Brian Moore's Sketchblog

“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.

Here’s a corner of my studio. My poor corn plant has apparently grown too big for its planter, and so it’s forced to lean against the bookcase to stay upright. Also visible is the umbrella plant on the bookcase, whose leaves get tangled up with the other plant in an interesting way. It’s a little jungle over there.

I forced myself to turn off the computer earlier and get down to work on Un. It’s scary to be alone with your thoughts.

More wc studies for Unintentional.

Watercolor and white gouache on Winsor & Newton paper. Visual research for a future comic.

More research work for the Unintentional revamp. Based on a photo taken at Alcatraz!

Some studies of tropical plants for Unintentional, v. 2.0. (We’ll see if actual pictorial research — as opposed to the “it’s close enough” school of plant-drawing — will help the story …) The drawings are from pics I took at S.F.’s Conservatory of Flowers last year.