IT

This will be one of the main characters in " Hole in the earth". Actually,  there is no much supporting roles in this graphic novel. Lets say that , as a whole, this is closer to , for example, Gosford Park , like a coral graphic novel were all the characters have, more or less, the same weight on the script.

"It" ( at the moment I didn't feel the need to find a name for him) is the psycho killer or serial killer on Hole in the earth, or at least , one of them. For this character I choose to get close (close enough to let you think that I don't have any light in my lovely head) to famous fictional psycho killers like Leather Face (I think this is pretty obvious if you take a look to what he is holding).

It will be not the only serial killer in the book, but it will be the only one of this fictional characteristics.

Characters Inspiration

 Half of the main characters are the sterothipical bad asses that you can find in any comic or movie. Carne de canyon we call them in Spain. Jail birds, small crocks with more balls than brain if you want.

I 've been always interested in this kind of characters but, and there is always a but there is not easy to find stories with good bad asses. Most of them are working in the same stereotiphical way, they are bad guys, they look like bad guys and they do the thinks that bad guys do. And that's it . I'm going to work with this they-look-like-so-they-must-be stuff aswell but I will try give them a bit more of caracter , make them more real if you want.  

One of my favorites bad asses ever is the main character in Payback, the movie . What I like in him is not how bad-ass-hard-motefucker can be. What I like in the character is his motivation, something that is only valid in his own world and doesn't have any sense out of it. And the dumb side of it.

Lately I been reading the books (or watching the movies base on the books) of Jim Thompson (The killer inside me). So I hope I've already learn something about how the criminal mind works.

I been surfing in the net to  find some real fuckers, to see how they look and to see if i can draw the  kind of look that they have in his eyes, the I-m-fuck-but-I-don't-give-a-shit-becouse-in-my-word-I'm-king look.

Malice sketches

Ok.
Yesterday I launched the Indiego-go fundraising campaign to try to raise some money to put together this Hole in the earth project.

So from today I will be posting daily , sketches, thumbnails, I will talk about the script, everything that I can come up that is related with the project.

Probably it will be kind of messy. And in a way it's cool. I'm a messy person and I  want  Hole in the earth to be a messy work. Later I will explain all of this.

I will label every post so in this way even if it's a messy blog, the interested ones will be able to find the way to understand something.

This is a sketch of Malice. Malice will be an important part in the story. She is a veterinary in Smalltown (this name at the moment is just provisional),  a loner by choice and a sex addicted. You can think about her as a Mantis Religiosa.

Hole in the earth will be a story with strong characters, and probably the girls-women of the story will be no less strong characters than the masculine side. 

Pag 6. Panel 3. Hole in

Lately, I've joined to some comic book related forums and posted some stuff there. On one of the forums someone told me that I don't give too much room for the eyes of the reader to take a breath. And I think he was right. Probably he didn't mean, like in this panel, to leave the panel without any background but I think at least in this "Hole in the earth" page it will help a bit.

Panel 5.Page 5. Hole in...

It had been a hard half week so I didn't have much time to work on the Hole in the earth project. Although I've just finished the 5th page. Now, that I'm looking at this panel I think I'll need to re-work a bit on the lines. It seems too flat. And this is funny. Funny because I've always liked "clear line" ( at least this is how we call it in Spain), the French line or European line is when there is not any black on the page and the line is clean with no intention to give volume to the drawing. But as soon as I do something in this way, zas!!! my eyes are telling me that something is not working.

But  hopefully the only thing that is not really working are my eyes. 

Color page

I think this Blog started to become a bit boring, all the time in B/W, so let's give some colourful stuff to it. This page belongs to Blackstone Chronicles issue 2.  When I finished this page I felt so good. I think this is one of my favourite pieces of all time.

Hole in the earth. Pag 4

Page 4. Hole in the earth. Yeah. 

Small panel

I'm working again on the final issue of John Saul's The Blackstone Chronicles. At the moment the script hasn't finished yet so I'm drawing the pages as soon as  Patrick McCray, the writer, is sending me the pages. If you ask me it isn't  the best way to work. But sometimes shit happens and Patrick has been quite busy in he last year. But looks like we are getting close to the end of it.

I just can't wait..

This panel ( page 11 ) is not really finished. The thing is that when I'm doing these pages I'm thinking always in color so most of the times some of the panels look a bit empty. Until I color them...

Concept characters sketches

Hole in the earth. Trailer preview

This is the preview of the promotional trailer for the Hole in the earth project. As I said before I'm planning to run a fundraising campaign in Indiego-go to try to raise some money to make this project real.

The video has been made with a mix of drawings -that probably you've seen already on the pages that I've been posting- and some sketches that I made only for this.

I posted the video straight on the blog. At this moment I didn't want to post it on Youtube or similar sites because I still need to change the soundtrack (for this video I used the song "Hole in the earth" by Deftones). So the quality is just good enough to see it in small screen. If you want to see it full screen it's not going to work well (quality isn't good enough )

Enjoy it.

Page sketch

Well, this is not actually a page. I made these sketches for a small promotional video of the Hole in the eatrh project.

The thing is that I really like it even as a page. Sketches are always something more alive than the finished page with all the ink...at least if I take a look on my own pages. Sometimes I have the feeling that they are still a bit rigid.

Pag 3. Hole in the earth

Polaroids.

Today I've been working on these "polaroids". They belong to the "Hole in the Earth" project. I will use them ( these ones and the new ones) for two things. The first one will be a Pin-Up of one of the characters. The second ( but probably I will do this one first ) will be something like a trailer (like in the cinemas) of the comic book.

 I decided to try to launch an  Indiegogo campaign to see if I will be able to raise some money to finish and publish this project.

Soon

A hole in the earth. Pag 2

Ooooooook, page 2. In this page there is a panel that I love and a panel that I hate. I guess it is not too difficult to see which is the one that I hate.

At this point I'm not sure if I leave the white frames or I will change them for black ones. Or something in between .

A Hole in the earth.Pag 1

And here is the page 1 of the "Hole in the earth". I moved some of the panels of the old version to page 2 to let the story breath a bit and to give a bit of rhythm to the page.

In the last days I've been listening my old albums of System of a Down and I thought that it would be cool to try to do the same as they did in the music but in a comic book.

Sleeping with Kody Chamberlain

In the last month I've been working slowly, really slowly when I invested some time in a personal project "A hole in the earth". I posted only few drawings and some panels.

At this moment I have almost 4 pages (yeah!) but I don't want to post all of them cos , well , let's say that the script is still coming up meanwhile I'm drawing.

Here is the first page but it is not the final one.

.
This is the original way that the page had been planned with big jumps between each panel. Probably you can notice even without the dialogues.

I wanted to do only 4 panels per page but meanwhile I was drawing I thought I was going to lose lots of fun, so I decided to be a bit more dynamic and let the story breath. So this page will look a bit different.

Other thing that I've decided is to use halftone patterns instead the grey that I used most of the times .
In the last months I've been kind of addicted to  Kody Chamberlain's blog (where if you like comic books and their creative process you will feel like in heaven)  and work.

I like the way that Chamberlain is using the halftones and I thought it would be just fucking great for this project .He has some halftone patterns for Photoshop on his blog that you can download.

So now, I'm going to check Chamberlain's blog to see if I can get more ideas.