Another New Idea...

The other project I've been working on the last few months or so is a large, stand-alone graphic novel about a bunch of kids who drop out of society and set up camp at the town dump.  Honest.  I'm actually pretty excited about it, as it is the sort of "could happen in the real world" type story that I really enjoy.  There's no magic or fantasy elements.  It's as realistic fictiony as I get.

Here are a few pages from my sketchbook.  The color was added digitally at a later date.  I could decipher the text in the sketches, but I think I'll leave it up to you.  Most of the writing in my notebooks and sketchbooks is as sloppy and messy as this. I think, in a way, I need to really commit to an idea before I write more carefully.  At this stage, the dialog itself is a sketch.

More Sci-Fi stuff...

I spent most of the summer working on a big, odd, sci-fi story that, while I'm excited by it, I'm also unsure about it. After slowly developing it for a few months, it occurred to me that it might not really be for kids.  It's not that it's too heady or violent, but I'm just not sure what it says to kids about the lives they live.  While it is a story that is meaningful to me, I simply don't know if a young audience would relate to it.  And truthfully, I'm not really interested in aiming at at adults.  This is a hard one.  I'm not sure if I'm going to go forward with it.

These were two sketches I put together.  In the top one I'm really trying to figure out how simple I could go with colors and solid blacks.

This one is a colored sketchbook page.  Some of the stuff, such as the lederhosen dude, just kinda snuck onto the page.