AXE COP 4!

Axe Cop is back in a touching tale about family values. This one is a tear-jerker. I decided to change Malachai's credit to sole writer, because he really is... all I do is organize it into art. Enjoy!



you may also download the PDF here.

AXE COP interview

Here is a video of me interviewing my five year old brother Malachai about the story for Axe Cop 3. You get an idea of our writing process here. Some of the details in the story were taken from other conversations, but I wanted to capture the kind of brainstorming we do and I also wanted to capture how Malachai pronounces avocado "aducado."

The Axe Cop comics are available on this blog in the previous two posts.
Axe Cop blog post one, and blog post two.

AXE COP 3!

We did it. Axe Cop 3! This time Axe Cop and Dinosaur soldier get a new job. If you missed Axe Cop parts 1 and 2, it is a comic written by my 5 year old brother and drawn by me, you can see them in the previous blog post.

Here's the pages. You may also view the PDF.



At this rate I may need to give Axe Cop his own web page. Let me know if you want to see the saga continue into an ongoing web comic.

Also, stay tuned for a video with my brother showing the writing process.

Ethan

AXE COP!

Since I have been visiting my family for Christmas, my five year old brother has been sharing with me his ideas for this hero named "Axe Cop", so I decided to start turning his ideas into comics. He are parts one and two. AXE COP!!






you can also see them in PDF format at:
www.ethannicolle.com/AXE-COP.pdf
www.ethannicolle.com/AXE-COP2.pdf

Quick Sketch Dump

Was showing these off at Doug's today and decided I should show them to the 3 people who read this blog too. Just some sketches from the ol's sketch book. The faces were all real people in Barnes and Noble I drew one day with Val, except the one guy on the bottom right is Patrick Swayze from a magazine cover.






And that is all for now. If you haven't been to my web site recently (like since last night) you can also check out my TV show pitch PDFs.

www.ethannicolle.com

Waiting at Disney Sketches

The other day I went in for a meeting at Disney and ended up waiting around for a good while, so I busted out my sketch pad I brought for taking notes and went wild with a ball point pen.


I don't know what any of these things really are. The top left is some sort of feminine crab alien. The one on the far left is some sort of retarded werewolf. The thing on the bottom right could be a rat-bug of some sort.

Whatever they are, I liked them enough to post them up, so there you go.

Ethan

the Naked Nutrino

So I finally got my sketch book back thanks to Jenny. Last time we went to draw nudies I left it there on accident. So here is the model we drew last time. She was this asian girl with this massive neutrino mohawk:


So here is my page of quicker skecthes... each around 3 to 5 minutes. (click for the big one)


and here is the only longer 25 minute pose I felt good about, on the brown paper:


And there you have it. More nudies!

Mini Sketches

I bought myself a little tiny pocket sketch book recently and have been doodling in it at random. I have used it for story notes, joke ideas, character designs, and just general sketching. I recommend carrying something like this around to anyone who is a write or artist. You never know what you will come up with. Here are some of my favorite things from my little mini sketch book. These are all done in a cheap little ball point pen.

Gone Zooin'

Ah! Another adventure drawing naked things with Jenny Goldberg, my new goth-hipster homegirl from the fancy pants part of town. This time they weren't even humans! We went to the L.A. Zoo and stood in the hot sun drawing as many cool critters as we could. Turns out after 6 hours of drawing, we got kicked out because the zoo closed at 5. We had barely scratched the surface of animal nudity. So, this is the L.A. Zoo sketch safari, chapter one. We had a lot of fun, even though are flesh did get charred in the sun. My arms are all red an pomegranety.

OK. Well, the first thing we came to were the Meerkats. Jenny, with her fancy-pants iPhone, snapped this picture and twitpic'd it whilst we were at the zoo. Ah, technology. It was right there then now it's right there just like magic! Well now it's right here...



Here is a clearer, crisper, tastier version with marshmallows.



So then we moved on to the Flamingos. Or, simply "the Mingos." Did you know they're pink because they eat so many shrimp? I did! I decided to draw a serious one, then a knee slapper one. The knee slapper ended up being one of my favorite drawings of the day. Here is the twit-pic:



Now here she is in all her shrimpy pinkish glory:



Ah yes. So, next we drew an alligator, and the damn thing would not hold still. My alligator sucked, so I have chosen not to show it here (it also never got finished). But here is Jenny's gator, posing in front of the actual gator who is swimming away grumbling like an old grumpy gator:



After that we sat in the shade and drew some seals. I tried a few serious, fancy ones... and they just sucked. So I did this happy-retarded-naive seal and it's cute!:



After the seals we went and ate a 6 dollar chicken sandwich, a 9 dollar turkey sandwich, and a 6 dollar soda. Then dumped soda all over our hands, then dumped water all over our hands. After that, we came upon something truly awesome... a Tawny Frogmouth Owl:



I busted out the brown paper on this guy. I think we worked on him for a good hour. He sat right there, sleeping, only moving his head here and there. This, along with the flamingo, is my favorite of the day:



After that, not having known the time, or the hours of the zoo, we continued on to draw these gerenuks, which are awesome and long. Gerenuk means girrafe neck! See! They look like alien deers. There was even little baby ones. About 15 minutes into drawing this guy we got booted out by the Zoo cops. I took it home and finished it up, using a googled gerenuk image for reference:



Most of these are a mix of Prismacolor Verithin colored pencils, Faber-Castell brush pens, a small tipped Copic pen, and a crummy Presto!white-out pen. Also, a bit of photoshopping to add snazz.

I am still giddy! I can't wait for chapter two. Drawing animals is my bread and butter! Thanks for reading.

Ethan

Nudies and Ooglies

Word up to the three of you who read this blog. I decided to dump some more sketch all over this place. I went to a seedy hipster art warehouse that smelled like the weed to draw nudies with Jenny Goldberg tonight (of Jellyfist infamy). She's a total hipster goth who draws awesome little nubby guys.

So this girl we drew sort of wore a naked Mary Poppins outfit... I really loved that movie when I was a kid. I guess she thought just plain ol' nakey was just too boring, so she wore a lil' hat and collar thing. Anyway, I just figured I'd post some of the art up. Hope you don't mind some boobs.

These were my warm ups... the smaller ones were 3-5 minute drawings, the one on the chair was 15.



Then I tried the brown paper, white/black pencil technique. This first one took 15 minutes...

This next one, also 15 minutes...


This last one was 20 minutes.

And now, just to offset all the seriousness and nudies, here are some more eefish sketches. I present to you a lizardy thing, a retarded bird, a babboon guy with flappy asses, a gopher beetle, and a demon bear.

Be well!

A thing with a gun riding a thing.

Haven's posted any art in a while, so here's one...

SLG Creator Studio

Want me to teach you mad skillz live and in person?! Of course you do. Come to San Jose on May 16th. Here's what's up:

Event Details

SLG Publishing continues it's succesful and informative Creator's Studio series with another day-long event on May 16th. Creator's Studio IV will feature panels on comics and their creation and will end with a live-drawing demonstration by the artist of the Eisner Award nominated humor series Chumble Spuzz Ethan Nicolle.

Our tentative panels for the this month's event include:

Preparing a Proposal - Taught from the SLG Publishing perspective, Dan Vado will go over what should and should not go into your written project proposal to a comics company. Also covered will be what to put into your portfolio and how to handle yourself when you are planning to show your work to editors at a convention.

Good Design/Bad Design - SLG Art Director Scott Saavedra goes over

good and bad design choices and how they apply to comics and graphic novels.

In addition to being SLG's Art Director, Scott is the creator of Comic Book Heaven, a book

series that looked at comics from the Golden and Silver Age with an eye towards examining the goofier aspects of those books.

Conjuring a page - Artists in semi-residence Ethan Nicolle sits down at his drawing tabld and demonstrates his drawing and storytelling techniques. This is an interactive demonstration, questions are encouraged. Ethan will show how he breaks down a page and take a page of script and show and explain his thought process for creating a finished piece.

Ethan is the Eisner Award nominated creator of Chumble Spuzz and is one of the funniest and most inventive creators to hit SLG Publishing in a long time.

The Creator's Studio seminar is not a how-to-draw class, a certain amount of proficeincy on the part of attendees is assumed. While some attention will be paid to the basics of drawing, for the most part this session will be devoted to storytelling and design. Recommended age for this seminar is 16 or older.

Buy a ticket for this event here.

uStream draw-cast 2

Alright! I did another uStream show tonight and it was once again really fun. If you ever want to catch one, follow me on twitter or watch for an update on myspace or facebook. Here is what we came up with tonight...

This is a zombie armadillo eating an ice cream cone. The ice cream cone is very sad. I imagine the armadillo is pretty happy, though he can't show much emotion.

This is Tigerpus. He is half tiger, half platypus. I like him.

This is Rebracta. That is the name that was made up for this woman... man... troll thing. This character was created as people shouted out various features, like emo hair, big lips, fishnets, etc. The results were


The last image requested ended up being me in a bunny suit in a space suit. So that's what you have here.

Thanks again to everyone who participated and watched!

First U-Stream Draw-cast

So, mimicking my friend Val, I decided to do a Ustream live video feed of me drawing in Manga Studio. As I drew, I had people in the chat make suggestions and I went off of those ideas. So for the first one, I asked for two animals and someone said girrafe and flamingo, so we ended up with a Girmingo:

Next, I had everyone watching start blurting out various features of a yet-to-exist character. Someone said batwings, then hook-hand, then bifocals, then squinty eyes, and we just kept going from there until we had this cuddly little guy who we named Hubert Bibbo:

For my final drawing, someone suggested a Wolf Turtle, and someone else asked for a unicorn, so I drew a Were-Turtle devouring a Unicorn:


And that was that. My first u-stream live draw-cast. It was fun. If you ever want to be a part of one, just try to keep track of me on twitter, or myspace. I will post when I am on. I may schedule something sometime, too, if there is interest. Thanks again to everyone who watched, chatted, and made it fun.

Ethan

I have a crappy website

I needed space online to FTP myself stuff, so I bought my name dot com. I figured I would use my very minimal HTML skillz to put up a basic page that links to my various crap already on line in other places. Putting this up reminded me that I actually have an art blog I never update, so I am going to throw some art up here with no explanation whatsoever. Enjoy!