Don’t have enough comics to read? The go check out my comic strip series Carpal Funnel! (link at bottom…)
So “Carpal Funnel” was a comic strip I did for my college design internship at a small tech company called Funnel 33 (go check ’em out >> Funnel 33). The comic normally centered around the odd quirks of the tech industry with a few oddball comics now and then.
Anyways, to make a long story short I posted all of them into a simple HTML file on my server. This way I can have access to them if I need to reference them for my design portfolio. The comics didn’t end up getting publicly used (at least so far) by Funnel 33 (minus one comic strip that made its way onto Twitter once). My understanding is that there has been some changing of hands at the company as far as leadership is concerned and its looking like it will never make a public appearance.
That said, with my limited legal understanding, I’m still attributing ownership of the comic strip series to Funnel 33 and listing me as only the artist. ^^
Well if you want a few laughs, good luck. Maybe you’ll find something here >> Carpal Funnel
After starring in the first six pages, I knew he had to go. He was just too “A-list” material and he was bound to steal the show. Well…that or I just spent 113 pages getting back to where Page 6 left off… ^^;
Also I don’t care if it’s only been one day in the story, Sam had to look different. It’s been four years for goodness’s sake, my style’s changed a lot, and there was no way I was gonna draw him the same way as I used to.
I hadn’t drawn a full-bleed, full-page panel since Page 86 (although I came close to doing so a few times since then), but I really wanted to give it another shot. It may not be as impressive or interesting as 86, but I feel that it’s more successful. Page 86, while I’m still fairly proud of it, gets (extremely) complex and hard to see what’s happening especially on the last four panels that also have backgrounds which get meshed with the background they’re already on top of. I tried to minimize the amount of backgrounds on this page, apart from panel 1 and 3 that are important for setting the scene, but even these are located on the top half against the less complex ceiling. This combined with a little more contrast between the dark darks and light lights. It’s still by no means a masterpiece, but I hope that it’s a step in the right direction ^^
Bauhaus was an art school located in Germany open from 1919 till 1933. If the Great Exhibition of 1851 is considered the BC to AD moment in Graphic Design history, the Bauhaus could be remembered as the moment design dove head first into the modern era. Not only was modern design rooted heavily in this school, but industrial design and minimalism became a focus as well.
Even though it was closed by the Nazi party in 1933 (due to the belief that it was teaching and encouraging communistic thought), its fleeing artists would spread their ideals across the world in the following years.
Another poster with two versions. I really wanted to do one in only black and red to more closely mimic circus posters of the time that were only printed in those colors. I’m honestly torn on which version I prefer, so I provide you both of them for your viewing pleasure x3
HA! Spent like forever on this poster.
I didn’t have any experience, and much less knowledge, about the Victorian Era, so I had to look at a lot of examples and practice some patterns. While I did ink all of this with a marker, I decided to call it good with filling in only part of the border decoration with color. The ones that aren’t colored weren’t live-traced properly in Illustrator to just apply a color to the shape. And well I was feeling lazy… 😛
The Victorian Era is the easiest era to place a date on. Just go by the time Queen Victoria ascended the thrown in England on 20 June 1837 until her death, on 22 January 1901. The design of the era is easily identified through its excessive ornateness and grandiose designs. Most Victorian posters would be filled top to bottom with words in all shapes and sizes and any imaginable font. Several of the fonts, like the one I chose to mimic with my pencil, is often identified with circus posters.
Despite the headache of drawing it, this might be my favorite so far though. Also tried out a texture behind it to help make it feel more real.
HA!! And you used to roll your eyes when I said I had a very eclectic taste in music! Well here’s something different for sure >:D
Also…FAIR WARNING!! This album contains explicit lyrics (specifically “Mama” from these three songs).
The Black Parade/Living with Ghosts, (2016) Also referred to as the 10th Anniversary of The Black Parade, by the late My Chemical Romance. While no one from the band is exactly “dead,” the band did officially disband back in 2013.
My Chemical Romance is probably one of the best definitions of an “Emo rock band” (even though Gerard Way, their lead singer, despises the term. Opting for “violent dangerous pop”), but they are ultimately grouped in the huge realm of “alternative rock.” Finishing off their career with a short list of four studio albums (five if you consider Conventional Weapons, which was just a compilation of a series of five previously-released singles) and two live albums may not seem like much at first glance, but I would argue their is something to their rough little run. While their first two albums are solid examples of alt and punk rock, their final two really seal their contribution to the music scene in my opinion. These two (The Black Parade and Danger Days) are concept albums that branch out to draw inspiration from an impressively large selection of genres while amazingly staying true to the sound the band developed in their first two albums.
This brings us to The Black Parade/Living with Ghosts the album that was released to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the The Black Parade. It is a 3 LP album that includes the entirety of The Black Parade as well as 11 previously unreleased demos and outtakes. My Chemical Romance has admitted to often writing way more songs than actually appear on their albums with both The Black Parade and Danger Days having over 30 songs written for each and with a final cut of roughly half that number for both records. The Black Parade‘s concept centers around a individual known simply as the “Patient” who is dying from cancer. The album fitting begins with his ending or death and then goes on to record his experiences after death and recount major events from his life. Imagine the classical “life flashed before my eyes” scenario. Gerard Way explained that his idea that death comes to a person as their fondest memory (in this case a parade from the Patient’s childhood) drove the concept of the “Black Parade.”
So I kinda broke my “two-song rule” once again this time around… ^^;
My ultimate reasoning was that I wanted to have one song from the original album, a demo song, and a song outtake. What I ended up with were these three. “Mama” is from the original album and features a soldier writing home to his disappointed mother of his terrible deeds in war. I really enjoy the midway point of the second verse and changes time signature and melody to match that of Pink Floyd’s song “The Trial” (from The Wall), which also had some very strong war imagery. “The Five of Us Are Dying” is an early rough mix of a song that would later be titled “Welcome to the Black Parade” (easily one of their most successful songs ever) and it provides an interesting look into how the song developed. “All The Angels” is one of the many songs that was left on the chopping block and never made it past a demo version, and while it clearly feels less refined (like demos tend to be) it’s still probably one of my favorite from all the demos and outtakes 😀
My Chemical Romance serves as a fairly decent example of a more recent band that is always a reminder to me personally to never overlook the music of my generation. Because I wasn’t interested in this band till I heard their “greatest hits” album May Death Never Stop You after they had already quit I only get to hear their music in retrospect and wish they were still around like any of my other 60s and 70s bands. Maybe the musical style of the 60s and 70s appeals to me the most, but if I stay too stuck and rooted in the past I can’t properly appreciate the music of today. But maybe I’m just rambling now…
I’ll end this slightly-longer-than-normal entry in LP Mondays with this quote from My Chemical Romance’s guitarist about their vision for The Black Parade that I think is an accurate statement as to what they accomplished with this album…
“The intention was to make something that was classic, something timeless. Something that 20 or 30 years from now, parents could play for their kids and say, ‘This is what I was listening to when I was your age. Check it out, it’s still f**king cool.’ We wanted to make a record you could pass down. There’s a lot of music out now that doesn’t feel like that.”
That feeling when you unexpectedly go too far with something…
So I’m pretty sure this has been the shortest, most precise scene ever so far in MitM (YAY!). Most of MitM’s scenes are slow and drawn out, but I somehow managed to compress this conversation and exchange between Dayton and Janice down to only two pages O.O
Although it may have helped the fact that I had a very clear image of how this conversation would go since I first wrote this dialogue with some rough facial expressions in my sketch book way back during the middle of last chapter…
Decently pleased with how the page came out for this. It has some fun paneling, some alright inking, and a very wet Dayton :3
So after playing around with the colors on this piece a lot I decided to make a two versions, a more relaxed one (above) and one that “vibrated” more (below).
The 60s and the 70s saw psychedelic design take center stage. The designers behind the music posters of that era were actually well educated graphic designers. They were well aware the colors they chose clashed hard, resulting in what is referred to as a “vibrating edge” to the borders between the colors. To also demonstrate their knowledge of the subject, the fonts they chose were very noticeably inspired from the Art Nouveau era, some were occasionally pulled and used directly.
Art Nouveau is one of the art/design styles I admire the most, but psychedelic might be the most fun to actually draw with. Ever since I was really young and before I even had a significant interest, I loved fitting shapes within and around one another. Taking type and stretching it and warping it almost beyond recognition is a rather amusing exercise 😀
For those of you who don’t know, this is actually the era that my favorite music comes from ^^
I have a very, VERY wide range in taste in music, but it’s the stuff from the 60s and 70s that I always come back to…
*IMPORTANT NOTICE*
If you look at it the second one long enough, it may burn a hole through your soul…
Bah! Who needs LSD when you can go on enough of a visual trip with these colors x3
Well it’s official now. This is a real series it seems. I made this inked drawing awhile back now actually, but I hadn’t gotten around to finishing the coloring till now. Originally I went with Grill’s color scheme (which I need to work on by the way), but I scrapped it for a color scheme that better suited to the era.
My Mucha is showing :3
Alphonse Mucha was an extremely talented artist that almost entirely defined the poster style of the Art Nouveau era, which was at its peak from 1890 to 1910. Art Nouveau drew heavy inspiration from nature and featured curved elongated linework. Someone commented to me about how they thought it was actually 1970s psychedelic, which actually was heavily influenced by Art Nouveau. Also I don’t envision Grill as a smoker, but cigars and smoke is so often a defining point to Art Nouveau work. Well that and the long curved hair tendrils O.O
Alright, here’s another fairly new artist to me that I’ve really been enjoying recently.
In My Life (1968), Judy Collins. Initially released in 1966 with a slightly different cover, this is the stereo mix released two years later. It was pretty common in the late 60s to re-release albums in stereo as this was when stereo was beginning to overturn mono sound.
This album was important for not only Collins’ career, but also for another one of my favorite artists already featured on LP Mondays: Leonard Cohen. Collins’ cover of Cohen’s song “Suzanne” is often considered the first major introduction of Cohen to a much larger audience. This album was important to Collin because it established her more eclectic taste in music. She was a fairly popular folk singer, but this album saw her broadening her horizons in material she covered. From the Beatles title track to a Bob Dylan cover, from a pirate song to two Cohen songs. I’m really fond of musicians that pull from several musical backgrounds because I think it results in a richer musical experience ^^
There are several great songs on this album and I was hard pressed to pick only two. The two I finally chose though were “Marat/Sade” and “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today.” “Marat/Sade” is a melody of multiple songs from the German play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (known as Marat/Sade for short) which was later made into a movie of the same title. “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today” is a Randy Newman song that I find extremely beautiful lyrically and musically.
I think this page actually marks the first page of this inking exercise that I didn’t mess up on. I’m not saying I’ve perfected the art of inking, I’m only saying that I didn’t make an accidental mark while inking this page.
For the “Splash” panel, I debated drawing a realistic water splash (after all, I did something similar way back on Page 39). Eventually I decided I would draw it poorly and it would look funky, so I went for a stylized approach instead. And yes, I used a really cliche manga scene change with the first panel looking up in the sky.
Fun fact: the last, bottom panel was not in my thumbnail sketch of the page. The original plan was to make the panels taller and end with a “splash!” (sorry, couldn’t help myself). However, I thought an establishing shot would be beneficial to show where they are, and I thought it would be really ambiguous that Dayton had fallen into a fountain without the panel.
So…I would like to dedicate this page to my mom. Alright, confession time. I obviously pull from myself and my experience to help build the characters of MitM. Certain characters have more of me in them than others, but ultimately all of them have a little piece of me (after all, I do draw them…). Dayton’s short-temper with his dad is very similar to one of my traits that I’m most ashamed of. My lack of patience with my mom. I would generally consider myself a decently patient person, but sadly that is a characteristic I rarely show my mother. My reasoning for my behavior honestly is along the same lines as Dayton’s line, “I really don’t know…” however, unlike Dayton, I’m no longer a teenager and I don’t have some lame adoption excuse.
Anyways, I’d like to dedicate this page as a way for me to say, “Sorry mom. I love you and I really don’t mean to be that easily frustrated teenager that never grew up.”
