Recently I came across the website of artist Goro Fujita, who does really appealing artwork that frequently features robots. His site also has some tutorial videos. I watched these and thought to myself, Hey, that could work. I haven’t really tried to do digital art since the days of DeluxePaint II, and I was struck that someone could do such beautiful, natural-looking artwork entirely on a computer. (I’ve been thinking about teaching myself to paint or something, and I was just in the university art store the other day looking at supplies, but I quickly realized that even if I had the time, space, and/or energy to set up an easel, clean brushes, etc., there’s no way I could even afford the paint.) Goro apparently uses some fancy gizmo that lets you draw directly on the screen. That looks awesome, but at $1000 or so is way out of my price range, but the same company makes much, much cheaper versions for hobbyists. The cheaper version doesn’t let you draw directly on the screen, but it does let you wield a pressure-sensitive stylus. I decided to splurge and get myself one.

During the time it took for the thing to arrive by mail, I poked around and watched a bunch of other tutorial videos on YouTube, and I learned about such paint-program functions as “layers.” Well, the tablet finally arrived yesterday. Unfortunately, I spent all evening trying to get Photoshop Elements (which came with the tablet) to work with my computer. Finally I gave up and installed a different piece of bonus software, Corel Painter Essentials. I fiddled around with it for half an hour or so before heading off to bed.

This morning I got up and started painting. Here’s the first piece I produced with my new drawing tablet. I call it Arr, This Island Be Aptly Named:

Here’s the development process for this image:

I just started fooling around, having no inkling that I would be spending all day on this piece. I wanted to do something dynamic and aggressive, where an arm was reaching out toward you or something. After I drew the sword, I decided to make him a pirate:

Here’s a YouTube video I just put together for the first scene of my story “The Skull-Faced Boy” (similar to the video I did for “Save Me Plz”).

Here’s the trailer for the John Joseph Adams zombie anthology The Living Dead. (This book includes my story “The Skull-Faced Boy”.)

Someone recently requested that I post some of the political cartoons I did when I was an undergrad, so while I’ve got the scanner out anyway, I decided that I would. (The strip pissed off enough people that I didn’t really want my name on it, but the editors insisted I be given credit, so we went with my initials, hence the “by D.K.” thing. Also, I redacted the names because I’m a nice guy.)

During hockey games against arch-rival school Bowdoin, it was a tradition for students to hurl objects onto the ice — objects such as oranges, tennis balls, and in one legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) case a decapitated cow’s head from a local slaughterhouse. Security became really tight for these games, and here we have a student who’s been caught trying to sneak in a few oranges under his coat:

This next comic involves a political scandal at the school. As I recall, it came out that one of the student body presidents had been in his office late into the night making phone calls to everyone he knew on planet earth, with all the charges going to the student body. This was in the wake of the Clinton impeachment (which seemed absurd even at the time and seems infinitely more so now that we’ve had a president who seems determined to do six impeachable things before breakfast each morning). Anyway, that’s why the two things are tied together here:

Just for fun I decided to see if I could colorize Nick Greenwood’s spectacular illustration for my short story “Red Road.” I’d never done this before, and wasn’t even sure I’d be able to. I futzed around a bit with Paint Shop Pro, and quickly discovered that the lasso + adjust RGB functions make it surprisingly easy to colorize a black & white image, and that this renders surprisingly good results. Here’s how it’s turning out so far:

WOW! Check out this superb illustration by Nick Greenwood for my short story “Red Road.” The story (and illustration) will be appearing very soon in Issue 9 of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. (To get the full effect of the art you really need to see the super high-res version.)
 

When I was in high school, some guys I knew started a comic book. Since I was known as someone who could draw, they invited me to contribute something and provided me with some comic book paper. I gave it a shot, but my whole idea was way too ambitious for my first-ever comic, and I ran out of steam after only a few pages. If I had had any idea how much of a pain it is to draw and ink a comic by hand, I would never have set my first scene inside a completely dark bunker. I used up all my black markers (and all my patience) inking just a few panels. Though I do think this panel turned out pretty cool:

A few more newly-scanned old doodles:

 

Over the course of my life, I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in class and doodling, and I’ve saved some of the better doodles. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that I should start scanning them into my computer, in case something ever happens to the originals. I just had to fire up the scanner for some business-related stuff, and while I was at it I figured I’d scan in a few doodles. Here they are. These were all executed with Bic pens on notebook paper. (I digitally removed the blue lines.)

 
I was just perusing the website of artist Huan Tran, and I noticed that he’s posted a newly-tweaked version of the artwork that he did for my story “Blood of Virgins.” This new version has a different background, some additional details, and some fancy computer-generated lighting effects. I now have both versions up on my “Blood of Virgins” page.
 

Here’s my illustration for my story “They Go Bump.” I wrote “They Go Bump” at the Odyssey workshop in 2001, and the story appeared in the anthology Empire of Dreams and Miracles, edited by Orson Scott Card. The story is a science fiction/horror hybrid involving invisibility suits and freaky aliens. Since all the characters in the story are invisible, I had to use some creative license in order to actually have anything interesting to illustrate.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that not all published stories receive illustrations, but it occurred to me that I’ve become pretty good (or at least facile) at producing animation-style artwork of the sort I did for my “Save Me Plz” video, and that I could do similar artwork for my stories that are sadly bereft of visual complement. First up, my offbeat zombie horror story “The Skull-Faced Boy,” which appeared on Gothic.net back in 2002.

Here’s a video picture book adaptation I did of the first scene of my short story “Save Me Plz”:
 

EDIT: The “Save Me Plz” video picture book described in this entry in now available at YouTube.

For a long time now — over two years — I’ve been thinking that it would be cool to turn one of my short stories into a sort of “video picture book,” like the show Reading Rainbow, if anyone remembers that. Not really animated, but sort of a slideshow to accompany an audio reading, with a new image that pops up every so often. Then I could post my stories on YouTube. But I didn’t know what sort of software I would use, and I figured that even to do a short story would take weeks, so I never got around to it. But recently it occurred to me that I wouldn’t even have to do a whole short story. I could just do the opening scene, to pique people’s interest, and then if they liked that first scene then maybe they’d go and read the story or listen to a podcast of it. So two days ago I decided to quit waffling, and I just downloaded the first free animation program that came up in Google, and taught myself to use it. I did the first scene of “Save Me Plz,” which takes up about three minutes in audio, and which took about thirty hours to render as a pseudo-animated cartoon. Man, animation is hard work. I can’t imagine how long it would take to actually make the characters, you know, move. I don’t have any special art equipment — heck, I don’t even have a mouse — so the artwork is necessarily pretty basic, but I think it looks pretty good. (Incidentally, drawing spiders is really hard. Seriously, try it.) The whole thing is basically done now. I’m waiting on a few things before I can post it, but here’s a sample of the artwork:

Meg & Devon

Brant

Leena

spider

dorm