252: Blood On The Tracks

by on July 16, 2015 at 12:00 am
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Jeremy: That’s the final page of our chapter, folks. We’re going on hiatus for a bit, but when we return, it will be with an entire chapter! Please read this blog post for more details! We’ll put up something with a good bit more information soon. Thanks for sticking with us through this roller coaster of emotions!

Jeff: If you want to review this storyline (or if you haven’t read it all, remember that just like unseen reruns, IT’S NEW TO YOU!), jump back to this strip. Or for those of you that bought our book, you can head on over to this strip to see where things picked up after the book left off!

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The Shape Of Things To Come

by on July 2, 2015 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Blog

Jeff: Hey, everyone! Yes, we know it’s another week where we don’t have a finished comic yet. Instead, we wanted to let you all in on what’s coming up with the Ouro Bros in the future.

We’re just two comics away from our “season finale”, after which we’re going to go on a bit of an extended hiatus. Please rest assured, though, that we WILL be back! I am already hip-deep in writing out our next season, which will not only take the band to places they’ve never been before, but also take you – our readers – back to past events that have only been hinted at thus far. It’s exciting, but it’s also a bit scary for us, because it does mean we’ll be leaving behind our post-every-Thursday philosophy that we’ve been trying to hold onto since the strip’s inception. The plan is for us to first put together 24 pages of some of the tightest-written material that we’ve yet created, and then once we have it all down, post 3 pages a week for roughly 2 months. Then we’ll probably go on another break while we work up the next chapter.

Why are we doing this? There are quite a few reasons, including time crunches and lifestyle adjustments, but mostly it comes down to us wanting to not only produce the best possible content we can, but also to provide it for you in a method that makes it much more conducive to reading and following. And as we’re closing the book on our longest-running single storyline at the moment, we want the next one to be lean, mean, and sparklin’ with sheen!

So, stay tuned! This season is ending with a bang!

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248b: Opportunity Knocks – Pencils

by on June 4, 2015 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Blog

Jeremy: Welcome to part two of the Ouro Bros “behind the scenes” process for the strip entitled “Opportunity Knocks”. Today we’re looking at the early stages of the art. This is what will complete the stage that I call “Sketches” or “Overall Layout”. This process starts with me reading the script that Jeff wrote in our shared folder in Google Drive (shown last week). Let’s break this down into a few stages:

  1. Panel Layout and Lettering: Given Jeff’s direction of 2×3 panel layout, I start with my basic template, which consists of 6 equally sized panels (2 rows of 3). Then I type in all the dialog for the panels, and surround the letters with word balloons or caption boxes. This helps me get a better idea of how much room I have for art. I believe this process is backwards from other artists, who may start with drawing out the comic in a thumbnail or rough format first, then pencil, and add lettering last, filling spaces leftover that isn’t taken up by art. I can’t describe why I like doing lettering first, but it just feels right to me. So, based on seeing the lettering, I start getting a mental image of where the characters and pieces of the scene will go, which also corresponds with any visual direction Jeff gave in the script. This allows me to decide which panels will be wider/bigger, and which will be smaller. Once I get a feel for that I start…
  2. Rough Sketching: You can see a ghost of this in red and blue under the black/gray pencils above. I draw and size these rough shapes and lines in Photoshop (I do everything digitally in Photoshop, using my WACOM tablet for drawing). Once I have a good feel for the rough layout of these shapes, I move dialog balloons around accordingly to get the best visual placement, and move my panel borders to get the closest-to-final position possible. After this roughing is done, I start…
  3. Pencils: This is what you see in black/grey. I use my rough shapes and lines as guides in a layer underneath the “pencils” layer, with the opacity turned down, so that my pencil details are the most visible. Sometimes, this involves a lot of hitting “Undo”, drawing over and over again until I get the details I want in the layer. Some finer details I save for inks, which you will see in the finished page next week. A good example of this is the sound board in panel 5. Right now, it is just a bunch of lines to indicate the placement of where the knobs and channel strips will go. To save time, I will likely just ink those right in. It is all a matter of what I feel confident in just “winging” when it comes to inks. My tastes and feelings change on this, on a week-to-week basis.

I hope you all are enjoying this look behind the scenes of Ouro Bros. As Jeff described last week, I am playing a bit of catch up, as my life has been really nuts recently. Please feel free to leave comments with any other questions you may have about the art process, and I will be happy to answer them! Thanks for reading this week!

Jeff: Yeah! …What he said.

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248a: Opportunity Knocks – The Script

by on May 28, 2015 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Blog

Jeff: Okay, a little change of pace for all of you, here. Jeremy’s been crazy-overworked of late, and has been unable to find the time to draw our most recent comic. That being the case – and since we’re already a week behind on posts – I thought some of you might be interested in seeing the process of how we create a comic for The Ouro Bros.Over the next couple of weeks, watch this space to see this particular strip take form.

First, though, our strips start out as a Google Doc. I write out the action and dialog as you see above, panel-by-panel. A couple of notes:

  • “LoS-ers”: Not long after we came up with the “Lake of Serpents” moniker, I realized that I could either keep calling them “the gang” or “the OBs and friends”, or I could use our band name’s acronym to its obvious advantage.
  • “OS”: This stands for “Off Screen”. I tend to write things as if I’m watching them on TV or in a movie. Occasionally, I’ll refer to the “camera” panning along or zooming into the action.
  • “Layout: 2X3”: If we have a chance to do something wild and crazy with the overall layout, I’ll mention it here. This time around, we’re doing a fairly standard 2 rows, 3 panels each format.

Anyway, feel free to ask us anything in the comments below. I’d never want to see sausage being made, but hopefully seeing this comic come together will be interesting to all of you!

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Intermezzo

by on April 17, 2014 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Blog

Jeff: My dear partner Jeremy injured his back last week, and has been unable to draw. Just on a lark, I asked my son to draw a substitute comic for this week, and he told me he’d surprise me. He said something about showing the creative process, which sounded pretty neat, so I gave him a blank template (okay, I added a bit of text, first), and let him to it and upload it to the site, sight (heh) unseen!

Hope everyone enjoys this quick break in the story!

Jeremy: You both will pay dearly for this outrage. Once I can sit for a prolonged period of time, I will draw pictures of terrible things happening to you.

To everyone else, I wanted to let you know that I recently received a lower lumbar sprain from the Work Injury Demons. I am recovering at a steady pace, but sitting for prolonged periods of time is still pretty painful, and that is how I most comfortably do all my art duties for the strip. I hope you like what Jeff has delivered to you from Chez Burkholder, and find it entertaining. It really does speak a lot of truth to our collaboration dynamic.

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SPX 2013 Recap

by on September 19, 2013 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Blog

Jeff says: Hey, everyone! Sorry for the momentary time-out from the comic, but we wanted to talk about our time at #SPX.

We had a fantastic time at the Small Press Expo in North Bethesda, MD, this past weekend. Met a lot of people, sold a few books, and generally made a lot of good connections in the independent comics world. We shared table space with a lot of really great people, a number of whom are shown in the sketch above. In case you’re curious, they are (from Left to Right):

One of the things that we really strove for was to look professional. This was our first show – not to mention the debut of our book – so we figured we’d dress (the table) for success, as you can see below.

It was hard not to be inspired by the raw talent of the artists around us. For instance, mid-Saturday, a cup of coffee tragically spilled across some sketch paper we had lying about. We won’t mention that Monica’s tippy display stand is what knocked the coffee over, but what we will say is that she then took that stain and turned it into an adorable (if kinda icky) doodle that I share with you now:

I’ve come away from the whole experience feeling a bit like I just left summer camp. There wasn’t much marshmallow roastin’ or ghost-story-tellin’, but there were friendships forged among this pen & ink crowd, and I’m already looking forward to next year.

Jeremy says: When I attended SPX in 2012 for the first time, I left feeling quite overwhelmed. There was so much talent on display there, that it was difficult not to compare myself with the exhibiting creators. The fact that I was experiencing a comic creator’s convention for the first time ever made me feel a teeeeensy bit out of place. It was hard not to see my own work as chicken scratch, after seeing so much amazingly polished work.

One year later, this time as an actual SPX exhibitor, and with another year of drawing the Ouro Bros under my belt, I left the convention feeling like a colleague of other comic creators. Yes, I saw an overwhelmingly large amount of incredible work, but this time I felt like I measured up to the standard. It certainly helped being (literally) surrounded by a group of awesomely supportive friends and fellow creators (not to mention all the great new people I met this year!). The work of these familiars and other attending creators has this time served as an inspiration to me. I want to be a much better cartoonist/comic artist, but I don’t feel depressed that I still have a long way to go. I am excited to see what drawing hurdles I will jump over next, and what Jeff and I can do with the story of the Ouro Bros that will make the comic ever-engaging and fun to our audience. Here’s hoping we make it through the registration gauntlet to exhibit at SPX 2014!

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