New Artist Onboard

Allow me to fill you in on the current going-ons with the behind-the-scenes of Unwanted Children. There is a new artist working on it.

It's kind of a long story, so I'll just give you the CliffsNotes. When I first started working on this story, I asked my friend of 12 years, Mike, to be the illustrator for the comic. He's graduated with a BFA in Traditional Illustration from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Naturally, he would be my first choice. Unfortunately, he initially asked for 30 dollars per page. I didn't think that was too fair of him and decided to find another artist. I've already gone through the steps I took to find another artist, so I'll bypass those details to ease your mind.

The artist I had was great. His name was Richard. I liked his art, he was a nice guy, and he was very interested in the story. The problem was, he didn't seem too committed to the project. I didn't give him any deadlines, but he was kind of lax with showing me any progress. I understood for the most part, because this was a non-paying job and all I offered was exposure if the comic ever got picked up. Well, after my adventure at SDCC and receiving the business card of a publisher, I didn't want to wait too long before I sent off the submission package(we decided not to e-mail the submission package we already had because it only had two pages of art and we thought we should show more). By the time I sent Richard a message asking for an update, it had been two weeks since I had heard from him and it took him another five days to reply.

He was out of town working on a big project that would earn him some cash. Like I said, I'm understanding to paying gigs taking priority, however, he also told me that he wouldn't be able to work on Unwanted Children for most of September. I'll admit, I could have handled things a little more professionally, but I didn't want a whole month to go by where I didn't see any progress on the project. I didn't want the publisher to receive an e-mail from me, eventually, and wonder who the hell I am or think that I took too long to send him something.

Now I have a new artist (I'm leaving out the details of what transpired because they're not necessary). Ironically enough, it's the original artist I wanted on the project. My friend, Michael. He's already shown me some of his concept work and understands that I want to get a submission package to the publisher at Archaia Studio's as soon as possible, so he is bypassing concept work on the main five characters for now in order to work on six pages from the first issue. These six pages will go into the submission package as a way to show that Mike is a capable artist and that we're both able to tell a story in the comic book format.

Here is a preview of Mikes work:

This was the first image Mike sent me. Just a series of poses for Zachary (the protagonist of the story). He asked me which one I wanted him to work on for the initial concept. You can see which one I chose in the following image.

I love the style he's using.

This is the main character, Zachary. It's not the final design for him, but we're going for kind of a punk look. I've already e-mailed Mike my critique on this image and he'll be making the necessary adjustments.

Yes it's in grayscale. I'll elaborate on that in the future.