Oy.

So since the class finished, I haven't really needed to use this blog anymore. Odds are, I'll shut it down when I have a solid chance but if you weren't from the class, and you liked my stuff at all, let me know by emailing me at russellvandor@gmail.com so if/when I start a real website for my art, I can let you know!

Yours truly.

Well, there's my final project. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to travel back into the 1990s and figure out how the hell burning CDs works.

So far

Early sketches so far

The most difficult part of this project so far has been coming up with interesting ways to do the scenes. So far, I'm trying to have all the sketches completely done before tomorrow, have a foothold on my panel layout (although I probably won't have a definite idea of how that will work till maybe late Tuesday/ early Wednesday), and find or take a series of abstract photographs for backrounds, ref, etc. I plan on reworking the sketches through Photoshop ASAP and cleaning them up, colorizing etc. Odds are the fine detailing won't come in till Thursday, but I've started looking up which tutorials I know I am going to need for detailing already.

mech concept

Rough samples

Scene Details for Sample

SPIDER ENCOUNTER: PART II

Note: This is a rough draft of a scene. Will likely change names, dialogue, and certain details as needed.

MIN parts drawn for project: Shots 18-31

1. Focus Shot: Small bird like creature flying

2. Action Shot: Bird is suddenly stabbed through by long appendage.

3.Horizon Line distance shot: Spider creature stilting on stretched legs. One appendage is stretched upwards, indicating its involvement in bird’s death.

SFX: *7 *7 *7 *7 *7 *7

4. Group shot: GRAVES, MIA, and ROCKO huddled around computer.

ROCKO: See? No way we’ll get past that thing!
MIA: It hasn’t moved from that spot since we entered the silo. Even if it can’t get us in here, it’s not letting us leave.

GRAVES: Biggs, did you find anything that looks useful?

5. Side Shot to Biggs on his hand radio, looking up
BIGGS: There’s an old loader unit here for mounting cruise missiles. Its pretty beat up, buuut I think we might be able to use it.

6. Angle shot at Loader Mech
GRAVES (radio): What are you thinking?
BIGGS: We can mount one of these warheads to the unit’s self destruct trigger, then charge the Loader right into the side of that creature. After that, all we have to do is hit the kill switch and watch that spider burn, if we’re lucky.

ROCKO: Easier said than done. The remote sensor looks whacked. Someone would have to drive it.

7. Shot of BIGGS looking at mech.
BIGGS: Not a problem. The Loader’s still hooked up to a recovery winch. If we unlock the RPM governor, we could use it to extract the pilot.
ROCKO (radio): And break his damn spine in half! Who the hell would try that?

8. BIGGS: I will. The rear hatch panel comes right off, I can ride it all the way back to the garage.
   ROCKO (radio): You’re out of your mind!
   GRAVES (radio): We’re out of options. Getting to that convoy is our top priority.
Do what you have to Biggs.

9. Garage door shut

10. Garage door opening.
SFX: ^/ ^/ ^/ ^/ ^/ ^/

11. Front shot of Loader Mech

12. Cabin shot of BIGGS.
BIGGS: I’m moving out.

MIA (radio): Confirmed. No reaction from target.

13. Shot of treads kicking up dust

14. Rear shot of mech moving towards Spider Creature

15. Creature turns head to face Loader unit.
SFX OWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOO
MIA (radio): Target is responding.

16. Rear shot of Loader mech. Spider Creature leaps out of view of panel
SFX H:H:H:H:H:H:H:H:

MIA (radio): Shit!

17. Action Shot, Spider has leapt onto front of Loader Unit
SFX KYYYRRRRRR

18. View of Spider’s face through display monitor
SFX OWWOOOOOOOOOOO

19.  Shot of GRAVES, MIA, and ROCKO around monitor
ROCKO: Shit that thing’s fast!

20. Cabin Shot of BIGGS at controls of mech

21. Shot of Loader raising 1 arm

22. Shot of Loader’s raised arm grabbing Spider’s head, lower arms reaching back

23. Zoom of lower arm blade going into Spider’s side

SFX OWWWOOOOOOOOO

24.  Shot of GRAVES
GRAVES: IT’S LATCHED! DO IT!

25. Shot of BIGGS hitting kill switch and raising arm to release latch

26. BIGG’s hand on release latch.

27. BIGGS pulls release Latch
SFX CHNK

28. View of Rear Panel w/ steam shooting out

SFX FSSHHHH

29. BIGGS is ejected from Loader.

30. Shot of Rear Panel w/ BIGGS shooting towards viewer.

31. Explosion, w/ BIGGS still being pulled towards viewer.

END SCENE

One moar t'ing, Jackieeeee

I almost forgot here's the version of my last project I'm printing

Final Project

So for about maybe a year or so, I've been working (time allowing) on my own pet project for a comic that's been in my head for maybe 4-5 years now, but only has rough work on paper until said last year. There's been a lot of thought put into it so far, and I think that I am going to actually use this final project as an opportunity to finally get a handle on how I can pull it out of the rough draft area and actually do a page for once. To that end, I'm going to actually produce a page of this comic, doing all of the hard copy work by hand based on scripts and rough sketches, while using all of the Photoshop tricks and tutorials I've learned over the past few weeks that make me think I can actually pull this off now (honestly I felt like I was dead in the water until I saw some of the tutorials this past week). So more or less, if I'm doing this, I need the go ahead now, because my time to work on this will be limited over the weekend, I've already started, and I don't want to go to square one come Monday.

While I'm not going into detail on the plot, I'll go ahead and say its a post apocalyptic tragedy about people struggling to survive in a doomed, war ridden world, lamenting mankind's past futile attempts to control their own nature through law and technology, and a faux government's attempts to dominate others by scraping together whatever "glory" they can find from the dead empire that led their world to ruin.

(I did a lot of digging. This isn't even half of it, but most of my sketches are rather unintelligible)