SIKU – Inuit Comic Character Concepts
Posted on June 25, 2010
Sometime in early 2008 I was doing a ton of work for Inhabit Media illustrating a variety of Inuit based folklore. I had already done a ton of story illustration and creature concepts when I was approached to color an actual Inuit comic for a gentleman who worked with Inhabit Media on occasion. I agreed, but the project never fully manifested and I continued to do some work for Inhabit Media.
Due to some unforeseen circumstances, the original illustrator for the comic eventually decided to leave the project and I was offered the full gig. I agreed with some trepidation.
You see, I love comics. I've tried unsuccessfully a number of times to do comics. What I have found is that I am just too damn slow to maintain any kind of regular pace doing the pencils/inks for a comic. It just doesn't work - I start out strong and as I progress, find myself more and more distracted and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work involved in actually illustrating a comic. I've found I enjoy doing illustration work much more.
But, considering I was so familiar with the material and that there wasn't an overwhelming amount of characters that I would be expected to deal with, I thought I could could probably handle the project. So, I took it on. And to date, it's the biggest comic project I've ever penciled in full - I think we ended up with around 22 pages when all was said and done. And while there are some pages/panels I'd totally do differently now, I'm still pretty proud of the project as a whole.
I was also supposed to color the project, but the deadline snuck up on me and I was forced to find a bit of help from a friend of mine, Chris Summers. Chris was a huge help and I did end up tweaking all the pages a bit, adding some textures and overlays to the pages, but Chris did the majority of it.
This project was also where I cut my teeth on lettering. I ended up lettering the project in both Inuit and English and to date, the English version has never been released, which I'll most likely post here for everybody to see since the book itself has been published.
Anyway, I'll start with the character concepts and then we'll move on to the pages. I started these concepts while I was staying down in Austin with my good friend Kennon James. The characters are Idlout (the main character), his wife, the goddess Sedna, and the creature Qallupiluk. Hope you dig it!
Jer
Projects: WMD
Posted on March 12, 2010
I've been friends with Jeff Wamester for quite a while now.
I believe it was in 2008 when we actually met in person out at Wizard World Chicago. At the time, I had him doing a few things for my project Baeg Tobar and was totally blown away by the work he was doing. I think it's fair to say that I could tell Jeff was on his way to big things (and from all indications, this is indeed true).
Anyway, I introduced Jeff to Matt Jacobs (my business partner with Outland Entertainment) and we started talking about how we could all work together. It just so happened that Jeff had a personal project that he'd been working on for literally years (which is something I can totally relate too, heh) called WMD. Matt and I took a look at several of the pages he had with him, listened to the concept behind the story, and were blown away! We immediately sat down with Jeff and worked out a deal to produce WMD through Outland.
We agreed that Jeff would pencil and ink the project and I would color and letter the pages. Matt would assist with any editing or plot help. I also designed the website and Matt built it using our webcomic CMS Panel Flow. We completed 12 pages + a cover which would function as a sort of intro/prelude to the actual full epic story.
You can read all of those pages right here.
COLORS
(Pencils and inks by Jeff Wamester. Colors by me.)
Right now, the project is on hold due to other obligations that Jeff, Matt, and I have. We're actually kind of shopping around for a publisher, but either way I definitely believe we'll get back to WMD in the not too distant future. This is one of those stories that just has to be told.
Unfortunately, with the loss of my hard drive earlier this year, I lost all the high resolution copies of these pages, which really stinks. I may eventually put the pages up that I lettered, but I'm not sure. I kind of feel you should head over to the actual WMD website to read the comic rather than reading it here.
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
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
Recent Work
Personal Sites
Friends
- Alana Joli Abbott
- Alex Petretich
- Allan Chow
- Daniel Tyler Gooden
- Jeff Wamester
- Kennon James
- Rick Hershey
- Sam Mooney