Just declassified and announced today! (Thank goodness! It was hard to keep it a secret!)
I’m drawing the X-Files comic series and here’s the solicitation for the first issue! It’ll be on sale the week the movie is released and the same week as Comic Con! How awesome is that!
Order it already! It’s from Wildstorm/DC Comics!
THE X-FILES SPECIAL 0
Written by Frank Spotnitz
Art by Brian Denham
Photo cover
Variant cover by Brian Denham
The hit motion picture and television franchise returns to comics! With July’s release of the brand-new X-Files blockbuster, WildStorm joins Mulder and Scully in a previously untold story from the film’s cowriter and producer Frank Spotnitz! Don’t miss this supernatural epic so large it will leave you screaming for more!
Retailers please note: This issue will ship with two covers. For every 10 copies of the Standard Edition (with a photo cover), retailers may order one copy of the Variant Edition (with a cover by Brian Denham). Please see the Previews Order Form for more information.
Retro-solicited; on sale July 23 • 40 pg, FC, $2.99 US
Webcomics Weekly podcast episode 21, the hosts were talking about signing their comic strips in the comics.
Scott mentioned that he does not sign his strips because when he was a child his Dad mentioned that it looked like bragging to do so. So Scott has never signed his strips. He also mentioned that Image had asked him to sign his covers but he felt like the people who bought the comic knew who drew it and there was no need to sign the covers. He also mentioned that it brought back images of the early 90’s where everyone was signing their covers, and how huge and out of control it got.
He brought up the fact that I used to sign covers with a big pocket image. And I agree that the Image days got out of control with the big signatures on the covers and it’s also the reason I don’t sign my covers anymore. I want the art to speak for itself.
There are a number of reasons that an artist should sign the covers, one main reason is it helps publicize your work as an artist, and hopefully it will build your audience as well. Sometimes I feel that i just want the number of people who like and appreciate my art to grow on it’s own without any publicity on my part. Another part of me can see the multitude of talented artists who felt this same way and don’t get their names out there, who still sit in the same position in their careers.
It can go both ways. Which do you prefer? Signed covers or not? Publicity or no?
I hung out with Scott Kurtz today and tried to show him my technique for drawing comics in Illustrator. He showed me how he drew his comic first and I went in and showed what I did. We came to the realization that what works for me does not necessarily work the same for him, nor for Kris Straub of Starslip Crisis.
Some of the things Scott really needed was an accurate brush design similar to what he had already, and the eraser function to work without distorting his clean line art. The methods we came up with to do that added a lot of time to each page. He draws his webcomic very fast and does not need an added couple of hours correcting lines that could be fixed easier in Photoshop.
When I complete a page there is a lot of extra details I put in with an added layer on top of the layers stack where I go in and add white highlights or random extra details or highlights or correct ink lines. He does not need to do any of that because he works in very clean ink lines. Photoshop delivers clean lines for him quickly and easily that is just too time-consuming in Illustrator where the remedy might be using the pen tool which takes a lot of finese.
So Kris, Scott and I learned that what each of us uses individually is the right program for each of us. Simple. Except Scott needs his line art in vector format. So he posted this video on PVPonline.com today hoping that someone may be out there in internet land with the idea or ability to help. I know enough about Illustrator to do what I do, but I don’t know enough to help him achieve the things he needs.
Maybe someone out there can help. If you have any ideas send them to Scott at his www.pvponline.com strip. Or post suggestions here in this thread.
My briandenham.com website was deleted over at blogger so I had to start it all over. Instead of using Blogger I’ve switched to wordpress. This will give me the added bonus of merging illcraft.com, my illustrator tutorial site, and briandenham.com which was used as an online portfolio/gallery.
So over the next few weeks I’ll be working to get this thing set up again. Hopefully it’ll be a painless process. It took a while to learn all the ftp and hosting stuff that I didn’t have to worry about at blogger, and i’m glad for that because I need to use my website for more than it was being used for already.
I have another site which you may be interested in at sketchcaps.com. I started drawing on trucker caps at conventions and the people who have bought a hat so far are on the site. I have a few more to load soon.
I’ll have new tutorials up within 2 weeks. I just thought I’d remind you all that I’m still alive and kicking.
Check out the new Illcraft.com logo! (It’s at the top of this site.)
What do you think? I’ve been working on it for weeks.
If I see one more color picker or hex code I’ll poke out my eyeballs and feed them to the monkey. Whose monkey? Well the one on my back telling me to get my comics work done instead of goofing around with typography.
Hey, my new issue of Nova from Marvel Comics shipped this week. It’s issue 4 and I drew 6 pages of sub-plot and hot-alien-chick action. Sean Chen did his usual stellar job on the book as well. He kicks ass.
Ok. Back to work. See you very, very soon!
By the way, the sweet font for Illcraft was designed by my buddy Nate Piekos over at www.blambot.com so stop by, say “Hi” and buy some fonts. There are free fonts there too!
I downloaded the trial version of Illustrator CS3 a few days ago. I’ve been playing around with it for just a few days but I can tell you that this program is incredible.
The newest change they have made is having the tool menu boxes on a side panel. Once you need a Stoke you click on a little icon on the right and the menu box opens. Once you make your new stroke change it releases and goes back to it’s side panel. You can customize the side panels with your favorite tools.
It sure saves a lot of screen territory to have these tools hidden away in the side panel. I can now utilize the portrait feature of my 24″ monitor. The monitor has been turned on it’s landscape feature so I can see all of my menu boxes. Now I can just collapse the menus down and concentrate on my art instead of moving menus so I can see the work under the boxes.
They also made it so the side panels rest outside of the image area so they don’t cover up your art. Genius~!
I am about to buy the full upgrade and I am happy to do so. I have still been using Illustrator 10 because of the pencil tool. Something was changed in CS so the pencil didn’t work so well. CS2 was cool but I haven’t been using that as much as Illustrator 10. It may have been because there wasn’t enough changes to the program for me to care enough to switch over. Plus I had a collection of cool plugins that I wasn’t ready to let go.
With CS3 that has all changed. I care more about the side panel tool boxes than I do about my plugins. I can still go back to 10 and use them there and then just send them over to CS3 if I really need them. I am so very happy using CS3.
I was ready to dump my computer all together but this program made me fall in love with my old ass PC all over again. Even though CS3 blew out my graphics card! I was happy to upgrade that as well.
I’m using a 4 year old Gateway 700XL with 512MB of memory. Not a powerhorse but it does what I need.
My first comics work with CS3 was for Nova #5 from Marvel Comics. It ships in August if you want to check it out.
I’ll post some more tutorials before summer is over!
This was the most ordinary tree with nothing amazing about it at all. But the artist had a new digital camera and took a picture of the tree anyway. Now the picture was plain and not of any interest to anyone whatsoever, so it sat in a file on a computer for a year.
No one ever looked at it again.
Until one day when the artist had a new PLUG-In for his Illustrator program. The artist was curious and wondered what the tree would look like in vector form.
So he opened the little file of the plain tree and turned it into a magic Vector.
The artist was amazed at how beautiful the Vector Tree was. Its leaves look like an explosion, and it looked like bubbles and debris. why, it looked like a million Amazing things. So the artist grabbed the top of the tree and copied it and pasted it next to the Tree.
Why, now it looked like an Angel with evil wings.
What was this amazing Tree? It turned itself into many amazing things. Now the artist gazed into the eyes of the evil winged creature and it spoke to him in his mind.
“YOU WILL USE ME ON EVERY PAGE YOU EVER DRAW!”
The artist nodded stiff with fear.
“YOU WILL PAY FOR NOT LOOKING AT MY BEAUTY IN COLOR! YOU WILL PAY FOR UNLOCKING THE VECTORIZED SECRETS WITHIN ME!”
And with a thunderous roar the creature went silent and released the artist.
The artist returned to his work with his digital pen and his tablet of Wacoming. And everyday for the rest of the artists life he opened the Vector Tree file and gazed into it’s beauty and saw more and more things that could be used on each page of his art.
The Vector Tree laughed and waited until other people would see it’s beauty on the printed page. And then it would claim more minds for it’s Vectoring ways.
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