We know it's been some time since the last update about WMD.  Well, we wanted to take a few minutes and let you all know that we are, indeed, working on the next part of the project. 

We don't have a solid date, as of yet, that we'll launch the start of chapter one, but we'll try to keep you all updated about our progress.  And believe us when we say, we will be back - this story is too good to not be told.

We hope to have some news for you soon!

The Creative Team

I am just buried right now... have been for a few weeks now. I have several projects going at once here and its been really tough. But there's all sorts of good sides to it... even if I am all kinds of tired, frustrated, tired.

The bads are of course, missing a monday blog post ( doh! ) a lack of responses on comments etc. ( Which I would like to apologize for, right now... :D ) missing a few emails And forgetting to send out a couple of commissions ( Sorry!! I will try to get out this week!! ).  That's not all of course... SKRATCHWORK... which I need to get back to ( which I will asap! ), Thankfully though, its a double edged sword ( how often do you say that?! LOL! )...

I learned that I CAN produce if I need to.  I did a personal record of 2.5 penciled pages, 1/2 page inked and 4 thumbs on friday. No cheating too... quality pages! ( Granted, they're not super clean but then again that's how I work when I ink my own pages :D ). Then there's 2010... not a whole lot of my stuff has been to print yet... and its a lot of stuff. You may see me all over the place next year. Mobile phones, indy publishers, webcomics, big publishers and maybe even a couple of artbooks ( I am working on stuff now George!! )?

Unfortunately I need to keep this pace for the foreseeable future. If my wife and I want to make a successful transition we need to take care of some business. Which means I have to not only work hard, but learn how to do things like 3D, speed painting and animation. AND keep the webcomic going.  Do NOT ask me how I am gonna do this! Just think of me as a kind of zombie... you can shoot me and I may go down but I just getting back up... I just keep going... like some sort of gruesome energizer bunny... good luck stopping me... grrraggrrgle... braAAAAAAAiiiins....

A little late today - it was a busy day spent working on a personal project and I just realized I didn't have my Wednesday blog post up!  So, my apologies!

Anyway, page four is probably one of my favorite pages in the prologue.  I love landscapes and I think Jeff created a really lovely mountainous landscape here.  It turned out just fantastic, in my opinion.  Plus, it was quite a bit of fun to color. 

I tried to give a sense of depth by fading out the mountains in the background a bit and having the bottom of the next nearest mountain go to a sort of off white.  I think I was pretty successful with this, but I'll leave the final word up to the readers. 

The other tricky part was the rain, but I found a pretty interesting Photoshop turtorial about how to add rain to photographs and felt I could apply it to comic art as well.  I had previously used it on another project that Jeff and I did called Warlord.  You can also find the turtorial here.  I thought it worked out pretty well!

More next week!

Bloodstone

GhostCity

Farcity

more later!

Wow, today almost got away from me!  I meant to get this post up earlier this morning, but it's been a super busy day (finishing up the colors for the next page of WMD and working on another project with Jeff) and hey, I'm in Central time, so technically, I still have an hour (it's 11PM as I type this)!

Anyway, I have to say - I really enjoyed coloring page three.  We got out of those dark hallways and into a well lit room!  It seems like I've been coloring a lot of dark scenes lately, so any chance to color a scene with a little light was really refreshing.  I also got to work with a bit of color for the banners as well.

Now, somebody mentioned how their eyes were drawn directly to the banners - and I have to be honest, this wasn't intentional.  They said that they felt that the color was a bit overpowering and that the rest of the scene was almost ignored.  Going back and looking at the piece, I have to agree.  Sometimes, as an artist and a colorist, it is easy to lose track of what your doing in favor of just throwing some fun splashes of color into the piece.  So here it seems like a failure - the two small main figures are lost in the wash of color. 

I'm going to try very hard to pay better attention to this in the future!  And folks, we (artists) only learn by critiques.  If you see something that you find to be odd or terribly off, let me know!  I'm always trying to learn and sharpen my skills and I wouldn't turn down any kind of constructive criticism.

See ya next week!

verything you see in there is FULL of notes, research, sketches, writings, tests... just a lot of stuff.  In the coming weeks I will be rifling through these and posting a bunch of goodies as we count down to the regular series. Be forewarned, there will be some crappy art and some good stuff that will be found and ressurected here.  But it was all in the name of development.  And well, good stuff really does require a tower of crap for a pebble of the good. So here's to the reanimation and its manifestation of...  the crap golem... grggle rawrrrooo drip drip ... does anyone smell that?

LOL!

This one may be a short one seeing as how I'm getting married today. 

I have to say, I really enjoyed this page.  I loved the massive sense of scale there is in the fourth panel.  Granted, I don't think I managed to pull off the depth as well as I should have here, but none the less, I think it's a cool page. 

This page, much like the previous, had to deal with orange lighting coming from overhead, so you'll see in the highlights that there is more of an orange feel to it.  I believe what I did to get that was to fill the highlights with a bright orange, reduce the transparency a bit, and switch the layer properties over to soft light. 

Anyway, we'll have more for you next week and a new page on Friday!

Wish me luck!

WMD Cover

The cover was the first piece of artwork that I got for the project, so it was especially fun to work on. 

The trick on this cover was to figure out a way to make the main character, Kael, stand out from the rest of montage.  I began with flatting and coloring all the characters the actual color that they would appear in the comic, as I was going to use this as a color guide for the various characters that would show up later in the comic. 

After getting everything colored, I pulled back a bit from the image and looked at it as a whole and decided that a good way to approach separating Kael from the rest of the montage was to separate through the use of warm and cool colors.  So I dropped a blue layer down over the montage (except for Kael) and I tweaked the layer property so that we could see some of the different color tones and shadows through the blue layer.

Now, the way I usually work is I flat the entire piece in the various final colors.  Then I drop a dark, dark grey layer over everything, switch the layer property to multiply, and tweak the opacity to around 60-50%.  At which point I cut out all the highlights. 

That is a very general approach to how I color things.

WMD Page 01

Page one was fun since I finally got a chance to work with the charaters inside an actual environment.  It was also tricky because I had to show the characters lit by the orange lighting from overhead - so there is a more yellow-orange layer that I dropped down over the areas that are lit.

I don't know how many times I tried to write this story the way one is instructed... you know write and outline then write the story page by page chapter by chapter.  But it never seemed to work for me... at least in the most traditional way. I found writing and rewriting just to move a sentence or idea from one section to another either by scribbling or writing in a computer VERY restrictive. It never worked for me...

Comics and this story in particular ( WMD ) was a funny beast. Its a scifi comic.  The visual development can and does play a large part in the story.  This made the writing process a nightmare.  I tried a bunch of ways, one of which was...

But this was crazy... I actually did 8x11 thumbs to write the first chapter .... I got a lot from it but talk about time-consuming!

I also did a bunch of one shot imagery to try give my self a "feel" for the story hoping that it would make the process of writing easier ( thinking that by having the imagery in my head it would seems obvious what to write ).  I finally just sat down and wrote the first three chapters.

This may seem like the traditional method but really it wasn't.  That's like saying I started with the chicken. In reality I did a ton of visual development BEFORE I wrote anything. But don't mistake this for an egg endorsement. Because I also switched off with a lot of writing, even if they were failed attempts.

In reality, the process of "creation" is starting with the right protien and then moving up from a single-celled organism to a multicell asexual reproductive to an simple animal that reproduces sexually ( male/female ) to ever increasingly complex animal, that has eggs...

This of course led me to a whole other way to write and develop a story ( which I am using both on future chapters of WMD as well as two other stories I have in the story pipeline of my head. It is very fast and makes the process fun :D

So the answer to which comes first? I say both ...

and neither!

To introduce myself, I am the colorist/letterer for WMD, as well as an occasional sounding board and friend.  I am also a creator and illustrator and you can find more of my work on my website.  Jeff and I have known each other for a couple years now and we've worked on a variety of projects together over that length of time.  It's good to finally be in a place to be working with him on something a little more personal and close to home finally!

I thought I might also give you all a bit of history.

I came across Jeff's work sometime back while I was on the hunt for people to work on my own project, Baeg Tobar.  I have to say, I was instantly impressed!  There is a certain quality to Jeff's work that I find extremely pleasing.  It's gritty, but in a clean way, if that makes sense. It also reminded me a bit of my own work in a way, and I would be lying if I said that wasn't a draw as well.

Anyway, we finally had an opportunity to meet out at Wizard World Chicago in 2008.  During one evening, in which I, of course, had a terrible allergy attack, we started talking about his project, WMD. 

Matt Jacobs and I had met earlier in 2007 and had been putting together a company called Outland Entertainment.  The goal of Outland Entertainment was to publish content worlds online. 

Once Jeff told me a little bit about his project, I knew it would be a perfect fit.  So I mentioned to Jeff exactly what we were doing and he agreed that it might be a good fit.

Fast forward a year and here we are!  Jeff's project is available for everybody to read and enjoy and we'll be working hard at updating the webcomic and WMD content on a regular basis.

Next week, I'll talk a little more about the coloring process for the first few pages and cover!

Well hello there! And welcome to WMD's 1st blog post.  MY name is Jeff Wamester and I am the artist/creator/writer of WMD. And as some of you already know this project has been a LONG time coming.

About five years ago I was terribly conflicted about going pro as a comicbook and concept artist.  I had tried once before and failed fairly quickly but I still knew in my heart that this was I wanted.  I tried several other ways and for a while I thought the only way I would be able to make that true, even if it was remote, was develop my own property.  After many MANY failed attempts at various projects that I had so enthusiastically started I was starting lose hope.  I finally decided that I had to make an actual commitment to at least one project in my lifetime.  I HAD to follow through on this through thick and thin... little did I know that that commitment would have such an impact on my life.

Since that decision, I finished creating an entire world, four different cultures, an entire history, a fleshed out outline, a well thought out ending and completed writing the first three chapters. In the process I also became a professional artist, a husband, homeowner and a father. Its pretty awesome... but now how do I publish it?

And that's where Outland Entertainment, Matt and Jeremy come in... Jeremy and I had met online doing various projects together and we decided to room together for Chicago Comicon 2008. And well that's where we started talking WMD and history is made ( well at least in my little world :D )

Now, we know that the site is still quite skeletal... but we are making this a slow building process.  We will add many pieces of functionality, content and design work as we go along.  Not to say that we won't get a few things wrong but we understand that this a long haul kind of thing and we need make sure we are paced. For the moment we have the following schedule... its not set in stone but its a start ...

Mondays: my blog ( Title yet to be determined... any one got any ideas? Tweet me @jeffwamester http://twitter.com/jeffwamester ) I'll mostly talk about the creation and history of the development of WMD as well as the current development ( i.e. behind the scenes kind of stuff )

Tuesdays: Journal Entry from Kane the Traveler ( http://twitter.com/KaneTheTraveler )

Wednesdays: Jeremy Mohler's blog post... he'll be mostly discussing the process of colors and lettering of Friday's comic as well as whatever the heck he wants to talk about :D

Thursdays: Journal Entry from Kane the Traveler ( http://twitter.com/KaneTheTraveler )

Fridays: COMIC!!

We hope to post more and more comic pages as the site and its followers increase. If you would like to help us to do this there are MANY ways you can do this ...

Follow/tweet us on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/KaneTheTraveler
http://twitter.com/JerMohler
http://twitter.com/jeffwamester

Follow us on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=118869822674
http://www.facebook.com/jeffwamester

Follow Us on DeviantArt
http://w4m1.deviantart.com
http://jermohler.deviantart.com

LinkUs
http://www.WMDtheSAGA.com

You can also help us monetarily by buying a print and/or original art and/or visiting our sponsors! With your help hopefully we can turn WMD the webcomic from a M80 to a full fledged WMD!

And lastly and by all means most importantly, thank you so much for stopping by and I hope that you find WMD entertains you!

-jEFF