Phalanx
Posted on March 10, 2010
Here is another of the pieces I completed for the Alexander project for Pearson Educational Group. This piece needed to show a group of soldiers in a phalanx formation. It was a fun piece to do - I enjoyed researching the armor and I was rather pleased with how the composition turned out on this one.
You will also see that the final art changed a bit from the original thumbnail.
In the original thumbnail the phalanx is pushed back a bit, but the client thought it would be a good idea to pull the phalanx up a bit closer so we could see a bit more detail. Personally, I think it was a great decision - it added more depth to the piece as well as allowing me to show more detail in the character and armor in the foreground.
Naturally, you are the final judge, but I am pretty pleased with how this turned out.
Thumbnail -
Pencils -
Colors -
I've got a few more pieces in this series I'll be posting up, so I hope you are digging these!
Jer
Next Alexander
Posted on March 2, 2010
Here is another in the series of Alexander pieces I completed at the beginning of 2009.
There is definitely something I find appealing about doing work from history that requires a bit of research and reference. That was one of the things I enjoyed most about my Inuit work - getting to research and learn about all the different people and their clothing, tools, and lifestyles. This is no different - it was for a history textbook, so required that it be as accurate as we could get it.
I'm no historian, so I won't claim that everything is perfect, but if not, it is at least pretty close.
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Pencils -
Final colored artwork -
This, by the way, was also one of my favorites of the series of images I did. Alexander overlooking his empire! I really love drawing wide, panoramic, environmental scenes.
Jer
Projects: Warlord – The Adventures of Keziah Firehair
Posted on February 25, 2010
ABOUT
It seems like ages ago, now, but I think it was about two years ago I was out at Planet Comicon in Kansas City and had a chat with a fellow artist and friend of mine, Dan Scott. We were talking a bit about creating artwork for card games and that I was looking for some additional work doing card art. One of the games he suggested was Warlord. He had recently been contacted by the gentleman who owns/runs Warlord, Arne Reuter, and was too busy to take on any cards. He was kind enough to hook me up with his contact info.
I got in touch with Arne and we got to talking and it turns out he was interested in doing a webcomic to go along with the card game. Now, I love comics, particularly webcomics, so I was pretty interested. But, as we all know, I'm a bit slow at drawing pages. I felt that if there was any hope of this project being consistent and moving forward at a regular rate, I would need to bring in somebody to handle the actual drawing. Enter my good friend and fellow artist Jeff Wamester. I talked to Jeff a bit to see if he would be interested in something like this and once I got his okay, I showed his work to Arne, who quickly approved.
It was agreed that I would design the characters (based on characters already created for the game), do layouts, and color the comic. Jeff would handle pencils and inks. Arne would handle the final lettering. We got right to work.
CHARACTERS
The characters were pretty fun to design, draw, and color. I spent quite a bit of time on them trying to make each unique as well as researching clothing and armor to make sure everything looked and functioned accurately. It's pretty important to me, at least with my art and design, that clothing, weapons, armor all appear real, believable, and functional. I think these, for the most part, appear that way.
LAYOUTS
I have to say - this is one of the hardest things about comics for me. Getting the flow of the story down, keeping a balance between long, middle, and close-up shots, and leaving space for word balloons is tough. But, I like the challenge (maybe a little more than the actual drawing, though less than the finished product, heh). I have to say, one of the funnest parts of this whole project was seeing Jeff make finished artwork from my layouts.
FINAL PAGES
(Pencils and inks by Jeff Wamester. Colors by me.)
These, in my opinion, are still some of the strongest color work I've done to date. I believe part of that has to do with Jeff's amazing linework, but, with this project something just clicked and throughout, I was pretty thrilled with how my color work turned out.
CURRENTLY
This was (is?) a fun project to work on. It moved along kind of slowly and it was never posted in full. I do hope that we'll actually finish this up at some point - I think Jeff actually has one or two pages left to finish, but I'm not sure if we'll ever get back to actually finishing it. Communication with Arne sort of dwindled off toward the end and he never actually posted several of the finished pages I sent him (which you can see here without lettering). So, we're sort of in limbo - but I hope that we get a chance to come back to this and wrap it up. I think given enough time, promotion, and effort, it could have been one of the better fantasy webcomics on the web.
Jer
Another Alexander Piece
Posted on February 15, 2010
Hello folks!
Here is another piece I completed for Pearson Educational Group at the beginning of 2009. I spent a good part of this past year doing color work, so these are among the few illustrations that I completed all of the art duties on, from concept to finished color. Hope you dig them!
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Finished Illustration -
Thanks!
Jer
Projects: Baeg Tobar
Posted on February 12, 2010
I am currently involved in a number of projects, some have ground to a halt, are on pause, or are moving right along. One of the things I'll be using the new blog/site for is to talk about some of these projects I'm involved in and I may make announcements about them over here from time to time. Either way, I'm going to be posting an introduction to each of my various projects here on the blog over the next several weeks.
First and foremost, anybody that knows me or about me has probably heard or probably knows a little bit about my massive online world building project called Baeg Tobar. And really, I use the term "my" loosely - there are many talented people that are involved and have helped form this project into what it now is. I contribute art, art direction, and help manage the various elements to keep things moving along.
So, how do I describe the world of Baeg Tobar? It is basically a massive fantasy setting with some steampunk elements. We created this expansive and detailed world as a place in which a variety of stories can be told through various media, such as novels, short stories, comics, flash fiction, and art. I believe the last I checked, our resource guide (basically the encyclopedia of the world) clocked in at over 150 pages of detailed information, including details about the world, creatures, and peoples. We even have details about the biology and geology of the world! It's really pretty insane.
To give you a bit of history on this project, it's been around since late 2004 or early 2005. Around that time I was getting out of school at the Kansas City Art Institute and I was looking around for some kind of project I could be putting some of my free time into working on. Something that would allow me to approach the project through any medium I wanted. I also wanted something collaborative that I could invite fellow artists and creatives to have fun with. I had several false starts with several groups of people until I started talking to a friend of mine, Jeffrey Vasquez. Something clicked and Baeg Tobar was born. Over the next year we not only met regularly to work on the project, but also invited a couple more people to help us develop the world - my long time friend Dustin Dade, to help with the web stuff, and Jeffrey's wife, Janell Vasquez, to help with the business side of things - though we all contributed to the creation of the world.
I think we managed to really create something interesting and unique and more than a little exciting to play in. We managed to recruit some pretty amazingly talented creatives (such as Scott Colby and Daniel Tyler Gooden - both steadfast and integral to what Baeg Tobar has become today) and we worked pretty hard to get the first incarnation of Baeg Tobar up and online.
Over the next several years, we went through a variety of incarnations of the site. Nothing really had any staying power and eventually, the original group that created the project decided to part ways, with my buying the IP rights from them. I managed to keep things rolling, more or less, but they slowed down a lot. I just didn't have the know how to really get this stuff out there right, or the business sense.
In 2007 I met Matt Jacobs through some work I was doing for Platinum Studios (more about that in a later post). Later that year, we met in person out at Wizard World Chicago and found that we had a lot of things in common. This friendship would later form into Outland Entertainment, but it began with our deciding to work together to publish Baeg Tobar. A lot of things changed when Matt came on board. He had the know how to really build a great website and had a lot of good connections to get us out there. We spent most of 2008 and 2009 reworking a lot of our material and building content. So much of what you see on the site now has happened over the last several years.
We relaunched Baeg Tobar in October of 2009. So far, we have had a few small hiccups, but we are currently updating the site weekly with new content. Right now we've been running a short comic story, A Gift of Life, written by William Ward and illustrated by Shannon Potratz, which updates every Monday, and we've been alternating every other Friday between Daniel Tyler Gooden's The Unmade Man novel and some short flash fiction. In a few weeks we'll be getting back to the main storyline, The Torn God, illustrated by Alan Gallo and colored/lettered by myself, written by Scott Colby and Daniel Gooden. This will alternate with a variety of short stories and excerpts from our resource guide.
I'll be adding the pages I've colored to the project page here on this site - I'm rather proud of the work!
Incidentally, The Unmade Man is also now available in full on the Kindle. Check it out and buy a couple copies, by all means.
From the website -
Baeg Tobar is an epic fantasy setting brought to life through a variety of media, including comics, short fiction, novels, and illustrations, focusing on several core themes:
- twin realms of mortality and immortality
- music-based magic
- young, expanding nations fighting for control of the land
- magic's place in an increasingly industrialized world
- the influence of the Aiemer, an invisible energy source that covers the planet like a second atmosphereWriters and artists have been developing the world since 2002. As such, Baeg Tobar is huge. No one story or comic could hope to do it justice. On the other hand, telling the tale of Baeg Tobar using multiple stories and points-of-view could get very confusing very quickly. It leaves the reader with one very important question: Where do I start?
Luckily, we’ve got a simple answer: “The Torn God.” TTG, as it’s come to be called, is a web comic that serves as the reader’s entry point to the world, the feature story that will move everything else along. All of our other media relates to TTG in some way. For example, early pages of TTG depict our hero, Boruin, running through the streets of Mydess. Where is Mydess? Who lives there? What makes it important? How do the actions of our heroes affect life in the city? Answering all of these questions would severely restrict the speed of TTG’s narrative; hence, the reader can learn more about Mydess via Resource Guide entries and short stories (specifically, Alana Joli Abbott’s “No Matter How You Hide Her...”) released in parallel with those pages of TTG. Want to learn more about the heroes of TTG? Check out “The Unmade Man,” a novel by Daniel Tyler Gooden. All of these various snapshots combine to tell the story of Baeg Tobar, but they all stand on their own as complete experiences. And they’re all illustrated by our extremely talented team of artists!
I hope you enjoy the site as much as I've enjoyed working on it through the years!
Jer
Life, art, work, and website.
Posted on February 8, 2010
The last year and a half has been nuts.
I went from being a single man to being married, buying a house, owning two dogs, and having a baby on the way. It's been exciting, wonderful, trying, and tiring. All at once. I hope it never changes. It is absolutely crazy how so much can happen in such a small amount of time.
Of course, through all that, work hasn't slowed down at all.
Over 2009, I completed a comic (based on Inuit folklore), relaunched Baeg Tobar, launched an Outland Entertainment project with Jeff Wamester and Matt Jacobs called WMD. Did a series of illustrations based on Alexander the Great. And colored a whole bunch of comic pages (again, over Jeff Wamester) for a company called Taylor Made Comics.
I'll be posting this material right here on this site over the next year. I think I'll go ahead and start with one of my Alexander the Great pieces completed for Pearson Educational Group. This was a really fun project to work on and I am very, very proud of the work. This is the first time I've posted it anywhere and I have four other pieces I'll be posting in the near future as well!
In addition, I also suffered a terrible loss. We laid to rest my former hard drive around the beginning of this month. Not only did my hard drive die, but it took just about everything on it with it to the grave. Nothing was recoverable. Due to what I laid out above, I have been terribly behind on backing up my data. Sometimes, lessons have to be learned the hard way and in this case, that's just what happened. I'm not going to ever go through this particular loss again. If you aren't making regular backups, take it from me - go back up your data now.
I will also be updating the projects section of the site with more information regarding my various projects. I will likely have news on several upcoming projects as well in the very near future (at least I hope too).
Anyway, I have a lot of plans for this website and I am going to work hard to keep up with maintaining the site and material. And I hope you all let me know what you think as well!
Thanks!
Jer
New Website Coming Soon!
Posted on February 4, 2010
Hello folks!
Please bear with me as I set up a new site. I'm planning to have a variety of new content for you to see in the very near future.
Thanks!
Jer
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