The book focuses on the culture shock experienced by a teenage boy as he immigrates from Trinidad to Canada, specifically to the Regent Park area of Toronto. With that idea in mind, I drew up 2 initial cover concepts, in colour like I usually do. Both the drawings below were drawn quickly and featured Regent Park, a distinctive area of Toronto, as a specific location:

While I liked the first concept, I hated the 2nd one. But I sent them both to Jennifer, to get her suggestions. After talking with her and getting the proper final dimensions for the artwork, I drew up another round of cover concepts: some were slight tweaks to previous ideas, while others took the cover concept in different directions:

After sending these to Jennifer, I was told that concept 6 was approved. She also sent back a rough mockup of the cover with all the copy in place:

That mockup formed the basis for the final cover illustration, which is at the top of this post.

I also drew 20 black and white interior illustrations, to be printed very small, as chapter openings. You can see a sampling of some of them below:

All in all, this was another highly enjoyable project to work on. Jennifer Lum gave me a lot of freedom on this, especially with the interior art, and was a great collaborator to work with.

For more information The Amazing Absorbing Boy, you can check out the the listing on Random House Canada’s website.

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More info here and here and here!

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This is very exciting for me as this will be the first published work of Aardehn! I have a short, full color 5 page story in the book which will coincide with my current storyline but can also be read as a one off, for those of you who don’t follow along with my online comic.

Alongside my pages, I contributed a poster with a tutorial on how I created this piece. This is just a sample of the tutorial, but rest assured a full write up and more images are included. I also have a 6 page gallery of misc Aardehn artwork.

The hardcover is only available at SDCC and a few other shows I believe but you can already pre-order the soft cover here – link

Hope you guys enjoy it and would love to hear your feedback on it all.

Cheers!

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So some time ago i met Bruno Steppuhn, founder of thefabler.com – comics site and home to the very excellent fabler blog. It’s a cool idea of a comics site, still in it’s early stages of being developed but very promising from my talks with Bruno. They plan to have quite comprehensive services to help you self publish comics. I’ll let them tell you themselves here.

One of the things he’s doing to help kick start the site is holding a contest to get creators to upload content and promote it. As it happens i have some older stuff I’ve been meaning to get a few pages done on, that’s just about perfect for the job i think.


The rise and fall of it all is a short graphic novel and multi media project i started in the early 2000’s with John O’Brien, that got stalled and shelved and I’ve felt much self recrimination over.

Happily i think I’ll have the time and means to get the next ten done to make the 25 pages needed to qualify, in fact about 4 or 5 are already and just lack lettering.

Unfortunately you do have to join the site to vote, it’s kind of like Zuda that way. But if you dig what I’m doing and what to help make my job getting it done a heck of a lot easier and faster, then take a second to register, and vote please!

This is the Atom feed for my work diary. This feed is published from my web site at www.salgoodsam.com

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The final painting was done in gouache and ink on water-colour paper. You can check out the original thumbnail drawing for it below, as well as a sheet of warm-up doodles I did while getting accustomed to the character.

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Finally I can reveal the secret project I’ve been teasing for the last few months: Karl Kerschl and I are hard at work writing and drawing a new comic miniseries for Ubisoft, based on their hugely popular Assassin’s Creed videogames.

We’ve been given an amazing amount of creative freedom, and so we have been able to create a story featuring an all-new Assassin character in a new setting, which will hopefully deepen and enrich the Assassin’s Creed universe and go far beyond what people have come to expect from a “video game comic.”

You can watch the teaser trailer, written by Karl and I, here:

And if you will be at the San Diego Comic Con next week, you can come and get more information and see more art at the Assassin’s Creed panel, Thursday July 22, 3:30-4:30pm in Room 7AB.

See you there!

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work wise things were a bit busy as i was building up the coffers for the home purchase – but now are dying down just a little. on top of my max finder monthly gig, of which i will share some are eventually, i worked on a chapter book of a series titled rink rats for scholastic canada – it was fun doodling our unofficial national sport as i have never played it outside of on the road between passing cars. as well an interesting little gig popped up as well, actually make that three, for marvel; a two page sequential sequence for a aafes (army & air force exchange service) history comic starring captain america and the avengers, four pages for an aafes colouring book, and finally a two page sequence featuring logan and the winter soldier for a hulked out wolvie and cap comic currently on the shelves!  on top of all that last month, the icing on the cake was a cover and interior piece for a insurance magazine… for which i decided to dust off the watercolours and do wash painting, the results of which are up top.

whew.

as i said things are winding down. yesterday i was able to sit and start roughing out the end of kukuburi volume 1, for which i am pretty excited to wrap up… a special thanks for all my readers and their patience. i plan to illustrate and finish most of the pages before i begin updating again so there will be no more interuptions!

kukuburi aside i also received a call from one of my favourite editors, mr. abernathy of wildstorm comics, to ink the book kane and lynch over chris mitten’s amazing pencils. chris’s pencils arrived today and i’m truly looking forward to the challenge of inking them.

my most exciting new though, i can’t quite share yet, a writer of awesomeness whom i admire very much requested me as artist for a project slated for next year some time. i wish i could say more… maybe i can? …best to play it safe for now… i’ll share when i can

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This took me waaay too long to do. There is over 110 characters I believe and I don’t think I’ll do one of these again. We also had to make it a themed piece and I decided to choose the Olypmics as they happened to be in Canada this year.

I started the process digitally. Roughing out quickly a picture flow so your eye would read left to right and back into the picture. I decided to do a line up as this was an easy way to show all of the characters. It also avoided me having to draw every face or full body as there just wasn’t enough time for all that.

Once I laid in a rough layout, I printed it out on separate pages and traced over the rough poses, dropping in characters here and there. I started with big characters first placing them in easy to read areas, then filled in the spots with misc characters trying to avoid possible color conflicts.

Then came the fine tuning of the pencils. Little by little I roughed it all in, double checking references for all the characters making sure I got everyone. I also added misc characters that I thought would be a fun addition for the die hard fans. Just around the same time, they were announcing Super Street Fighter 4 so I had to make sure Juri was in it.

Once I cleaned all the pencils up, I began flatting this monster and also had to draw in a background registration building of sorts. Initially it was going to be for Vancouver registration but I decided to just generalize it and go with Capcom instead. I think it made more sense too.

Funny enough, I thought I was done but then they go and announce Hakan as the last new character for SSF4! So I had to quickly go back in and add him, replacing Chun Li’s rump with him.

All in all, I had a lot of fun working on it. It was a massive undertaking though so I hope you all like it… see if you can find them all!;)

Cheers!

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I drew this one up as a commission – one I was glad to do. It was painted in markers and ink, with a few white highlights painted in gouache. The image was referenced from a photograph of a young Russ from the Sports Illustrated archives.

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This drawing is actually a companion piece to a drawing I did years ago, of a group of DC heroes. I pencilled it months ago, but didn’t have time to finish it up until recently. The final art was painted in markers and ink, and you can check out the original pencil sketch for it below:

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I’m quite happy with the inking on this one – I am trying to make a change in my drawing where I am looser with my inking on pieces like this, trying to bring the roughness of my inking on Sin Titulo (returning soon!) to all of my work. I inked this very fast and instead of controlled smooth curves (compare with the New Year’s illustration below) I tried to ink with short, sharp scratchy flicks of the wrist. I’m pleased with some of the irregular line weights here, like the curve around the top of the head. I’m making it my New Year’s resolution to draw like this a lot more.

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I start by thumb-nailing out the panels right on the script as I read it. I then scan in all those thumbs and piece it together into something a little more coherent.

Once that’s done, I proceed to tighten them up. Sometimes I really need to sit down and flush them out better, so I blue line all the pages tighter – nailing composition and the forms along with placement of the word bubbles. Once that’s all done, I rescan, tighten up just a tad more in Photoshop then send them off for approvals.

Here’s approval-ready rough layouts:
The only revision I got was on pg 4. Udon felt that the last panel should be bigger and also be an up shot. So we decided to squeeze the top two panels together and enlarge the last panel.
Here’s the new page:

I think that worked out much better. I had to adjust the angle of Haggar as he didn’t feel like he was sitting on the same plane as Cody and Guy. A small tweak and I was ready to go.

From this stage, I print out the pages to fit onto a 11×17 comic board. Tape it down using a light-box to line it up, then proceed to blue line it. Once blue lined, I proceeded to pencils, using a mechanical pencil with a 2H lead. For smooth and faster outlines, I used an HB pencil.

Here are the final pencils:

I had a lot of fun working on this. It certainly was a LOT of work but in the end it’s always worth it. I look forward to more of these projects and I hope you do too!

Cheers,

eric

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These painted sketches were all done fairly quickly, and I was just aiming to experiment with new approaches and techniques. The first two, of Paul Simonon and Mick Jones, were painted in gouache on paper. The ones of Joe Strummer and Topper Headon were done as ink drawings, mostly in drybrush, with tones added digitally.

The Clash were my favourite group as a kid, and I still think of them fondly. I can’t think of any other rock group that can evoke in me the same feeling of hope and possibility like they do. For a little while, it really felt like they could change the world. I still miss Joe Strummer and listen to their early records often.

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TX Podcast

Anyways, it was a great experience, even though I was a little shy… all in good time I guess!

Cheers,

Eric

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PEN Canada recently asked me to draw a portrait of imprisoned writer Dawit Issak, and I was happy to accept. For those unfamiliar with PEN, it’s an organization which assists and publicizes the case of writers in many countries who are “persecuted for the peaceful expression of their ideas“. I urge you to read more about Dawit Issak online.

If you’d like to read a little bit more about the process, then you can continue below for a short process post.

I was grateful to art director Gary Beelik for giving me free reign with what I drew, pending approval of course. So to start with, I just researched everything I could about Dawit Issak and his case. There was a lot to read, and some of it was mis-information, which made this part very interesting.

Near the start, I asked my friend Tim Davin, one of the favourite art directors, for his help in throwing ideas back and forth. I always appreciate Tim’s input, especially on the more challenging assignments. He was gracious with his time and we had a great couple of meetings at local cafes while we drew quick thumbnails on a coaster and discussed issues surrounding Dawit Issak’s case.

Among the things we weened out during those meetings were initial ideas like this one:

Sometimes, you just gotta put your big first idea on paper to see that it’s not gonna work. It’s something I’ve had to do often in my career.

After some discussion, we agreed that I should just do a straight-up portrait, with little overt editorial. I also thought it should be something with a graphic approach, but still contemplative.

Next I drew up a portrait of Dawit Issak in pencil (below left), and followed that up with a gouache painting at about 50% final size (below right). It was painted with two colours, mostly in drybrush:

From that painting, I cropped and tweaked an image in photoshop which made the final cut as the rough I submitted. It had something of the quality I was looking for:

After that rough was approved, I set about panting the final. Again, it was painted in gouache and ink on paper, using mostly dry brush. The main differences were a tighter under-drawing and a much larger size – 120% of final size:

Neither painting required much photoshop colour cleanup because they were painted in gouache. Both the rough and the final were painted in a graphic palette suited for posters. The final is a closer likeness, but the strokes are more subdued.

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Go go go! Buy buy buy!

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Anyways, if it allows you to play as a Samurai again, i’m sold!

E

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http://ps3.ign.com/articles/109/1096281p1.html

I’m a huge fan of the piano and this one comes with a Midi keyboard which you can learn to actually play like a real piano, at least for the songs they have. Sounds pretty kick ass so hopefully it actually works that way hehe.

e

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