Page 39 is Up! sorry it was late but I didn't want to release it until it was just good enough.

I just want to announce a few things. First off I want to let everyone know that I'm going to be taking 3 weeks off after next week's update. Two holidays are happening followed by my birthday. I don't have anything special planned for my birthday (or anything for that matter), but it's more of an excuse to get things caught up on the rest of this chapter and to get the ball rolling on things with the next one. Although since Christmas lands on Wednesday, I might throw something on the site that day.

Second, My comics are on both Comic Rocket and Ink Outbreak. They are both really cool websites for reading webcomics with features like saving your page. I will be making buttons on this page to link to those soon. That will be another thing that I work on during my break. Plus I will also make facebook, twitter, and email buttons on this blog page that are much clearer.

Okay, that was quicker to do than I thought.

Time to go back to work!
-TiMBo

Page 38 is out now and we're close to getting 40 pages behind us. So keep tuning in to that!

Well I bought the domain name for this website a year ago this upcoming December 18th and I'm getting notification e-mails telling me to renew it, and I'm going to do it, but I am looking for how I can make things better.

I don't try to be coy when I tell people that I don't look at doing this as a hobby, but as a path to doing what I really want to do, draw comics for a living, and I have invested a lot of my lifetime to hone my skills to do this and I don't want to drop all that and begin learning to become an accountant, or start from the ground floor to be a mail man, or start from scratch to become an electrician.

That being said, I haven't been doing great reaching that goal. My PayPal balance is still at zero, and I haven't sold any of the original art for precautionary reasons. So I haven't gotten anything back (of monetary value) for all the work I put into this. And believe me when I say that it has been a lot of work that I put into this. For any of you not savvy to the mainstream printing world, penciling, inking, coloring, and lettering are all jobs that are divvied up between different people. So from that perspective, i am doing 4 people's jobs all myself. So let me be very generous for how much time I put into each page and say that I spend 20 hours per page. We are at 38 today and that would mean that I have invested 760 hours into this comic, that would make an even 800 including 2 of the chapter covers.

Now, as much as that previous paragraph sounded like complaining, I wouldn't take back those 800 hours for anything, but I do need to move that in a direction towards making a career. I am hoping to have a convention schedule, art to sell, and I may delve into some kind of crowd sourcing in 2014. And if any of you have any suggestions for things I should do, let me know.

Enjoy the work
-TiMBo

As per usual, the new page is out, and without further ado; my rambling of the week!

When a person embarks on a creative endeavor, the first thing that happens is the envisioning of the project. You get an idea weather it seems concrete or a little abstract of how the project turns out and you just think to yourself "Oh man! It's going to be so great when this thing materializes into the thing I see in my head." Yet something that doesn't often come to mind when we get these visions for a project are logistical questions like "How much work will this take?", "Do I have the time to do this?", "Am I even at the skill level to achieve this vision that I see in my head?" Sometimes the fantasy of the result that we see in our heads binds us from from what we actually have to do in order to make it a reality.

So Why am I picking this for a topic for a blog? BECAUSE I'M SUPER GUILTY OF IT! This happens all to me all the time. I get a vision for doing something cool (mainly drawings or illustrations) and I either underestimate how much effort needs to go into it, or I just outright don't  take it into account. This will then lead into much frustration to be had. Either in the tumbnail process, or the the bulk of the main project, or BOTH that I try to work out the kinks of the project and I'll think to myself "What's going on here?! Why is this thing not turning out like this super high quality version of it in my head?!" Then I'll either begrudgingly quit the project or finish it with a less than satisfied feeling for it. It's hard for me to name a time when I'm drawing or painting where it doesn't play out closely to this.

So what's happening? Is there something wrong with me? Should I get help for this? No, not really. I used to the term 'fantasy' in the earlier paragraph for a reason. The definition of the word is: "The faculty or activity of imagining things, esp. things that are impossible or improbable." That's what a lot of these flashes of inspiration are. They're an unrealistic expectation of what the result of our project should be. I said that these ideas can can be concrete or abstract, but when you boil them down, all ideas are abstract. We are chasing after a feeling we have and scramble to find a physical way to translate that into the real world, and no matter how much effort we put into it, our desired result can't overcome the limitations of reality. A picture is worth a thousand words but the feelings that they can make us feel can sometimes be wordless.

Now is the moral of this blog that all of our trails to achieve dreams are futile and not worth trying? No, not at all. There would be no progress if people weren't trying to push themselves to a higher ideal. We need to work to get closer to our ideal, but the issue with that is that you need to finish something at some point. You can't just keep polishing something for an undetermined amount of time or else who knows when you'll have something to show for your work. So while it's good for you to do better, it's also good to set limits or deadlines to it as well. If something turned out a little less than desirable, then just brush off your shoulder and try better on the next venture.

Am I right? Or am I some anomaly living in north west Ohio who thinks this?

Keep working towards that "perfect piece"!
-TiMBo

The new page is up and now I have all the original art of the pages I have published up on my deviantart page.

As you can see this blog entry is called finding your voice, and by that I don't mean your singing voice, I mean what it is that makes your drawing/paniting/illustrations uniquely yours.

When one embarks on learning how to draw, we start off by copying a lot of stuff. Some would say this is "tracing' or some would call this "using reference" but either way, we are copying another work whether it's an illustration or a photograph, and this is completely fine. Hell, there's even a "grown up" version of this called "Masters Studies" I think that asking someone to learn a skill completely in a vacuum is a very unreasonable request. Usually a reason that we peruse learning a skill like drawing is that we're inspired by the work of someone else.

Now does this make it okay to master someone else's drawing style and market it as you?... Well, I would be inclined to say no but it might bring you a little success, but I'm also willing to bet that you wouldn't want to go down as "The Poor Man's <Blank>"

So you have to branch out and experiment with other looks and styles. Surely your a fan of more than one artist or illustrator, otherwise you're a really boring person.

I guess the way to illustrate this is to go through a journey I had. Up until I was 22, i figured that I would be a pencil and ink guy and nothing more. I figured that painting was just for those people who "get it" and I wasn't one of them. Then I came across this video of Alex Ross painting a cover:

I felt like I peeked behind a magicians curtain when I saw this. "OHH! This is how he does it!" I thought to myself. Every other art lesson I had prior to this video didn't show me an organized structure to making a painting like this did. So now that I had some idea of how to approach painting, I wanted to get my hands dirty.

I decided just to try it with pictures of my friends. My first attempts didn't have the same finesse as Mr. Ross, but I was learning about how the medium worked.

I decided to do these fun paintings of the Chrono Trigger characters. I wanted the structure of Toriyama's character design to be undeniable but I wanted to push the realism.

I also did these pieces for The Legend of Korra. Here again i was pushing that realism with mixed results.

So I put some time aside to do another one for this year's season "Book 2 Spirit" and I found myself as a cross roads for how I was going to approach the painting of this piece. If i was going to go for that realistic look or if I was going to take a bit more of a stylized. So I asked my other art buddies and they all thought i should make it a little more stylized with subtle outlines.

I was really psyched about the way this turned out. I felt like I found a look that was something unique to me, and I cant wait to do more! But I have to keep up this comic as well.

So If you feel like you're being too derivative, just throw something different into it to see if it's something you would like to stick with your art.

Now to get back to work on this comic.

Peace!
-TiMBo

I'm going to be frank with you folks, I was going to do a much bigger blog entry here, but there's an aspect of it that's not finished yet. It will definitely be finished for next weeks page entry. Just letting you all know that it's keeping up the hard work for you all.

Thanks,
-TiMBo

I have decided to move the page updates to Wednesday, because well frankly, I would like my weekends to be totally Galsha free. The artwork has been running behind, and I should have known with my crappy sense of discipline that I would be doing things the night before an update needs to go up. Now I have my weekend totally free to either draw or paint other stuff, or for other activities entirely. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work.

Hope you're enjoying the experience!

-TiMBo

You know the drill, here's the new page and here's the scan of the original art of the page.

Here I am at the halfway point of chapter 2. I've enjoyed making this comic so far, but something that stinks about it is that it doesn't give me a lot of time to draw things outside of the comic. Each step of the process of making a page demands many hours out of me. I sometimes find myself not wanting to draw in my free time since that's all I'm doing when I'm not free.

This bit of complaining might sound like I view creating a comic as a burden, but I've actually started viewing it as trying to break bad habits. Before this project I went from just drawing whatever the hell I wanted with no deadline attached to it, to to needing to have a fully penciled, inked, lettered, and colored comic page a week. I may be on my 33rd page I still have a lot of learning to do. I have to learn how to focus on my work more and manage my time better.

I don't have much more to say other than I need to work harder, but the encouragement of you readers would be much appreciated.

Thanks
-TiMBo

Page 32 is now up and in the places that you would usually expect it.

Now I want to use this spot one my comic's website to talk about another comic, Y The Last Man.

Comics have a hard time folks. I don't mean the people creating them (Although creating them is pretty tough), but I'm talking about the way they're precived. The master status that they've had for years, decades to be more exact, is that they're only an outlet for the superhero genre. I haven't done a lot of international research on this topic but I'm betting it's mostly an American problem. Go to anyone you pass by in your day to day routine and ask them what the first things that come to mind when they hear the term comics or comic books and most of them will say Superman, Batman, Spideman, or characters of the like from the two big comics publishers. Although you might get a few propel there who mention Charlie Brown or Calvin and Hobbes.

Now I'm sure if you're reading this that you're smart enough to know that comics can do so much more than superhero stories. Yet when I hear people say "I'm not really into comics." I can't help but think that they're really referring to the genre's I've mentioned. They just need to find a different comic and story being to show them that the story being told is just as important, if not more important than the form it's being told in. After reading the first two volumes of Y The Last Man. I feel like this could be that comic for so many people (Well... Streets of Galsha first then this comic :-p).

For anyone unfamiliar with this comic, the premise is that though some freak reason, all the male mammals on planet earth die simultaneously, except for a young man named Yorick Brown and his new pet helper monkey in training and they have to figure out why that happened. While the hook of the series is a very interesting "What if?" story, what's really interesting is what this series tells us about ourselves. It shows how we have created a pretty unfair world for women over the centuries. Since all the other characters other than Yorick are women they are defined by their distinct character traits and not their gender roles.

The series is written by Brian K. Vaughan who came from working on a lot if television and the comic can can have the feeling of a TV show, but is that necessarily a bad thing? I would like people who have never read a comic before to try this and it would be more accessible to them if it bared similarities to something else they might already be familiar with.

So yea in loving this comic so far, I might post about it again for the middle and ending of the series.

Thanks for reading

-TiMBo

Well page 31 is up now which also means you can go check out the original art of the said page on my Deviantart site.

Sorry I'm putting this page up later in the day but I was distracted by this little guy!

Yup I have a cat now. Just getting used to having it in the house and all so I was playing around with it most if the day before going over to this site and updating things and I realized something that was kind of scary for me.

I thought I was still in te early part of chapter 2, but I'm actually nealy halfway through it. I was feeling a little complacent for a while but now the work on this comic is catching up with me. I have a lot of pages to color this week but now I have a little co-pilot in my lap to keep me company durring it!

-Thanks for reading!

-TiMBo

WOW! We're up to 30 pages so go check out the 30th one! Also check out the scan of the original page on my DA site.

Now let's talk about brush pens. For professional inkers or people wanting to be professional inkers, brush pen can be a dirty word. For a long time they have been these spongy felt tipped things that fall apart very easily. When I started getting a feel for inking with a real brush, I thought that these other so called brush pens were junk too. However i was looking for a good brush pen since carrying all the tools around to ink with a real brush was a pretty big pain. It wasn't until a little over a year ago that I came across the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen. It was not disposable, but refillable. Instead of a felt tip it has nylon bristles. It can do dry brush effects with either quick strokes or drying the brush a bit. It's a nice tool and a good alternative to carrying your brush, ink bottle, water cup, and towel everywhere you went.

So am I totally satisfied with this brush pen? Not completely. The bristles are real nice but not quite as smooth as real hairs. The ink dispensing can be temperamental, fluctuating between not dispensing enough ink that the brush will dry out and need a rinse or dispensing too much to where the brush becomes globby. Although I will say the the pros outweigh the cons in this case. I do want to try other brush pens. There is one that has actual sable hairs in it that I would love to try out but it's pretty expensive (Maybe you can help me in that venture by clicking that donate button up there! Wink). In the main time this comic will be mostly inked with the pocket brush.

Keep on Brushing!
-TiMBo