Chris Howard's Writing & Art

New blog link

Please update your links. My new blog is here:

Chris Howard's Writing & Art

 

Comic panels

Something I've been thinking about for a while. This is a scene (or set of them) from the book I'm currently working on. I've been doing some scripting and panel sketches along with the writing, with the intention of completing a comic edition along with the prose.

Chloe and friends are making cookies for a school dance tomorrow night--they're making cookies tonight--and a lot of noise, and I've just been sitting in the dining room drawing these panels in Art Rage on the iPad.

 

The Wreath of Poseidon

This will be available soon! The Wreath of Poseidon is basically Saltwater Witch remixed by my daughter Chloe and I.  This version of the story is in 3rd person (Saltwater Witch is in 1st), and this version is a bit longer, contains more story, including some scenes cut from the original. We went back to the original 3rd person story I wrote in 2003 with some help from a nine-year-old Chloe (She's seventeen now).        

Seaborn Battle

I spent another four or five hours last night finishing up this one.  I'm still doing a bit of detail work, but this is pretty much done.

Click on the pic for the full view!

What I'm working on...

Here's a painting I'm working on, a really big complex thing with a bunch of figures--seaborn and orcas--engaged in underwater combat.  Still a ways to go, but here's a detail and a much reduced version of where things stand at the moment. So far about twenty hours of work, mostly in Sketchbook Pro and Art Rage, but I've also incorporated sketches from Brushes and Sketchbook on my iPad.  I'm about halfway done.  So much detail in this one.

Detail:

Tomorrow's Navy

Spent a few hours painting today, and this is what I did:

iPhone app for Seaborn

Finally. It's months late but I submitted it to iTunes Sunday night, and expect to see it in the app store soon—within the next couple weeks. I'll keep you posted. 

This is pretty much a straight port of the Seaborn iPad app to iPhone.  The main difference is the "Art Portfolio", which points to my online portfolio. (One collection to maintain and it's always up to date).

I was halfway through development of a Seaborn "universal app" which covers iPads, iPhones, iPod Touches, but dropped that path a couple months back and moved to two separate apps because there are different features and presentation methods--some of them significant--I will be adding for each platform.  (e.g., I may move the iPhone version to the Cocos2D framework and include games and other cool things).

Seaborn iPad app

Mermaid drawing tutorial

I spent a few hours putting together a step by step guide to drawing mermaids. I did this for the Mermaids Group on deviantArt. Mermaids have become more popular than ever--there's even a "World Mermaid Awards" con in Las Vegas next month.

I did all the art on the iPad in the Brushes app, using the Pogo stylus. One of the cool features of Brushes is the ability to generate a video of every pen and brush stroke, so you can show off any painting from beginning to end.  I posted the video on Youtube here.

Here's the finished piece (warning: breasts)

Here's the video generated by the Brushes app:

Here's the Step-by-Step tutorial--click for the full view (very long)

 

 

Saltwater Witch graphic novel is a Go

Again. After serveral months on "holiday", Kassandra is back--or will soon be back. I'm certainly back, working on new art, repainting a dozen pages over the last four days.  Some things are going to change, like how often I post new pages. It's just not going to be every week. For a few reasons, the main ones being time and quality.  I tried to race against the weekly deadlines and failed. It became all about the shortcuts, how to draw, paint faster, use whatever tools I thought could help me get Saltwater Witch pages out faster, and I think the art suffered for it. So, it's going to go slower, but I am hoping you see much higher quality.  Those of you have already seen my pre-holiday updates to the first ten pages or so, won't be seeing entirely new pages at first--although I repainted faces, clothing, and backgrounds in some.

Here's the current cover art--front and back, reusing existing cover themes. Still working on it, but what do you think? Click for the full view.

Cover Art with sea monsters

Here's a first pass at another piece of cover art for...not allowed to tell you yet, but I can tell you that it has some underwater scenes and there's this sort of oceany creature and a guy swimming... There, that's about all I can say right now.