Pearly Whites Sketch dump- July 2014

Had some time to myself during a weekend visit to my parent's house in Maryland and spent a good chunk of my time out on the back porch sketching and writing for my eventual comic, Pearly Whites. 

It's coming along. I actually closed a few gaps in the progression of the story and even made up a character or two that streamlines a very complicated origin story. The problem with writing a story that's been in my head since I was 15 is that that early on I had so many bad teenaged ideas ingrained into the story that they're simply taken as history. But in reality, I can change whatever I want and no one other than me will really know the difference. I mean some of these characters have been hanging out in my head for over 20 years so I don't necessarily want to un-make my imaginary friends, but for the sake of story sometimes you make sacrifices. I'm pretty proud of how much tighter Pearly Whites is getting though. I think I might actually *finally* have the beginning of the story figured out, which is exciting. It just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. It's like I'm taking a pinch from everything I love and putting it in a mixer and making my own cake of awesomeness.

New merch, sketches and a TUTORIAL!

This month I was invited by Natalie Kim to come to Frederator Studios to speak on her video podcast, It's A Draw to talk about streamlining inks in Illustrator using the LiveTrace and Pen tools. Learn professional technical terms like 'jaggedy', 'wonky' and 'just slide them around til it looks good'.

Amy

Little sketch for sanity amongst tons of work for other people. Realizing that my eventual comic featuring vampires is probably going to have a lot of night scenes, my New Year's resolution is to become better at light sources and colored shadows/highlights.

 Also got a new banner for my convention table!

 Got new stickers of my UTZ & Boh artwork on my etsy store!

 And new promo stickers I'm giving out with purchases from my etsy store and convention table!

Pearly Whites.

See the full shots of these creeps and scoundrels on my Pearly Whites page.

Logo by Phil Balsman!

This is Amy, one of our heroes.
See the rest of my characters here.

In preparation for actually sitting down and doing my fabled magnum opus comic series Pearly Whites, I'm drawing character studies and other fun stuff. I consider this separate from my usual pinup work, so it's all going in here.

The long-winded 'elevator pitch':

It's best described as almost an east-coast version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but from the monsters perspective. (I'm not even gonna pretend people aren't going to make comparisons.) It could also be considered a superhero team book if the superheroes all didn't wear costumes and have no actual mission to carry out. It's got action, horror, comedy, romance, drama, powers, drugs, fashion and pop culture references out the wazzoo. Alot of the stories and characters come from my 4 years of playing/DMing tabletop dice-and-paper RPG's like Vampire and Shadowrun in high school.

The main story follows our main character Amy, an amnesiac who is of unknown origins. She is haunted by two girls, Suzan and Fiona, who could be either ghosts, figments of her imagination or incorporeal aspects of her own personality. Or all of the above. Or something else entirely. She comes to live in a sort of halfway house for the supernatural called the Monster Lodge, which is occupied by a rotating cast of various werewolves, vampires, demons, witches, Frankensteins, mad scientists, fairies, and ne'er do well's. Many who comes to live at the Monster Lodge are there because they're running from something, which results in several character's pasts eventually catching up with them. Depending on the character, this can result in anything from riotous hijinks across the country (and sometimes across the world) to heartbreaking realizations that can shake the characters to their very cores.

As of right now I've got 16 characters down, a bazillion to go. Look for more designs soon! With the summer weather being absolute shit right now, this is basically all I've been concentrating my free time on. It's like I'm in high school again. I'm proud to say I'm further along to a cohesive plot than I've ever been in the 15+ years these characters have been running around in my head, and I'm taking serious steps to organize my thoughts and get my shit in gear to do my own goddamn comic. Woot.

I added an actual page to my blog up above under the title banner of this very blog where you can see my character designs as they progress. Or just click here. Be sure to check it out every few weeks as I plan on adding more characters and concept drawings and who knows, maybe some comic shorts as I get back into the sequential game.