Airs in the evenings @ 8 pm EST (see schedule to the right)
"The Inking Room" is an online art show hosted on Livestream, specializing in sketched and inked line art, watercolors, ink wash, and occasionally digital mediums. It is hosted by myself and my wife, Whitney.
During the show, we will:
- Draw and ink artwork for my personal comic projects, including Peter and Company, The Chronicles of Ademar, and any other projects I may have on my plate.
- Draw random nonsensical and occasionally off-color sketches as warmups, or just spend the entire two hours doing so if it's "one of those days."
- Listen to music and occasionally sing. You can tell me to stop.
- Request feedback and take requests from the viewing audience via the chatroom.
- Schedule live tutorials of traditional and digital art techniques.
- Try to keep the two hours as entertaining as possible.
I also typically record each show and post the saved video to the blog here after each broadcast. That way those who were unable to attend the show can catch up on what was missed.
This stream was focused entirely on refining the character designs for the upcoming pilot episode of Peter & Company. In discussing the project with the lead animator for the studio, we realized that the current character models (as they appear in the comic) would be difficult to animate because of their detail. So I decided to use the opportunity to get some feedback from the viewers on how I could streamline the models to make them easier to animate.
Whitney sat next to me for the entire show, playing a demo on the 360 and chatting with the viewers. It was a pretty fun couple of hours.
Yes, it’s been a good number of months since I’ve updated this blog with the recordings from each episode. I’ve done a ton of broadcasts since the last update (about seven months ago), but have not been recording them because Livestream limits the overall number of hours that you can record material.
The good news: Youtube is now allowing for full-length video uploads, so I can now use my old account there as the running archive! From this point on, this site will have new life breathed into it as the central hub of the Inking Room, linking to content hosted on both Livestream and Youtube.
To start things off, here is the first archived video I uploaded to the ‘Tube: my old 2-hour tutorial from Ustream on comic book design and theory.
Stay tuned for more regular updates once again, including an updated Livestream schedule for the week every Sunday evening, just like before!
After a couple weeks of forgetting to hit the “Record” button on the video feed, we’re back!
Tonight’s show centered around the next Peter & Company page (#159) where everything goes terribly wrong for Whitney at her party, and likewise for Peter as well. This whole series of pages has featured cameo appearances of other artists’ characters. I’m really enjoying filling in the crowds with actual pre-existing characters instead of simple cookie-cutter generic designs.
For this week’s page of Peter & Company, I wanted to have a huge crowd of kids at Whitney’s 13th birthday party, with her surrounded by a group of guys all fawning over her. I really didn’t want to just use general cookie-cutter characters, though, so I thought it would be a cool idea to include the original characters of some of the other artists/fans who follow the comic on FurAffinity. I put out an open invitation in a journal detailing the plan, and when the time came to draw the page, I turned on the feed and let people throw down the reference images for their characters.
The end result was a new record for myself — 20 characters in a single panel — with each one (not counting Peter and Whitney) being an OC from someone on FurAffinity. It’s like an awesome FA version of “Where’s Waldo.”
Hit the jump to watch three hours of penciling madness.
Now that the work room is finally complete and Whitney & I are back in our little art-cave again, I had the desire to get back into some old-school gaming. Since I no longer own any of my older consoles — I had to sell them a good while ago to pay off a chunk of student loans — I decided to jump onto an emulator to play through a few of my old favorite games. The idea hit that I could stream the emulator through the Livestream feed and invite people to just hang out and goof around in the chatroom while the game plays in the background. On Sunday afternoon, I turned on the gaming stream and gave it a test run. About a dozen people showed up to watch the first couple hours of Earthbound, and it was a ton of fun.
Since it was a pretty good success, I figured I’ll do this regularly and use the Inking Room feed to stream old-school games in the early evenings/weekend afternoons. I don’t have any recent PC games (since I’m currently running an 8-year-old Mac), so don’t expect to see any games like Portal or Dragon Age 2 popping up. This will be limited only to classic consoles; nothing more recent than the N64.
I won’t be posting on the official schedule when I plan to run the gaming stream, since it probably will just happen on a whim whenever I feel like jumping on and playing through it a bit. The best way to keep informed of when the stream goes live is to watch my Twitter feed, since I will be posting there as soon as I turn on the Livestream feed for any reason. These shows also won’t be recorded, so you’ll have to catch them live if you want to tune in.
Strangely enough, in the last show I was completely unable to come up with the dialogue for the last two panels in this page of P&C. The first few moments of this show was spent finally nailing that down and finishing the sketches of the page. The rest was dedicated to inking. Towards the end of this video I attempted to hook up the keyboard to play for a few minutes after getting the inking done, but the cables had become lost during the renovations to the room. Even after finding them and getting it hooked up, the Livestream site decided to cut out and prevent me from recording the broadcast any further. I guess that was the site’s way of telling me to call it a night, hehe.
After several months of renovations and gradual repainting efforts, the work room is finally assembled once again. Now that the drawing tables are clear and the Macs back up and running, productivity levels should shoot back up and the show will resume a regular broadcast schedule once again. Awesome!
To celebrate, tonight’s show was dedicated entirely to producing the pencils for the next page of Peter & Company.
So after taking a bit of an extended break during the process of renovating the house, Whitney and I have returned to hosting duties on the show in order to get back into the habit of producing artwork on a regular basis. Tonight’s show ran for the usual length of time and got about halfway through the new page of pencils for this coming week’s Peter & Company update.
Scheduled shows will be a bit less than usual (probably two per week instead of three), since the renovations are still going on. We’ve actually had to set up a temporary art space in the dining room since the work room is a massive jumbled mess right now. The renovations include painting every room, removing old wallpaper, and the installation of a completely new bathroom (which is currently in the early phases), so it will be some time before we can get our old art space back up to full speed again. This will just have to do until then.
Well, tonight was interesting! After going through two hours of pencil work on the next page of Peter & Company, I managed to finish up all but the top two panels on the page… and then was shocked to find that an ink spill accident on the table inadvertently resulted in several of the panels being completely ruined.
I have always loved the feel of traditional drawing techniques. No matter what your chosen or preferred medium, however, you always run the risk of having these sort of tragedies occurring to your work. Photoshop can crash or corrupt your save file, the ink can spill, paint can smear or drip unintentionally, and it always ends up with additional work having to get done to catch up to where you were. Such is the hazard of being an artist, but it comes with the territory. There’s no use crying over it when it happens; just take a brief break to recompose yourself, take a deep breath, and get right back on that horse. The silver lining is that 99% of the time your second attempt at drawing the same panel will end up looking even better than the original.
Regardless, I’ll always embrace traditional inking with a brush, but man… the ink can be a harsh and cruel mistress sometimes.
Hit the jump to witness the tragedy yourself at the tail end of the video (actually, it’s not NEARLY as bad as I’m making it sound; as I can salvage most of the damage in Photoshop and will only have to redraw a minimal amount. Still, it sucks that it happened at all).
Tonight’s show was a special one. An old friend of mine and Whitney’s from SCAD, Tracy MacLauchlan, is revving the engine on her senior animation project: a short film entitled Test Flight. She let me know awhile back that she was looking for artists to join her team and crank through the project, and I was happy to offer my help whenever she needed it. Now that the ball is officially rolling, I’m beginning my work on my promised part of the deal and producing background layouts for various scenes in the film. Whitney is helping with the project as well, producing costume concepts/designs for the characters (although she wasn’t on camera tonight).
Over the two hours of tonight’s broadcast, I finished up two individual scenes: the first is an overhead shot of the butterfly woods (with one tree shaking after being struck), and the other an interior view of the butterfly woods, showing details of the millions of butterflies clinging to the bark and limbs of the trees. The final look of the film is going to be a vector style with flat colors. To take a closer look at the concept art and animatics that have been produced so far, check out the official Test Flight production blog.
Hit the jump to watch the video. The final scans of these images won’t be posted here, but they might make it onto Tracy’s blog at some point.
