Starting Over, For Hopefully the Right Reasons

This particular blog was started as a way to get the word out about my first real foray into the Kindle Comics world, and as far as promotional endeavors go, it was a flop.
  But since I believe that success is  the ability to run from failure to failure with great enthusiasm, I have decided to take the comic that nobody would pay for and  put it out there for free for the sheer love of doing it.  Stay tuned.

This is What Finished Looks Like

Ok, technically this is the next to last page. But we are finally finished with the Kindle Comic edition of Kung Fu Rabbit:The Beginning!!  The pages will be uploaded this weekend and  put out there into the big bad world  on Sep 1st!!

Kung Fu Rabbit: Page 13

Just another example of the writing and art coming your way September 1st when Kung Fu Rabbit: The Beginning becomes available on Kindle!!

My "Method" As it Were....

I'm finishing up the prologue and will be preparing it for publication shortly, but  at the moment I am in search of a colorist ( for reason that will become obvious shortly) so in the meantime I thought I would highlight several panels that are in various  stages of production so that I can show how it is that I do what I do from the  first rough sketches to the finished product.
  Speaking of rough sketches, here is one of young Peyung fighting the original Kung Fu Rabbit, and losing.  I do these really rough, and often change the positions of the limbs several times before I'm over.  I don't normally leave them  this messy, but I couldn't find my eraser.

 

  Once I decide where I want the limbs, I pencil it in with a tad more certainty, and erase the extra lines.

From there I frame things up with a ruler and  sharpie.  I  ink it with a series of  round brushes of various sizes and Black Magic ink. I commit horrible crimes with my eraser once the ink dries.  I will occasionally jot possible dialogue in the borders between frames, and these frames aren't in any particular order other than what would fit on the paper.

  Eventually these will be assembled into the right order, dialogue added, and made ready for publication.

 

  Alas, here is where I run into a wee problem.  I am not a digital colorist,as I have proven on other  projects. I also want a very organic color scheme to the prologue all of which takes place  in and around the ancient rabbit temple.  To get that look, I  broke out my watercolor pencils and  colored some pages then scanned them in. Apparently the scanner function on my copier/printer/scanner was added as an afterthought because even at it's best, it makes my colors look all washed out.  This looks much better in person, and so far, no amount of digital tweaking can  fix the washed-out look.

 

  The search is on for a colorist who can see the picture that's inside my head, and will work for free, or at least for  so cheap that it would appear to be working for free. They also need to be able to  shift gears to a non-organic color scheme once the scene shifts away from the rabbit temple to the outside world. That's a tall order for 'free'.  I intend on giving the eventual colorist full credit, and I would be happy to share  money with the colorist if the money ever arrives, but in the meantime, if you know anybody, let me know, ok?

Artistic Development

  One of the many reasons that I decided to  redo KFR at this stage of life is that  the art has frankly, gotten better.  There are a lot  of reasons for the uptick in art quality. One of these reasons is  my short-lived  career as an editorial cartoonist.  For several  years there I  had meet a deadline, which I hated, but helped me. I also had to take  complex ideas and make them  understandable in a cartoon.  Lastly, I  had to really get better at drawing. The  newspaper gave me a platform to  try different techniques  and see the results in print every week as well as people's reactions.  That was invaluable, as it turned out.  Here, I'll show you exactly what I mean.
  Here is a panel from the original webcomic. It was drawn on  Bristol board, inked, scanned, tweaked, and colored on my computer using  Photoshop somewhere around 2007.  The context of the scene ( which probably won't  make it into the Prologue) is that the Easter Bunny is being pursued through the nighttime  forest  by our protagonist.

  I'm pretty sure this is the panel that  caused Tom Lyle to recommend I go outside once in a while and actually look at a tree. I  realized that I  didn't' have the understanding of shading and inking that I needed to have. I went back to the masters, like Jeff Smith and Walt Kelley (whose styles are very similar).  I went outside and looked at trees. I looked at trees at night , which is slightly more difficult since, well, it's dark. A few years later, here is the  'redo' of that same panel in line art.

 

  But wait, there's more. I had also dedicated myself to becoming at least a functional colorist.  Voila!!

  The point of all this isn't any sort of back-patting or compliment-fishing.  I merely want to emphasis that any artist is in a condition of continual growth and development as a practitioner of their art.  Something that was  a clumsy attempt  a few years ago  might be  not quite so clumsy now.  By taking things back to  square one and focusing on the basic of  drawing, and  being in a position where I had to produce caused  the differences you see  here.
  Never stop practicing, never stop drawing.

Welcome to the Lair

 This blog is an attempt to  document the creative process behind the writing, drawing, inking, lettering, coloring, scanning and eventual publishing of the  Kung Fu Rabbit saga.
  Why do this? You may ask.  Good question.
  Years ago ( high school) I developed a character known as Kung Fu Rabbit, long before the  animated movie of the same name.  It started out as some  colored pencil drawings on some graph paper in a loose leave  notebook that I was supposed to be  using for school work.  It was a series of one-shot panels, consisting mainly of a series of running jokes  involving a light brown rabbit in a martial arts outfit who went around  battling  various other  rabbit-esque characters  like the Easter Bunny. We threw in some other villains that were running jokes between my buddy Carlton and myself.  That loose leaf folder with  about 20 or 30 drawings in it somehow survived all my time in the military and all my subsequent moves and  surfaced in a box of stuff about 7 or 8 years ago.  Keep in mind, I've had a lot of ideas, most of them pretty silly, but  for some reason this one stuck with me.  So in 2007, I  took those loose leaf drawings and used them as a skeleton for a webcomic.

2007

  Looking back, it's really obvious that I had no idea what I was doing.  In addition to having little formal  art education, I didn't really have the  materials I need to pull this off.  I bought some 11 x 17 Bristol board and would draw out the comic page, then ink it, then scan it.  Trouble was, I had an  8.5 x 11 scanner, so I wound up having to scan every page at least twice and then  paste it all together in Photoshop. I would then  color the page and post it.  It was insanely time consuming to update every 3 or 4 days like a good webcomic should.
  About this time we were having kids like there was no tomorrow and I was working two jobs and  it all began to fall  behind.  There were only so many hours in the day, and I had to prioritize, so the rabbit lost out.
  I continued to draw, actually working for  5 years as a political cartoonist as well as drawing for the ministry.  Every once in a while I would sketch out a  KFR scene or think about the story.  I wrote a book or two, and as I  matured as a writer, and as an artist, I realized that the story had been missing some things all along.  It was still a good idea, but it would be better now, than it had been before.
  So the idea now is to  take what I have, tweak it where necessary to make it better and publish it on Kindle.  This blog will hopefully  help  keep me focused.  I intend to release the prologue story on Kindle for free, and depending on the response, follow up with the main story.
  Along the way I'll post sketches and  tell some stories about what went wrong, what went right, and what I'm learning along the way.  Hope you decide to  come along.