CASTLE PART 3

Andrew Marlowe, creator of CASTLE shook my hand and wished me luck with all the work I had to do. All the while you're speaking to him, you're painfully aware that you're speaking to someone incredibly intelligent who is measuring your every word and intonation. His insights during the meeting were quick and incisive. He cuts to the point quickly and effectively communicating that he had already played out all the possibilities in his head. I learned a great deal watching him work and I'm beginning to appreciate the qualities and the level of vision required by a show runner.

After Andrew had left I turned to Howard Grigsby the producer of CASTLE. I asked him if it would be possible to come down to the set and watch any of my art being filmed. He said of course and would keep me in the loop.

Unfortunately schedules clashed and I wasn't able to see the sets that were made out of my artwork. Nor did I see any of the scenes that involved my graphic novel. But I got to sit in on the scene at the police precinct where Castle explains to Beckett why people get involved in the vampire sub culture.

Gina was my guide and took me around the set. The first thing that hit me was that the precinct set is HUGE. Holding cells, corridors, office after office, interrogation (er interview) rooms, stairways to nowhere, and of course the main area where Detectives Beckett, Ryan and Esposito have their desks. I first ran into Seamus Dever who plays Detective Ryan and then Jon Huertas who plays Detective Esposito. At the time I hadn't watched enough CASTLE episodes to appreciate who I was meeting. My reaction would be very different now. They were really low key and stopped by for a chat when they realized I was new and how I was involved in the show.

Afterwards, I mentioned to Gina that I'd love to meet Nathan Fillion. I asked her if it would be "out of line" to get him to sign a couple copies of Firefly that I'd brought with me. She said he's super cool and snagged him as he zoomed past on a kid's scooter. It looked miniscule on him. I'm not small, I'm 6'1 and 215 pounds and he made me feel pretty tiny. He's gotta be 6'3 and 240 pounds and he carries it well. He was fun and gracious and signed both the Firefly dvds with his signature, "Watch this, it's good".

When I later gave my friend her dvd she totally flipped out and actually jumped into the air several times waving her arms and legs like a hummingbird. She's a pretty cool cat, and to see her lose it was gratifying and hilarious.

I'm a reasonably cool customer, but I may have gushed around Nathan and there may have been some fanboy babbling.

Maybe.




Anyway... moving on. They finished shooting the scene and it was great to watch them work. Then the crew moved across to Castle's apartment which is also huge. And it's a really nice apartment. It was all decked out for the Halloween party and Michael Courville from the art department gave Gina and I a tour through the Halloween candy that he had especially catered for it. The whole apartment is so thoroughly designed. Everything is thought of. The letters of congratulation and rejection to Castle on his wall are all proper letters not garbled words. The books on the shelves seem like the sorts of things that Castle would read and they're all real books. He has fencing statues (reminiscent of the time that he and his daughter Alexis began an episode fencing.

I ran into Barry, the first AD and a huge HEROES fan. I mentioned to him that I'd brought down my first HEROES graphic novel for Stana to sign but that she was nowhere to be found. Above and beyond the call of duty, Barry ran upstairs and asked Stana to come down and chat to me. I was taken aback. Stana was lovely, very tall and very lithe. As I handed her the graphic novel we spoke about her character on HEROES, Hana Gitelmann and how the character was the mouthpiece for the online fans. I commented that the writers probably didn't realize her rise in popularity and really should have included her in the show more. She would have been the perfect way to keep the sprawling cast together.

On the plus side, I got to draw her Death which set me on the map as a creator who cared about his work on HEROES. She had a great laugh at the ridiculous portrayal of her body and clothing by some of the artists. I told Stana how the fans agreed and how I tried to get them involved and to put their money where their mouth is and get them to design a dress for Hana. Meanwhile she's flipping through the pages of the story I drew and I'm getting increasingly nervous. I then hurriedly told her how I was going to do a competition for who gets to kiss Hana. She laughs flicking through the pages saying, "So who won? Who did I kiss?"

Then her hand moves away from the offending panel...

http://jasonbadower.blogspot.com/2007/05/hana-part-1-i-eight-hana.html

Yeah. Em-BAR-RASSING!!!!

We laughed so hard. I told her that at the time I didn't have a girlfriend, and I joked that if I wasn't getting any action in real life, I could at least get some in my comics. So I drew myself in thinking that I would NEVER HAVE THIS CONVERSATION with Stana. She (graciously) laughed very, very hard.

So she asked me if she could write something in the front of the HEROES graphic novel for me as well as sign it. "Will your girlfriend read it?"

"Yeah, but you can write anything. She's totally cool."

So Stana wrote:

"To Jason, For the best virtual kiss I ever had. Stana."

And that ladies and gentlemen is why Stana Katic is awesome.

That concludes my time on CASTLE. I had a ball and was overjoyed to see how well it turned out. I only hoped that my artwork would be integrated as well as it did. Thank you to everyone involved for making it such an awesome experience. I hope you liked seeing the extra artwork and if you go back and watch the episode again (206) you will see where it fitted in.

As a final piece of icing on the cake, I turned in my invoice. A day later I got a call from Howard, "Jason, we need to have a talk about this invoice.". I start thinking, "Oh god, I've over charged. I thought it was fair but he's going to ask me to compromise or explain some of the invoice. Here we go..."

Instead Howard says, "I've been talking to Alfred (the head of the art department) and we both think you did a tremendous job and seriously undercharged us. We think you should redo this invoice. Here are some suggestions..."

Howard basically increased the invoice by 50%. I was so humbled, and stunned. I knew I'd probably undercharged myself, but fair is fair. I quoted a price so I felt (as a man of honor) that even though the amount of work blew out, I had to stick to that price. That Howard would call me to tell me that he didn't think it was fair to me tells you the caliber and integrity of the people working on this show.

Immeasurable.

Castle. 10pm ABC.

They've made me a fan for life.

NEXT: More freelance work. The GI JOE Facebook application.

HANA PART 2: Epilogue

I can't tell you enough just how much THE DEATH OF HANA GITELMAN has changed my life.

It was an incredible and exhausting experience, and something I'd do again in a heart-beat. It almost put me in the hospital, but I enjoyed every minute.

Here's a quick recap:

1. My blog was averaging around 500 hits per day for a week after Hana was uploaded. Before that it averaged about 7. The idea that 500 people were taking five minutes out of their day to see my behind the scenes process. That blew me away. It was the most inspiring validation of my art that I'd ever received. I also want to especially thank the 80 or so people who drop by every day to quickly check what I'm doing. Your support means the world to me!

2. The 9th Wonders favourite artist fan poll was incredible. I was nervously watching the numbers expecting a nice close race, and I won by a landslide (94%). I was totally humbled. Especially because I was so nervous about the style I had used for the story. I'm so glad to see it was so well received. In fact, the whole experience has changed the way I draw. Right now there's PH (Pre Hana) and AH (After Hana). =)

3. The 3HEROES podcast interview. In the past I've done interviews that were then published or posted online as text. But I'd never had the opportunity to do a recorded interview before. Paul was brilliant and so incredibly supportive and helpful. He was also a joy to talk to, which helped enormously. I apologise to anyone if we went too off-HEROES, but we just got chatting. Paul assures me it's fun and we do keep coming back to HEROES.

4. The online friends and support network I've made blows me away. If I've ever forgotten to reply, just shoot me another email. I'm terrible at remembering what I have and haven't replied to. There's no slight intended. I'm just kinda useless like that. But I will reply! To all the people that email, to all the people that help me - thank you!

I've also posted the above original version of page 11. In some ways I like it more, in other ways it lacks. If you look back at the layout I did ( a couple posts ago) you will see that I also included the HEROES logo. Here's a version I did with the logo included.

Here's my worklist right now:

Final page of the Emperor (almost done)
Zero G - laid out pages 1-11. Start drawing asap!
HEROES con sketches.

Keep your eyes peeled for the above and some surprises in the meantime.

HANA PART 2: 11th Hour

And now fateful heroes, we come to the end of Hana's and my journey.

I'm trying to remember when I got the script for this page, and I'm pretty sure that it was before the screening of "5 YEARS LATER". So it was a fairly long time ago. So for the longest time I knew how the series was going to end. People begged me to tell them. But at the end of the day, so few things come along in life that are worth the reveal. I felt that this was one of them. You don't want to read the answer in some blog or on an email. You want to see it yourself. You want to see Nathan turn up at the last minute. You want to see Hiro stabbing Sylar. You want to feel Niki and Mohinder's desperation.

This page was the culmination of everything I wanted to see and feel at the end of the HEROES season one finale. I've had some fans comment that it was everything that they wanted and didn't get, which is incredible praise.

I don't know if the finale was a let down, I already knew what was happening ages ago. I had the joy instead of watching all the pieces in the puzzle fall into place.

When I got the description of this page I pestered poor Frank and NBC for as much reference material as possible. They came through with the goods and I managed to get screen caps for everything I needed. I wanted this page to be as authentic as possible. I'm pretty sure that everything except for Hiro's sword is perfect. On the reference they gave me I could see the red sword, but I'd never seen it before. I had no idea what it was and thought it must be a stunt prop that they would colour correct later. So I just drew Hiro's sword instead, and in some ways it looks better like this.

I might upload some of the reference images that they gave me. Some of it is test 3d renders of special effects - like Nathan and Peter flying off. I'm sure Ryan from Heroeswiki will dig them.

Next post I'm going to upload the monochromatic version of the page, version 1 if you will. There's also a bit of a story to go along with it.

OTHER NEWS: Paul tells me that the 3Heroes interview is done and that it's "gold". My interview will apparently be the entire podcast, so I'm really looking forward to that. We spoke for about one and a half hours and Paul has cut it down to what he thinks is a really entertaining hour. So for those of you who want to know what I sound like... stay tuned.

HANA PART 2: Of Ten

So here is where I had some fun with the injokes.

First up, I can't remember if it was Ryan (of Heroeswiki) or myself who remembered the Uluru desktop from the 9th Wonders that Micah is a fan of... But I'm glad it's there. To be honest, it was probably Ryan who remembered it.

Of note also in the first panel is my injoke shout-out to the members of the 9th Wonders Forums. Wolfbro7, one of the moderaters of the 9th Wonders had been aware of my presence on the boards and my rapport with the fans there. He asked me if it were at all possible to include any sort of shout out to the 9th Wonders fans. I was already on page 5 of this story, but I instantly knew what I could do. The hardest thing about including stuff like this, is making sure that it doesn't get spotted and subsequently asked to be removed by NBC. I snuck the 9th Wonders into the taskbar on Micah's laptop. You could rationalise it that he was simply checking out the 9th Wonders comic forum in his world. =)

Of additional note is that I decided to letter this page also. Once I had designed the user interface for the captions, as well as the font, I thought it would be easier if I just did it myself. I did specifically ask Frank to make sure that the letterer was still paid for this page. I didn't want to go taking anything anyone's pay packet just because I decided to make an artistic call. The lettering is most of the actual artwork - I mean, look at the lineart. Again, there's barely anything there.

Panel 1 is simply the laptop frame before I pasted in the Tim Sale Uluru picture. I slapped the text box on top (cobbled together from a Skype window) and added the lettering.

Panel 2 is just the same text box and background with different text in it.

Panel 3 is a close up of a circuitry board, again with the text caption over it.

Panel 4 is a hybrid of panel 3 and a closeup overlay of her eye from panel 5.

Panel 5 is really the only other panel of note. If I could be so bold as to say it about my own stye - or process rather, I'm really enjoying knowing where to stop and knowing what I can do with the painting and the airbrushing. Look at Micah on page 10. The lineart barely resembles him, but the painted art is pretty spot on. I'm still stunned by my ability to just know when to stop. It obviously didn't work for Niki, but hey, there's always casualties in war. I find that the lineart on this page doesn't look a thing like Hana, but the painted art makes it look like one of her glamour shots. I'm very happy with it. It has a nice angelic look (intentional based on her angel references in part 1) while still homaging the digital noise that she has now integrated with.

The hardest thing was to not make it look like the Matrix.

So I made her blue.

Genius, I know. =)

This process again is why I don't want to do HEROES sketches at San Diego. I just don't do great likenesses as lineart.

More on those winners images coming.

HANA PART 2: Nine lives

As you can see, while I did very little drawing on the last page, I more than made up for it on this page.

Page 9 was hell. I don't think I spent so much time on a page apart from the final montage page.

This was so damn tough for one reason alone: Niki. I drew, redrew and redrew that picture of Niki. It killed me. Even after I sent off the final montage page, I came back and with an hour to spare, redrew this page. So despit me touting the revolutionary new drawing technique, I still got done over.

At the end of the day, I ended up coming back to this version. Not because it's a great likeness - it's not. But because it had the best performance for me.

Personally I blame my lack of photo reference. Do you realise how far back you have to go to get a picture of Niki not in a straight jacket? Really far. Really, really far. Then consider how little I had to work with and then I had to find a picture of her with the right expression with a reasonably similar lighting. Suffice to say, my likeness of Niki is inversely proportional to my likeness of Micah. I don't wanna blow my own horn here, but the likenesses of Micah on this page are pretty damn solid.

I can't believe that I never saved any of the other versions! In my haste I must have saved over them. Ah well.

I also want to apologise to the letterer on this page. Normally I have a very clear idea of where the dialogue balloons should be placed. I stared and stared at Aron's dialogue, but I just had no idea how to lay the balloons out. In the end I just drew the damn panel and let the letterer figure it out themselves? The final result meant that many people found this page difficult to read. While you could blame the letterer, I personally hold myself accountable as I really left the poor guy out to dry.

Thanks again to Ryan Gibson Stewart for finding me the reference for Niki's car, their house, Micah's room and even the model of laptop that he owns! He enabled me to leave no stone unturned, so that was pretty cool.

For my "night effects" I chucked a transparent blue layer over the top. Included here is what the page looks like during the day. =)

HANA PART 2: Page Eight, Final Fate

I'm going to go to hell.

Yep, what you see below is the lineart for this page. This picture of Hana is ALL I drew on this page. I'm a lying, cheating and swindling bastard. NBC and all the HEROES fans should lynch me.

So how the hell did I get away with artistic murder? Well, I grabbed the satellite that I drew from panel 3 of part 1 and enlarged it and distorted it a bit so its perspective worked for the angle. I cleaned it up so that it worked at this higher level of detail. I believe I had to redraw the "wings" on it. I then drew Hana on top.

This is one of the few times that I break the fourth wall. If you look very closely she is looking directly at us. It's like when you're about to die that your life flashes before your eyes, well I figured that just before she dies she realises that she's just a character in a story.


Then I added all the flame, re-entry effects on the satellite. If I could do this again, I would add flames to her suit to show her burning up. I don't think it was totally clear that she was burning up and going to die. Lastly I added a close-up of the planet earth, specifically Australia as per the script. I decided to flip it upside down to add to the disorientation. I wonder if they mentioned Australia specifically to totally distance it from Nathan and Peter?

Here's an earlier layout of page 8 also. As you can see, it was a great deal less dynamic, and lacked the scale of the image I eventually went with.

HANA PART 2: Seventh Heaven

I've been listening to the enjoyable 3Heroes podcast as I draw. You can find the podcasts at:

3Heroespodcast

One of the presenters, Emily commented that she enjoyed this comic more than the finale. I was really warmed by that. I really gave all that I could for this. She also made the comment that it was so good that it should have been on tv. And therein lies the trouble with the comics. The first thing I read about the comics on the posts is that they have to contribute to the tv series in some real way. The problem being, that if they contribute too much, they should be on the show itself! What a fine line these graphic novels have to walk.

My favourite 3Heroes presenter, Paul left a message on my artblog (flawedprefect) commenting also on how much he liked the art. I contacted Paul on his blog (barenaked hurley) and asked if I could help in any way. He asked me if he could interview me about HEROES and comics in general. Of course I said, "Yes" as it sounds like a load of fun. We're going to crank the nerdometer up to max there. You have been warned.

Ok, onto the page:

Boy this was a hard, hard page. Now I know one of the benefits of doing this as a comic book story is that there is effectively unlimited budget. But it just seems so weird to go so widescreen and extraordinary to the point of disbelief in this installment. This page especially suffers for it. I mean, first she cops a death-ray-like-computer virus beam, then she JUMPS ONTO THE SATELITE! My god. I wracked my brains for ages to make this fit into normal HEROES continuity. I mean, you would NEVER see this on an episode. I decided to try and play up Hana's pain and her sacrifice. I wanted panel 3 to let you know she is really dying. I mean, globlets of blood floating in her helmet? Eyes bleeding? You know it's bad.

I like the blurry star field in the background. It almost looks like a 70s sci fi movie.

GREG GRUNBERG: I managed to contact Greg's agent (thanks to Sheindie) and she contacted NBC. She informed me that NBC wish to hold onto the rights for the art for another upcoming auction they wish to do. So sorry you guys and Greg, I tried. =(

ONE YEAR: My blog turned 1 year old on may 22nd! It totally passed me by. I can't believe I've been artblogging for a year. 172 posts. That's blogging for 47% of the year. Not too bad. I did take a LOT of time off. But more importantly (to me) is that is 172 pieces of art I've posted or done in the last year. Now that's not bad at all for a guy who works full-time! I'm pretty proud of that.

HANA PART 2: Six Shooter

This is a wonderful example of a mis-managed page. I have a theory (forgive me if you've heard it before) on the difference between art and illustration. Art is done when the artist says it's done. Illustration is done when someone else says it's done. The key to a good illustrator is making as few mistakes as possible and making sure that you complete the artwork to the best of your ability in the time given.

As you can see by the lineart, there is a great deal going on in the background that is not present on the final painted page. In the past when I have worked with Annette, she has been reluctant to place in effects or layers which would cover up the linework that I had drawn. I would ask her to do what the story requires. If I had over-drawn an area, then that's my fault. As is obvious in this case. You can see all the background that I drew - the chairs, the monitors and the background textures and details. But I decided that the "tech cloud" should be all encompassing and dominating. I also used it as a means to make Hana stand out more.

I'm such a lazy/crafty bastard. I don't believe I ever drew the satelite again after drawing it on part 1 page 1. It's just been cut and pasted over and over again. So, as you can see on the lineart, I've drawn around this cut and pasted image. Apologies if you noticed and it lessened your reading experience.

One of the toughest things to deal with on this page was the visualisation of Hana's powers in panel 4. The script looked like this:

Hana sends out a WIRELESS COMMUNICATION, like a bolt of lighting (or something), right at the SATELLITE -- but it doesn't reach the satellite, it's deflected off.

For such a low-key show like HEROES, a bolt of lightning from someone's head was going to look incongruous. But I realised I had very little choice. I tried to overlap the technical data into the lightning bolt to make it look like a technical signal. If you look, the "forcefield" is made of red data. I think Aron's captions really helped here.

Finally the last tough thing was Hana's infection by the computer virus. Again, if you look closely into her red eyes, you can see the words of data/text in the whites of her eyes. I took artistic licence drawing the blood trickling down (we all know there's no gravity in space) but I couldn't think how to make it work any other way.

Well that's page 6! I normally don't blog on weekends, but it's saturday night and it's 10:52pm and I'm already in my pajamas. I also let you all down during the week with my technical difficulties. The least I can do to show my appreciation for your patience is to continue the commentary.

HANA PART 2: Five alive

It's been a while, so let's catch the hell up. Sorry about the technical difficulties. My mouse wheel died so that it eternall scrolled downwards. In Photoshop this meant that any picture I was working on was zoomed out until it was little more than a speck in the distance.

Then while trying to fix my mouse, I managed to pour water all over the left side of my keyboard. For some reason, it took about 3 days before none of the keys on the left hand side refused to work.

Weird.

Anyway, back to Hana. This is an interesting page. It's all smoke and mirrors, and everything I've drawn you don't actually get to see!

As you can see, the top page is actually fairly detailed. I put a significant amount of work into the background. I think it's because I knew that the rest of the page would be all cutting corners.

I quite like the top panel, I like Hana's expression. It speaks of a subtle trepidation. While I think it's a decent likeness, it's hard to create an exact image of someone when you can't see their hair! One of things I did with the Zero G outfits was to make sure that you could see everyone's hair and tell everyone apart at a glance. You will also notice that she has a Chinese flag on her arm. I was tempted to do the Israel flag, but I had a look back at the story itself. I got the impression that Hana's plan had been executed no more than 5 minutes before she was captured - perhaps even as she contemplated the rocket. If she'd thought that far ahead she could have forged the documents in their system well beforehand and walked onto the base as an honoured guest. As it was, there's no way they would have had the time to sew an Israeli patch onto the astronaut suit.

This second panel could have been so much more beautiful and epic. I'm not sure what got lost. Perhaps the scale? Some trucks or people in the foreground would have really helped the scale of it. As it is, it looks a bit like a Thunderbirds mission.

The final panel is just so simple. A mediocre likeness at best. About the only thing the page has going for it is that at least she looks Israeli. The data streaming in was an afterthought after I had drawn page 6.

In other news: I finished another Emperor and the Concubine page. It's so hard to go back to this style. I'm going to make this Heroes style, my new visual style. It's so fast and effective. I can't wait to see Annette colour some of this stuff. I'm still burnt out from Heroes, and work has been relentless. I'm hoping that next week is the light at the end of the tunnel.

HANA PART 2: Fourplay

When you've made progress in your craft, sometimes you can look over your shoulder and realise that all the baby steps have taken you a mile. Sometimes, just sometimes you can point to one page, perhaps one image as the key point where you stepped up to another level.

Panel 4 is that image for me. I know a lot of people are going to snicker that it's because I was drawing a woman undressing. That's only accurate on a very superficial level. The naked body is (arguably) one of the easiest things to draw from a technical level. It's also the first thing most artists learn to draw. It's why life drawing the naked figure is recommended as one of the best ways to improve one's drawing. So it stands to reason that the (semi) naked figure is where I'm going to be able to mentally go back to basics and re-evaluate this style.

Up til then I had been kind of thrashing around trying to figure this style out as I was going. I had a system, but it wasn't working and I wasn't getting the exact look that I required. It was doing ok, but it looked rough and unfinished to me.

Here's what I had been doing:;after I had drawn the lineart (see left) I layered underneath a black and white page of ink wash splatters. I would then tone that layer using the Burn and Dodge tool in Photoshop.

As I mentioned, it was a nice technique, but it was kinda... rough. If you look at the rendering on panels 1, 2 and 3, there's something gritty about it. When I drew panel 4, it was as simple as applying a very subtle Gaussion Blur to it. It kept the organic nature of the watercolour texture, but smoothed it out just enough that if I Burnt or Dodged it, the result was slicker and subtler than what I had previously been doing. I also learnt to slightly adjust the colour of the tonal layer. This brought the textures more to life and made them a little less flat. Two quick and easy techniques that were little more than a couple of mouse clicks... I just hadn't considered them.

For those this doesn't seem like mumbo jumbo to, I hope it helps you.

HANA PART 2: Three-fully

It's funny, but for a guy so well versed in action (ex stunt man and black belt martial artist) I'm terrible at comic book action. Laying out this page was akin to pulling teeth. I believe it was one of the last pages I handed in.

But perhaps I've put my finger on the pulse of the problem? Comic book action is not the same as real life action.

Let's start with the problems that the script initiated. There's so much action communicated in the script:

Splash Page - Hana QUICKLY, grabs the GUN with one hand. KNOCKS OUT a guard with the OTHER HAND. And KICKS a THIRD GUARD in the gut. F*cking action star.

As an aside, I love the energy of Aron's scripts. The final line brought it all to life for me. =)

It's almost impossible to communicate all this action in one image. I drew sketch after sketch of the possible layouts, finally being drawn towards this image. It contains what I call "implied action". I don't know what she's doing to move the two bald guys (3rd and 4th from left) but it just works. She emanates a convincing energy that makes you believe that something has happened by the sheer power of her movement.

It's once I unclenched my reality-gripping butt cheeks and just go for an image that communicates the spirit of the movement that I find real success. And that's the key. It's something Frank Miller does especially well. These dreamy idyllic beautifully choreographed almost-sequential images of action vignettes. It's a rare skill that I haven't had enough time to develop. I'm looking forward to disecting that skill and replicating it. Very few people can do it. It's either blow-by-blow action (which I like, but doesn't work too well in comics - it means the majority of the comic is spent trying to depict a fight) or it's so decompressed that all you're looking at are seemingly random images meant to convey feeling rather than a sequence. The best comic book action lies in between.

But why can't you depict it blow by blow? A good way to put it is that the space needed to depict a fight is inversely proportional to the time it takes to watch it on film. That is, what only takes seconds on film, takes an INCREDIBLE amount of space in comics. Remember, most fights are a series of quick, quick cuts to communicate the action. Imagine that each cut is a panel - a separate image that needs to be depicted. You're looking at close to 100 cuts or more for your average small Jackie Chan fight scene. That's 100 panels or around 20 pages... for a SMALL fight scene. That means you just shelled out US$2.95 for what would be a minor fight scene.... Basically a waste of your money as it doesn't progress the plot at all.

POSTER/PRINT: thanks to SHEINDIE from 9th Wonders who found me Greg Grunberg's manager's details. If this goes through Sheindie, you got yourself a thank you incoming. =)

HANA PART 2: Dos Dedos Mis Amigos!

This was again, another easy and fun page. My main effort was spent trying to adjust the colours so as we moved forward through each flashback the colours became more vibrant and familiar. Again the trick for the first three panels were to draw people of appropriate ethnicities. Drawing three totally different Jewish people was fun and interesting. I wish they were somebody as they would probably be nice portraits. I'm sure I could have used some friends or something and made some brownie-points while I was at it, but I guess there's a limit to even my gratuitous injokes and muti-tasking.

POSTER UPDATE: Sheindie has emailed me Greg Grunberg's manager's number and I gave her a call and spoke to her assistant. I've now got her email address and will send her an email moving this to the next stage. Sheindie has already done some groundwork and mentioned it might be "doable". Great work Sheindie! I've got an idea for a special thanks for you.

SUMMER COMICS: Regrettably I won't be working on any HEROES comics until August. Apparently the whole team has been pulled off as they've loaded up the big guns. Ahh well.

HANA PART 2: One Giant Step

This was one of my favourite pages of the whole series. First up, it's totally different to everything else. Aron's script jumps scenes faster than a video clip, yet is held together by a narrative tighter than Noah's love for Claire.

My main goal was to communicate a child-like sense of wonder without dismissing the danger. I’m especially happy with the picture of the young Hana in panel 1. I don’t often draw children, and I think she looks great, and she has real personality to me. As I joked in an earlier post, “I just drew the cutest kid… EVER.”

I enjoyed the minimalism of the second panel. There’s a fair amount of detail and texture on the house. The house itself is based on a photo of an actual house I found in Tel Aviv. That’s how authentic I was in my research.

In panel 3, I wanted you to believe with her that for a split second she can fly. That an umbrella and faith will hold you aloft despite the unimaginative laws of gravity and physics. I love the overblown clouds and dream-like light. I think it lends to the nature of the flashback without actually having to use clumsy visual tools to tell you it’s a flashback.

The final panel is easily the weakest. It still does the job, but it’s not a great piece of art. It just does the job. I like the crop. I think it gives you more of a sense of motion, that any second now (perhaps if you turn the page) she will fall into frame. It’s an unusual storytelling choice from me, but I’m quite happy with it.

As an aside I heard a flattering conversation about me from some professionals I admire. It’s not often you get feedback in this business, especially feedback that labels you “hot” and “new”. It really made my day.

Off to work on the Emperor!

COMPETITION: Acidburn133! Email me your HEROES picture requests! I’d like to get started this weekend.

APPEARANCE: I’ve been invited as a guest to ARMAGEDDON EXPO in Melbourne in October 2007. My name’s not on the list yet, but I will be there with my good mates David Wohl (Witchblade, Darkness co-creator) and Christian Berenek (SE7EN: lust).

http://www.armageddonexpo.com/

HANA PART 1: Eleventh Heaven

Here's the page... which you've seen.

I've used all my creativity and energy coming up with a crap title that doesn't mean anything.

Lemme actually write a post tomorrow when I feel human.

Ok, went to bed at 430pm yesterday, slept til 7am. Not a bad innings. Thanks to everyone for all the tips and well-wishing. Let's try this again.

The main thing I had to contend with on this page was justifying how 5 no-name guards could creep up on "super-soldier/spy" Hana. I guess she has a history of getting caught while on missions. =)

Anyway, I decided to play the first panel from the guard's point of view and really emphasize Hana's contemplation of the rocket. The second panel is just a cut from the second page, the recurring image that Aron asked for in the script.

The final panel was a lot of fun. I think it's a decent likeness of Hana. It's quite a comprehensive panel given how simple it was to draw.

One of the things that I'm a huge pedant of is making sure that people of different races and backgrounds look like they should. While I'm half asian myself I've mainly drawn white people. So a small amount of research was required to find some asian gentlemen who could be my Chinese soldiers.

COMPETITION: Geoff has now foreited his coveted second prize, and it now falls to ACIDBURN133. Acid, would you like to submit two suggestions as to who you would like, please? Email me at grael23@yahoo.com. Soon as I have Acidburn's entry I will get started on these.