reMIND - a graphic novel

[Jason_Brubaker]

Hey all, I've been working on a graphic novel for about 3 years now in my free time. I'm getting close to finishing it but still another year till I have it all colored. I'll try to post some of my progress, sketches and finished pages here. I'd love to get feedback too. You can also see more on my blog here. http://jason-brubaker.blogspot.com/

Here's the cover and first page. Please let me know if it's too big to view easily. All the pages are drawn in pairs as if you have the book open.

[Derrick Fish]

I went over to your blog and checked out your stuff there and that combined with these samples really has me interested. I like the way you pace and lay out your pages and control the readers eye. Great looking work, so far! Thanks.

[Jason_Brubaker]

Derrick - Hey thanks for the compliments on this. I'm glad the first few pages make it interesting enough to want to keep going. I'll keep posting a few pages here tomorrow.

[JEIK]

hey Jason!
Long time no see...

This is superb.
I think it is some of your best work!

take care man!

[Jason_Brubaker]

Jeik!? - Hey man. It's great to see you on here. Thanks for the compliments on this stuff. Your signature link didn't work when I clicked on it, I wanna see some of your new stuff! What have you been doing?

Here's some more...

[Arrow]

Awesome style!

[patrace]

Nice textures on the gear and I like the use white space and light bloom. I'm not sure I would like it as a style for an entire book but it works really well here because it gives a sense of height and atmosphere.

[Derrick Fish]

Dig the textures on that second spread as well as the storytelling.

[Ikage]

I love where this is going, so clean and such a good sense of space. Keep this up!

[Jason_Brubaker]

@Arrow - Thank you!

@patrace - I know what you mean about the blooming light. Most of the book wont look like that but I really liked starting it off that way to give a warm and fuzzy feeling.

@Derrick Fish - Once again, thanks! I'm glad you like it.

@Ikage - Glad you like it so far.

I have posted many more pages on my blog at http://reMINDblog.com
I don't think I will be able to post many more pages here because it just takes me a while to upload the files to a server in order to link from here. I might be switching my blog over to Wordpress instead of blogspot and I think it will be easier to reference images from there but I'm not sure yet.

Either way you can always see the progress if you are interested at my blog.

Thanks again for the comments.

Jason

[Kazu]

Looking good, Jason! I'm going to move this thread to the Storytellers Circle, since it features comics...

[Jason_Brubaker]

Thanks Kazu! After I posted this here I realized it should have been in the Storytellers forum. Now my problem is solved! Thanks again!

[Jason_Brubaker]

Okay so it's been a while since I updated these pages but I wanted to show you the new reMIND pages. These have new fonts and new word balloons.

[Mr. Average]

Great stuff as ever, Jason. I like seeing these pages here up-close: somehow on your site they always seem to scale down on my monitor. Something to do with a bad video driver I've never bothered to fix. Which I should, considering I use this thing to work with. But whatever.

The amount of detail and the quality of the colors has been excellent throughout, and I can almost feel the glossy paper of this thing in print. By the way, you mention on your site that you boost pencils in photoshop instead of inking - I have NEVER managed to make that work, mainly because I have such a loose sketching style - there's little construction lines everywhere that just muck the whole thing up - it's a habit from being a draftsman first and an artist second - everything is constructed in 9H at least five or six times on the same sheet. Or it was, before AutoCAD. How do you get around this? Do you just naturally put things exactly where you intend them to be?

--M

[Jason_Brubaker]

Yeah the site shrinks it to fit the size of the blog. I've never been fully satisfied with it either. One thing you can do is right click the image on the blog and see it in a new window at full scale. I know it's a pain to do that every time you look at a page but I can't figure out a better way yet.

As far a scanning pencil lines. I learned a long time ago that my pencil lines never look very good if it's on the same page as the sketch for some reason. Now I always use tracing paper to go over my sketches and then light table it for the final lines. If I don't use a fresh sheet of paper then it just gets all muddy and sloppy looking. It's something I learned while storyboarding for commercials. All the storyboard artists used tracing paper religiously to get the structure down first then go over it quickly later with final lines.

Hope that helps. It sure saves me a lot of headaches when I draw. Knowing my sketch can be as messed up as possible and it wont show through in any way to my final.