Look Ma, I'm on TV!

The fine folks over at Space: The Imagination Station (Canada's answer to the Sci-Fi Network) ran a nice spot about The Annotated Northwest Passage throughout the day today on their HypaSpace news segments. Those who missed it can click the link above for the online version. They did a really nice job cutting together panels from the book (with some heroic music over top) with interview segments filmed at The Toronto Comic Arts Festival back in August to create something that should really help promote the book.

Thanks for the airtime, Space!

Tek Jansen Original Art on eBay

I managed to get through convention season without selling all of the original art pages from Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen #1, so I've decided to put one up on eBay. If this page (the third page of the story, with Tek kicking in the door, stroking the kitty--*not* a euphamism--and getting his finger bitten by the six-inch villain) goes for an appropriate price, I'll try putting the other remaining pages up, too. Go take a look, and if you like the page, throw down a bid!

And don't forget that I also have dozens of pages from Days Like This and Northwest Passage vol.1 for sale at my art store on ComicSpace. I'm trying to clear my office of the unsold artwork that's laying around, so you'll be able to find some good deals there.

Creating a Cover

When I began this blog, I wrote that I'd be posting more sketches and work-in-progress stuff, and so far I really haven't been doing that much. In attempt to change that, here's the step-by-step process of how a recent magazine cover assignment went down:

The cover was for an issue with various Christmas-themed articles, so for my initial sketch I went with a classic--if somewhat generic--holiday image. While the client liked the feel of it, they decided they wanted something a little more focused on gift-giving.

Sketch #2 focused more on the gift...but the client wanted something even more overtly about the gift, and less overtly Christmas-y.

Sketch #3 was the winner. I managed to avoid the more obvious trapping of Christmas (the tree, stockings, etc.) while still making it clear that it wasn't simply a birthday by keeping the boy in his pyjamas. With this sketch, I finally had an approval to move on to the final art.

As always, I enlarged the approved sketch, tightened it up significantly, and inked it.

Then, it's onto the scanner and into Photoshop for colour and effects. One more assignment down!