Where I been.

Taking a month off Twitter/ Facebook's been good for me. Pencilled 13 pages of CHEW 22 last week (that's the entire in-progress issue above), and inking them this week. Gonna be a good week.

Leaving Oct. 18 for Armageddon Expo in Melbourne and New Zealand. Should be a great trip.

Also, finally got an iPhone after my son destroyed my cell over the weekend. So I may be posting via mobile a bit more. Who knows?

Back to work,
Rob

Back to Basics.

Found these cool 5.5x4.25 inch pane cards in my closet and decided to make some use of them. So I've been screwing around with these fun little shots of some of my favorite characters as a morning warm-up. Below are the initial trials, which I scrapped since wet media didn't work well with the cards at all. Above is today's trial, Goku and Piccolo from DBZ (yeah, I'm a fan from way back). Happier with the DBZ ones, so I think I'll try to keep a daily blog of these for fun. Fingers crossed. I may or may not sell these at www.RobGuilloryStore.com.



Below is a cover for IDW's new TMNT series that made the rounds quite a bit last week. It's a long, exhausting story, so if you wanna hear it, feel free hitting the Google. Very proud of the cover, and it was really a dream come true, as TMNT was a big part of my childhood. Will I ever work on the project again? God only knows. Regardless, the cover is for TMNT #6, which I think comes out in December.


And below is the final cover art for the CHEW Omnivore Edition Vol.2, which also comes out in December. Tons of extras and goodies.



And that's kind of it. I'm taking a bit of a sabbatical from the usual Twitter and Facebook haunts at the moment, so here's the one place to find me. I'm kind of done with the constant information barrage that is social networking, so I may or may not return to it. And if I do return, it'll be in a way reduced capacity. I've definitely been guilty of using both sites as a forum for mindless bitching and snarky comments, so I'm done with that at the moment. I just wanna draw good comics and have some fun.

Oh, and I finally dropped my LinkedIn account. Because it was totally useless.

CHEW #21 hits stands today, so check that out. I'm knee-deep in penciling #22, which should be out in mid to late November. It's a longer break between issues than I like, but the issue calls for it. It'll be worth it, promise. Strong, strong issue.

Best,
Rob

On The Schedule.

Last Monday was an important day, as Mondays tend to be. It's all about building up that momentum that will (hopefully) carry me through the week. An important day, made even more so because I was starting the next issue of CHEW, the first of a new story arc and the first chapter of the second third of the book's life. It was crucial that I start the week off on the right foot. So on Sunday I mentally prepared for the work day, psyching myself up. Off to bed early, planning to wake around 5:45am and begin the kickassery that surely awaited me when I woke.

Monday's Goal: Layout, pencil, ink and scan Page 1. And pencil (and maybe ink) the cover of the second CHEW Omnivore Edition.

Cut to Monday morning. My wife is down with severe neck pain from God knows what, bleary-eyed from sitting up with our 7-month-old, who has the shits from a mild food allergy. Apparently, he's lactose intolerant, as I am. He's okay, but CRANKY.

So work had to wait. As it does whenever Life kicks The Schedule in the crotch. You see, Life, REAL Life, hates The Schedule. Mine, at least. It's always throwing things in the spokes of my plan. Someone gets sick. Someone dies. An impromptu trip pops up. Someone gets a flat tire and needs a ride. And it tends to be right when I'm getting into the flow of things. Never fails.

So, after taking care of things on the home front, I arrived at the studio 5 hours late. Half of my workday GONE, just like that. GAH. I don't know if other artists experience this, but there can come a point when a blank page can be a bully. For me, my blank pages remind me of time I wasted and of potential unrealized. Fortunately, yesterday was one of the good days. I tore past the doubt and anxiety and got to work.

Five or six hours later, I'd produced the work you (partially) see above.

Actual Work Completed: Page 1 penciled and partially inked. Omnivore Cover penciled.

So I fell short of what I wanted. Sucks, but it happens. Didn't finish the inks on either piece, and I still have to make up the time later. Maybe on a weekend or a late night. Bummer. Still, I left the studio at a reasonable hour, happy with the work and energized.

As I said, Monday was one of the Good days, despite the small bear trap that Life set in my path to achieving the day's goal. I've had many, many bad ones. Days where NOTHING went right. Days where I sat at my desk, fought with a page for hours, then tore it to shreds. Days when I forgot how to draw. Horrible, horrible days.

It happens. All you can do is keep rolling with it, suck it up and work the extra hour later. That's how it is for me, anyway.

A week later, I'm still cranking, and still a few hours behind where I want to be. But what else is new? Below is the above cover, still in progress, but getting closer.




-Rob

On Style.

"How'd you come up with your style?"

I get this question more than anything else. And it's funny because my "style" was a pretty big hindrance to my career up till about 4 or 5 years ago. Don't get me wrong, I got work. But getting editors to really invest in me fully used to be pretty friggin hard. I just figured it was all me. "I must not be good enough." So it's really odd when young artists wanna know how I developed the look of my work.

Of course, I don't have a set formula for this stuff, really. And I certainly don't have the secret to becoming a great artist. It works different for everyone, I think. As it should. I think the key is finding the place where you're most comfortable. And by "place", I mean a visual vocabulary. For me, I'm most at home in a place that's bright, silly and manic with just a hint of darkness under the surface. Unfortunately, it took me something like 10 years to find it. Sorry. There are no shortcuts.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we?



Circa 1991, my first official mini-comic. I was 9 at the time, and I ended up doing dozens of these between then and high school. No focus on "style" or anything. Hell, the thing was done in Bic pen on pink construction paper. Not much to discuss here, really. I just loved comics even then, and my motives for making it were pure. I just wanted to entertain the few friends I let read it. I may even revamp this later, so don't steal it.





Jump to around 10 years later, 2000-ish. A young Rob was just starting college as a Computer Animation major (because how the Hell does one just become a pro comic artist anyway?). I was still dabbling in comics between classes, still trying to draw "serious" comics that "mattered". I'd always been a Marvel kid, and stylistically, I'd always tried to attempt that look.

Except for the fact that I totally sucked at it, as the above images show. This was about the time I was discovering Photoshop (Ooooh, lookit the colors!). I had a decent grasp of what color grabbed the eye, but still had no friggin idea what to do with the program.



Cut to 2001, the above page changed the course of my career, and I suppose, my life. I did this autobiographical comic on a whim, just trying something different. Angsty, right? OH, it gets much, much worse.

I sent this page to an old artist friend of mine along with the page above it (the one with the fire). I think I even did both in the same day. Anyway, I sent them to this older, wiser artist pal, expecting him to tell me how friggin AWESOME the angsty "serious" stuff was. But what'd he say?

"Hey, what was that other thing you sent me? That cartoony thing? That was great. I think that might be your style."

"Really?", I thought. How could he like that page? It was just me messing around. I didn't even break too much of a sweat on the damn thing.

But being the glutton for affirmation that I am, I pursued it, deciding to try a stripped down, elastic style to learn the finer points of storytelling. After all, I sucked at drawing backgrounds. And I hadn't done a whole lot in the way of composing a page. If I wasn't focusing on "the cool shit" (like drawing veins and abs that showed THROUGH clothing), maybe I could learn these rudimentary comicbook principles that had eluded me. What a concept.





Cut to 2002. Simple style, it was. Not a lot of frills, but I was learning. Also, I was pumping out art by the assload. I didn't even remember half of this stuff existed until I found it today. A lot of these were failures, but I still see seeds of things that I still draw from today. Most of my vocabulary for character expression came from this period. Learned a lot about color, too.



More 2002. Young Rob was full of angst, hormones, philosophy and loneliness. I'm posting this because it shows some pretty neat experimentation with transition, storytelling and page layout. Also, I was getting better with Photoshop.





2003. I was doing a weekly strip for my college paper, getting the hang of this nifty simple look. As I got the visual language down, I started experimenting with texture, adding more detail to the art and testing Photoshop's capabilities.

All autobiographical, by the way. The bottom one was a cathartic documentary of how I was let go from my job at Office Depot. Upon seeing the strip in print, my old manager sent a letter of warning to the University's Dean. I stand by my decision, since the rival Office Depot found it hilariously accurate.



2004. This shows nothing, other than I still had a hell of a sense of humor.





More 2004. Slowly adding more and more detail. I was getting confident with the simpler style. I was learning a lot about Photoshop, too.








Now 2005-2006 was weird. I'd gotten the rules of the simpler style down, so what'd I do? I started breaking them. I started bending things that shouldn't be bent, twisting shit around, and I loved it. Another really important time for my development. Also started working on line quality and inking after Erik Larsen thumped me during a critique for having shitty line variation. He probably wouldn't even remember it.




2006-2008 was a blur. Having graduated from college, I basically got a real job and barely drew for a good year and a half. Yep. I just stepped away from it and paid some bills. Here are a few pieces I came up with for various projects once I decided to return to comics. By this point, I knew how to navigate a comic page pretty well.




2008-NOW. You know how this story ends.

Anyway, I'm hoping this can be somewhat encouraging to up-and-coming artists unsure of their direction. Everyone has a beginning. Ya just gotta keep pushing. Not everything will be beautiful, (as this post shows, I think) but even the bad stuff is ultimately redeemed by what you learn from it in your new work. So make some ugly-ass art, dreaming of the day when it'll be beautiful.

And you suckas better appreciate me embarrassing myself, just to make your asses feel better...

Best,
Rob!

Pill.

Panel from HERO Comics 2011 Charity Book. Out Today!

-Rob

Peek.

Panel from CHEW 20.

Yep.

My wall of Awesome. And Voltron protects them all.

For those who haven't heard, CHEW won the 2011 Eisner for Best Continuing Series last weekend. And that's pretty stinkin' awesome. Thanks to all you fans, creators and retailers that made this possible. You guys are awesome.

And YES, I know the blog's been pretty damn barren as of late. What can I say? Between having a kid and keeping an (almost) monthly comic schedule, things have been busy. A lot's happened in the last year, and I've sucked at covering all of it. So I've dedicated myself to posting more regularly from here on. Seriously this time. SERIOUSLY.

See ya tomorrow. (seriously).
-Rob!