Nightmare Girl

The comic I've been in the process of coloring for the past year and a half now has a blog, started by creator Jimmy Leigh. It's a 100 page graphic novel and Duval Stowers is still drawing it and Jimmy still writing it. Good thing it's such a big project because I haven't had time or energy to devote to it for quite some time because of Darcy being sick for so long. Now that she's gone I've been in kind of a stunned mode and hard to do anything - and I have to move in a month!

Jimmy has our most recent work, a new cover, at his blog but I'm putting my favorite here.

More can be seen at my Nightmare Girl Gallery.

Dave Stevens

I just found out yesterday that Dave Stevens died last Saturday at the age of 52 from leukemia. Anyone in the comic biz knows who he was, and any comic fan as well. For everyone else he was the creator of Rocketman, which was made into a movie in 1991 with Bill Campbell in his first starring role. He was also the artist who started doing the paintings of Betty Page that made her famous and got her a movie as well a few years ago.

I didn't know him well, only met him a couple of times at the San Diego Comic Con but I worked with some of his art through Bob at Graphitti Designs. I knew his art very well, he was one of the best in the business, and I've never heard anyone in the biz have a bad thing to say about him. A while ago Bob told me that Dave was trying to learn how to paint in the computer and wanted to know if he could give me a call for some advice. Of course I said yes, and I waited for a call that never came. A few months later Bob came by with a disk of a painting Dave did that blew me away. In 15 years of comic coloring I never did anything as good that piece.

Right now I can look up and see the signed, limited edition print of Vampirella painted by Dave that my wife bought me several years ago. The name of the painting seems quite bizarre at this moment - “Back From the Grave.” I have #4 of 850.

“Well, I do expect a lot of myself. I'm a harsh critic because I know what I'm capable of. I have hit those occasional peaks amongst the valleys, but the peaks are so few-things like genuine flashes of virtuoso brush inking, like I've never executed before or since-I can count on one hand the number of jobs where I've been able to hit that mark. The same with penciling. Sometimes it just flows, but more often than not, it's pure physical and spiritual torment just to get something decent on paper. I often get very discouraged with the whole creative process.“ – Dave Stevens

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Stevens
http://www.davestevens.com/

The Nightmare Girl Comic

My big graphic novel project is starting to take shape with the first 13 pages done. I've set up a Web Gallery using iPhoto 08, first time I've used it and it's great. Down at the bottom of the web page there are various settings for how to view the thumbnails so everyone can use what they like best. Carousel let's you flip through it like you would flip through album covers in iTunes, very cool.

Then there is the head of the project, Jimmy Leigh's MySpace page, which will have artwork show up occasionally. And, of course, there is the main Nightmare Girl and Dark Matter Comics web page where he is going to set up a Flash flip book for the pages.

I'm really having fun with this. Once we get into her nightmare world I get the chance to really let loose and do all kinds of fun stuff. And Jimmy and Duval put in a lot of single panel pages which is the colorist's best friend. Allows us to really go into detail and do some nice rendering.

Nightmare Girl

I've got a new comic book coloring project. Been a while since I had a juicy one and this is a doozie - 120 page graphic novel, I'll be at this one for a while. I've got 3 pages done so far!

With all the stress of the last year my brain is having trouble focusing, I'll answer an email and the next thing I know I've spent 2 hours answering emails instead of working, not my usual pace but I'm so easily distracted these days. Also I'm just damn busy, Darcy took care of just about everything around the house, cleaning, shopping, cooking. Now I have to do all that, and take care of her and work my usual 14 hours a day. She is getting more independent as time goes on so I don't have to stay home until almost noon to get her ready for dialysis, she can do it for herself now, but she is not up to shopping or cleaning yet and I'm not good at either one of those. But I'll get past it, I always do. She's trying to chip in by doing some flat coloring for me but 3 days a week of dialysis really eats up a person's time.

The name of the comic is Nightmare Girl and the page here is the main character just before the nightmare begins, click on the image for a larger view. Creator and writer is Jimmy Leigh, who really has a lot invested in this project and pays me on time, which is very important since times are pretty tight right now. Here is Jimmy's Facebook page. The only thing of mine on there is the background image, which is page 1, scroll down for page 4 of the comic. Jimmy is quite a character, which is a necessary requirement for comic book creators. Duval Stowers is the artist, doing both pencils and inks. Man, is that a lot of work for 120 pages but he's a talented artist. Haven't met Duval yet, just talked on the phone a couple of times.

Here is the official Nightmare Girl web page. Not a lot on it because we are just getting started but it will fill up soon with sample pages. As for me, I've got to get to work, even though it's 10:15 pm. Sleep is for the weak!

Bear Byte Graphics

My official Bear Byte Graphics site is now all set up with my own domain name. This is very cool, I've had this site up before but under my dot Mac account or under my Roadrunner account, this is the first one under bear-byte.net - click here for the link:

Comic Coloring

And I've linked that page back to this blog as well. This is also the first time I've tried linking a file to elsewhere on the net (this is one of my comic coloring pages) instead of uploading them to Google. I figure that if I keep doing that I'm going to use up Google's disk space eventually, they only allow 1 GB for images while I have 40 GB for my domain.

Now I just have to remember to change the URL on my links over on the right side. My cats and grandkids sites have been changed to bear-byte.net as well but I will leave everything under Roadrunner for a little while yet, doesn't hurt to have both up.

CATS

GRANDKIDS