Saturday, May 07, 2011

Collaborations are awesome

Ah, work is going good. I finished most of my projects for school, so 3 weeks before graduation I can kind of relax, wish is amazing. I can thank myself for being super stressed out in advance all the time, which I can only resolve by working super hard, super early. It sounds like a good habit, but believe you me, it is more like a neurotic disorder than a good habit.

Capstone

(Below: Little Zoo explores dangerous places)

Anyways. More about my capstone (as requested by Klee). What is it about? Let me give you the overview: When I arrived in New York to study illustration, I was fascinated by the wide variety of art in the children’s book market and decided to work on my first collaboration with a writer (Jason Ellis).
(Below: Zoo and his friend adventuring)

Together we have created the story of “The Little Scribe”, a fantastic tale about a young boy who is an apprentice to the only scribe in the town. This town is a place where ink is a rare commodity and only the mayor is allowed to provide it in order to warn the inhabitants of new dangers awaiting them in the larger world. When a young girl appears out of nowhere, stealing the ink the mayor has provided for the day, the young boy is forced to go on an adventure to gain it back.
(Below: A dark monster threatens the waters around the city)

The setting is a Caribbean fantasy world full of magical creatures, pirates and other colorful characters. In more than 40 colorful illustrations the book follows the boy’s journey through a world where not everything is as it appears.
This project si still in progress, but I have enough illustrations for the exhibition opening up in June. This has been a great experience so far, because I have never researched as much as this for a project before. I also surrounded myself with a lot of very inspiring art by other people. The next steps are to finish this (hopefully over the summer, who knows) and get it published somewhere.

Project Codename: Pepperpot

The other big project is a collaboration with my good friend Becky. This I a very exited about, because this is the first major comic collaboration that I have ever worked on. To sum it up, it is my dream of making a major fantasy comic with a female main character. It supports all my passion for fantasy, gaming and magic stuff. We have a rough story and we have sketched out parts of the world the story will take place in, but I don’t want to tell too much as long as we don’t have at least a part of the piece finished. So far, we have a couple of pages and a very very rough script. But believe me, this will be awesome. And a little sneak peak can be seen here:
(Below: A first model sheet of our heroine)
(Below: City guard, drawing by Becky, coloring by me)
(Below: A little sneak peak to the comic. Pencils me, inkings Becky, coloring me)

3 comments:

Klee said...

Yay, endlich :D
Ich kann mich nur wiederholen: Das Projekt interessiert mich wahnsinnig. Keine Ahnung warum, vielleicht weil es Spaß macht neue Fantasy-Welten zu entdecken und deine (bzw. eure) so aussieht als gäbe es da eine Menge. Und die Illustrationen sind einfach super. Ich mag den Stil und die Charaktere. Ich hoffe zu zeigst noch öfter was daraus, wenn du weiter bist.

Killer ZEES said...

Wow....This is amazing stuff!!! I love your colors!

queenmob said...

Thanks Zees,

Klee, danke!! Ich leibe Fantasiewelten auch total, und vor allem die Erkenntnis, dass man sicj als Autor und Zeichner alles so hinbiegen kann wie man will :-D