Inktober 2023 is well underway and I’ve been hard at work experimenting with traditional Manga tools like Dip Pens and Screen Tone rendering. I’ve been having a ton of fun challenging myself and I hope you like the outcome!
For those interested in purchasing an original piece, I am planning to put these up for sale in my SHOP in November.
More info on when exactly they will drop soon.
In the meantime here is a closer look at my Inktober week 1 illustrations.
I’m excited to announce the very first CHIBITZ Collectible! Mallrats: Jay & Silent Bob designed by yours truly!
PREORDERS are coming soon! Head over to BEDROCK COLLECTIBLES for more information!
Jay & Silent Bob 3D render
I’ve been a massive fan of Kevin Smith ever since I first watched Clerks on a bootlegged VHS in my friends basement so very long ago. When I saw Mallrats in theatres (I was there opening day!) I fell in love with his entire universe of hilarious characters and stories. You can imagine my excitement when I had the opportunity to collaborate with the man himself! Dreams do come true folks!
The Mallrats Jay and Silent Bob Collectible Prototype is on display right now at the Mooby’s Pop Up Shop @ The Tin Roof San Diego! If you are attending SDCC be sure to go check it out in person!
CHIBITZ is a brand new line of licensed collectibles based on my original chibi style. In partnership with the great people at Canada’s own Bedrock Collectibles, we are excited to bring you a whole new line of high end collectible statues in the near future! Together we are partnering with some of the world's best model designers and pouring our love and passion into each one to make sure these are the best collectibles on the market!
Jay & Silent Bob Original Concept Art by me!
I can’t wait to show you all the cool stuff we have in store!
Stay tuned!
For a while there I was putting out a new artbook every year and I really enjoyed doing them as it motivated me to design and draw everyday. However I have been dealing with some bursitis in my hip over the last few years and it has really limited my creative output. The hours I could put into drawing at my desk had to be drastically cut. I’m slowly getting better but it’s still not 100%. I still have to keep an eye on how much I’m sitting to avoid flare ups.
Anyways that’s the main reason I haven’t put out a new artbook. The second reason is that I’ve been working on two different personal comic projects over that last 18 months. Crimson Fall, which saw the first short story getting printed last month. You can crab that here if you wish. Along with another story in that series that I’m currently plucking away at. Then lastly The Rats of Ironwood, a larger follow up to The Witch of Wickerson book I put out last year.
Oh and did I mention I still freelance almost full time to support my family so there is that too!
Despite it all but I’m still determined to publish Creations Volume 3. I’m maybe 60% there but I need to create a lot more content for the next book. My current goal is to finish it next by Spring 2024 and then run a Kickstarter for it. Hopefully all goes well and I can hit that goal.
I’ll leave you all with a new page from the artbook in progress.
I will be at TCAF this coming weekend from Saturday to Sunday and I couldn’t be more excited. It is my favorite convention as both a vendor and a patron. There is such a big focus on creators and indie comics! It’s a place that encompasses new budding artists along with seasoned pros. It’s also FREE to get in! If you live in the Toronto area or plan on visiting this weekend you can find me on the 2nd Floor at booth 2059!
I will have copies of my NEW book Crimson Fall: Lambs of God as well as The Witch of Wickerson, BOT-9, Ruinworld, Creations Vol 1 & 2, along with some stickers and pins.
After the pre-sale went so well, I was overwhelmed by the support and how many of you snatched up the limited PRE-SALE. I was originally going to save a proper print run for a Kickstarter but decided I would just go ahead and print a run of 2000 copies myself. That way I’ll have enough for everyone who is interested and new people that discover the book in the months to come. The second printing will have a variant cover and SPOT UV, so I’m excited to be able to bring that bit of extra quality to the new books! Look for them to drop around the middle of June!
My latest comic series CRIMSON FALL is underway with a brand new limited release of Lambs of God. I’m only printing 200 copies right now with 100 going with me to TCAF 2023 this coming weekend and the remaining copies to be sold via pre-order on my website. I will print more in the future when I get around to finishing the next book, The Shore Tower which I’m currently working on.
CRIMSON FALL is a project I’ve been working on since 2020 and is my love letter to some of my favorite horror fantasy IP’s. It’s Hellboy meets the Witcher with a splash of Game of Thrones in there. Crimson Fall is my own little sandbox to play in and tell more mature stories outside of my typical all ages fare. I’m treating this series much like an anthology, with at times reoccurring main characters, but other times some stories will involve completely new characters. I will even be experimenting with style along the way. For example, the first book is done entirely in Black and White while the next book is going to be in full color. The beauty of self-publishing your own books is that you can make the rules up as you go. In the end I just hope to make the most entertaining stories I can, and most of all have fun doing it. I hope you all come along for the ride!
Here is a preview of the first book which is a 24 page short story about a massacre at a monastery called LAMBS OF GOD.
The next story in the series is called THE SHORT TOWER, which is a 48 page full color story I hope to finished this summer and launch the book on Kickstarter.
If you would like to follow along the progress on all things CRIMSON FALL or any of my other personal projects like my WICKERSON SAGA consider joining my PATREON for an exclusive behind the scenes access!
Yesterday was Hourly Comic Day. For those of you unfamiliar, it’s a fun a social media art event that takes place on Feb 1st, where you challenge yourself to draw a comic panel every hour you are awake throughout that day. Those are the “official rules”, but if you know me I don’t like following the rules!
I DO WHAT I WANT!
After seeing all the wonderful comics popping up in my feed yesterday and some encouragement from the very talented Becky Cloonan, I decided to dedicate a few hours in the evening and do one. However, this time I wasn’t encompassing a full day but instead created a fun look at real life events from the perspective of my cats.
For context since I have come to realize some parts of the world don’t have them… The cats discovered the “springy door stops” in our house and that when you whack them it creates a loud reverberating noise. My one can in particular can’t get enough of it and I’ve since had to remove most of them for the sake of my sanity.
I hope you enjoy this silly little cat comic.
Here are our cats Layna(left) and Pepper(right), the stars of the comic.
It was really satisfying to come up with and knock out a fun little story in a few hours and I was really happy with the result. The last and only other time I had drawn one of these was few years ago when I made “A day in the life of a middle aged artist”. (YOU CAN READ IT HERE)
If you want to read more Hourly Comics from some super talented people go check out, Becky Cloonan, Sam Bosma and Anthony Holden!
-Derek
I have a love/hate thing going on with my own fan art. It’s a complicated relationship because without Fan Art I would not have been as successful in my freelance art career, but yet I have a lot of negative feelings towards it.
I had always drawn popular comic book characters since I was around 10 years old. It really got me into drawing in a serious way and I started to believe I could one day draw comics as a career. Fast forward many, many years later to 2014 when I discovered INKTOBER. I hadn’t drawn traditionally in years so the idea of using ink and markers to draw again really excited me and I started to post on Instagram in a more serious way at this time as well. During the course of this month I had drawn a few pieces of fan art that would really shape the rest of my career. I had been working in the video games industry for about 7 years up to this point and I was drawing a lot of game sprites. What is a game sprite? If you think about the first Super Mario Bros game, where the characters were 2 or 3 heads tall, artists would design the characters this way so they would read easier on the screen. These were called game sprites. It was during this month of participating in Inktober that I decided to draw a few popular pop culture characters in this “game sprite” style. I would later go on to learn that there was already a term for this in the artworld, “CHIBI ART”.
This is my collage of images from Inktober 2014. See if you can spot the beginnings of me drawing Chibi Fan Art.
Over the next 6 years I really leaned into drawing Chibi Fan Art. I enjoyed the challenge of taking characters from pop culture and transforming them into what I referred to as “Cute and Cool” pieces of fan art. Not only did I enjoy drawing Chibi Art, people really started to take notice of my art and by June 2016 I had reached 100K followers on Instagram. Not only were people starting to follow my work but unbeknown to me, art directors from some pretty major companies were as well.
About 6 months later in January of 2017 an art director from Marvel contacted me through my Instagram DM’s to ask if I would be interested in designing their new MARVEL SUPER HERO ADVENTURES line. I worked with Marvel for the next 3 years building a style guide that would see my designs appear in books, clothing, toys and more! How many artists get the opportunity to shape an entire line for a company as big as Marvel? I knew how lucky I was and I was going to make the most of it. This was a dream job, but the dream didn’t end there.
Within 2 weeks of Marvel contacting me, an art Director at Hasbro wanted me to help design a project with them based on my chibi art. I later went on to design their new Mighty Muggs Line. I was in disbelief of suddenly landing these huge opportunities and I wasn’t done yet.
About 6 months after that Warner Brothers asked me to design their DC Super Friends toddler line and again my artwork would grace a ton of products. Around this time Mattel had also reached out to have me do some work for them. I was ticking every box and making new boxes to tick. It was a pretty amazing time in my career and I was very fortunate to have be drawing Chibi fan art at the right time in a style that both resonated with people and companies. Had I started drawing this fan art today I don’t think it would have blown up the way it did. Social media back then was much easier to build a following. Algorithims weren’t being used the same way and if you had popular work, simply more people would see it.
My freelance career had taken off. I could never have imagined that so many doors would open from simply sharing my fan art on social media. Despite the success I was having, there is a bit of a dark side to fan art that would begin to rear its head. As my work gained more popularity and my images were appearing in google search engines and shared on platforms like pinterest and reddit, my work was being used on unsolicited products at an astronomical rate ALL over the world. I was getting at least 10 messages a day from fans finding someone taking my art and putting it on products. It made me furious and in the beginning I would do my best to try and shut down these people with take down notices and reporting copyright infringements but over time I realized it was futile. Art thieves are like cockroaches, you kill one and a hundred more pop up. It was endless and so I became numb to it. The other big issue I had with my fan art was that I had become addicted to getting likes and attention from my artwork on social media. I was posting everyday at the same time like clockwork, obsessing over the numbers. When I would post an original creation my followers barely respond and that stung a bit. However, if I posted a new drawing of Spider-Man I’d see the numbers shoot back up again. It was an ugly cycle I was in and over time made me start to resent drawing fan art and in particular Chibi Art. I have not drawn Chibi fanart since the spring of 2021. This was the last one I had drawn, a Boba Fett for a Kickstarter Commission. I no longer do Chibi Commissions.
It’s not all doom and gloom. My freelance career has never been stronger. After building my social media presence for all those years, I’ve made great connections in a lot of companies and the fan art that is out there still drives new art directors my way all the time. These days I get my fanart fix through paid freelance work. I even have an officially licensed project coming out next year that will have me drawing Chibis once again but this time it’ll be under an official license and I’ll have some ownership over the images this time. Careers evolve and as an artist you need to understand that your journey through the art world comes with lots of ups and downs but you need to stay vigilant. If you read my last blog you’ll know there are big challenges that might lie ahead for every artist. The most important thing I can say is to just go “draw what you love” and for whatever reason you feel it’s not working for you anymore don’t remain stuck in the creative mud, try a different path and you might just be happier for it.
DAREDEVIL DRAWN FOR TOPPS MARVEL DIGITAL TRADING CARD APP
In a future blog I’ll talk about how I used fan art to draw attention to my own creations and brands.
-Derek
A little while ago I had an idea for a story about a group of female hunters who get stranded on an alien planet. While they try and figure out how to get back home they are hunted by these big large creepy aliens monsters… you know, like really original stuff here! They befriend a slime drooling dog-like creature and then hilarity and adventure ensues!
I love to use these half backed ideas as an excuse to create and design new characters. These are the designs I came up with for the Space Hunter Project.
You can find these designs and many more in my latest art book CREATIONS VOL. 2 available in the shop.
-Derek
AI is a hot button issue right now and for good reason, it’s coming for our art industry. So yeah, I care about it and I feel like this is the best place to share my thoughts and ideas on the subject. You may have a different opinion and you can feel free to comment below but I’m not looking to have a debate about this with strangers online. I’ve had many personal discussions about this topic with both professional artists and programmers and among those are a lot of varying opinions. A lot of people are divided on the topic and if you feel a certain way about it my thoughts are probably not going to change your mind, but I’m going to speak my mind none the less. If you are totally on board with AI art and see it as a positive thing than feel free to frown while you read this.
AI can have many positive uses in our world but we need to be careful about how and why we use it. The people building these AI Image Generators don’t care about art and they certainly don’t care about artists. They’ve built these platforms on the literal backs of hard working professional artists by taking their artwork without consent, compensation and without any regard for the creators they stole from and feeding it into their programs in order to “teach” the AI how to reproduce a similar image. So at its core AI image generators are unethical for that very reason I just mentioned. The AI doesn’t know how to draw or paint, that is not what it does, instead the program mashes together and copies from existing artwork, ripping the very “code” from the artists themselves. It breaks the art down into ones and zero’s and then vomits out a similar looking piece. I’ve been told by many people that “programmers steal code all the time”, like that somehow is supposed to justify the AI theft of artists' work. Art theft has been alive and well in our industry for ages, but unlike programmers, artists have NEVER accepted it as a norm and we certainly won’t accept it now.
“BUT WHAT ABOUT PHOTOSHOP???!! YOU USE PHOTOSHOP!!!!”
Yes many artists like myself use digital tools that help cut corners and save time, heck, before I used computers I used light boxes and stencils to help save time and improve my overall work. Technology in one form or another has always been a part of art but up to this point it’s only been a part of the process. The artist still required years or training and skill to produce the artwork with the help of tools. AI Image Generators are different. Sure they can be an art tool as well but it gets really murky when you think about how it can be used and that the images it spits out are made up of pieces of stolen artwork. Since AI has the ability to leap frog over the entire creative art process I fear many corporations will use them to cut artists out completely in place of these cheaper rip-offs. It won’t be long before a lot of the content that fills our eye holes is solely generated by these Frankenstein’s monsters of the artworld.
Am I personally worried about the impact of AI Image Creation towards my own career? A little bit. It could certainly affect some of my potential design jobs down the road but I hope the companies I work for value what I bring to the table. The one thing I know is that AI will never replace is my ability to tell stories and draw my comics. I’m betting that people who truly value and care about the art of comics and story telling won’t choose some mutant monster of a graphic novel spit out by a machine over what I can create on my own. At least I hope not! Regardless of how bleak the art world gets, I believe people will always have a need and desire for true art created by humans, so for that reason I’m trying to keep a positive outlook for the future.
So as it stands now, I’m perfectly content being the old man refusing to embrace change, much like many artists that came before me in the face of big changes to our industry. However, I feel this new change that’s coming is far bigger and potentially more devastating than any other that has come before it. I know that AI is inevitable in many aspects of our lives, including the art world. However when it comes to my industry I refuse to help usher it in. I won’t be using it and I certainly won’t help promote or champion it in any way. If an inevitable flood is going to devastate your town would you destroy the dam to get it over with quicker or do you grab a bucket and do your best to dump the water out? I choose to fight the flood of AI into the art world and not simply let it drown me.
-Derek
Back when blogs were popular I was not in a place in my career where having a personal web presence was a priority. I worked in the games industry and I was a cog in the wheel. I would always look on in admiration at all the wonderful artist blogs and use them as a source of inspiration. Back then you had to go and seek out the blogs to find out what your favourite artists were up to. There was something special about being able to absorb someone's blog and really take it all in. Social Media has changed things so much. Now it’s a continuous stream of content bleeding into your eyes and it’s not a negative thing, it’s connected artists to so many more people and allowed the independent artists to really grow their fan base. I got into social media in a major way in 2016 on Twitter and Instagram with the latter really exploding for me. Without social media I don’t think my freelance career would have been as successful today. The downside to social media is that it’s overwhelming and it’s at times just too much. I miss so many posts from my favourite artists and it makes me pine for the days of blogging again.
I know many artists are feeling the same way and I’ve noticed a movement to bring back the long forgotten BLOG. As someone who never knows when it’s the right time to follow a trend and is usually late to the party on most things, I figured what better time for me to get into the thing I had missed out on in its heyday?
So here I am with my first ever blog post and hopefully first of many as I share my artwork and latest projects with you. My hope is that through this Blog people will get a chance to discover my art in a whole new way and really get a chance to connect with it in a way that they can’t through social media.
-Derek
