Cropped Will Cardini artwork

February 23rd, 2010

Titanic Clash of the Shamen Page 7

Last week I finished the seventh page of Titanic Clash of the Shamen, a collaborative comic that I’m doing with Josh Burggraf.

We were hoping to have the comic finished in time for STAPLE! but it looks like that won’t happen, considering that we would have to do five more pages and the cover in a week. However, we do plan on having it done in time for MoCCA Fest, April 10-11th at the 69th Regiment Armory in NYC, where Josh will have a table.

Page 7 took me a while to plan out. Although I knew what I roughly wanted to happen and who was going to say what early on, I had to do a lot of sketches and try drawing the page with a number of different layouts. Josh has definitely drawn a pretty psyched-out Page 6, and I don’t want Page 7 to come up short.

Here are some of my sketches, in chronological order:

In this first one I was trying to figure out a good panel layout and some good back-and-forth magical attacks between Floyd and Shamanman.

In this second one, I refined my idea of how I wanted Shamanman to attack.

Once I busted out the Faber-Castelli I was really able to get some images flowing. I drew this one and the next a couple days later than the first two, at Sketch Klubb this past Thursday. The good people at Public School were kind enough to host us. Their studio set up is dope and it was good to jam with a bunch of new people.

The final sketch from that nite. At this point I was on the verge of drunkenness and just kind of doodling some ideas floating around in my head, including Shamanman transformed into a yeti and some space invaders that I might put into a future project.

Here’s one panel from the final page:

I ended up using a lot of the ideas that I sketched in my final drawing.

February 21st, 2010

VDay 2K10 Drawing Closeup

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , , , — William Cardini @ 8:38 pm

Hey y’all, sorry that it’s taken me so long to get a second post done this week!

Per request, I’m posting a close-up shot of the drawing that I did for Glade for Valentine’s Day:

The drawing is watercolor over india ink. It depicts Glade and I defeating a monster with rays emanating from our wedding rings. If this drawing is too big for your computer screen you can see it various sizes on my flickr.

February 16th, 2010

VDay 2K10

Filed under: Life — Tags: — William Cardini @ 7:01 am

So I didn’t finish a comic last week …

***DISCLAIMER: The following post might be too vom-inducingly cute for some readers***

… because I was busy making a drawing for Glade for Valentine’s Day. The drawing was an integral part of my Sneaky Proposal Plan (she said yes!). It shows Glade and I destroying a monster with rays emanating from our wedding rings.

Here I am posing with the drawing and Glade’s gift to me …

… a pillow that looks like my head!

I’m going to try to finish two pages of comics this week to make up for last week.

February 12th, 2010

Shinobu Kazu

Filed under: Inspiration — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 7:39 am

Here are a couple of pages from a comic called “Violence Becomes Tranquility.”

The story was written and drawn by Shinobu Kazu, who was influenced by Philippe Druillet, a French sci-fi artist. You can find more info and the entire comic here.

February 9th, 2010

Titanic Clash of the Shamen Page 5

Filed under: Print Comics — Tags: , , , , — William Cardini @ 7:29 am

This past week I finished page five of the collaborative comic that I’m doing with Josh Burggraf called Titanic Clash of the Shamen.

Here’s a one-panel preview:

Our comic is, just in case it isn’t obvious from the title, about a battle between our two shaman characters – this is a drawing of Josh’s shaman, Floyd.

February 5th, 2010

Draw Thyme X Sketch Klubb

Filed under: Sketchbook Pages — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 2:42 am

Last nite was Draw Thyme X Sketch Klubb, one of my favorite activities. I get together with a bunch of kewl ppl and we just hang out and draw all nite. I think that just spending time drawing whatever I want in my sketchbook is very important to my artistic practice. I would show y’all my sketches from last nite, but they weren’t very good, so I scanned some pages from the nite before last, when I was drawing at the laundromat.

When I was sketching on this page I was thinking about Obama’s recent budget change for NASA, so I was drawing spaceships and arcologies on Ganymede (or Callisto? I can never remember which moon is farthest from Jupiter).

On this second page I was drawing cartoon Glade, a dragon, and a character based off of the black mage from Final Fantasy I.

February 2nd, 2010

Titanic Clash of the Shamen Page 3

Filed under: Print Comics — Tags: , , , — William Cardini @ 7:54 am

Last week I finished the third page of Titanic Clash of the Shamen, a collaborative comic that I’m doing with Josh Burggraf.

Here are two panels from the page:

We came up with a plot starring our respective Shamen, decided what would occur on each page, and now we’re drawing alternate pages. I’ve never collaborated this way before, it’s pretty fun. I’m hoping that we’ll have it done in time for STAPLE! where I’ll be tabling as part of the Gold County Paper Mill. I think that Josh and I will finish the comic in time, we’re a third of the way there and we have a month to go.

January 29th, 2010

FISTS Page 2

Filed under: Print Comics — Tags: , , , , — William Cardini @ 7:52 am

Last week I drew two comics pages. I tried to get three done but I ended up only having the stamina to pencil the third page.

Here’s the second page of the FISTS comic that I drew last week (you can see the first page here):

This comic and some other, older FISTS strips (from college!) will be published in issue #14 of the humor zine Smear Campaign.

January 26th, 2010

FISTS Page 1

Back when I was in college I drew a comic for the Daily Texan (UT-Austin’s paper) called Fists: Free For All. My original premise, inspired by Krazy Kat and not too different from my current ATTACKS series now that I think about it, was to have each strip end with (or revolve around) one character hurling a gloved fist on a stick at another. Although I quickly abandoned that concept, I did, over the years, develop a set of regular characters and images that I kept coming back to, like the previously mentioned flying fists, a weird metal bat creature, the cigar-smoking frog, masks, and suited men who had to hold up their own lower jaws on a stick. After I graduated from college and got into Fort Thunder, my style changed pretty rapidly, and abandoned all of these characters except for, of course, the cigar-smoking Frog.

However, this past week, my buddy Natalia Ciolko asked me to do a two-page comic for the next issue of her zine Smear Campaign, and she was already reprinting some old FISTS strips, so I decided to do a whole new one.

Here’s the first page (I’ll have the second one up Friday):

January 22nd, 2010

Meditation

Filed under: Print Comics — Tags: , , , — William Cardini @ 7:05 am

Here’s the comic that I did for last year’s STAPLE! Program Guide:

I was working on TRANZ at the time, this is an earlier version of the “meditate” page that made it in the final mini.