Brock Beauchamp

San Diego Comic Con!

Brock Beauchamp
March 21, 2011

I haven’t done much work on the comic this past week (thanks be to my small buffer for the short hiatus) and it’s been a nice change of pace after over three months of non-stop work. My batteries are recharged and I’m ready to spend the next seven days working on building that buffer back up because on Friday, I found out that SelfCentEnt is going to San Diego Comic Con! To have the first issue all printed and ready, I need to be about three pages ahead of schedule by the end of the first issue. That gives me... View Article

Friday preview page 6

Brock Beauchamp
March 18, 2011

I’m glad I spent a few weeks building a small buffer because I really needed it this week. Last weekend, I couldn’t draw anything that mattered and this week, I’ve had things to do and/or I needed to do a spring cleaning on the place in preparation to getting my motorcycle up and running, the garage cleaned for the incoming floodwaters, and tonight, I need to have the snow tires removed from my car so I don’t burn off that precious soft rubber in this 50 degree weather. You have to love Minnesota sometimes… On the more fun side of... View Article

New page & Intuos4

Brock Beauchamp
March 7, 2011

On Friday, I finally spent a few bucks and upgraded my drawing tablet, an older Wacom Graphire Bluetooth. It worked well for what I needed at the time but now that I’m comicking full-time, something larger and more sophisticated was in order. Enter a large Intuos4 tablet. It’s about double the square footage of my old tablet and offers four times the sensitivity. I’ve never been comfortable with drawing digitally and now I see why it bothered me. The larger real estate and increased sensitivity gives my hand more room to work, which results in less jerkiness in line quality.... View Article

Preview: New scene

Brock Beauchamp
March 4, 2011

After a short three page intro to the Blake Monroe story, now it’s time to switch gears. Here is the first page of the second main arc of Variables: 1992. It takes place in Atlanta and involves two detectives who are looking into mysterious break-ins that are plaguing the area. I thought these scenes would bore me but it turns out that I’m enjoying drawing them more than the first three pages (I’m currently working on coloring page five right now), even though very little action is going to occur for a few pages (damn you, exposition!). For the past... View Article

Webcomicking: RGB vs CMYK

Brock Beauchamp
March 2, 2011

To preface why I’m writing this blog, one of my first post-college jobs was working as a pre-press tech in a print shop before later moving into graphic design for the better part of a decade. I’ve sent hundreds, if not thousands, of print jobs to printers all over the world. I learned much of what I know on the job and while the experience was often “do it wrong three times before getting it right”, during that time I became very comfortable with various print processes ranging from film-based offset to digital offset to pure digital to large-format printing.... View Article

Superhero webcomics

Brock Beauchamp
February 23, 2011

I've been fishing (trolling) around the Internet for weeks, trying to determine why there is a dearth of superhero webcomics online. They completely dominate the print market in America but have a very small web footprint. After asking various webcomickers and fans why this is the case, I'm still nearly as puzzled as I was when I set out to answer the question. On the plus side, I did find a few superhero books so the landscape isn't *quite* as barren as I initially believed it to be. These are the reasons people gave me: They dominate print and therefore, no one wants to read them online.