I’m planning to take the site down at some point tomorrow for maintenance. Not sure how long it is going to take.

(The day before Story Drawing #1 takes place.)

Holy shit! The world has gone crazy! I can’t believe this is happening. I must be dreaming this. It can’t be real. I went out Saturday night with friends and had way to much to drink. We got home really late and I crashed in Josh’s basement. I must have been in a freaking coma because I didn’t wake up until late the next afternoon. I went upstairs looking for Josh and no one was home. I helped myself to some food and a shower and decided to hitch a ride home. That’s when things got weird. When I went outside there were bodies in the streets everywhere. They all looked like they had been shot in the forehead. I started freaking out. I took off running and just kept seeing more bodies. They were all laying outside staring up at nothing with dead eyes and holes in their foreheads. I kept running as hard as I could toward home. When it started to get dark I started to get even more scared than I already was. I ducked into this house because I didn’t want to be outside with the bodies any more. I can’t figure out what’s going on. Some crazy virus maybe. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard about. I’m so scared. I’m going to stay here tonight and continue toward home in the morning. There’s no way I’m going out at night.

This week I started posting a drawing per day. The drawings are meant to tell a story. There is no dialog. Just the drawings. Although I may end up adding dialog in future drawings. I don’t know though because I haven’t planned that far ahead.

Start the story at #1.

Why am I doing this?

Because I want my drawing skills to improve. I do a lot of sketching that no one ever sees so it doesn’t matter if it sucks. By putting these drawings out in front of people I care more about doing a better job. I took up drawing as a hobby recently and I’m really enjoying it. I find myself learning a lot as I do each of these drawings. Hopefully my skills will improve as I go.

What is my process for creating these drawings?

What I draw each day is very spontaneous. I have a vague idea of where I want to go with the story but I haven’t scripted it out and I certainly don’t know how its going to end. We’ll see how that works as I go.

I sketch them fairly tightly in a 5.5″ by 8.5″ Strathmore Sketch book. I use a mechanical pencil with Uni soft blue colored lead that I get from JetPens.com. This lead is perfect for me because it disappears when scanning black and white and it is very erasable. Then I ink them with Faber-Castell PITT Artist pens. I use the super fine, fine and medium tip pens. I also use a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen. After inking I scan the drawing into Photoshop CS4 and do a little clean up. I use a Wacom Intuos3 6×8 tablet. I’d love to have a Cintiq some day! I then color and shade the image in Photoshop. I’ve been doing them in greyscale but would like to start using full color. Color scares me!

I need to start using larger paper. I just can’t get the detail that I want on the small sketch pad. I’ll most likely starting using 9×12 sheets soon. That small pad was just convenient since I do most of the sketching at lunch while at work.

That’s it for now. Check in tomorrow to see how the story closes out for the week and come back next week for more!