Portfolio!

At the beginning of January, my brother and frequent collaborator, Nik and I discussed the things we have not done (as tends to be the case in January, the month of reflection, depression and resolution).  We resolved to do more this year and to hold each other accountable for those goals.  The main goals revolved around creating portfolios, sequential pencil art for me, and voice-acting for Nik.  I quickly devised a plan and got to work.  I will be displaying the pages here on Eat @ Shrimpy's once a month.

The plan is to create two pages of sequential art in various styles with various subjects every month for a total of twelve "stories" and twenty four pages.  This works two-fold.  One: I have not done much regular sequential art, especially involving characters that are not mine, since I graduated college nearly ten years ago (it's always a good idea to have an updated portfolio, and a collection of dick jokes made by a talking slug may not qualify as "portfolio material"), and two: by the end of the year, I will have plenty of pages to choose from when I try and get a job to get out of the 9-5 grind.

If you have any critiques or criticisms that you want to pass along, please do so and I will try to incorporate everything into later submissions.

January:
Angry Birds

In these portfolio pieces, I wanted to choose subjects that ranged across comic companies (in this case, IDW) as well as styles, while also drawing things that I enjoyed and I knew my kids enjoyed.  This led me to attempt some Angry Birds pages.  These are just penciled pages, darkened and slightly cleaned up in Photoshop, with a little black crayon thrown in to signify King Pig's speech in the second panel of page one.

February:
Mega Man

Mega Man was one of my favorite characters and games when I was young.  When I found out that Archie Comics was doing a Mega Man series, I was excited, to say the least.  I would like to think that my passion for  the source material and my ability to tell a story involving cartoon robots not only shines through here, but would also make me a good candidate for a job penciling the blue bomber's monthly book.

March:
Mass Effect

Mass Effect might be one of my favorite gaming franchises of all time.  The characters, the depth of story, it's one of those games you can really just lose yourself in for hours at a time.  Even though I haven't chosen subject matter that is totally realistic, I think that this shows that I can draw more than just "cartoon" characters, and as the months go on, there will be more of these kinds of samples as opposed to the more cartoony subject matter, if for no other reason than to hopefully highlight my versatility.  As always, let me know what you think.  Is there something I could have done better, something that you think I did well and/or should do more of for future samples?  I want to know!

April:
Masters of the Universe

Anyone that knows me well must have known that this was coming.  Masters of the Universe is firmly entrenched in the "dream job" category for me, and always will be.  Hell, even before they were making Masters of the Universe comics again it was a dream job for me.  I wanted to be the one to resurrect the franchise.  At this point, I'll take a backup story, an online exclusive, hell, I'll take a variant cover, anything to live out my childhood dream of getting paid to draw He-Man kick some ass.