ArroYEAH! Update for 31 May 2012:
The Bonds of the Battlefield - Steel Wraiths 14/15
The final pages from “Steel Wraiths”, my pilot for a fantasy/scifi story involving magitek mecha, is up on my website!
Click here to start at the beginning of the story.
Jam Comics with Hilary Allison, Eric Alexander Arroyo, and Kou Chen, 4 of 7!
So this one was a really random taco-involved comic that ended up in pretty grand circumstances. I really like that last panel Hilary drew. I was supposed to draw a final open panel at the bottom, but I felt like it was pretty self-explanatory.
Taco babies.
EAT ALL THE PEOPLE
ArroYEAH! Update for 30 May 2012:
The Bonds of the Battlefield - Steel Wraiths 12/13
Another pair of pages from “Steel Wraiths”, my pilot for a fantasy/scifi story involving magitek mecha, is up on my website!
Tomorrow I’ll be posting the final pages of the story!
(I, uh, got a bit carried away with these promotional panel edits.)
ArroYEAH! Update for 29 May 2012:
The Bonds of the Battlefield - Steel Wraiths 10/11
Another pair of pages from “Steel Wraiths”, my pilot for a fantasy/scifi story involving magitek mecha, is up on my website!
To make up for last week’s missed update, I’ll be posting two new pages of the current story every day this week, culminating with the final pages on Thursday.
(I’m sorry, but this has nothing to do with World of Darkness.)
ArroYEAH! Update for 28 May 2012:
The Bonds of the Battlefield - Steel Wraiths 08/09
Another pair of pages from “Steel Wraiths”, my pilot for a fantasy/scifi story involving magitek mecha, is up on my website!
To make up for last week’s missed update, I’ll be posting two new pages of the current story every day this week, culminating with the final pages on Thursday.
I’m writing a short blog series to open up Cartoon Allies’ Keep It Steady Initiative.
“Man Made Monsters” BFA Illustration & Cartooning Thesis Exhibition
Thesis year was a major turning point in my cartooning career. This was not due to all the hype built around the project or its accompanying thesis show. Instead, I owe part of my success to the framework of the project, one of the many elements which came together to pull me out of the failures and bad habits of my sophomore year.
In this inaugural weekly series for the Keep It Steady Initiative, I’m going to break down my journey to a better work ethic into advice which I hope will be useful to other students and cartoonists tackling their own thesis comics or any long-term work. This week’s post focuses on process and expectations, with a section dedicated to those who treat their work too preciously.
Last month, Cartoon Allies had its wildest end-of-the-year in recent history. Fresh Meat, our student comics festival, is traditionally CA’s final operation before the summer. This year, Fresh Meat’s 10th anniversary celebration was only a prelude to MoCCA Fest, creating a wild cacophony of comics among finals and portfolio reviews.
In the madness of it all, we were not able to formally pass the torch. Newly promoted Vice President Kou Chen and I joined our fearless leader Hilary Allison for one final round of jam comics at her apartment, but there were many things left unsaid.
Cartoon Allies has played an integral role in my time as a cartoonist at SVA. As a freshman, I followed fliers in the GW to a madhouse of upperclassmen and comicholics, my only connection to the rest of the department during my exile to Foundation Year. Fast forward to my first Fresh Meat, to which I arrived late with only a dummy copy of Nuclear Fiction v1.0, where my partner-in-crime Adrian James and I were invited to become CA officers. A few months later, I found myself under the tutelage of Hilary Allison, chatting up “cool famous people” at my first SPX and struggling to keep up with CA’s constant barrage of emails. With our fantastic president and co-kings Allison Strejlau, Megan Brennan, and Rel, we pushed for making CA a greater resource for cartoonists, put together the constantly-flailing CA blog, and marched into another great Fresh Meat that I skipped my Western Civ final for (sophomore year was not my personal best). Hilary was promoted to president, I became VP (but kept my rank of Major), and we invited Kou, Matt Clark, Hayley Weber, and Emily Kay Jay into our ranks. Together, we established a new foundation of events and programs to further enrich our department, resulting in our most ambitious and arduous year yet.
As long as I’ve known Hilary, she’s been a radiant beacon of dedication and enthusiasm. She’s the definition of a dependable leader and friend; when she accepts a task, she will see it through with all of her effort behind it. And even when she has heavy bags under her eyes and she’s buckling under pressure, she’ll give you a smile that’s genuine. As both a cartoonist and president of Cartoon Allies, she has been full of ideas and focused on self-betterment, treating every action with a commendable level of social awareness. She’s never been a preacher or authoritarian; she leads by example and tries to be the best person she can possibly be.
With her graduation, our school has lost one if its most ardent and giving pupils. I have no reason to doubt that Hilary will bring her positivity and progressiveness to the greater comicsphere, but damn, she is going to be a hard act to follow.
In terms of workload, I’m not afraid of becoming president (or Major General, as we prefer internally), already used to putting way more hours into this organization than I do my actual classes. But I’m inheriting a treasured legacy from Hilary, Megan, Rel, Allison, Pat Woodruff, and everyone else who has led this force. I thank them all for their dedication to Cartoon Allies’ success and growth, and for providing spectacular examples for me to follow. I hope I can do justice to their legacy and continue to push this organization beyond the boundaries of our department and school. Cartoon Allies is a bastion for new ideas, collaboration, and revolution in comics. This is my generation, and I will do everything in my power to provide the resources we need to make fantastic comics, be caring and ambitious people, and have a blast while we do it.
Thank you, Allies, for staying strong. We hope you’ll help us build another stellar year at the School of Visual Arts. We are nothing without the will of cartoonists.
Yesterday I inked a drawing of my Exalted character Nagare Gai I had made last summer. He’s a Fire Aspect Dragon-Blooded from Lookshy’s First Field Force.
I’ve been practicing inking with a lightbox again, and while it gives me a headache, it has its pros. Oddly, it’s a lot more stressful than inking straight on the pencils for me. I avoided large fills because I’m considering coloring this.
Unfortunately, since I waited so long to post this, this can easily be mistaken as my Legend of Korra fan character. Dammit, I was drawing elementally-aspected characters with bushy eyebrows, hot-blooded sideburns, scarves, and Meiji Era-influenced uniforms in pan-Asian-inspired techno-fantasy settings before it was cool.
Maybe I should consider doing commissions (Exalted or otherwise).
Oh, I should note that my webcomic updated a few days ago with two new pages from my techno fantasy story “Steel Wraiths”. More pages go up Monday!
Eric Alexander Arroyo / “Reloading” work-in-progress
Finally inking that PunchGun drawing I did while watching Trigun with Kou and Peter. I tried fudging in a background, but while looking for reference, I got sidetracked researching San Francisco high schools in the ’70s. Not only did I decide on what high school Jonah would’ve attended, but I found the entirety of its 1975-76 (whenPGtakes place) yearbook scanned on the ‘net. Research is pretty cool.
Anyway, I might finish the background later tonight. I found some old Exalted drawings from last summer that I wanna ink, so expect those up soon, too.
I should note that this drawing is displayed larger than I actually drew it.
While I love the adventures of Robin Wraithcaller, the poleaxe-wielding and mecha-piloting woman with a ridiculous name, “Steel Wraiths” is a story that really suffered from my poor time management last year. Every time I’ve published the story, I’ve had to slip in little art revisions here and there. While I serialize the story online, I’m doing my final touch ups ever; it’s about time I lived and let live and moved on to other projects.
Page 7 is a special case; while the art was touched up a bit, the main change was to the dialogue. As you can tell from the original page on the left, the exposition (which the second half of the story hinges upon) is clunky and too cryptic for its own good. I have a habit of being too oblique with my storytelling and world development, a habit I probably picked up from old Gundam.
“Steel Wraiths” was definitely a situation of putting setting first without realizing I failed to put a strong story together. As the first “long”-form comic I ever completed, a learned a ton from it, though. And as I’ve fiddled with it for the past year, I’ve continued to learn from it and come to terms with my perfectionism in some ways.
Whoops this became a rant about the story instead of commentary for the page comparison.
