Unlocking my car door I hoped in feeling bloated from that grand slam dinner I had with Jose at Denny’s. As Jose hoped in the passenger seat I was scrambled looking around for my iPod thinking it might have fell in between the seats. Then Jose said, “Hey bro, look back!”

I turned around.

A week before that I got a call to do some casino gigs with an artist named Francis Yip. What a great experience working with wonderful people especially Francis. Performing in front of thousands of people was a first for me, the nerves got to me, but I believe I handled it pretty well.

After the tour with Francis Yip That was my first dose of performing in front of massive crowds. I got hooked and my ego grew.

I connected with top music pros and that spawned new opportunities for me.

 The day they stole my bass.

Fast forward a week later I stumbled on a church gig with my friend Jose a great drummer. The church gig was Holy Ghost moving, toe tapping service and everybody was moving.

After the service the guys in the band decided to grab a late night snack at the ever fattening Denny’s restaurant.

I shouted, “Why do we always go to Denny’s, let’s grab some tacos at the taco truck.” No one listened and I lost the battle.

Jose rode with me in my truck, he stuffed his drum gear in my backseat including my bass and effects pedal.

We arrived at Denny’s at around 10pm with everyone else. We waited, ordered, laughed, annoyed each other and the waitress, filled our bellies with grease, paid the check and left.

When we jumped into my truck Jose told me to turn around, I glanced at the backseat where our gear was, it took me a few seconds to realize that our gear was gone.

Vanished into thin air.

We freaked and started thinking who did it. Jose remember a group of guys parked right next to us before we entered into Denny’s. But how did they get in the truck? No windows were broken into.

Jose opened the back door and realized it was unlocked. Doh!!

I’m not blaming him, it’s my fault as well I didn’t bother to check if the truck was locked and secure. My bad.

We called the cops waited for two hours for them to arrive, filed a report and never saw our gear ever again. We ended up getting new gear eventually. Several months later I purchased a slamming new 5 string fender jazz bass and Jose got this amazing new drum set.

This was in 2007 and as of today we still haven’t heard of or seen any of our gear.

The End.

Thanks for reading and please let me know if you’ve encountered any similar situations.

Peace

I thought I’d create another behind the scenes look at my cartooning process. This will be my second behind the scenes look. Click here for my first behind the scenes post.

I figured I’d create this post based on the Guitar Samarai slicing the guitar in half with bits and pieces flying all over.

This image was for a tutorial I wrote awhile back on the “10 steps to cutting your guitar practice routine in half.”  Click here to read more.

Creating art is always a lengthy process, but I love every minute of it. When a comic is created there are always several folks involved. There’s the: writer, editor, penciller, inker, colorist and letterrer. One of these days I’ll be able to hire every single one.

For the meantime I’ll have to tackle the whole process myself. It’s a great learning experience.

Behind the Scenes: Creating the Guitar Samurai

Let’s begin.

The Idea: 1-2 days. This is the hardest part, because if the idea is executed correctly then everything else will follow. For the 10 steps to cutting your guitar practice routine in half, I literally talk walks around my neighborhood and let ideas just come to mind. If I stay home, ideas tend to not come very quickly for me.

Open environments give my mind some breathing room. My walks can take 30-60 minutes or more depending on the weather, it’s good exercise too. For this post I was looking for an image that had movement of something being cut in half. In this case I chose the guitar to be cut in half.

But who was gonna do the cutting?

Since I love martial arts, ninjas and samurais I figured I’ll have a samurai flying through the air slicing a guitar in two. It sounding like a cool image so I went for it.

The Tools: It’s important to have tools that work for your process. You don’t need super expensive tools to get the job done. Here is a list of my basic tools.

Mechanical Pencil
Gum Eraser
8.5 x 11 paper
Pigma Micron Pens
Presto Pen whiteout
Black Sharpie Pen

I’ve bought many mechanical pencils, some cheap and expensive. I’m always looking for a better mechanical pencil, but it seems this cheap pencil I bought at Target seems to work for me. Use what works for you.

References: 10-15 minutes. I believe it’s important to always have references for your artwork. Most artists don’t have great photographic memories. Sometimes you’ll have to draw an image you’re not familiar with and you have to gather references. All the great artists do it today. Jim Lee, Mike Mignola, Todd Mcfarlane, Bill Watterson, Sean Murphy, all use references. The internet is an abundant resource.

Use it.

Light Sketch/Thumbnails 10-15 minutes. I was experimenting with different poses but I thought having his legs kick up would make it more dramatic.

Light Pencils: 30 minutes. Here I defined the image a bit more and decided it would be cool to have the guitar strings flying all over the place.

Line Work: 10-15 minutes. Darkening the pencils a bit more made the piece more defined. I added action lines when the sword came thrusting down slicing the guitar. I also thought there has to be bits of wood exploding all over, so I added those as well.

Shadows: 30 minutes. I love adding the darks and lights of a piece, it brings it to life and creates that 3D effect. I wanted the light source to come from above so the shadows had to be filled in below the character. Looking good so far.

Scan: 5 minutes. I use an small Canon Pixma MG6220 for scanning. Once scanned, I open it in Manga Studio, a great software for cartoonists and coverted it into light blue for inking.

Inks: 1-2 hours. This part takes awhile but Manga Studio is great for inking your comic. Inking is basically tracing your pencil work, it does take a bit of practice to get it done correct. I used a Maru brush for this piece and it come out pretty well. I also added some extra action lines in the background. Now it looks cool.

Colors: 1-2 hours. I’m not a colorist so I chose just basic flats for the samurai. Orange is my favorite color so of course I added it to to the gee. I’m learning a lot more about color theory everyday and if you’re reading this in the future my coloring should’ve improved by now. For the time being this is the result and I believe it came out pretty cool.

I believe that’s it folks.

If you have any questions about my cartooning process feel free to leave a comment below. I appreciate you for reading this blog.

Cheers

As a kid I loved movies!

But what really fascinated me was watching behind the scenes of movies and cartoons. The process was very interesting to me. The way you can create something in your head and bring it to life was mind blowing.

I decided to create the behind the scenes of one of my comic gags.

Hope you enjoy it.

Ok, for starters I’m so unprofessional. I’ve been an artist since I was kid and wanted to be an animator for Disney, but the music bug got me. I’m still learning all the tools on what to use in my cartoons.  But here goes….

Step 1 The idea.

I’ll be talking about the process of my previous comic gag in the previouse blog. If you’ve missed it click here.

For starters I had to come up with a gag about Time. I used my usually characters, MD and Ham. These ideas don’t come easy it could take a day or two for me to come up with something that seems like it took me 5 minutes.

At my place I have a small garden with tomatoes and a potato plant growing. I was thinking of growing some herbs. So, I was thinking of: Rosemary, cilantro, basil, and thyme.

Then it hit me. Thyme! Rhymes with Time.

The two panel gag goes like this. MD is practicing on his bass and Ham walks in with a bag full of thyme that he got what he asked for. MD turns around and scolds Ham saying he meant we’re running out of Time, not Thyme!

Haha! Yes, I know corny. But, it’s funny corny.

Step 2 Tools

I need to up grade my tools and my process but this is what I use.

• Prismacolor Turqoise Pencils
• Pigma Micron Pens
• Black Sharpie Pen
• Creto Lead Holder for covering big areas
• Prismacolor Sharpener
• Gum eraser
• Presto Pen whiteout

• Mac PowerBook 17 inch
• Wacom Intuos 3 tablet and Wacom Pen
• Manga Studio EX4
• Canon Pixma MG6220 for scanning

I use very dinosaur equipment and I need an upgrade but it gets the job done for now. Any donations will be helpful.

Step 3 Referances. 5-10 minutes

I used my iPhone and took a few basic poses. I just mounted it on my keyboard and took several pics. These poses were basic I would usually use my imagination to create the poses depending the difficulty but this time I got lazy.

Step 4 Rough Sketch. 10-15 minutes.

I use a standard 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. One day I will upgrade to the standard comic Bristol  board of 11 x 17 and reason why I haven’t is because my scanner doesn’t fit that size. Here is a rough sketch of two panels.

Step 5 Line Work. 30 minutes

Here I’m actually drawing the character lines and then darkening them to stand out.

Step 6 Shadow and balloons. 1 hour or less

Adding the shadows gives the characters depth. The balloons and dialogue are also added.

Step 7 Scanning. 5-10 minutes

The drawing is now scanned into the computer and opened in Manga Studio and converted into photo blue line for inking.

Step 8 Inking. 1 hour or less

Manga is a great tool for comics especially for inking digitally. Here is the inked cartoon.

Step 9 Colors. 30 minutes

Colors make it all pop. I just started playing around with color with my characters. I’m going for simplicity just like in popular comics like, “The Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes.” If I used more colors it would obviously take longer.

That’s pretty much it. My whole process from start to finish of a cartoon.

I hope you’ve enjoyed it and please share it with others. Onto next blog!

As always thanks and God Bless.

Roland