2911-2013 in workstation photos.

Of Inks

Regularly, I alternate between different inks depending on the coloring medium, paper, or where I’m drawing.

Recently, I got a hold of these:



Faber Castell PITTs. India-based ink, comes in a large assortment of sizes. In the 8 pack, I don’t like the soft brush or soft chistle as I have no control over my strokes with them. The other large size I only use to write signs, but it’s good for filling in black spaces, I guess.

India ink is water proof, but not 100% alcohol proof. On many paper types you need to let the inks dry for a few hours before grinding your markers on it like I do. If you just color flats or do light blending, the ink holds off pretty well! On mixed media paper, the inks still smeared from my markers a day after inking.

Faber Castells are my go-to markers for moleskine paper and watercoloring.



This is the smaller pack of the pens. Has three nib sizes plus the classic brush which is awesome for thickening some of the lineart. The bigger pack has an Extra Small (XS) nib which I find nice for fixing some jagged lines.



More india ink, Speedball wasn’t fucking kidding when they put “Super black” on the label. It’s gorgeously black. I use this at home when I’m drawing larger things (like a character portrait on 9x12 bristolboard) or on textured paper like watercolor pads. I can’t get regular pen strokes to stay consistent when I draw large or on bumpy surfaces, so this does the job and so nicely.

But wow does this ink suck with alcohol markers! I inked a commission with this, colored it almost two weeks later and the lines STILL smeared. I think the same thing happened with mixed media paper. Watercolors won’t budge it, though.

I found Acrylic ink to be better with markers but you have to shake the bottle regularly because whatever dry bits come up will mix in and you’ll be inking with little black specks.



Pigma Dengars. You will find yourself replacing these a lot, but they are cheap and are totally marker proof. They’re even completely marker proof in more paper types than copic pens and stroke over textured surfaces better than other pens. Do not diss the pigmas. The brush pen… I don’t like it too much. I just manually vary line widths by juggling the other pen sizes.

Most of mine are dead right now, so I’m currently using the Faber Castells for my marker work. Carefully.



Copic Multiliners. They come plastic disposable and metal refillable.It lasts a bit longer, the ink is a little blacker than microns, and if I remember correctly, a copic representative said that their 0.05 pen is the smallest nib in the whole technical pen market. It is of course Marker proof.

I bought three of these about three years ago, I think. a 0.05, a 0.3, and a brush. the brush dried out quickly with the brush itself getting too busted to be useful for details anyway, and the 0.05’s nib also broke so I couldn’t use that one anymore. I kept the 0.05 in a drawer, and when my 0.3 ran out of ink, I swapped the cartridges.

Owning the metal copic multiliners is like owning a set of Samsung electronics. As good as they are, If you’re a clumsyfuck, you’re going to break them.

For a while, my technical pen set was basically a Micron 005, Copic 0.3, and microns 05 and 08.



I also have the Rotring art pen you gave me a while back, but its last ink cartridges have dried up. I have the pen itself stashed as a keepsake.

New Markers

I ordered some Letraset ProMarkers a few weeks ago, but shipment was delayed since a bunch of them were out of stock at the time I ordered. Even after the delay, the order was split into two shipments. Today I received six markers. The other fourteen are coming on Monday (i think i said 26 in a tweet earlier forgetting I bought a 12-set and not a 24 one)

Katzii was telling me about these markers for a while and sent me the original comic drawing of the Banjo-Kazooie/Chocolate Pudding 4am crossover (I can’t take it out now, I have it secured between skechbooks in one of my bins until I get my own bedroom to hang it up). The colors were so nice and smooth, like flat digital coloring. I wanted to try them myself!

If you follow us both on twitter, you’ll see WE’RE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT MARKERS :D

I was going to go with the flex markers originally, which have brush tips, but the promarkers had more colors and were cheaper atwww.dickblick.com, so i was able to get more colors for the $50 I had budgeted for them.

They feel a little lightweight compared to prismacolors and copics, have the fine tips like prismacolors and chisel tips like copics, and do not emit obnoxious smells when you color with them (unlike Chartpak, though I last used those nine years ago). I don’t think I can properly describe how the ink flows out of the pen. It’s like kind of heavy and consistent to where you can lay down flat color pretty quickly and not see any streaks, and if you miss a spot and fill it, you’ll barely notice. If you shade through layering the same color, it will take a few layers and that’s after you let the first layer dry. If you shade with assorted colors, these markers blend really well on absorbant paper like the other brands, but probably better because the tips are really wet.

The 12-set comes with an added colorless blender, but since that didn’t arrive yet, I blended the greys on Azu-Maya with a copic blender and it worked out really well!

I’m gonna try more paper types over time, so far I’ve only scribbled on Mixed Media paper and computer paper. It took a little getting used to but I am really loving the results! I can’t wait for the others to come in, but it’s also fun seeing what color schemes I can whip up with the six I have now.

More info on the Letrasets including colors and different marker types can be found on their website. Blick has the markers for $2.61 per single.

And enjoy the most recent snapshot of my workstation.

Otakon 2013

Last weekend, I've made my Artist Alley debut as a web cartoonist over at Otakon 2013 in Baltimore, Maryland and with me was Christi Warren of Prismatic Star.  I have to say it was really amazing. We were visited by old friends, made new ones, and gave out lots of business cards promoting our comics.  It was a lot of fun just being there, drawing pictures, eating snacks and shifting through various table layouts.  In a separate post, I'm going to talk about running an artist alley table.  Sure, I may have been a complete newbie without any kind of vertical displays or shiny photoshop-filtered bishonen pin-ups, buttons or plush alpacas for sale, but there was a lot that I've picked up from this learning experience.

I want to thank our assistant FC for his speedy response with our demands ;) as well as our other assistants Joe and Keith, and the Artist Allet staff at Otakon for being all nice and awesome.

And special thanks to everyone who visited the table and checked out my comic whether at the table or online!  I love you all!

You can check out the photo album here.

of Watercolor

I recently got re-hired at my former place of employment full time as a graphic/web designer and mail clerk. It's been very busy.

One of my co-workers saw my watercolor stuff and asked me to email her the amazon links I got them from.  This is raw copypasta I'm too lazy to fix.  Also, I'm going to fix this blog up a bit sometime soon.

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Alternatives-Pocket-Watercolor-Set/dp/B000JQSV88/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373073226&sr=8-1&keywords=art+alternatives+watercolor

The link above is the watercolor paint case. 18 colors, convenient metal case, comes with a regular brush. Amazon slashed the price on this recently.

http://www.amazon.com/Koh-I-Noor-Watercolor-Wheel-Stack-Pack/dp/B0006OLQLC/ref=sr_1_1?s=arts-crafts&ie=UTF8&qid=1373073443&sr=1-1&keywords=koh-i-noor+watercolor

This is another paint set I have, which is four trays of six colors that stack up into a little roll.. I like it better because the colors are richer and more vibrant (this would be "professional quality" paint while the other set i showed you is "student quality". "Children's quality" would be crayolas you find in Target), but they're just a little less convenient to travel with. I can bring this to the office one day if you want to see them.

http://www.amazon.com/Royal-Brush-Aqua-flo-Set-3/dp/B001H8IIUI/ref=sr_1_4?s=arts-crafts&ie=UTF8&qid=1373073690&sr=1-4&keywords=waterbrush

This is the waterbrush. You fill it with water and this keeps the brush wet for painting. This is a pack with three brushes in different sizes. Good for experimenting.

The next three links are different types of watercolor paper. Any brand is fine. I like smaller ones for portability, but I use large paper for works I sell to people and submit to anime conventions.

http://www.amazon.com/Strathmore-Series-Watercolor-Paper-bound/dp/B00251AIO0/ref=sr_1_1?s=arts-crafts&ie=UTF8&qid=1373073809&sr=1-1&keywords=watercolor+pad

This one is large. Has less sheets but the pages are nice and big.

http://www.amazon.com/Strathmore-Visual-Journal--140lb-Watercolor/dp/B003YIXDKE/ref=sr_1_1?s=arts-crafts&ie=UTF8&qid=1373074045&sr=1-1&keywords=strathmore+visual+journal+watercolor+5

This one is small, but not too small. I can show you mine for a size comparison. These make great hobby sketchbooks. Especially since an artist should always take a sketchbook with him wherever he goes.

http://www.amazon.com/Moleskine-Watercolor-Notebooks-times-Notebook/dp/B002YKMN4U/ref=sr_1_10?s=arts-crafts&ie=UTF8&qid=1373074212&sr=1-10&keywords=moleskine+watercolor

This is what I carry around with me typically (and you saw this in the office. Moleskine books are a lot more expensive than regular watercolor pads the same size, but it has a sturdy cover, a folder pocket in the back cover, and is considered very fancy and professional. The paper is top-notch, too!

Now for the pen

http://www.amazon.com/Sakura-30062-6-Piece-Pigma-Micron/dp/B0008G8G8Y/ref=sr_1_7?s=arts-crafts&ie=UTF8&qid=1373074212&sr=1-7&keywords=moleskine+watercolor

Micron pens are bold and waterproof. Anything drawn with this, when dried, will not get messed up when painting around it., and this is the cheapest deal you'll get with professional grade inks. Compared to more expensive pens, these dry out kind of quickly, but are the easiest to replace because everyone sells them and they're dirt cheap. 

HiEx book is finally underway

I knew from the start of making this comic that I had to draw the pages in high-resolution. What I didn't do off the bat was assemble the final print-ready pages when the web versions were done. This came in part from not knowing what company I was going to choose to print my comics. Each one I've seen requires a different file format, different trim/bleed dimensions, only prints in specific sizes, etc.   Also, the pages were drawn in A5 proportions, but in 7.5x11", which do not translate well when slapped traditional comic book page sizes, and the high-res pages were split with the artwork being in Paint Tool SAI files and the text and word balloons being in Photoshop files.   With all the copying, pasting, cropping, layer merging and consistency edits needed to be done, putting this comic together for print was going to be a mess, and it is something I have worked on in pieces for a few months now.

Then there was the proposed artbook I was going to make as a donation incentive. In the end, I decided to make the art book and the comic a thing put together.

Originally, I had skipped last week's comic update because of a new video game addiction, but that game was completed before the weekend, and the weekend was spent juggling between spending time with my mother, and learning Adobe InDesign, both to land a job in desktop publishing and to put this book together (Scribus was not working out for me). The 88 high-res pages done so far were all assembled in Photoshop and JPG files and the "Master Page" feature in InDesign made things so much easier.

Now with the pages set up and the art book text written, all that's left to do is to finish this chapter, work on the bonus comics, and make some new character drawings.

I'm looking at a completion date sometime in the summer, but with the time constraints I have, my webcomics may be facing a month or two hiatus in the near future to get this book done.

Free Comic Book day and site changes.

Download a FREE e-book of the EvoRelution Pilot issue

I was gone for most of Free Comic Book day, but we still have three hours in the Pacific Time Zone. In 2004/5, I made a 16-page comic in attempt to become a somebody and published it via Lulu.com. Compared to what I draw today, this looks like shit, but since I announced on twitter yesterday that I’m resuming development of this story, I thought it would be cool (or at least a good laugh) to bring this back from the grave it was buried in for so long and give it away.

The comic will start some time canonly after the events of the pilot, so this won’t be a reboot, exactly.
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Some parts of this blog may appear or function kind of wonky for a while. I'm currently making changes to make this blog my main website, and it can now be accessed through www.cammiluna.tk. The art gallery will be updated and moved as well, but I currently have found no ad-free wordpress-customizable (or gallery script installable) free hosting that can hold more than 250mb of files, so there is nothing I can do yet. I want the gallery to match the design of this blogger. Feel free to drop me a line if you know of a good hosting service.

Let's Talk About Immortal Fool

A few days ago, I just finished drawing Chapter 5 of a webcomic called "My Immortal Fool."  Most of the time when I talk about my comics to people who are NOT fans of Nintendo characters, I usually just refer to Highly Experimental, but on the side, I've been working on this one, too.  It's a fan comic of the comedy-drama type that follows the exploits of a few villains from the Super Mario games taking place in the Bean Kingdom from Superstar Saga in particular.

The comic itself began in early 2010 based on an unfinished fanfic idea I had six years prior that fans of mine had wanted to see revived.  I chose to make it a comic because I was afraid of making comics.  No comic I've attempted in the past had lasted long and I felt like my art would never be good enough to make Highly Experimental a successful reality.  For the most part, Immortal Fool had a story that was almost fully planned-out, so all I had to do was draw pages and see what my capabilities were. The comic was posted on deviantArt and had a tiny handful of responsive fans that made this project fun and kept me going.  Not to mention, I was able to try different line and coloring styles, try different perspectives and layouts- basically do anything that I couldn't get away with in a serious ongoing webcomic. I mean, it's just a lame fancomic. If a critic were to tell me to be more serious with this comic, they would more likely say "draw an original comic instead" rather than "improve this fancomic."  Anyway. Later that year, I finally had the guts to work on Highly Experimental and started planning out the story and concepts for several months, and in Spring of 2011, I finally launched the comic on the web.

From then on, Immortal Fool was no longer my main comic, but while it was updated less and less, I couldn't let it die.  I get the feeling that fan comics are pretty frowned-upon in webcomics communities, and honestly, I would have had time to shell out two HiEx pages a week if I would have just axed Immortal Fool altogether, but it just didn't happen.

There are two big reasons for this.  Firstly, the fanbase. I've mirrored the project at ComicFury (IF currently runs alongside Mushroom Go on that site) and the reader base continued to grow both there and at deviantArt. It's not a big fan base, I don't get a lot of fanart of this project, and the last Formspring question I've received for it was in mid-2010, but I still get feedback when I post pages.  When I return after a long hiatus, I get really touching comments from some people on how glad they are that the comic is still running, and a couple of fans have even mentioned the comic when I've introduced myself.   I find it to be a rather arrogant idea to put down a successful fan project because I'm suddenly an original character artist or something  now. I love my fanbase.  The comic will eventually come to an end, but not without an actual ending.

And secondly, I vowed to finish this comic. I think I just said that.  There's only three more chapters left.

When it's time to make HiEx into a book, there will be a long hiatus for Immortal Fool, but rest assure, it will continue.

Happy third anniversary, awful cesspool of headcanon in comic form!

Let's call this the "Adobe Mock Suite"

Adobe: Build Your Own Adobe Creative Suite with Free and Cheap Software(via @Lifehacker)

Adobe’s Creative Suite is one of the best software packs out there for professionals, but the suite is prohibitively expensive for most people. If you can’t drop the cash, you can still get a similar experience with free or cheap software.

As someone trying to get work in the graphic design field, I’m thinking of downloading some of these free programs to learn the basics (namely Scribus and Inkscape) and if I do that, I will let you guys know whether or not these freebie compensations Employers will bother to look at your resume or not if their job opening requires “proficient adobe CS knowledge.”

There are some Graphic Design jobs out there that just require knowledge of Photoshop. Like, if you can slap stock pictures and text on a banner or page and know the size you need to make it for print, you’re qualified.  My first job worked like that and a couple of IT companies had pulled out my resume and called me for a graphic design position instead of the IT spots I had originally applied for with them.  I didn’t get either of those jobs probably because I came off as a timid little shit in the interviews, but I think this might useful to know for all you photoshoppy artists looking for work.

Using Colorless Blender Markers

Yeah, these:

Some people know about them, some people don’t care, some people leave these to collect dust asking “how the fuck do you use these?!”

right?

This post is for the people who ask “how the fuck do you use these?!”
Sure, there may be lots of online resources for markers, but I feel like doing a straight-to-point one for my [tumblr] followers.

COLORLESS BLENDERS DO NOT BLEND TWO COLORS TOGETHER.

Try all you might. You might get some that looks like two colors blended together, or maybe you just got a pale mess on your paper.

Colorless blenders DILUTE COLOR and PUSH IT AWAY

It’s basically… kind of… turning your marker into watercolor except the water is alcohol so it’s kind of becoming wateralcoholcolor or something.  Some people have used a trick where you dab the end of your colorless blender onto the ends of two colors and that causes the colors to mix when you lay it on the paper with the blender.  I haven’t tried this yet.

You can stop reading this entry now and toss those blenders out of they’re no use to you after all.

But what if you WANT to know what you can do with the blender???

0. Copic and Prismacolor have the same blender but different nibs to work with
I like to have one of each. The Prismacolor blender has sturdier nibs for details and texturing (discussed later) while the soft copic sketch brush nib is more comfortable for blending and gradients. If you’re a user of different/better/cheaper markers and they don’t come in brush nibs, I highly advise to add this one copic to your stash. 

1. Make pretty gradients.
 Mind you, this sample doesn’t look very pretty. Anyway, rub in some colorless blender over the edge of a light color and you can soften the edge into the natural white of the paper.  Repeat in layers if you want to add more gradient.

1a. Blend highlights
If the highlights are the natural color of the paper, again, rub the blender with the nearest color and this will soften highlights. If your highlights are an actual marker color, like yellow, use that color to blend instead of the blender.
If requested, I will go into this in more detail with a marker shading tutorial. In the future.  Maybe. 

2. Lighten up mistakes
It’s pretty inevitable that when you color an inked drawing, some color may spill outside the lines.  Rub some blender over it!

Dark colors will dilute into something lighter, and lighter colors will almost vanish. Make sure to direct your strokes towards the drawing. If you stroke your marker outward, you’re going to spread some faint color on the canvas.

Both Prismas and Copics can do this job, but the flat end of the copic does get destroyed a lot easier if you find yourself rubbing pretty hard, so go with Prismacolor or something sturdier, even if you’re an avid copic user. 

3. Make highlights
Take whatever marker tip you’d like and draw slowly over the color. It’ll look like shit when you first make the strokes, but it’ll look nicer when it dries.  You can run a little of a lighter color over the newly-faded area for some fancy effect or something.  

4. Make Textures
Because fuck photoshop (not really).  While the markers are still wet on the paper, take your blender and simply draw on the colors. tap in some dots, wiggle in some squiggles. Have fun experimenting. There was a lady at an Anime Expo copics class was able to make leafy textures on anime trees but I forgot how she did that.  This is where having blenders from assorted marker brands has the biggest use: you can vary your textures with what each brand of blender has to offer.

I never did this much since I do mostly character sketches where I can’t find a use for textures, but hope to start making a habit of texturing in future drawings

End of Tutorial

Full versions of samples can be spotted here (Amaaré), here (Burds), and here(Polish the Poltergust).

For my markered stuff, I have about 100 Prismacolors that are about 8 years old, and 27 copics that are about four years old and I use them both together.  Most of my art is digital these days so these things have been lasting me a while.

Rebloggable Tumblr version of this article can be found here.