Page 19 is now up for your viewing and reading pleasure!

When you work on a big project, it is real easy to get caught up in trying to make everything look crisp, professional, or cool that we loose sight of what it's like to be playful with our craft. Doing comic art takes hours upon hours UPON HOURS of drafting, polishing things up, and problem solving. So putting time aside to sketch gets shoved into the back of our brain and our priorities.

It's also easy to overlook doing sketches because they're not as "sexy" as a comic page or polished illustration. There isn't a deadline for drawing pages in your sketchbook and if you work traditionally, then you're typically not using the highest grade paper neither. Also if you are creating comics you're producing multiple pages in a week or month and you think to yourself, "Aren't I getting a lot of practice just doing those?" But it's not about the practice, it's about the experimentation.

It's your sketchbook, paper, or digital canvas, so no one has to see what you're doing. This is your opportunity to go nuts! Try to use tools you wouldn't regularly use, or use your most standard tools in different ways. I have three sketchbooks (four if you count my graphics program). One for standard drawing with pencils and ink, one better suited for watercoloring my drawings, and one with heavier paper for gouache or acrylics. That might sound cumbersome, but it's nice to have all of those venues open to you if you want to try something out.

"But Tim, what about making time for it?" Well that's a hard question to answer isn't it? One can't really have a cookie-cutter method of how to fit sketching into your schedule. You'll just have to look at your schedule and etch out a spot where it would best fit. like from 7-10 on Wednesday night for example.

So get out there and make some time for some creative experimentation!
Thanks for reading!
-TiMBo

Page 18 is up! 4 more to go until the end of the chapter.

When people ask to see my artwork for this project, there are a lot of time when I'm asked "So what do you do with all of this? Do you collect it all and send it to a publisher?" This is a sensible question. After all that was one of the most commonly known routs to getting a book made for decades. So then when I answer to them "Oh I just publish everything online first." I sense a little bit of confusion. Why just put your work up for free for everyone to see? While the internet is a very modern and cutting edge form of delivery, it helps to look back at the history of comics distribution.

This was one of the earliest delivery methods for comics, the news stand! These things were set up all round cities and towns in the country to distribute new published works from daily newspapers to magazines, and yes, to the good old fashioned funny books. This was the main way that these forms of media were circulated out because it was the best way to do it. Television hadn't been invented yet and this was your first stop source to see what was new in the world.

This was long before my lifetime, but some remnants of it still remained. The earliest memory I have of seeing comic books where on a rotating rack in a grocery store like this one:

There are people around my age that joke about when comics were available at grocery stores, but this was a great way to make people conscious of comics. This is where I thought comics came from for the longest time. Then before I knew it, grocery stores stopped carrying them. Then the only place to find a comic was at a dedicated comic store.

Now, I think that comic stores are a good thing. It's a great way to find back issues and to fill in the holes on a series you were trying to collect, but the locations for these were few and far between. I grew up in a town that had an awesome comic store, but little did I know how lucky I had it. Most people have to drive to a bigger metropolitan area for their comics. So for the most part comic stores are for people in their area, and for people who were already in the know about comics.

Now we have the internet. The internet IS the new news stand. Not only do magazines have digital issues for download but there are websites dedicated to covering things in a magazine-like fashion. So this also makes it a perfect place to distribute comic material out. Who knows, maybe there will be a book in there sometime when I'm finished!

SO support web comics and print comics!
Thanks for reading!
-TiMBo

Page 17 is up so go check it out!

This past weekend was the 4th of July weekend here in the states, so for this blog entry I think I'll talk about something that's very American, COMICS! of course in the Scott McCloud book "Understanding Comics" He talks about forms of comics such as hieroglyphics existing long ago, but the idea and the model of these mass released forms of graphic storytelling were birthed in America.

Now if you think this article is going to be some jingoistic "Rah Rah, America is better than everyone." then you might want to find a different blog post. This is about how Comics were America's gift to the world and how the world gave back to it.

The Style I draw with, people ask or infer to me that my style has realism, or a Japanese style, or a European look to it. and my answer to all of them is just simply; "Yes..." I don't feel like I need to gave an answer beyond that. I'm a sponge that tries to absorb all of these approaches to storytelling that I see around me. One style or expression is not greater than the other. They are a techniques given to us to help us understand this visual medium.

That is the approach that I have taken into doing Streets of Galsha is that it doesn't have to be just this one thing. They only commitment I've really made to the series is producing each page in landscape format. Other than that, it is a world I have created that can house all of these different influences and cultures and styles. I try not to be dismissive of the other different styles that are out there and I admit that doing that can be pretty hard.

At our core we all want to stick with what we know we will like or what we're comfortable with. For someone who likes to read manga, I might suggest something done by the French artist Mobeus or vice versa. If he or she ends up disliking it, that's not bad, but I do suggest to keep an open mind. I watched something on the Discovery channel once that was talking about wolves and it said something like (and obviously I'm paraphrasing): "Wolves would purposely mate with members of other wolf packs to ensure that their offspring would come out strong, rather than inbreeding their pack into  disease and death." Now I'm not trying to promote any philandering here, but I do think that is a mentality that those who create media should take to heart. Don't just feed off of one type of influence or you're work is going to feel regurgitated and bland. If you try to gather influence from everything that's out there. than that will create a richer creative experience for both the creator and the reader.

I'm sorry if that felt a but ranty, but it's something that's been on my mind for a bit.

So here's to the love of comics, and I hope this one I've created is a proper love letter to it.

Thanks for reading
-TiMBo

Page 16 is now up for people following this comic. For my blog/journal/personal musing for this week I thought I would shed some light on an artist who is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, influences on the look of this comic, and that would be colorist John Higgins.

If I took a look at my art life as a whole, I would actually consider myself pretty new to using color. I didn't start taking painting, or in that case coloring my art seriously until I was 22 years old. So when I decided to make a comic, I didn't want to take a big risk in the way that I colored it since I was still relatively inexperienced. I already knew that I wanted to go for an old school look, but visual ascetic wasn't good enough. I needed a classical looking colorist who's colors told the story well. Once I looked back at my copies of Watchmen and The Killing Joke, I found the guy who checks all the boxes of what makes a great colorist.

John Higgins isn't simply a guy who puts colors on an image to make it look a little prettier, he's a storyteller in his own right. There was nothing workmanlike about his colors, it looked like every color on the page was a calculated creative decision either of his own volition or in collaboration with his other creators. For example here's the end of one of the pages of The Killing Joke (Took this photo myself so sorry for the shoddiness).

Here is the top of the next page:

Look at how the switch to a red color palette gives the scene a sense of dread. I could list several examples of his coloring creating mood but I need to finish updating the page. In short this the power that comics have, using simple means to extrapolate emotions from the reader. John Higgins got this, and hopefully I will too over time.

And no, I will not discuss the inferior re-coloring of The Killing Joke. Just see for yourself (re-colored version on the right):

Thank you for reading,
-TiMBo

Page 15 and i made a Boo Boo

Okay, If you have been following my web comic from the beginning up until now you might be thinking to yourself "Where did the blog posts go?

Well folks, I made a Boo Boo. I won't go into detail on how I lost all the blogs on my site (if anything to save myself some embarrassment), but i messed up and they are gone now. I was mad about it for a little while and now I'm just ready to keep at this again and the show must go on.

Here's page 15 for ya!

And i promise a big blog entry for next week to make up for the content lost

-TiMBo