Back Again After a Long Hiatus!!!

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Hello, everybody!!! It has been quite a while since I posted anything, and partly because I have been crazy busy, which is a shame in some respects since it kept me from relaying big news that is old news now. However, I can still post the pieces that I was supposed to, but since I am short on time it will have to be finished pieces instead of the working ones. First off, this is the line art/finished piece from the six pager entitled The Damned from my Visual Storytelling II class. My professor, Shawn Crystal is a professional comic book inker with Marvel Comics, and the great part about taking his class was that he showed us some inking techniques. My favorite technique was creating a starry night. You simply get a bottle of Art Masking Fluid, Windsor & Newton is the best brand, and dip a toothbrush, one that you don't use for teeth brushing, into the fluid and flick the drops onto your sky. Once it has dried, you ink the sky. Once you're done inking, you rub off the dried masking fluid with your fingers, and...Viola! You have a starry night. I knew the moment Shawn showed us that technique that I was going to use it for this comic since you just can't do a demon story in the daylight. After I tried it for the first time I fell in love with the technique, and I have implemented it into my Vampire Mouse mini comic.

I think someday I may go back and letter these pages. Lettering was not part of the original project, and in fact, the only digital lettering that I did was for the title and credits. I had even considered colorizing it, but I think this story is actually better in black and white.

No One Can Hear Me Shout!

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If there is any story that I have done as of late that needed coloring it's No One Can Me Shout!, and unlike The Damned, I actually wrote this story. It was a return to my storytelling of character driven stories, where the audience feels something emotional for the characters. It's about an overweight teenager who is being not only cyberbullied, but also bullied at school, and he feels that the only way out of it is to kill himself. It's not that far from reality, unfortunately. This was my second anti-bullying story, but I think because of the visuals this one is more powerful than the first, which was a short story. 

When it came time to color I mainly had a cool color palette to give off that depressing mood while only using warm colors to enhance the drama of a particular panel such as Jeremy holding the gun to his head. 

Although this is a very serious story with very little laughs, unless you're psychotic, I did drop in a few Easter eggs in the background. On Page 1, Panel 2 - Jeremy is looking at all of the nasty comments that were made on his Grapevine Page, but to top it all off someone had hacked his account and replaced his profile picture with a picture of his head on Porky Pig's body.

Perhaps you all will remember this drawing of Porky Pig.

The Loony Tunes Universe

I actually did redraw Porky Pig, I didn't use Photoshop to replace the head although I did think about, and in retrospects it might have looked more authentic if I had done so. In Page 3, Panel 1 - there is a framed picture of two creamers hanging on the wall behind Jeremy. 

Also on Page 3, Panel 2 - there is a framed picture of three pears although only one can be seen because the banister is blocking the other two.

Both of these pictures were pastel drawings that I had done at the Ocee Community Art School (now John's Creek Community Art School) a few months before I attended SCAD Atlanta. They were also the first pieces that I've had shown at a festival since elementary school.

They were both tough to duplicate through digital coloring, but it was a nice Easter egg to put into the story even if very few people knew about it. Another small Easter egg was the den and foyer of Jeremy's house, which were based off of the house where I had grown up in at Stone Mountain/Lilburn, Georgia. The den was almost duplicated in every way from that house right down to the furniture arrangement. I take the line "Write what you know" very seriously.

The Vampire Mouse Maquette

During Spring Break I was able to finally complete the Vampire Mouse Maquette, and it debuted at the 2013 Fluke Mini Comic Festival in April with great success. It did exactly what I was hoping it would, which was attract people to my table. I wound up selling out of the first Vampire Mouse mini comic. People enjoyed looking at him, and in fact, one person asked me if it was for sale, but it wasn't and still isn't. I am open to the idea of a maquette commission, but any maquettes that I do on my own time are just for me. My favorite interaction with the Vampire Mouse came from Prof. Chris Schweizer's daughter who each time she came by me would put up her hands to imitate the maquette. It was adorable.

I am presently working on another maquette that will serve the same purpose as the Vampire Mouse, but it will attract people to the Atlanta Art History Society's table during SCAD Day type events. I am also hoping to create a third maquette by the end of the year, and that one will be Vincent's sire, Elizabeth.

Final Thoughts

As I had mentioned in the last post I got an internship with Crazy Legs Production, and I helped them with a project that they were doing for Adult Swim entitled Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell. It was a great experience that I will definitely share with you all at a later time. As soon as the internship ended two weeks before the end of the Spring Quarter I heard about a freelance job to create a comic strip for Stream Realty, which is another story I will get into later. So there's a lot going on, and I certainly hope to bring you up to speed before the Fall Quarter.

I would like to congratulate my brother DJ Wright and his girlfriend Michelle Foster on their engagement!!! 

I promise that I will keep updating you all with my art projects a lot better than I have been doing. So until next time, this is Billy Wright wishing you all a goodnight! So long, everybody!