I have awesome news to pass on and update you with. But first, a little set-up. As many of you may know, I am a professional graphic designer by day and I create my illustrations and extra designs on what extra time I can put together. This has lead to an awesome amount of learning on my side alongside excellent opportunities to meet amazing people in this vast sea of talent online. This has made me a better artist and has improved my abilities to aid and work with others in both a learning environment and a project one. I have even made friends with an amazing Disney artist in Chris Oatley and a wise and talented independent comic writer and artist named Lora Innes of the comic "The Dreamer". Both of whom host the Paper Wings Podcast site and who I have been great teachers to me. Visit their site and you will know what I mean!
Well, through the community in their blog I learned of and met the artists of the illopond.com site. That is the group I am working with for my Kodi the Starfish short story. While building, drawing and digitally painting the story, I have also been helping where I can with the book's layout and design. That is the common type of work I do daily so it was pretty easy for me to add that kind of work into the mix. The project lead, Paul Caggegi, has been great to work with and I have truly been enjoying helping out with such a big project.
After the recent delay due to the loss of two contributors, the Paul re-opened the book to the illopond community and additionally to his local area of Australia (yeah, Australia!!!! I am working with an artist on the other side of the world from myself here in Texas!! How awesome is the internet!!).
Following this opening, Paul was faced with a great amount of submissions and interest from both sources! We now officially have illopond member, Lee Wiley, taking a spot and an Australian local, Michael Patrick Monaghan filling the 8th to round out the spots needed to have the full book.
What to do with the rest of the submissions you ask? Well, after discussing things with community members and my wife (I cannot take on such a task without her brilliant support), I have taken the position as lead on a second space-themed anthology book!!! Man, that is crazy- awesome!
Now, I am still working with my writer on my other comic submission and I am dedicated to ensuring that is exercised to its proper ends to see if we can get picked up with either Image Comics or Dark Horse Comics!!!! That would ROCK!! So, while we finish out the submission (the goal is the end of this coming week) I am only taking on the task of project lead with this second space book. I am looking forward to the type of experience that it will bring me and I would love to put a project like this into my resume! If things change, then I will also add a story to the anthology with a second tale for Kodi the Starfish! ( since I have like 7 waiting in my file, it would be pretty easy to pull one out!)
I will continue to update you as I finish my last 2 pages for the first space book and I will get back to regular posts of inspiration, tutorials and rants so no worries! Below is the new project's logo and here is the link to the new anthology's main discussion thread and it is also linked in the NEW TABS under my header art at the top of the Captain' BLOG page! These things are awesome and I am hoping to build them in a way so that I can link all of the tutorial posts to one and inspiration posts to another. Thats is for the near future though. Follow the link to discover why I named the project "The Gemini Project!" ( aside from the obvious fact that it is the 2nd book with that same theme). Also, if you are an experienced artist and want to throw your hat into the ring and submit a potential story and its art to the anthology, go to this link and click on the post titled, "Across Spaaace...Again!". It will have instructions about the project and a link to the starter kit I developed so contributors could hit the ground running!
(See, it just screams spaaace awesomeness!!!)
Either way, thank you all for visiting along with this journey and please check back often as I will try to post more crazy fun stuff soon!
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