Brian Moore's Sketchblog

In the spring and summer of 2004 I worked on a slightly unusual comics project, “The Big Wheel.” It was a story featuring characters from an animated series I had started in 2000, Teddy & Anna. It was the first sustained comics story I’d done since high school. And it was drawn, in ink and marker, on sheets of paper that were about 4 1/2 feet tall by 3 1/2 wide, for display in a window space in downtown Lowell. I’d go down there when a new page was done, take down the old one and put up the new.

It was tremendous fun to do. I made up the story as I went along, figuring out what would happen on the next page midway through the page I was drawing. I drew a minor character into a few panels and figured out later that he’d have to be one of the villains. The story was vaguely steampunk-y, with clockwork robots, pennyfarthing bicycles, airships, and a Tesla coil (the Big Wheel, a weapon developed by a secret society called the Electric Victorians.)

It was also pretty exhausting to make, and I got behind schedule pretty quickly. Then I got married to my lovely wife and went away on the honeymoon and by then the next exhibit scheduled for the windows space had to go in, so the story stopped on a cliffhanger with our heroes’ airship under attack. Someday I hope to finish up the story and find a new display venue for it (or at least take photos and publish it here.)

I made a “production blog” as I worked on the pages, so that anybody that saw them in the window could go home and look up how that day’s page had been made. I did a lot of research for the story (on airships, Tesla coils, early aviation, Victorian dress, etc.) so that’s the bulk of the blog entries, but there’s also some silly stuff. I’ve copied the entire blog into one big entry, for posterity.

“Unintentional” was an improvised strip I started and abandoned in the summer of 2007. I was trying to work around the hesitancy I was feeling about putting pen to paper, so I just picked an arbitrary doodle and used that as the first installment of the story. To my surprise I was able to keep going, on a near-daily schedule, for a few weeks. At that point I was starting to feel a bit wobbly on my story-telling tightrope, and also was about to embark on a cross-country vacation, so the strip fell by the wayside. It was a lot of fun to do, though, and the improvisatory nature of it was a nice break from the more structured, “realist” work I was doing on Smithson. And it’s provided me with some core ideas that I plan to expand into a longer, fully composed story.

Each page was drawn directly in ink with my then-favorite crowquill pen, and then shaded with washes of pthalo blue watercolor (chosen because it’s a dye-based, intense pigment that didn’t go too dull on the absorbent copy paper I was drawing on.) I tried to do as little preparatory work as possible, and to avoid after-the-fact Photoshop work too. I did end up doing some sketches and combining panels spread across two sheets into one page. Maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to try this experiment again.

I’ve moved the strips from their old home on Webcomicsnation.com to this blog’s archives – here’s the first strip.

Just added the short video (played at about 6X realtime) of me making a watercolor illustration. I posted it to the News section of my illustration site awhile back, but it might be new to you. Just click the “Watch Brian Draw” button near the top of the page.