makes sense but that is what I do most of the time.
There seems to be a sort of purity in the idea-seed, which can be lost as it’s worked over and developed. For example! My ideas for things usually start with some mood or visual aesthetic; much less frequently with a discrete concept. Koark started as a sense of a tall, mysterious person, obsessed with fictions, visually dramatic but with a sense of awkwardness that sort of disarms the self-importance of him. I found myself looking back at that seed throughout my development of the character, and throughout the story. That seed is what got me interested in the character, and what got me interested in making OoT at all, so I guess I figured that there was something essential there, and I made it a point not to get too far off-track.
But getting off-track can be useful, too, can’t it? It’s easy to get stuck on something, or to get too attached to a character or idea or passage of the story. It doesn’t really help to invest these things with too much importance before they’re realized; I think it’s good to remain open to different arrangements for as long as possible in each successive stage of making the thing. Having somebody you can go over stuff with while it’s still embryonic can be helpful– I find myself making a lot of basic assumptions about the structure of a story long before it’s worked out tightly enough to make such assumptions, and it sometimes takes someone else’s input for me to realize I’ve been making them at all. If that makes any sense! I guess this is something that editors are for but I have never had one; I talk about stuff I am working on incessantly with my girlfriend Lela and she is very helpful.
Ok. It’s important to know that pretty much everything starts vague and simple, and when we say that we love the IDEA of a story, it’s more a testament to the skill of the creator in realizing that idea than it is to the quality of the idea itself, I think. I try to err on the side of underestimating the value of ideas, because it’s easier to have them than to realize them, and we shouldn’t get excited about them and burned out before we’ve started the actual work!
I want to write more stuff about comics. Maybe we can consider this Part 1 of a thing. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to read.
