Shiver Bureau

Welcome back for another spine tingling Shiver Bureau update.

First off, let me just say I am now an honest man.  Yep, that’s right, I’m married!  The deed was done back in October and it was and is awesome!  Here my wonderful wife and I try to mimic the smiles on our cake toppers.  I actually made those cake toppers myself.

Actually they are one of the many reasons I am behind schedule now.  I never worked with clay before, so I did several learning/failed attempts.  I am really happy how they came out though and glad we have something original we can keep forever, but holy cow they took me forever!

The other general wedding prep was a lot more time consuming then I thought.  Well worth all the effort though.  Of course then we came back home to a slew of house fixing, I won’t bore you with the details, but it ate up a fair bit of time and money.

But fear not, I am not too far behind schedule and I am about to start my holiday vacation which will last almost 3 weeks.  It is going to be awesome.  I will be drawing a lot during that time.  Though there is a caveat…my entire family is coming into town for 2 weeks of that, but they will just have to be happy with watching me draw 🙂

Now for the progress…

I have finished penciling up to chapter 6.  Just one more chapter to go!  That’s right, just another short 20 pages and I will be done penciling.  That’s the hard part.  Inking will take a little time because I am sure I will redraw some stuff, but it should be much quicker then pencils.  Then it is just colors and letters and that should fly.

So we are getting close, just another 4 months and the story continues!

Hello once again from the Operation Update HQ.  I will try to get in a new update every month if there is something fun to report and show off some pages.

This month has a lot of news.  Let’s start with the status of Shiver Bureau.  The pencils for chapter 3 are completely finished and I am about half way through chapter 4.  There are 7 chapters.  I am on track to finish penciling all chapters before the end of the year.  Which means the relaunch of SB will be around March of next year.  I am getting married in October, but I’ve planned accordingly so it shouldn’t affect the timeline.  I’ve had a really good pace and I’ve been penciling much quicker then I expected, so if I finish sooner, I will post sooner.  I know it sucks for you guys to have to wait for me to finish the entire book before I post, but if it is any incentive I am having way more fun and enjoying the process much more.  I think it will show in the finished product.  Here is Chapter 3, page 1 in finished pencils.

 

In Webcomic news, I ran across this comic call All Night.  If you dig the genre of Shiver Bureau, you will dig All Night.  I think Pickle and All Night’s main character, Clarence, would make a cool team-up.  I like the comic so much, I had to draw a quick SB/AN piece.

 

And finally some SB fan art.  I can’t tell you how much this makes me feel like a slacker and lights a fire under my behind.  SB has been off air for since the start of this year and I still get messages, donations, and now Arts from people who still support SB.  That is really just too awesome.  The creator of these pieces is Timmy and I can’t thank him enough.  I also like the artistic choices he made with the characters to make them his own.  Looks like the piece is from an alternate dimension where Pickle never had a run in with an elephant.  If anyone gets that reference I will draw a single character digital sketch for the first person to post in the comments.  Check out Timmy’s webcomic Streets of Galsha.

Speaking of fan arts, here is a pinup I did for my buddy, Lee.  It is for his Sci-fi, horror, survival comic Tangled Weeds.  You can read the first issue for free here.

I think that is it for round.  Next time I post I will be a married man.

Greats news!  I’ve finished writing/roughing out Shiver Bureau.  The first story ‘Welcome to London’ anyways.

In total it will be 149 pages (though I am sure I will do some edits before I am done) and 7 chapters.  44 pages are already posted online.  So that means I have 105 still to finish.

I had a really great time thumbnailing the pages as I wrote.  It is very organic and immediate.

Of course now it’s the hard part.  I have to do some real drawing and make these pages pretty.  Just to show you how much more work I have left, here are the first 4 pages of chapter 3 in the rough form.

But the story is done and I had a crap ton of fun writing it.  Wish me and my hand luck with the pencils!

I’ve been making a little more progress into Shiver Bureau.  I was meandering for a bit because I didn’t really have a goal.  So I’ve set myself a deadline of posting new pages before MegaCon2014.  So I set a schedule to have all the chapters drawn and 1 chapter lettered/colored by March 21st, 2014.

So there you have it, an official date for the restart of SB…now to stick to schedule…I’m already a day behind!

Want to read some other comics?  Check out my brother from another mother, Gabe Ostley, webcomic Eagleburger.  The Kickstarter just kicked off as well.

In the meantime I leave you with this commission piece that someone was kind enough to request.  I am really happy with out it turned out and was sad to see it go.

And for you process junkies

I’ve been chugging along ever so slowly on Shiver Bureau.  I finally finished thumbs for chapter 3.  Honestly I wish I was further along, but life has other plans.

But look I brought a gift.  A Shiver Bureau wallpaper in the style of Adventure Time.  I am a new fan of AT.  Everyone seemed to be watching it, so I figured I should give it a shot.   Love the off the wall humor.  Marceline is great!

And an updated progress bar…hopefully the next update will be completed thumbnails.

Keep looking under the bed…

 

So here we go, time to get back on the trolley.

I’ve looked over the story and tweaked a few things and I think everything is good to proceed forward.  My plan is to ink all the way to the end chapter 6 before I start posting anything.

So in the next couple of weeks I will thumbnail all the chapters, this will be part art and part writing.  This will be fairly large hurdle.   Once I feel like I have something good I will move on to pencils.  My plan is to pencil a chapter, then ink the chapter, then pencil the next chapter, then ink and so on and so forth.  I am sure this will depend on my mood, I may pencil everything, then go and ink everything.

Once I’ve completed inking for all chapters, I will letter and color chapter 3 and that is when the posting will start.  I don’t take very long to color/letter.  They are also less stressful parts of the process, so I feel comfortable posting as I work.

I will try to post bi-weekly updates to this progress chart and also some sketches and page teases as we go forward.

Case in point…

I was planning on using this image for the progress chart and reveal a piece of the image as I made progress, but grew tired of the idea.

 

 

Well, I guess I’ve been sort of a git, haven’t I? It’s been over 2 months and no update. Shame on me. It’s time to rectify!

First off, the comic isn’t dead. More on that later.

Secondly, I want to thank everyone for their support. Whether you posted a comment, emailed me directly, or even just thought ‘Hey, Shiver Bureau is pretty cool’; it means a great deal to me. I had a huge influx of support and encouragement in the last few weeks and it feels wonderful. So again, a big hearty thank you for that! You are the people that will keep Pickle, Trish and Todd running strong.

I’ve also created PDFs of the first 2 chapters. Here are the covers to the two issues.

How do you get your hands on these wondrous PDFs?  Read on…

SUPPORT

So what if you want to support S.B. in a more tangible way? Well now you have options (Thanks Jim for lighting the fire!).

Option 1 – Donate
Yes I have a ‘Donate’ button. Kind of silly for a comic on hiatus, I know…but wait, there’s more. If you donate more then a dollar, I will email you a link to download a PDF of chapters 1 and 2. But wait, there’s more! Inside each PDF you will not only find high quality images of every page that will look exquisite on any computer or tablet screen, but you will also find the original pages as well. These are the original, naked ink only images, free of the trappings of color and word balloons. They look a little something like this…

Option 2 – Buy Original Art
Speaking of original art; Yes, the original pages are for sale. The pages are on sale for $100. The pages were inked on 11×17 bristol with Copic microns and toned with an ink wash. Most of the pages are still available, though the intro of Trish and some of my other favorites have already been picked up.

Option 3 – Commission Art
Yes, I do commissions and I am currently open. Check the menu bar above for my commission prices. I offer two tier of commissions, sketches and full. Sketches are quicker drawings with little or no background. Full commissions are fully planned out illustrations. There are samples on the commission page.  I will draw pretty much whatever, though I don’t do nudes/porn.

WHAT ABOUT THE COMIC?

Ok, enough about that. The comic is still alive and I have not abandoned it. However, I am going to be making a change to the update method. I plan on finishing the story before I start the updates back up.

Whoa! I realize this may make it seem like it will be 100 years before I update again, but that won’t be the case. Here’s my plan. I will ink all the pages and consider the story finished. Then I will begin to color/letter the pages and update the website concurrently.

Why am I doing this? Shiver Bureau is a long form story. I believe this should apply not only to the reading of the story, but also the creation. I want to be able to take the long way around in the creation and allow the story to breathe. I also think having a singular focus on pencils/inks will allow me to work faster.

But to show I am not totally heartless, once I begin updating, I will update Shiver Bureau 3 times a week. So when will I start updating again? I do not know. My life has been hectic, but it is slowing down some. Though I am not certain of the rate of deceleration. If you guys are familiar with ‘The Wormworld Saga’, he does this Milestones gauge. I will do something similar in the coming weeks. I will also post page roughs, panel teases, and other arts to help ease the wait.

Shiver Bureau’s Welcome to London story is planned as a 6 chapter story arc.  I have ideas for a second story already that will have the gang in a new location.

IN OTHER NEWS!

MegaCon was last weekend and it was a great show.  This is my 4th year and it has gotten better and better every year.  I printed a few copies of chapter 1 and chapter 2.  Chapter 1 sold out.  I sold a few more copies of my graphic novel Cubicles and did some commissions.  Check out my Facebook album to see the commissions.  Here’s is the first one I did.

Shiver Bureau’s first chapter was reviewed by Stars and Popcorn. This is a really cool website that reviews movies and has just started doing comics.  It’s a really unique website because it gives two ratings.  A stars rating and a popcorn rating.  Stars are for the snobs and popcorns are for the slobs.  Not really 😉 Stars rate the movie as an art form and popcorn rates the movie as a form of entertainment.  Read the review.

Okay, that is all for now.  Thanks for hanging in and being patient.