doctorbaer

With a loaner iPad Air I’ve been working on learning the app that so many of my friends are using for their comics and sketching. And it’s pretty neat! It wasn’t obvious to me how I could adapt the process I’ve come to lean on in Clip Studio Paint, but over time (and with the help of my students), I’m starting to figure out how it might work for me.

And I have to admit, the drawing experience on the iPad is pretty great. The 6B pencil in Procreate on the iPad is the next best thing to working with paper.

I see what they hype is about! I just need to practice and experiment a bit more to see where this might fit into my workflow and whether I might be able to include this in my classes.

Doctor Baer faces the mysterious liquid spirits in the catacombs of Yonyovid Cove. An art drop at the recent Buckeye Book Fair.

#DoctorBaer #Watercolor #Spooky #Comics

Follow me on Pixelfed!

If you’re at the Buckeye Book Fair this Saturday, November 4, be sure to keep an eye open for some Doctor Baer art drops I’m leaving around the convention center. Like this one, which is also a sneak peek at the next Doctor Baer story I’m working on now.

Saturday was a glorious day where I had no obligations outside my studio (well, I did have to mow the lawn and weed the front walk). So most of the day was spent on creative pursuits!

My favorite Saturday nights are spent drawing while watching old horror or monster movies. Most of the time Svengoolie provides the movie, but when he’s playing something I’ve seen recently (or don’t ever want to see again), I’ll turn to Tubi. This week I found a fun Peter Cushing film from 1977 titled The Uncanny.

If you love scary movies and cats as much as I do, you might like this one. Peter Cushing plays a frightened writer with a manuscript proving that cats are truly out to get us. The manuscript is a framing device for an anthology film with three stories wherein cats create a body count (but the people always had it coming). I was happily surprised to see one of my favorite actors (and inspiration for an upcoming Doctor Baer character) Donald Pleasance was in one of the stories. It also has one of the coolest title sequences I’ve seen in a long time.

I will warn you that there is some minor disturbing gore in the first story, though.

So now I move on to flatting this piece so I can have it painted before Halloween. Fingers crossed that it won’t be as hard as it looks!

The Blender model of the Doctor’s house is almost done!

It’s very reassuring to know that I now have his house as an asset to drop into any scene in future stories. I wish I had done this with the first book.

I’m feeling so emboldened by this I’m considering making the entire setting for the next story in Blender. It’d really only be like 20-30 houses, some cliffs, and an abbey on a hill. I’m watching the clock, though–if making the setting cuts too much into thumbnailing time, I’ll have to ditch it. This first five weeks of teaching full-time has been instructive for me in the sense of knowing how much time I’ll actually have for art production.

Another development piece for a short Doctor Baer story. In some of the stories featuring Baba Yaga her house is surrounded by a fence capped by human skulls, whose eye sockets glow eerily. I’m playing with that image to see what it might look like if Baba Yaga had some sentient skulls who assisted her similarly to how the Wisps assist Doctor Baer.

I’ve also updated the runes on Baba Yaga’s mortar. In the previous drawing I was aping some approximations of ancient Slavic script, but I remembered that I was sitting on a mystical alphabet I designed over 20 years ago:

Which appears at least twice in Two-Faced Statue.

Baba Yaga’s mortar got updated with these runes:

I’m not telling what it says. But I do plan on releasing a lot of Doctor Baer merchandise with this writing on it, so observant readers will eventually figure it out.

I’ve still got a lot of work to do on the outline, but my goal is to begin thumbnailing by the end of August. I’ll share what I’ve got as I go!