Thursday, November 24, 2011

HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!




Just wanted to wish all of you a great and happy Thanksgiving.
Thank you all for taking the time to look around in this insane little blog of twist and turns.
Playing around with the Iphone this morning and did a quick little sketch of good old John Carter of Mars, and that other character with the laugh.. When I get my DVD driver working I will post some old Carter drawings I did years ago.
May you all eat well today, and be with your loved ones.
Frank.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Nightmare high tech at twenty thousand feet




In the words of the wonderful Shatner.. "There is an APP at the wing of my plane!!"

Fate finally made me take the plunge. My phone broke down and I had to get a replacement, so I got one of those insane Iphones. Naturally I have now joined the wild horde of app crazy addicts. It happened at a good time, just before my trip to Stanford so I had some good time during the flight to play around with all the gadgets.
Couldn't help thinking what Jules Verne would say if he saw a couple of hundred people sitting in the belly of this giant metal bird that was flying at twenty thousand feet. He would look around and see people reading, sleeping, playing games, his mind would explode, then again, he might just say.. " I knew it all along!"
Imagine Columbus playing with the star app.. or the compass app..

So here I was trying to figure out a way to learn to draw with my giant index finger on this little screen. I have to handed to the designers, because after a while I actually began to understand it a bit.

One of my favorite books is Moby Dick, recently it has dawned on my mind to want to illustrate a version of it. In my opinion nothing beats the black and white illustrations done by the master Rockwell Kent. But I wanted to take a different path, while Kent worked in black and white, I want to work with symbols and colors and shapes. The book is all about symbols and metaphors and my drawings would try to take that to the limit. So here are some very early Iphone sketches of Ahab and Queequeg who is my favorite character in the book. As I get that time I will play around more in Melville's wonderful world.

And to all the Rocketo fans, I have added some concept art for the Mapping Guild, although in the book its going to be ten times more massive than in this sketch.
The girl, well she was just fun to draw.
Enjoy and have a great day everyone.
Frank.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

STANFORD UNIVERSITY







Hello all.
I just got back from Stanford University where I got to meet some fantastic professors, and a great comic artist and fine artist, Marcella Trujillo, who managed to make a quick sketch of me while on a train to visit the San Francisco comic art museum.
The trip was amazing and the scholars who gave their lectures on Latino comics and creators gave me some wonderful insights that I will carry with me for a very long time. So hats off to Hector Hoyos, Angela Becerra, Haerin Shin, Hector Fernandez, Juan Poblete, Vanessa Chang, Ramon Salvidar and Frederick Aldama they made my stay at Stanford feel right at home.
So now I am back and its back to work! I will post more stuff this week.