Friday, August 24, 2012

26 - You Belong To Me

Don't worry! The aesthetics of the rest of the comic won't change drastically - the pages are a bit bigger, and the text is handwritten for uniformity. I decided the text and the speech balloons for this comic should be integral to the page composition. I'm still playing around with it a bit, but I'm hoping it will give me an opportunity to grow from a formal standpoint.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Willow Wood Chapter 2 - MoonGlow




Hello folks! It's been a long, long while, but Willow Wood's second chapter starts tomorrow! The first page of the second chapter will be up next as visual tribute pages to Sergio Toppi and Moebius - two masters of illustration who have passed on within the last year.

Thank you for being so patient! I hope you enjoy what's to come.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

A Short Break


Hey folks!

I see you've been checking up for updates, and I'm really happy about it.

I'll be involved in a couple little gallery showings, and I've been more than swamped. I'll give you some more updates about that later, but I'm also going back and revamping all the pages of the webcomic for consistency. The process has taken me up through page seven, and I haven't decided if I should keep the old pages up for posterity's sake quite yet. I'll let you know. In the meantime, I am, in fact working on an old webcomic project that I had once nixed. 

Instead of exploring masses of clear-line illustration, like I have been doing here with Willow Wood, I'll be exploring line value with an ink brush over at PuppyCrush.

Both PuppyCrush and the revamped Willow Wood will be over at SmackJeeves here and here.

Thank for following! New pages will be done soon, so keep a lookout! 

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

25 - Big Brother

It has come to my attention that things are currently confusing. Fear not! I will rectify the confusion soon enough.

Friday, June 29, 2012

24 - Kelpie


This is the first page I've done so far that has no text. The visual language of my webcomic is a nod back to early 20th century western children's book illustration, and I didn't want comic book movement lines or overemphasized dynamism to happen outside of the figures. I'm challenging myself to convey movement and to imply it in other ways.

Monday, June 18, 2012

22 - Give Me Your Name


Hey folks! Sorry I didn't update last week. I'm still floundering around in a post-college limbo, but I'm hoping for things to turn around, soon! For those who want to know, this particular page took between 4 and 5 hours to complete from pencil draft to ink. Enjoy!

Friday, June 1, 2012

20 - I Must Return to the Heavens



I think we're all connected by stories, by narratives. I think it's necessary for us to encapsulate our experiences within the contours of narratives, however elegant or inelegant, however individual and personal or collective. I feel an urgency to pen monsters and fairies, a visual vernacular that I can use as a vehicle to carry my stories.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

19 - If You Wake The Child

Drawing the Winged Serpent of the Silver Wood always presents an interesting challenge, but I sort of love doing it.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

18 - The Great Guardian


What's this? A new page?! After how many weeks??? I am so sorry for the wait. Yours truly just graduated with a BA.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Intermission and History

A bit of history

Hello dear reader,

I sincerely hope this finds you well, and I am extremely honored and grateful that you have found your way here. I apologize for the extremely long dry spell. I am in the midst of a storm of formalities and special send-off obligations at school because I will be the first in my family to attain a college degree. After this, I plan to build my resumé and work part-time to begin to save up for an MFA program. Essentially, that means that this webcomic, this very project, will become my biggest portfolio contribution.

I have been working on this webcomic since February of 2012 after I attended a workshop facilitated by a wonderful professor and author, Barrie Jean Borich. It was called "Pictures for the People," and the guest speaker was none other than graphic narrative artist Alison Bechdel! I can't even begin to describe how fiercely I was struck by inspiration after that event. I used to do little horrendously drawn comics in high school, and I don't think I've kept any of them around. I never considered that the graphic narrative could be a powerful means of expression, especially as a first-and-a-half-generation immigrant whose parents insisted that he find a practical and lucrative job. They were just cartoons, right?

I fumbled around for a bit in college these past four years, praying all the while that a compromise between happiness and comfort would miraculously fall into my lap, but I have since come to understand my use of the graphic narrative as a sort of compulsion - I know I have to do the legwork to fill the gap between my wildest dreams and my immediate reality. There is no other way; I have to draw. I do it to understand myself and my environment. It is my visually-oriented self struggling through my personal iconographic repertoire in the hopes of building that perfect visual vernacular through which I might attempt to come to an understanding with my world. 

Since Professor Borich's workshop, I have been taking a City Arts course through the HECUA program. It's an amazing class, and I feel as though through these experiences I have come unbound and free from the shackles of prejudices I didn't even know I had. Why did I inherit a legacy of depreciating certain images by delegating them to the caste of "low art" when the graphic narrative could move the spirit and stir the soul as visual art and as literature? And how can I overcome that legacy? How can we overcome it?

I am still trying to figure all that out for myself, but I hope to use this comic as a vehicle to explore my inner self. The comic began as a simple drawing experiment in the form of graphic narrative, but it suddenly grew a name, a plot, and personalities.

Through my Tumblr posts and various pieces I have illustrated in the past few weeks, I have provided some clues as to the nature of Willow Wood and its characters.

How much do you know about Addison, for example? What can you tell me about how you visually code Addison and the way the character looks and behaves? And what if I told you the above illustration is indeed an illustration of Addison?

And what about the Star that tumbles down from the heavens? Do you know she has a name even though it has yet to come up in the pages of the comic?




Do you know that you will eventually run into the Rabbit and the Fox?


And I bet you most certainly didn't know that you will soon be introduced to a character you have already seen floating around in development on my Tumblr, the King of the Red Dawn?



I am so excited to finally be able to introduce you to all of these characters, all of these names, faces, bodies, masses of swirling hair, and pen contours, to you!

Again, thank you so much for keeping up with this project. It means the world to me that someone, anyone, might derive some joy from reading and viewing my little experiment. I look forward to producing some more pages very soon, and I hope you're excited as well!

Love,

Trungles


Tuesday, April 10, 2012

17 - Quiet Your Weeping



Dear everybody,

I know it's been ages, but my last semester's been reeeaaaaaally rough, and I'm on my last academic leg and on home stretch! And that'll happen in like a month! Literally, just about a month.

I'm a little bit scared.

Monday, March 19, 2012

16 - Please Don't Die

Dear everybody - I'm so sorry it's been a while since my last page post! I just finished my midterms and am about to embark on an art-oriented excursion to Chicago today, so it'll be a six-hour train ride.

These panels were tricky this time. The hair is typically really easy for me because most of the time I can improvise it, and it's a relaxing, almost cathartic sort of experience for me. However, it was really important that the hair imply movement in a particular direction in this one, and that took a bit of fairly meticulous planning, and the ink pen was not cooperating with me for the most part. I hate using action lines for dramatic flair, so I'm trying to imply movement with pretty much everything else. Enjoy!

Friday, March 9, 2012

15 - I must follow



I'm so sorry! I just realized that the past few pages were randomly in a cumbersomely larger resolution. I went back and fixed it.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

14 - Little Butterfly, You Cannot



I had an inspiring conversation with a peer tonight, and decided I needed to pick up all of my haphazard pieces of life and focus on my work. I am going to be SO busy over the next couple weeks that I'm afraid my page updates might be irregular. To that end, the fifteenth page is already drafted and scripted. Yay! Please enjoy, and thank you for reading :)

Thursday, February 23, 2012

13 - What I Want to Protect



Hey everybody! I am so pleased right because I have just settled into my process, and it's SO exciting to be doing just that. I even posted the process for the bottom panel on my tumblr for all to see. Just gotta say that I am currently taking a class called City Arts through the HECUA program, and it's been amazing, and it's actually informed the way I do my work!

I'm glad for it, because my life's been going through some rough transitions, and it's just nice to feel comfortable breaking away from what was to what is.

Thank you for all your patience, everybody!

Saturday, February 4, 2012

12 - You're Naive



I've had such an incredible emotional roller-coaster tail-end of January, and I apologize for not posting more. SO I MADE TWO PAGES FOR YOU TODAY! I ended up working from 2:00pm until 11:30pm, with a couple little breaks. The dining room table of full of games of Go, comic pages, art supplies, and treatises on photography? Anyhoosies, I have one more internship interview to go. More work.

Also, I'm sorry for the type. I'm honestly just using writing it without too much thought for it (so so so sorry, design people! I still love you, I promise!!!).

11 - Lucinda



AAAAAHHHHHH I'm so sorry for the incredible delay! I've been saying that a lot lately. I'm trying to land an internship somewhere in the I can focus on my art once again. Except... I'm being spread a little thin between painting and doing these pages. Thanks for sticking with me!

Monday, January 16, 2012

10 - Worthy of the Crown



I think I figured out the text thing. I'd been bouncing back and forth about it in my head for a while, but I think I'm going to just hand-write all the dialogue. It just looks more natural, more uniform. I wonder what I'm gonna do about the first nine pages, now, though. Uh-oh. Whatever. I'm sure I'll figure something out. In the meantime, so sorry for the delay. Here is page ten!

Saturday, January 7, 2012

9 - The Morning is Wiser than the Evening






Oof! Sorry, it's been a while! While the comic is still very much in experimental growth stages, I didn't want to make changes too rapidly to the formal aspects of the pages. And, of course, as a result of my semester kicking back up, the pages will come out a little more slowly.

Thanks for sticking with me!