Keith needs steroids

At the moment, I'm being flooded with error message upon error message from my printer (which is perilously close to being thrown through a wall. Or at least thrown towards a wall. It's a pretty big, wide-format printer. I'd need steroids to throw it through the wall).

Anyway, before I tear my hair out, it seems an ideal time to distract myself with the weekly blog post for The Switch.

Tom and I appeared together last weekend at Mighty Con in Missouri. While there, we shot some video for the behind-the-scenes documentary all the kickstarter backers will receive. The docu is Tom's project, I really don't know what it's going to be like any more than any of you do. It's probably a safe bet that there will be bikini girls in it, knowing Tom. All I know is that a couple of times, I looked up from sketching at the convention (or working on Green Lantern in my hotel room at night) to find Tom filming me. 

It's just as creepy as it sounds. 

I'm from Connecticut, where we don't even look at each other as we pass one another in the street. So I was caught off guard by how friendly the people of Missouri are, so much so that I broke my own rule about shaking hands with strangers at conventions many times. You're almost guaranteed to get sick and sure enough, I've been cursed with the plague this week. I'm finally starting to feel human again, thank Dayquil, just in time to drive up to Worcester, Mass tonight for Massive Con this weekend. If I see you there and don't shake your hand, don't be offended. Just say thanks. I'm done with conventions until November after this. 

In the meantime, our plucky pal Tom is down in Knoxville, Tennessee at Fanboy Expo. He's pulling double duty as the celebrity photographer and a comic book guest. So if you get a picture taken with William Shatner or The Dukes of Hazzard, that's Tom behind the camera. Enjoy him, he's a national treasure.

In the meantime, between all these conventions and plagues and the such, we've continued to plug away at The Switch. The script is complete (although I continue to tinker/fine tune dialogue for the second half) and Tom is producing some beautiful pages. I'm happy with the story; I feel like tonally, it takes a reader on a full roller coaster ride of emotion, all the highs and lows of Electricia/The Switch's journey. I'm anxious for all of you to get to read it.

Anyway, here's some art to hold you over until next week. This page features Kickstarter backer Christopher Gerber in panel two.

 Hope everyone is doing well out there lately!

Thanks,

Keith

Update #13 (Tom)

I'm typing this update from the airport as I prepare to meet Keith in St. Louis for St. Louis Comic Con this weekend!  So come on by and get your autograph from the Switch creators, maybe even a print ;)

Here's another sneak panel from The Switch, with Electricia in full rage mode!

Keith and I love getting fan art, so here is Knoxville area artist Joey Gossett 's cute take on Electricia: 

We'd love to have a print of this!  Anybody can send fan art to us, we'll post it here!  And here is Joey sporting a Switch shirt:

Since this weekend will be the first (but not last!) time Keith and I will see each other since we created The Switch, we'll be filming some behind the scenes stuff for the downloadable, 1-hour movie that you Kickstarter backers will receive! ;)  Until next week....

A little color (Keith)

I'm in the middle of a super-hectic day so this won't be the most in depth blog post of all time. Still, anything is better than nothing. At least that's what I usually tell myself when I look at my 401k.

Anyway, you might remember this page from the Kickstarter campaign, Tom and I had it posted. But here it is for the first time with the flat colors filled in. Flat coloring is just pretty much basic colors without any rendering; it kinds looks like 80's comic book coloring. I've been doing the flatting on the project and, while it's a bit tedious, I am enjoying learning a lot about the coloring process in this day and age. FUN FACT: my first professional gig (aside from background inking) was as a colorist at Valiant Comics in the early 90's. I was only there briefly, I decided to return home for the summer instead of staying in Jersey where I was living for school at the time but I remember coloring with watercolor dyes onto photocopies of the original art.

Coloring is a little different these days, what with photoshop and all. 

So from here, Tom will eventually take this page and do the color rendering and special effects and add all the bells and whistles that he does so well. 

Next week, Tom and I will be in Missouri kicking off our Switch tour at Mighty Con. We're both travelling on Friday but one of us will get the blog updated regardless. If you're in the area or at the show, please stop in and give us a hug.

See you soon!

Keith

Update #11 (Tom)

Howdy.  Tom here.  Before I begin, I'd like to thank Keith for taking over for last week's update while I was out with a freak/severely strained neck injury that prompted me to go to the doctor.  I'm in better condition now (thanks to all on my social media for the well wishes--really made my week!) and can get back to being more active and productive again (I was very much bedridden for most of the past week or so).

Last time Keith showed you a little of his writing process along with one of this page layouts, and contrasted it to my own layout.  I'm just as fascinated with how he sees things in his mind's eye as he's writing.  Being an artist himself, his vision is not to be discounted.  Sometimes our layouts will end up very similar, sometimes quite different as you saw.  There's really not much of a rhyme or reason; usually I don't even see his layouts.  So that is a good reason why there's a difference.  Differences in how artists see things can be for a variety of reasons which I won't bore you here.  The point is that Keith just goes along with whatever I put down because he's just that easygoing.  Or too trusting.  Or a sucker.

Anyway, since Keith already kind of spilled the beans with a sneak peek at one of the pages, I thought I'd give you guys another peek at that same page, this time in a more advanced stage:

That's me inking at a restaurant because I am that dedicated!  By the way, this is one of many clips that will be incorporated into the 1-hour Switch behind-the-scenes movie that all you awesome backers will receive ;)

In two weeks, Keith and I will kick off our Switch tour in St. Louis for St. Louis Comic Con!  He and I are trying to see if we can do something special for Switch fans that weekend.  Hope to see you guys there!  

Let's all pray for Tom. A bonus update from Keith

Hey everybody, Keith here. I'll be playing the roll of the beloved Mr. Nguyen this morning for our weekly update. Our plucky little pal Tom has a debilitating neck injury; not sure how he suffered it but I'm told it's very painful and he can barely move.

So, long story short, while I play substitute blog hero, Tom is somewhere in Minnesota getting x-rays and MRI's and trying to figure out why his nubile young Vietnamese body is failing him.

I guess there's a segue here into how this comic-book lifestyle can take a toll on the spine. I know a lot of guys in this field who suffer from back and neck issues after a couple of decades hunched over their drawing boards. I have some minor recurring problems with lower back/sciatic nerve pain myself, nothing major but I now have the angle of my drafting table adjusted almost vertically so I don't have to lean over as much. Everything falls on the floor all the time but it's better than that sharp ache at the base of my spine.

Anyway, who would think that sitting still all day could take a toll?  Just goes to show you, no one is safe!

I didn't have anything planned to show this week so I scrambled a bit and scraped together some stuff. I mentioned in last week's post that I usually draw a rough layout of every page as part of my writing process so I wondered if you guys might enjoy comparing my original rough to the page of script to Tom's layout for the same page. I'm not sure you'll be able to tell heads or tails from my layout, they're pretty quick and crudely drawn but I always find it fascinating to see how what I have pictured in my mind is interpreted by someone else's imagination. So first...my layout. This is for page 3 of The Switch.

 And now...the page of script.

PAGE THREE

PANEL ONE

Cut to the interior of a demolished BANK. Lots of overturned desks, office furniture, scattered paperwork, chairs. It should look like there was a super-powered BATTLE in here.

Because there was.

Electricia is sliding through the debris like a shark in shallow water. It's dark in here; she's the light source. All shadows cast from her.

ELECTRICIA: Siiiiidekick...

PANEL TWO

Electricia flips over a nearby desk. Nothing underneath it.

ELECTRICIA: Don't make it harder for me to FIND you, kid.

ELECTRICIA: GAME OF THRONES is on tonight.

PANEL THREE

Electricia unleashes a massively powerful, double-barreled blast of energy, disintegrating pretty much everything in front of her.

SFX: ZZZZAAAXXXXX!!

PANEL FOUR

In the aftermath of Electricia's blast, there's now a LARGE, JAGGED SMOKING HOLE in the middle of the floor. The hint of a dark sub-basement below.

She's noticing it.

ELECTRICIA: I turn into a TOTAL bitch when I miss my shows.

PANEL FIVE

Close on Electricia's lips, smirking.

NO DIALOGUE

And finally, Tom's layout:

So there you have it. I think if you scroll up and down, you'll see some interesting differences.

That about wraps it up for this week. Hopefully, Tom will be back up to speed and will take over the production blog next week. There's just no replacing him!

We'll keep you updated, thanks!

Keith

Some odds and ends from Keith

For this week's update, I thought I'd hit you guys with a few different tidbits, various production stuff, as well as some train of thought behind this whole mess. So...first up? A bit of my writing process:

So basically, every time I write a new project, I buy a new notebook for it. Over the course of producing that project, said notebook gets filled with various scribblings, doodles, and assorted chicken scratches that eventually congeal into the script. So what you're looking at here are some thumbnails as I work out the pacing for a scene (I'm not worried about spoilers here because I can barely even ready my own handwriting. Plus, it's a comic book. If you figure it out ahead of time, it's not like the world is going to stop spinning.)

Anyway, as I work out a scene, I'll break it down in terms of panel count per page and just enough of a description to remind myself what I was thinking at the time. The step after this is to draw a rough layout to block the scene and make sure it all works. And after that, when all the problems are solved, I'll sit down and type it out.

Do I do this 100% of the time? Nope. Sometimes I just sit down at the keyboard and wing it. But I find that when I have the luxury of time, a little thought goes a long way in avoiding problems down the stretch.

Moving on...

This is a rough character design for GREASETRAP (the blob of grease that walks like a man). It's a member of Murderer's Row. In terms of design, it's just enough for Tom to work from without hamstringing him and, hopefully, the five minutes I took to rough it out saves him a couple of hours of figuring out what I'm looking for. Teamwork for the win!

So yeah, corpulent, greasy, disgusting and full of air bubbles. That's our guy.

I gave it perfect, clean tighty whiteys just to amuse myself.

And look! It's a crappy cell phone pic/sneak peek of Tom's pencils/inks from page one!

This week, I officially started lettering the book. More like I've started TRYING to letter the book. It's a pretty slow process right now because I have no idea how to letter in Illustrator. So I go back and forth from my computer to my reference books and slowly muddle it out. I think about five pages from now, I'll have a much better idea how to use the software and the speed will pick up.I have a bit of anxiety about lettering right now but it'll all work out. Once the balloons and dialogue are slapped down, I'll flat color this page in Photoshop and send it back to Tom for finished color.

And that's your look at the glamorous, behind-the-scenes production of The Switch for this week. I wonder what Tom will surprise us with next Friday? Not even I know, let's all find out together!

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!
Keith

Update from Nashville, TN (Tom)

Hello again.  I'm posting from fairly hot and humid Nashville (my first time here) since I have Fanboy Expo to do this weekend.   So first of all, you all should come and see me here at the fairgrounds.  I will actually have some Switch prints with me to sign/sell! ;)

For this Switch update, I'll post a few sneak pencils that I've been working on here on my Surface Pro 2.  The first batch of pages are at home since they are original page giveaways to some backers.  As usual with my other work, if I'm away from the drawing table, then I will draw on my Surface Pro, which greatly aids in being productive.

That said, here are some more non spoiler art sneak peeks of our girl Electricia and Lover Boy:

Next week I'll throw up some sneak peek inks and maybe even colors.  Back to work..!