Back on Track: More Artwork!

So, let's get back on track here with some art.

I finally finished the Punisher, Descent into Darkness piece!  Just in time too!  It seems that it can still be used for the Capitol City Comic Con, taking place in the middle of July.  Hooray!  I'm going to be honest, I thought that I was just going to fail this one and let down my client.  Which would have really sucked.  It was already long overdue and that alone made me feel terrible

Pencils by: Ace Continuado

I had some issues with it, one of those issues being how black everything was.  It was so heavily inked and I have never worked with anything like that before, it was definitely a learning experience.  I still kinda feel like I made a huge mess out of it.  The colors are bright, which is odd for me anyway.  Especially since the subject matter is so dark.  I guess at the very least it'll get someone's attention right?

On top of the colors, I've also been trying very hard to brush up on my own pencils and solo projects.  There were a couple that came out of boredom since work had slowed to a crawl for a week or two.  I'll admit, I may have drawn a few silly pictures and wrote some really nerdy things in box lids while I was doing inventory.  At least anyone who finds these boxes might get a laugh if they understand the references.

Someone's going to be so confused.

Hey, look!  Sarlacc barf!

Along with video game references, there were movie lines, silly "Confucius" jokes, an inside joke, which I'm sure no one will even understand but it sounded like a good idea at the time.  One said "Han shot first!" Another had a picture of a stop sign and then "Hammer time" down below it.  I think the "arrow to the knee" joke made it in there somewhere too.  

I even drew a De Lorean in one of them.  Yes, THE De Lorean from Back to the future.  Unfortunately I don't have a picture of it.  All I had to screw around with was a single black sharpie, I made the most of it.

Only YOU can prevent range fires

As you can see here, I do have a Star Trek reference, a Portal reference, Boba Fett, Smokey the Bear, and if you can't read the one with the itty bitty writing in the corner of the first picture, it says "Let the Wookie Win."

I'll probably get in trouble for it, but it's totally worth it.

As for some even more recent sketches... well..  They haven't been many and they haven't been easy either.

I know I want to put an owl on this next one below.  I wanted to do some crazy fancy owl makeup too, but I wasn't too thrilled with her neck.  I attempted to add a different angle than usual and some movement to my sketch but I sorta failed.

I'll fix it later I suppose.  It should be fun to paint over and I may actually have some nice original work to add to my prints before I head off to Otakon in the next few weeks.

Oh yeah that.

I'm so freaked out about going right now.  I have never been to Baltimore in my entire life and I have only ever passed through Maryland to visit my in-laws in Jersey.  Hooray for being scared shitless!

This next sketch of Daenerys from Game of Thrones I did with every intention of practicing with my greyscale markers. I ended up caving into the pencil in the end.  I wasn't even happy with the way her face turned out, not to mention her wonky boobies.  And what's with that hair?  It's all floaty and all over the place.

This is because I'm a total amateur and I was going to attempt making it look like a fancy portrait because I can't draw arms, hands, or anything else for that matter.

I really did have a vision for this one and I'm slowly completing it with the help of Photoshop.  It's proving to be very difficult but I need to challenge myself.  Most of my best paintings start out as sketches I didn't even like. 

I do have a work in progress shot for you guys.  It's only a very small portion of the overall piece.  I'm saving all of that for the big reveal.  I also want to finish this with enough time to print it out for Otakon.  It would be replacing my old Daenerys piece.

Everything I have been doing lately is an experiment.  As of right now I'm not even sure that I like her skin tones.  Perhaps it's a little too dull.  I jumped ahead of myself and started adding color before I was really done laying out the whole thing.

This means I'll probably be taking a few steps backward on this one.  But no worries!  I have a feeling I can finish it and that this will be one of my best works to date!  There will be dragons, and fire, and so much stuff that I'm pretty sure I can't draw.

I'm gonna do it anyway!  Onward with the artwork!

Also, for those of you who are interested, I would really like to do a Q & A blog entry.  One with illustrations.  I'd like to practice some expressions and this seems like a fun way to do it.  If you're curious about anything at all, feel free to ask!  There's a little box to contact the author on the side of the page.  Use it to ask whatever you'd like and I'll answer all the questions in a blog post within the next few weeks!  You can also comment on this blog post to ask your question!  It doesn't even have to be art related :3

Fire away!

Guns in Coimcs: You're Doing it Wrong!

Alright fellow comic book artists!  Let's talk guns!

*Also, a quick disclaimer.  Since I don't feel like rummaging through my house to find all the necessary items to take pictures of, most of these pictures are from google and are not mine.  (Except for the one below, Bad Company is mine.)

His and Hers.  Mine and my Husband's 1911s

I know how popular guns are in comic books and in movies.  They're everywhere.  You draw your crazy vigilante hanging out with his guns, you draw them being fired, you draw them being pointed at things, yadda, yadda, so on and so forth.  I'm not sure some people know just how wrong they're depicting it.

As some of you may, or may not know, I am not only a comic book colorist, but I work in a factory that manufactures handguns.  I know a thing or two about the real function of guns and how the comic books and movies get them wrong EVERY TIME.  For years Hollywood has been teaching people the weirdest crap about firearms and I'm going to debunk a few of them for you so that your comic book characters can handle a gun in a much more realistic sense and I can stop beating my head on the table when I see it.  

Some of these are just super nit picky and you can ignore them for style reasons (stuff like bullets sparking and all that.) I'm not going to go into tremendous detail, you have Google for that.

1. THE CUP AND SAUCER GRIP

Yer doin' it wrong Jack!

Yes you guys, Jack Bauer here is doing it wrong.  And you guys thought he knew how to handle a gun. Pfff.

This is probably the most common mistake I see, well, everywhere.  In comics, in movies, at the gun range with newbie shooters.  If they don't try to shoot like a thug, with the gun turned sideways, this "cup and saucer" grip is generally their first instinct.

While you should hold your pistol with both hands, this isn't the way to go about it.  If any of you have ever shot this way before, you know from experience that this is a very unstable way to hold a handgun.  I'm actually not even sure what possessed Hollywood to find this okay in the first place.

This guy does a pretty good job of showing you how to hold the gun correctly and why you should hold it that way.

 

2. BULLETS DON'T SPARK OR EXPLODE ON IMPACT

No, just no.  If you're in the process of drawing a comic frame right now, where there's a big bright poof of light where the bullet strikes, stop drawing.  Stop right now and back away.  Bullets just don't do that!  In reality they don't even spark.  

I would say it's okay to use sparks since comics are very visual, but it all depends on how realistic you want to be.  There IS a round that flares out, called Dragons Breath.  It's just a novelty item and I wouldn't even consider it for anything other than shits and giggles.  It does make a really cool picture but it's super impractical.  I think it's also only made for shotguns.

*Disclaimer: I don't own this picture.

There is also a such thing as incendiary rounds but, again, they're not going to make a super opaque explosion looking thing if it just hits a person.  Just something to think about.

3. RELOAD!

So I was watching The Walking Dead and I realized a number of things that they got wrong when it comes to guns.  There was the usual "cup and saucer" grip, there was also exaggerated recoil, and someone being told to take the safety off a Glock, which doesn't come with a manual safety unless you put one on it. I figure.  Alright, that's excusable.

Then this happened.

How many shots does that thing hold!?  If you want to do something at least half way accurate please do a little research on the gun you're planning for your characters to use and how many shots they hold.  Counting the number of bullets can even be used as a very effective way of building suspense.

One thing I don't think I've ever seen used in a comic is the quick and easy way to reload a revolver. 
For revolvers there's this thing called a speed loader.  You just pop the cylinder open, empty the old shells, put the new bullets in, twist and close the cylinder and you're ready to go for another round.  I personally have one of these myself for my little five shot revolver.  Just keep in mind that these things didn't exist back in the cowboy days.

There's also a such thing as a  moon clip which may, in fact, be even faster than a speed loader.  Not all revolvers are made to use these so I'd suggest looking up which revolvers do.  Some even require moon clips to function.

Moon clips with ammo

The Oh-So-Convenient speed-loader

Another thing I would like to touch on briefly, is the difference between a magazine, and a clip. (Speaking of moon clips and all)  People get them confused very often.  Since I was harping on The Walking Dead earlier, I'll get them on this one too.  I do believe it's the second episode of the series, maybe the first, Rick calls his magazine a clip.  

If you have a character that you really want to know guns, and who really should know guns, impress your gun-loving reader base with this little detail.

Notice something?

A lot of people that refer to a magazine as a clip have probably never actually seen a clip.  A clip is used to put bullets into a magazine.  Some guns have magazines that aren't removable and you can use a clip to load them.  Most modern guns have magazines like the ones shown above that can be attached and detached.  Not to mention the visual difference.  That's a super simplified explanation, but with a little visual aid, at least some people won't confuse the two now!

4. OTHER NITPICKS

Now we're just going to go through some of the smaller, lesser known gripes. 

The right way

*Gun safety!  That's actually a big one. When your character is handling a gun without intending on shooting someone, the gun-loving reader base will love to see your character practicing proper safety.  This means keeping their finger off the trigger until ready to fire, making sure that the gun does not point at someone that isn't an intended target, whether or not the gun is empty.  Maybe even scolding another character for the improper handling of a firearm. 

Unless your character truly is crazy, they should never be pointing a gun at their own head and smiling... like the character below.  We all know Revy is totally crazy but this is ... well... a little too much.

Revy from Black Lagoon.  One of my personal favorite Anime shows.

That picture makes me cringe every time I see it.  I'm pretty darn sure it's just fan art since the actual series does a pretty good job of accurately portraying guns.  With the exception of some dual wielding and all that.  In real life dual wielding isn't really practical as I'm sure some of you may have figured out.  It's just one of those things that looks cool, therefore, even most gun lovers will let that slide.

*Revolver Flubs. Another nitpick comes yet again from the series, The Walking Dead.  I forget which season, but it's the season finale episode.  I'm going to avoid spoilers here buy just saying that Rick's Colt Python was fired.  You never see the shot fired, but you hear it, and you also hear a clink of an empty casing hitting the floor.  Guys, revolvers don't have an extractor.  They do not spit out shells.  If you watch the show, some of you may know the scene I'm speaking of. 

*Firing.  Guns being drawn, firing while the hammer is back.  If the gun has gone off that means the hammer has hit the firing pin. This means that the hammer is down in the case of a revolver, or it means that the slide is flying back over the hammer and ejecting a shell in a semi-auto pistol.  In some cases I've even seen people draw the hammer following the slide backward.  If the gun has a slide on it and it is being fired, the slide pushes the hammer back as it flies backward, re-cocking the hammer for the next round.

 

*Silencers.  Contrary to popular belief, silencers aren't completely quiet.  They don't make that noise you hear on TV.  As someone who has fired a suppressed handgun before, I can tell you the movies really exaggerate this one.  While it does make it quiet enough that you may not have to wear hearing protection, it can still be pretty loud.  You would have to be a considerable distance away before having a suppressor would really keep your position hidden.  

Sometimes silencers can be filled with something to dampen the noise even further.  The one that I fired I'm pretty sure was filled with a little water.  It keeps the suppressor from getting hot as quickly,  and it also makes a mess.  It was still loud enough to hurt my ears just a little, granted the range I was in wasn't exactly spacious, just to give you an idea of what it's really like.  I also came out of the range with specks of grime all over from it.  Not something they show you in the movies, that's for sure.

Pillows also don't really help.  I've never shot through a pillow before, but if an actual suppressor can't make a gunshot completely silent, a pillow is certainly never going to do the trick.

 

THAT'S ALL FOLKS!

 Like I said, some of these are small nit picks that can be ignored in favor of style and this was only meant to be informational.  I hope you guys learned something and I really hope this helps in your action comic endeavors!

And now I leave you with multiple types of guns firing in slow motion. 

Research! Slasher Movie Binge

What an appropriate day for a picture full of slasher villains!  I am still working on this Punisher piece for a comic convention.  I plan to have it done sometime this weekend because it really needs to be finished!  Ugh, me and deadlines don't mix.  I really need to get a handle on my procrastination.  I could have this piece done in just a matter of hours if I could only get up the inspiration to do it.  I've even gone on a slasher film kick just to get a good idea of what I'm supposed to do with the rest of the picture!

I think I'm looking perhaps a little too colorful for something that's supposed to be ... gritty.  They actually chose me to do this picture because of the whole grit factor.  I don't know what I'm doin' here!  I do know who ALL of the characters are now and hopefully that will help me along so I can his my goal of finishing it tomorrow. 

Livestreaming, as odd as this sounds, seems to keep me focused on artwork better than anything so I may stream the rest of this work tomorrow.  I guess I feel like I have to be doing something interesting for viewers to want to watch.  This way I'm obligated to keep working and I don't get as easily distracted by--

Ohh shiny internet...

Anyway, going on a slasher film binge also may have inspired something.  I just might have a short story on my hands.  I never do short stories, this stuff is pretty freakin' rare.  I know how I want it to start and I know how I want it to end and I can't tell you much about it.  If I gave you a summary I'd have to kill you.  There is almost no way I could give some kind of summary that wouldn't spoil it in some way.  And yes... it's kind of a slasher.  Can't wait to get it on paper it'll be awesome.

I'm certainly not going to have my heroine (if there is one) keep thinking that she's killed the psycho and then keep dropping the knife right next to his pseudo dead body!!  *cough* Halloween *cough* I've also come to the conclusion, after multiple slasher films, that some slasher film antagonists are scared of sex and that's why they feel the need to kill every character that gets some.  Even if that's totally not true, I did find that to be an odd correlation there.  In any case, I plan to write and whatever comes out, is what comes out.  It might go into the direction of a thriller more than a slasher, who knows.

In other news:

So we all know about how I went on a very large rant yesterday.  One point of my rant was my crappy apartment and how much is broken and wrong with it.  I appreciate that the maintenance staff really did try to fix the old unit, the problem was that it was just too small and the complex itself didn't want to shovel out the money to fix the problem.  Our AC never turned off because it never reached the temperature it was set on so our power bills were insane.  All just to keep the temperature below eighty degrees.

The AC at work is broken too and the last thing I wanted to do is come home to a hot, musty apartment.  I finally had enough and I sent them an ultimatum last night.  I must be a more intimidating person than I thought.  Today I came home to a nice, shiny new air conditioning unit.

 Victory is MINE!

Student Loans: Satan's Idea

Hello again everyone and sorry for the long absence.  I recently had a sort of heartbreak.  If you're no interested at all in a rant, I'd suggest not reading this particular entry.  I'll probably have another entry this weekend to get things back on track.  For now though, I need to get this off my chest.

So, I decided to start looking for a house to buy but it turned out to just be a terrible idea.  After being turned down by numerous lenders I was very depressed.

I haven't completely recovered and I haven't completely given up.  I really want a house of my own.  Renting is almost just like tossing money into a dumpster and I really don't want to continue to rent apartments like this.  These disappointingly small, run down apartments that go for as much money as it would be for me to pay a mortgage on a decent house.  I mean, it is absolutely disgusting the shape this apartment is in.  I pay more for this two bedroom piece of crap than my friends do for their three bedroom brick house.  We've had so many bad experiences with this apartment that I never want to rent again.

(boring alert!  If you don't care about our crappy apartment, which you probably don't, you can skip this.)

The neighbor, he's a nice guy, nothing against him, but he smokes and we can smell it in our apartment.  It's not his fault, it's the shoddy construction of this building.  The floors are uneven, the windows are drafty, there were squirrels living in the ceiling (I'm honestly not sure if they left of their own accord or if they died up there.) and the air conditioner doesn't work as well as it should.  Heck, I found even more wrong when I was hanging up curtains the other day.  While I was making measurements to make sure I got the curtain rod straight, I discovered that the ceiling is actually not level.  I thought the molding around the top of the walls looked off, now I know it's off.  No matter what I do, that damn curtain doesn't look like it's hanging straight.  I knew that I should have backed out when they showed us the model and then wouldn't let us see our actual unit until only two days before we were set to move in.

(End of apartment rant.)

I'm still saving money but now I'm trying extra hard to build credit.  Why is the credit system so stupid anyway?  So many ways to screw it up, but so few ways to actually build it.  I have this dumb secured credit card that is supposed to report like a normal credit card.  I've been using it for seven months, to no actual avail.  I still have a credit score of zero.  I didn't think that it would be quick but I also didn't think that my score would still be non existent by now.  We're working on converting other bills to my name since that seems to help at least somewhat.

I'm actually really irritated that they never taught any of this crap while we were in school.  I mean seriously, a little head's up would have been nice!  Like hey, this is how you write a resume, this is how you go to an interview, this is what credit is and how it can royally screw up your life if you don't know what to do with it.  What did I learn instead?  Thanks for the course in calculus, I've totally been using that. (note the sarcasm.)

Not that I scoff at knowing calculus, just that it's amazing how it doesn't matter once you get into college.  I mean, the first thing they do for your core classes is take you back five years.  Seriously.  Algebra I, again?  I took that in the seventh grade and passed!  Why in the hell would you make me pay for a class that I took and passed when I was twelve?!?

Anyway, back on track here.

Why not work with my husband to get a loan?  Well, we can't use his credit score at all, even though he has a good one.  Three words: defaulted student loans.  His loans went into default when he was nineteen and since we've been together, we've made attempts to settle his debt and start making payments on it again.

We tried anyway.

What it really means when your student loans go into default is that they give your debt to some dickhead collection agency that works for the government.  If it works for the government you can expect it to make very little to no sense and you can also bet that everyone you talk to in that agency is an asshole.  They will not bargain with you.  Especially not this one in New Jersey apparently.

They want far too much money a month in order to get back into good standing.  Twice our rent payment a month for six months?  $1400 a MONTH just go get back in good standing with them?  Excuse my language, but they can go fuck themselves.  I'm not interested in running myself into the ground to pay off a debt that isn't even mine to begin with.  I swear, this isn't student aid, this is the goddamn mafia.  They have to take small payments if we throw it at them, this is true.  The catch is that if we were to make payments of anything less than the outrageous amount they want, it won't even go toward fixing his credit.  It would be all for nothing and the interest stacks up faster than this shit gets paid.

I would love to know who it was that decided that loaning money out to dumb kids was a good idea.  Especially when there's no real collateral for it.  For any other loan you have something of value you could lose.  You don't pay your mortgage, you lose your house; don't pay your car payments and they repo your car.  There's nothing of value that they can take back from you if you fail to pay a student loan.  Their solution to this?  I guess some asshole was like, "Oh I have it!  The collateral for the loan will be their quality of life!"   For those of you that don't know just how badly student loans can screw you over, they are the ONLY debt that will never leave your credit until you pay it off.  You either pay it off or you die, those are the only two ways out of it.  Not even filing for bankruptcy will get rid of it.

It's absolutely ridiculous.

It will keep you from getting anything in the future.  It will keep you from getting a home, it will keep you from getting just a small loan for anything, it can even keep you from getting a job. (Apparently you have to have squeaky clean credit in order to be a cop.  Didn't know that until recently myself.)

All things considered, I'd think twice before signing those FAFSA forms if I were you.  This day and age it's almost more likely to hurt you than help you.

So... is America still sounding like land of the free to you guys?  More like land where everyone is expected to start life $20,000 in debt.

Well now that that's off my chest, the next entry will get us back on track.  Back to art and writing and away from the doom and gloom!

May the next blog post actually be happy!  May it also actually be about art or writing.