Portfolio of comic artist Cab

Happy Spooky month everyone! This year, I’m dressed as an overworked freelancer; faded hair color, that sweater, the tell-tale complexion of someone who’s forgotten to soak up the last rays of sun of the year. The wool socks.

I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Partly. It has been a big production month, between churning out illustrations for the kid’s book, Inktober, preparing classes and trying to work on Utown.

This year, I half-heartedly started Inktober, thinking that drawing the Hiver Nuclear characters would be motivation enough to keep going for 31 days. It proved true for the first two weeks, and then, inspiration started to dwindle and as soon as I found myself out of buffer pencils, that was that. Maybe it’s a good sign? I’ve squeezed everything I could out of those characters. Time to move on! Regardless, I did have fun drawing those 24 Inktobers; if anything, it was a good inking practice.

On October 7th, I gave my first Color for Animation class. I don’t think I’ve been this nervous in years. And of course, it went well! What an experience, honestly. It is equal part planning and improvising, trying to go faster or slower, reading a room, repeating, losing my voice, hitting all the wrong modifier keys and of course, making bad jokes. I get a few smiles out of the students and I do hope they’ll learn a trick or two!

Oh and I got my Surface Pro! Not regretting my purchase so far. Thanks to having a functional computer at home, I was able to catch up on Utown, finish all the tones and the corrections and finally wrap up chapter 1. It feels like a huge milestone. The next step is finishing writing all the dialogues so I can have a proper idea of the number of pages this hulking project is gonna be. You heard it first: I’m thinking something along the lines of 210-230 pages. Woof.

Speaking of Utown, I got the itch. I drew Sam and Ed, my go-to art therapy subjects. Oh… how amazing this would look in colors…. siiiiiigh

You know what’s best about the end of October? DISCOUNTED CANDY!! So until I stuff my face full of Sour Patch Kids, here’s what got me excited this month:

Reading: The Utown outline. In what universe did I think this was ready to be storyboarded?! Also: every single Photoshop tutorial out there.
Watching: Daybreak on Netflix. I got a big Turbo Kid vibe out of it. It has it flaws but the way the show breaks the fourth wall and deals with the flashbacks is really fun. It’s a fun, fun watch.
Listening: A lot of post-punk and new-wave stuff. Watching Atomic Blonde was a trigger I think.
Artist: Loic Locatelli. I’m a sucker for clean/sketch linework like this one, that seems to be done effortlessly in one decisive stroke.

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