The Lost Ice Creams and YZ Squire C

Yum!

My sketchbooks are full of messy panels of comics I’ll probably never finalize. But some I think are too ridiculous to keep to myself. So I’ve created a new page here where I’ll post either works in progress comics, rough drafts of finished comics, or scrawls that will either become finished products or never will. So check it out!

At the moment I’ve got one of Whyte I’ve doodled in one of my smaller Moleskines. This was one of those instances where the comic drew itself. It started with one random doodle and so on. Instead of karaoke singing or eating an ice cream Thorn hasn’t tried stealing yet, Whyte tries his hand at cooking. You can see where that went. Poor Whyte!

As is my habit, I can never decide where I want to post what. If you head over to my struggling deviantART page, you can check out Squire C dolled up in a Year Zero uniform. Many of you probably can figure out that I was trying to imitate Alessandro’s pose in this photo. I originally had Squire C nitpicking at the tie he was wearing and saying something along the lines of, “Eh, it is not *insert designer name here*.” just to show off his fashion snobbery. So now he’s just standing there with his mouth partly open. He could be in mid-sigh. Fill in the caption, if you will.

Mini Squires: Turning a New Leaf

Uh, like, why?

Hoo boy! Whether you like it or not, guys, I’m still here AND I return with a new Squires of Dimness comic. Actually, if you follow me on Twitter, you’d probably see more of my “still working on new comic” tweets than actual comics.

But, yeah, this comic, while just a Mini Squires, was sitting on my drawing board for, oh…I don’t know, two months? And how long did I spend on the last two panels? This past weekend I contemplated on the last panel, erasing, drawing, erasing, drawing again, until I either got lazy or figured the end result was the best idea.

I originally was going to have Squires C and Thorn duking it out. I already had that drawing out and ready to ink until I went back to my scribbly storyboard in my sketchbook to see a panel with a puff of smoke, fists flying, teeth knocked out and a stray sock. It was the stray sock. That was the winner.

Yeah, it’s probably a cheap shot, but it’s done! So check it out!

Speaking of Squire C, some of you might have noticed the “choose your own adventure” type story going on in the Squires of Dimness blog. At the moment, it seems the next scene involves the angry Italian squire running for dear life. I’ll keep updating the story as best as I can. I’d love to see how long I can drag this out…

…unlike the calendar that, somehow, stopped at March. Welp, you never know when I’ll fire those up again!

Concert Memories

I’ve had this Japanese album Moleskine for a while, but I was never sure what I wanted to do with it. I pretty much bought it only because I’m a Moleskine addict and wanted to have at least one of each kind – the ones that are free of ruled lines, that is.

Ticket stubs are usually the first piece of memorabilia from any show. I kept the ones I managed to hold on to in a little drawer, but they were jumbled in with a bunch of other paper items. Not exactly the way I wanted to preserve these bits of memories.

It wasn’t until this past week that I figured I should put the Moleskine to use. Before that I had other ideas that ranged from collages, doodles, attempts at being really fancy with Prisma Color pencils, gel transfers, to exquisite corpse drawings. The first few panels included a few of these jumbled ideas.

Anyway, I gathered what tickets I had, some origami paper, a glue stick and my Moleskine. Of course, I didn’t want to glue the tickets directly onto the panels so I fashioned bits of origami paper into makeshift mounting corners. Each panel had one ticket stub, a few doodles, and favorite memory written in any of the open areas.

Luckily most of the ticket stubs were whole. Some were too tiny or became paper mache. In those cases, I had to improvise and use sandwich bags to “seal” them against the panels. Unfortunately, there were a few memorable shows that had e-tickets which I didn’t bother to preserve. As convenient as e-tickets are, they just don’t have that certain something that an actual ticket does. Most likely because – let’s face it – we all don’t have the best printers at home.

Gathering all these tickets, sticking them onto the panels, and jotting down memories and doodles was a bit laborious this past weekend. But it was a labor of love, of course. I have a few more panels that I’m looking forward to preserving future concert memories (*cough*NINJA*cough*)! Check out what my Moleskine looks like so far in my flickr page.

Maybe they don’t have to be tickets to shows or concert memories at all. I’ve toyed with the idea of collecting business cards from favorite tea parlors and shops, sticking them into a Moleskine and jotting down favorite memories, maybe even favorite dishes, favorite tea, the staff. Maybe they don’t have to be cards – maybe they could be candy wrappers – the list goes on!

Oh yes. Check out the comics page. I’ve added another oldie. Squire D seems to be the attention whore these days. I promise to get these more organized soon.

Migrating a few Mini Squires

Squire Thorn tries a new look and lifestyle

I realized I finally had a whole day to actually do another update! Actually, the only new updated material is the Moleskine doodle on the left. This was done in Prisma Color pencils. Around that time I was working on the little “series” with Squire Thorn mourning over the loss (or rather – washing) of his beloved shirt. Here we see him how he probably would turn out. As for Squire C’s left hand – I got a little too lazy to have to deal with the sketchbook’s seam.

Hm, Squire C looks scared for once!

Man, I’ve been lazy about the old Squires comics. I realize North-Side.net won’t be going back up anytime soon and there just might be a few of you out there who would like to see some of the old stuff. At the moment I’m mostly putting the Mini Squires in there or any of the other comics that have only taken one page when it was on North-Side.net.

I have a HORRIBLE archiving process. But I’ll try to put everything in order as best as I can. For now, I’ve added two older Mini Squires featuring Squire D and his poor nerves. Enjoy!

Oh yeah…so about those calendars I never finished. I’ll get to them…

Twitpic

I swear, I’m still alive! Crunch time at work and a bit of laziness is taking a toll on my doodle time. I try to squeeze in a bit of doodles every now and then though. And, thanks to Twitpic, I can quickly share them! They’re not the best works, but it’s better than not updating for many moons. Excuse the random pics of stuffed toys, pork products, and pants-less Lego minifigures.

Oh yeah…that comic I kept rambling about. Welp, it’s still clipped on my drawing board. Unfinished. It’s getting there.