Introducing Izzy’s Drawing Board!

Ron here to introduce a new contributor to INKWEST, Isaiah Stephens, a friend from deviantART, who has amazing skills with pencils that needs to be seen to be believed and shared with your friends. From time to time he posts tutorials and walk-throughs on his youtube channel about how he does the awesome work he does. I’m going to post the older ones and then when he has new ones they’ll be added, if you’d like to skip ahead, subscribe to his channel!

Eye Drawing Tutorial

Please allow myself to introduce myself.

Yes, it’s been that long that I feel the need to tell you who I am and what I aim to do with this site.

My name is Ron Williams. For the curious, I’m a designer by trade but to be honest, I do many things well and desire to be great at more than a few of the things I do. I have a blog, this blog, it’s meant to be a cross between your average arts and entertainment site focused heavily on an old passion I wish to recapture (comics) but mixed with some newer elements.

These elements are equal parts idea incubator, collaborative community and educational tool for those like myself and the generations behind me.

Say what?

You’ve read correctly,this blog is about arts & entertainment, it is intended to serve as an idea incubator, collaborative community and educational resource. The mission is in the name: INKWEST  – Inspiration Necessity Knowledge Wisdom Effort Strength Talent – an inner quest to find your next level.

What does that mean?

For me, it’s a mandate to take something I’d like to do, but mostly end up complaining about and actively seeking out the means to learn it, understand it and make the attempt myself. For you, well that’s up to you to decide,  want you to join in and see what you can make of it.

How it (should) work:

At a basic level there will be content centered around arts & entertainment. Not just news and rumors but articles providing insight to the makings of some of these projects. There will be reviews, lists, rants, raves and perhaps even interviews.

We’ll take it further by seeking out information on how to go about doing some of these things for ourselves. Everything from how to organize ourselves, find others to collaborate with, project management, property development and the tools available to us to help get the job done.

While we’re at it, we’ll set up our own properties and use our own community to help develop them.

This is done with the aim not to just to have an awesome end product  but to really understand and embrace the journey towards that destination.

Where to begin?

Lets begin with the truth; a novel approach to how to build things. I’ve been trying to do this as a one man team, learning as I go along. That’s not going to work. Collaborative communities need more than one collaborative member. It’s time to open this bad boy up, develop some membership criteria and then a form and well you can get an idea of the rest.

Writers: I need writers of every skill level, if you have a background in education you are especially needed.Yes, even blog writers.

Artists: This stands for visual artists, while much of my focus has been on comics, there are other forms that need to be explored and exposed to open eyes. The idea is to establish that any medium can be utilized to tell a story. So photographers, traditional artists,  digital artists, sequential artists, you’re all needed. Again, if you have a background in education you’re definitely needed.

Vocalists / Musicians: What’s any project without a soundtrack? Boring. We need to involve music in this community because it is another form of story telling. So we need some experienced musicians to come along and help others understand this integral element. Yeah, educators welcome.

Film makers: Can’t leave you out, from animation to live action you have to marry text, visuals & audio into a project and then push the envelope.

Share what you know and what you’d like to know.

For this to work we have to share what we can and be willing to learn the rest for ourselves. Let’s do this!

If you have been thinking about making a comic for yourself, allow me to give you a bit of advice.

JUST DO IT!

This message is for anyone at any level of skill but especially to those like me, that tend to second and third guess decisions especially when it comes to dreams and aspirations. Don’t let your mind override your heart in this instance, you have a story to share whether it’s serious or just meant to entertain, let it out.

With that said, there is one thing you should allow yourself to pause for consideration for, this issue is important and should not be set aside if you’re serious about taking the steps necessary to becoming a published comic creator.

Will I be able to dedicate myself to doing this right?

This is a red pill, blue pill sort of question.

The red pill leads to hours of study, lots of stops and starts and a quality product.

The blue pill leads to an on-the-fly sort of experience that hops, skips and jumps to different things at different times and may or may not lead to a quality product.

Both pills lead to something that may be fun, it’s all about how you’d like to spend your development time.

In this series I will break down the elements of the red pill scenario so that you can see in some sort of order how you could be going about building your comic, the blue pill scenario has the same elements, it just runs on the chaos rule: there are no rules.

In some instances these elements can be broken down further; I will try to do that when time permits.

For now, these are the topics I plan on touching over the next few weeks.

• Story
• Tools – Get Organized & Be Productive
• World Building 1 Concepts, Reality & Scope
• Audience
• Characters
• Style pt. 1 – Drawing Them In.
• World Building 2 Location, Location, Location
• Collaboration – Pros & Contracts
• Format – How You Want To Share It
• Style pt. 2 – A Panel Discussion
• Protect What’s Yours
• The Fine Print – Self Publishing
• Promo 1 It’s Ok To Be A Tease
• Promo 2 The Saturation Game
• Promo 3 Outside of the box

In the meantime, start thinking about the sorts of things you want in your comic, write down notes as you get your ideas and remember the only stupid ideas are the ones you didn’t give a chance to.

This is not my first foray into comics, I have been a fan of comics since the age of 6. I have been enjoying them off and on for about 22 years. I have been creating them off and on since the age of 12. At 16, I once had my artwork reviewed by a local man that worked for Marvel Comics back in the 70′s and 80′s, he was impressed and told me if I kept t it I would have no problem getting in the door to Marvel.

Like the tool I am, I stopped drawing. I even stopped reading them.

Fast forward about a decade and after flirting with the idea a few times, here I am, taking the craft serious once again but not knowing where to get started or what exactly I want to do with this renewed passion.

A pal of mine suggested I make a blog and discuss the things related to developing my project, the subject matter and anything else I can think of to attract others to help me and hopefully to get help for themselves.

So here it is, INSIDE INKWEST, a blog about creativity, where it goes from here is up to us.