So Little Time...

Wow, what a couple of weeks!

Let me start by wishing everyone a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

2006 is shaping up to be a very exciting year for me which I sincerely hope will see me well on the way to a long hoped for career change.

I'm going to catch up with some exciting news today, even though I have a movie review pending (I recently saw the excellent Just Like Heaven, I'll post more about it later, but in case I don't, it gets 9/10, go see it!).

To the exciting news! Well, the first bit of news is not so great, Markosia won't be publishing The Young Gods, which is a shame, but not a total shock. That said, I really don't have the time to work on it right now, because of the exciting news that is to follow. I'm not too sure what the future will be for The Young Gods right now, I have some thoughts but nothing fully formed. If there is to be a future for the book it will probably be completely redone with a new art team, maybe with me just producing cover art, but the problem there is finding an art team!

Anyway, enough of that, on to the good news!

The good news is that Morkosia still like my stuff and have asked me to come up with some variant covers/pin-ups for their ongoing title, The Lexian Chronicles, featuring the main character from that book, Reena (who can be seen in the pic' above, expertly pencilled by the very talented Ryan Stegman). This has been quite a challenge for me as it's meant using Poser to produce a picture of a pre-existing character. I've had to replicate her costume and her look, which has been fairly tricky. I'm quite happy with the results (which I won't share with you as they're for Markosia's eyes only right now) but I might be purchasing a better leather texture...we'll see. Hopefully they'll like what they see and my artwork will be gracing the cover of a future issue of The Lexian Chronicles, but even if it doesn't it's been great fun and a rewarding challenge. It's definitely stretched and improved my Poser skills and forced me to dabble in the murky world of re-texturing.

That's not all the good news though! Some of you may know that many years ago I trained as a comic book inker and tried to break into the industry that way. Tim Townsend, possibly the best inker in the world, was kind enough to spend far more time than I could ever have hoped for guiding and teaching me and I got to a point where both he and I felt I was good enough to ink professionally. However, for reasons that I'll never know the doors stayed firmly shut and I ended up working in graphic design (nowhere near as fun). Anyway, flash forward to the present and I find myself chatting online with Midnight Kiss penciller Ryan Stegman about inking. He doesn't currently work with an inker and was commenting on how hard it is to find a really good one. Oh, and he mentioned that his dream was to have Tim Townsend ink his work. OK, to cut a long story short I've dusted off my drawing board, bought a new brush and a fresh pot of ink and I'm working on some inking samples for him. It's been far too long since I've inked but it's going really well so far. I forgot why I used to love inking - because I'm an inker.

It finally feels like all those doors that slammed shut in my face the last time I was trying to break into comics have finally started to open a crack. The difference this time is that I'm older and wiser. Not only does that actually improve the quality of my work, but it helps to keep me firmly grounded. If nothing else, I'm having a lot of fun right now (working 'till gone three in the morning, but having fun) and that in and of itself is great. Anything else is a bonus.

Yes, of course, it would be great to be inking professionally with a healthy side line in producing covers and pin-ups. That is the ultimate goal, the dream. Maybe do some writing too. But that's the future, right here, right now, I'm having a blast.