Slayers and Shaman

Finally! We finished up two more stories blocking our paths of Book II completion. Anthony’s slayer story: Devotion and my shaman story: Denial. The shaman story (both written by Cooper) took me a bit longer than planned because my game plan kinda fell apart and began to take new directions after I started working on it. We wanted both stories to have somewhat the same feel to them and share a “darker” theme. We originally wanted them to have a Mignola feel, so we made sure to have lots of blacks and plenty of negative space. Anthony wanted to use several smaller panels over a larger image while I wanted more of a promotional poster look to mine.

I think we both ended up where we wanted. Devotion is a four page story consisting of larger drawings covered by smaller panels and Denial is a four page story being told through four different “movie style” posters, each representing the words on that particular page. And as always we each worked on our own rough layouts with our own characters and then passed them off for the other to do his character. Anthony draws all of the Ele-Alta and I all of the Cropones. My story wasn’t so bad for Anthony because I only had one page where our characters interact BUT as for Anthony’s story he had quite a few panels where he needed Cropones added. One of which is a HUGE group of zombie Cropones engaged in battle with a slayer…not something that particularly makes me glow with excitement.

I wanted to share a page from each story for your viewing satisfaction…enjoy.

-Jesse

SUNDAY DRIVE!!!

Destination…Success

“The War” is the final story that is needed to complete the written part of Book II: Fight for Amity. It is turning out to be one of the tougher stories of the book because essentially it is also (in a since) our first comic. Thought Book II is composed of a bunch of short stories, The War is the same length as a comic (25-30 pages) so we are treating it as such…also we have hopes of actually putting out a comic or two (depending on the success of the first two books) so this could be good practice for finding the look we want for those books.
ANYWAY, Cooper is having some of the same problems I have come across when it comes to doing these stories…It can always be BETTER! After Anthony and I gave him our outline to The War, he immediately began to sink his teeth into it but after awhile he knew he could do better. After he made it better, it excited him enough to, once again, make it BETTER! But in doing so, he came across some problems in the story and needed to break through them.

The office with removable T-tops

That’s where THE SUNDAY DRIVE comes in. What better office then the 300zx? I dare to say there is one….no, no there is not! We jumped into the car and hit the road. Before too long we began to work our way through the story as well as work our way to other states…ooops.
We found ourselves entering Louisiana and started looking for somewhere to eat. The GPS was NO HELP AT ALL!!! At one point it actually said, “left in 1.5 miles. Take next right in 5…..where the hell are you?” I kid you not, it told us it had to call a friend and it would get back to us.

What did this thing just say???

We finally found a nice place to eat and later walked to a spot by the Mississippi River, with a good cup-of-joe and worked our way through the rest of the story. It made for a pretty good day.

Apparently everything closes on Sunday in this here Ghost Town. (Cooper)

-Jesse

More Bookmarks...

With free comic book day right around the corner and our preview book “most likely” missing its release date (making me a disgruntled artist) I figured I might as well try to get something new for the event. I started small with the always easy Bookmarks! I gathered some of the art from Book II as well as from other projects (posters, games and such) and laid them out for a presentable little spot saver! Here is just a little look at the start of the project.
-Jesse

The Little Things

It's the little things that make my day! So Jesse calls me the other day and tells me how he is working on some new drawings of Cropones. He is practicing drawing them in more dynamic poses to make sure they will be able to deliver all the expressions necessary for some upcoming projects...anyways, he mentioned how I was lucky that my characters had noses and more defined legs, cause that makes them easier to draw in all these different angles. So I took it upon myself to draw a little scene that popped into my head of one Cropone solving the problem his way. Needless to say, it made me laugh.

-Anthony-

Family-Alta?

Here is the kind of guys we are….We are tight on deadlines, have a couple of books about to hit the shelves, working on concepts for spin off games and comics and still working on the completion of Book II: Fight For Amity. BUT we always seem to find the time to do stuff to screw with each other. Whether it’s a quick picture sent through the cell (one that may or may not directly blame MY characters for the fall of our book) or just a goofy idea that we want to see unfold before our eyes…we always find the time to make each other laugh!

Having said this, there was NO way I was going to pass up the opportunity to do this little gem of a joke! This is Anthony’s character from “A New Dawn.” When I saw it I couldn’t see anything but the following picture and giggled the whole time while working on it.

I'm not even going to explain it because if I did….you wouldn’t like it anyway.

-Jesse

Special Thanks!

This is one post that I really looked foreword to! After the San Francisco Wondercon while hanging out in their hotel, Francisco and Humberto were nice enough to show us some love. They gave us a couple of quotes that we will be using on the Back of Berona’s War I: Field Guide. So having said that, I would be remiss not to say that Ramos’ “Art and Out” is also a must have!!! If you are familiar with his work (and you shouldn’t be reading this or any art blog, if you are not….SHAME ON YOU!) you would know all of his work is GREAT!

-Jesse

Ordinary meets Extraordinary

This is a page from the three part story “Dawn of the Nance” from Berona’s War II: Fight for Amity. What Anthony and I like is the actual story was conceived on our last trip to Chicago. Its basically one FAT inside joke. The actual joke, I'm pretty sure, guarantied us our own personal timeshare in hell. But that’s not even the funniest part…I actually REALLY like the story our joke turned into. At this point the story has little to do with the origination of the joke but we will always know…the truth.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I'm pretty sure that…yes...yes…I'm pretty sure that those are NOT the words that go to the pictures. In fact I'm certain of it. Just having a little fun with my buddy. My buddy who drew his Ele-Alta without even thinking about it, while I spent TWO FREAK’N DAYS on the environment!

-Jesse

Adding Color to Our Day

I just wanted to put down a page from another story from Berona’s War II. This is a story written by Opie and Colored by our buddy Wes. Not only does he take a lot of the stress off of ourselves by coloring these for us but we think he does a pretty good job as well! The R&D stories are going to be pretty funny (we think so anyway) and hopeful we will do several of them as sort of a running joke. So thanks Opie and Wes for sharing some of your talents with us!
-Jesse

A Broken Promise

Here are some of the inked pages to a recently finished story. All that's left for this one is to have the color added, but first I'm going to jump on some other stories. Enjoy the preview.

-Anthony-

under COVER...

Well here they are! Just to re-explain and to catch you up…Anthony and I made a small number of Berona’s Hundred Year War book to sell at conventions. The book sold surprisingly well and even more so, surprisingly fast. We joined up with Archaia and will be putting out a preview book (end of April). We wanted a new cover for the preview book. So what we did is (and here is where you have to keep up) gave the preview book our original Hundred Year War cover, since we would be changing that one as well. This way for all of you, who did not get a first edition book, it is a way for you to get something with the same cover.
THEN (if things go as planned in June) we will be releasing the second edition of Berona’s War (formally know as the Hundred Year War). We have given it a new cover and updated some of the pages inside…not to mention all the plot holes and endless field of grammatical errors.
The book we are working on, Berona's War: Fight For Amity, will be (God willing) finished by then and will be hitting shelves soon after (Aug).
We were excited about getting our new covers done and wanted to share them. So with no further ado….
-Jesse