Started this little piece while on plane flight back from watching a music gig about a month ago; finally went back and finished inking it the other night. It’s based on a time travelling character from a comic series I’m currently working on (whenever I get free time, which is pretty rare at the moment).
Uni has started to pick up again too. Man, I forgot how quickly semester gets out of hand!
Away for a small break in Brisbane this weekend to see Porter Robinson and Madeon’s “Shelter” concert (if you actually look at my “about me” page you’ll see that these two artists both rank in my top 5, so imagine how excited I was to see them both at once!) It was absolutely amazing and something I’ll remember for a good while.
Of course this meant I didn’t have my scanner and computer to finish cleaning up this piece, but my phone and little Surface managed to just pull through with it. Still playing around with concept art for my next comic project, but I have also started doing the pencils for the first issue too.
Well I’ve finally got internet again after having it go down for over two weeks because my ISP couldn’t figure out how to transfer my house to a different plan… I’m not bitter at all, nope.
One good thing did come from a fortnight without internet: lots of time for art. I’ve finished a few zines I’d been putting off for a while and I’ve just outlined my next mini comic project (the piece above is some concept art for the comic’s cover). All things going to plan, it will be a 12 part mini series published through sneakily hidden zines.
Hope you’ve all had a better fortnight than me, I’ve definitely missed keeping up to date with everyone’s different blogs, that’s for sure!
Flaming hot mess
First page of a little comic I’m making.
Somewhat related; I accidentally spilled ink all over my sketchbook while refilling a black marker. Even with my regular piece of protective paper under the page I was working on, it managed to soak through a further 6 pages!
Looks like I’ll be doing a bunch of pieces with black backgrounds to hid the splodges.
Handwriting looks much better when intentionally bad
Found the time this week to finish up an entry for my town’s local pop culture convention art competition that’s happening next month. Overall, pretty happy with the end result. It was a bit of an experiment in drawing at A4 scale too, as I usually draw at A5. Understandably, it took about twice as long to complete, but I think making it larger in this case was the right choice.
Just for fun, here’s a little gif comparing my initial sketch to the final outcome:
The time has come to be a fucking super hero!
I’ve been a long time fan of Deadpool; Marvel has me hook, line and sinker. I read the comics, I buy the merch, and I’ve been drooling over all of the promotional material in the lead up to the new movie.
It was brutal, violent, crude and offensive.
In other words: perfect.
So I thought, what better way to celebrate this achievement in cinematography, than by drawing the Merc with a Mouth himself?!
Just scraping in for the first day on Inktober (at least by Australian time)! Here is my latest minicomic; have a read and let me know what you think.
I’ll be doing my best to keep up with Inktober, but it’s the end of semester, so I have a shittonne of assessment I need to get through over the next 2 weeks. Really looking forward to seeing what other people produce for it though, as (if you hadn’t already guessed), ink is my favourite medium.
Due to a few set backs, inking took a little longer than I had planned, but nevertheless here it is: my first zine/minicomic (not really sure which category it falls under, so if someone knows the difference between the two, please fill me in!).
I will be doing a print run of these and secretly dropping them in random books at my local library too (shh don’t tell the librarians…), so it’ll be interesting to see if someone picks one up. And if by chance you ARE one of them, I’d love to know, so please leave a comment or send me a tweet (@MechanicalPen_).
If you would like a physical copy, I’d more than happily send one out in an envelope direct to you, send me an email at ‘sam_mulhern(at)hotmail.com’ and we can work it from there
So I’ll stop talking now and let the art take over:
(For those who read all the way, that QR code actually takes you to a hidden part of my site with some secret art, so be sure to give it a scan!)
I’m a fan of many pop culture phenomena; Portal to Ponies, Star Wars to Spider-man. At times, most of these things were considered geeky, but as society progressed, more and more people became accustomed to, or better yet joined, these fandoms!
However, one pass time in particular has been consistently seen as “geeky”: comic collecting.
But is all that starting to change?
Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) is by far one of the best annual events on the calendar, even possibly on par with Steam’s Summer Sale.
Held on the first Saturday of May and running internationally since 2002, FCBD is a way to introduce new readers to the wide world of comics, by doing exactly what is says in the title: giving away free comics on that day!
This year I was extremely excited to attend FCBD at my local comic shop and these are the great titles I picked up:
mechanicalpen 