Blueboy Brown

The Adventures of a Family
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Comics
  • Contact
  • Newsletter
  • Patreon

Comic Chapters

Recent Blog Entries

  • That Comic Book Cover September 29, 2020
  • Demo of my No Ink Inking Method August 14, 2020
  • Page 100 Finally on the table. Draw and color day. Yahoo! July 30, 2020
  • Replay of Variant Cover for AllStarComic. Milán Kovács and Steve Fabian join me online July 26, 2020
  • What I think of When I think July 25, 2020
  • Page 061. Yes, You Heard Me. Page 061! May 19, 2020
  • We’re Doing Page 60! Take That! And That! May 19, 2020
  • Page 059. This is BIG! – Blueboy Brown Comics May 19, 2020
  • Finishing Page 058 May 16, 2020
  • Could We Be Doing p058? May 16, 2020

Categories

  • Blog
  • Live stream
  • Uncategorized

Archives

I’m Going to Stream Video of My Production

by theWriter on April 29, 2020 at 10:05 pm
Posted In: Blog

I ain't no man's concubine!

I’ve been scratching my beard lately, thinking of new features to add to Blueboy Brown that wouldn’t distract me from what my goal is, to get this book in the can. So I stumbled upon Streamyard, which is a software encoder that prepares a livestream from your desktop, in your browser, and lets you stream to multiple platforms, like You Tube, Facebook, and Twitter. You Tube records the livestream and, for those who missed the streaming event, they can watch it there. I don’t know if Facebook does that, but even if it doesn’t I can link to the YT video on any site like Twitter and FB.

I have a LOT of video of me finishing up the B&W rendering of latter pages of the book, and now I can add the coloring and finishing up on this site by embedding it. I can do it in Hi-Def too. I’ll have to wash my face before getting in front of the camera. 

I already do this in a teaching platform named Blackboard. I stream powerpoint lectures on art history to my college classes. Yes, I’m a teacher, you guys. Teaching is an indispensable function of being an artist. The research you have to do in teaching brings one deeper into what it is to be an artist. An artist’s goal is to create masterpieces. Art of such high quality that it is remembered. Not so much the artist, but art that feeds the soul of the viewer.

Let’s see what happens. The first stream is probably next week. It will be the first page of Chapter 4: Back to Work. Colored in Photoshop and letter in Illustrator. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Comment 

Print Edition Coming Soon?

by theWriter on April 24, 2020 at 8:12 am
Posted In: Blog

Blueboy Brown - Mennonite KillersI’m mulling over the idea of presenting Blueboy Brown as a comic book in stages. The first would be Chapters 1 & 2, Mennonite Killers, and Gettysburg, respectively. That would make it a 24 page comic with a cover making it 28 pages. Then the next one would be Chapter 3, The New Wife. That one would be 32 pages plus a cover for 36 pages. Then as chapters work out to comic books that approximate that number, between 28-36 pages, I’d roll them out. Do it through Kickstarter and publish them through Afternoon Comics.

I’ll be designing a cover for this during the month of May, and also a promo video. Look for them in the blog area.

Please give me an idea in the comments if you’d like to see this form of the comic. Eventually, a full deluxe edition of the first 148 page graphic novel would come out, too.

 

 Comment 
Page 43 detail

Putting Some Perspective On This Thing

by theWriter on April 14, 2020 at 4:30 am
Posted In: Blog

A good deal of my perspective on life is founded on surviving 67 years, when many of my friends have not. Somehow, I sailed through a very chaotic youth into middle age, and got through some of the ailments that did in family members and friends. A few rocky surgeries, months of being an invalid, and I’m set to live a long life.

This coincides with much that I know of the history of humanity. In ancient times, the watershed came in several stages. If you could get out of infancy, you had a decent chance of getting to adolescence. If you could get past the age of twenty, you had a fair chance of living to middle age. If you overcame the middle age barrier, you could live to old age, if you didn’t come down with the plague or a virus released from eating certain wild game. How very current.

Then there comes old age, where I am now. I’ve gotten past clogged arteries (I had one of the best surgeons, Harvard trained and a smashing fellow, Dr. Kang), gall bladder disease (good riddance!), and managing diabetes and high blood pressure. My doc says I could live to be ninety.

Okay, now to cut to the chase. I have nine books of about 150 pages length planned. I have to live long enough to finish them. I started the first one in August, 2018, and it is now April of 2020. So I’m looking at two years for the first book. However, getting up to speed and crafting a comic book after forty years of not even thinking about them, that took some time. So I figure I can cut that in half, down to a year or so for each book.  I have an idea in my head for producing deluxe editions of the book in print, but I have time to let that germinate.

Everyone in town's talkingg about that Blueboy, ya kow.

The next thing to put into perspective is the nature of this beast, this comics thing. Despite best-selling authors also being comics writers, I haven’t noticed scads of literary fiction tackled in comics, at least compared to the stuff produced by Marvel and DC. That might be attributed to ignorance on my part. I don’t pay a lot of attention to what other people do. The Literary Hub listed some cartoons as literary fiction comics, but they’re just about reading fiction or being a writer, like Mary Atwood’s Book Tour Comics. Craig Thompson does it, and does it well. It’s stories. Stories is what I like. I grew up on superhero comics, but I think I’m burnt out on that genre. European comics seem to lean more heavily on comics as literature, but they’ve always taken comics much more seriously than we have in the good old U.S.A. I discovered Lt. Blueberry when I was nineteen. Blew me away. In 1972, I had no idea such things existed.

Here’s the rub for me: I could pursue publishers, but I’ve been there, done that. The web makes it possible to be your own publisher, and the reality of publishing is writers don’t make much money. I didn’t go into this for anything other than the love of telling stories with comics. I love this story, which is mostly written, weaving together stretches of tales I’ve spit out over the last dozen years, trying to work out the timeline of the research I’ve done over forty years, but putting it in the context of this axiom I’ve developed with age. It’s all about the point of view of an old man who has studied the world and the lives of people since he was twelve years old, staring at the stars at night, and wondering. I lived in the sticks then, and I could see zillions of them. Like a carpet I might mount and ride away to…something. Something. I suspect this is when this literary journey began, but I didn’t have the tools or experience to see  or describe things as they are. Not then.

The glut of graphic novels and webcomics flooding the market makes it likely that this little thing I’m doing will take a long time to get noticed. I knew that when I began. A few people know and remember who I was in the 1970s. The Comics Journal had a bit about me in 1985. But that was a few generations ago. The taste of the current crop of readers is different than it was then. Even though this story begins about a boy on the cusp of adolescence, who knows if it appeals to millennials? I write the story that needs telling. It might be that people need to catch up to where I am. That would make me sound like Gustave Courbet. 

Courbet, Gustave: The Artist's Studio The Artist's Studio, showing Gustave Courbet at the easel, oil on canvas by Courbet, 1854–55; in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Okay, so I sound like Gustave Courbet. Cool.

 

└ Tags: book tour comics, craig thompson, european comics, graphic novels, gustave courbet, literary fiction, lt. blueberry, mary atwood
 Comment 

My First Ad for Blueboy

by theWriter on April 2, 2020 at 5:23 pm
Posted In: Blog
To view this content, you must be a member of David's Patreon at $0.01 or more
Unlock with Patreon Unlock with Patreon
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.
 Comment 

Evolution of My Coloring Strategy

by theWriter on March 26, 2020 at 11:27 am
Posted In: Blog

I demonstrate how I’m using watercolor effects in Photoshop to create a watercolor. I put an overlay of a scanned page of Fabriano rough WC paper over the page, choose Multiply as the layer blending option, and then a layer of tone is placed over the drawing, after which I place the coloring layer. That tonal layer is how I get the lighting effects. I dodge certain parts of that layer to get spot lighting effects. The coloring layer is painted with a watercolor brush, which builds up strokes. I smudge the edges of the strokes where I want forms to turn in space. Forgive the sound of the washing machine on spin cycle. We have to call the Maytag repairman.

└ Tags: blueboybrowncomics, coloring comics, watercolor in photoshop
 Comment 
  • Page 4 of 6
  • « First
  • «
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • »

Like or Follow.

Blueboy Brown Newsletter

Get the latest updates on the development of our nine book series!

Get Updates When We Post a Comic

Subscribe in a reader

Support us on Patreon!

Support Blueboy Brown on Patreon!
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Comics
  • Contact
  • Newsletter
  • Patreon

©2019-2020 Blueboy Brown | Powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS | Back to Top ↑