Moving Right Along + DJ concept sketch!

Have you noticed I totally ditched my ghost story idea?  Did you even notice the ghost story thing in the first place?  No?  Well, never mind then.  The point is:  I'm getting focused!  The covers for the last Mastorism book, and the trade paperback are complete.  I'm (with luck) sending them off to my colorist this week.  So I'm going to be into full bore pre-press mode with those soon.  Wrapping my brain around the whole trade paper back thing is going to be the most challenging-- Keeping track of all the pages and whatnot.

With 132 story pages (plus editorial content that could push it close to 150 total pages), its most certainly the longest publication I've ever prepared.  So, equal parts excitement and nervousness.  Well, mostly excitement actually.  I actually really nerd out when it comes to digital pre-press and just working with the print world in general.  With my job, in a relatively short amount of time, I've had quite a variety of design/pre-press/print projects and I love every minute of it.  Usually there aren't enough minutes of it... making the minutes I do have a tad stressful, but hey!  That's the biz!

Anyhow, here's what you want to see, a prelim concept sketch from my upcoming Mastorism project.  This time it's DJ:

Oh yeah.  That's the good stuff.

So again, its a loose "ink" sketch done in Manga Studio, to kind of get the costume/character design down a bit.  Here's the concept for her:  From the beginning she was always kind of a "wannabe" Mastor.  Those of you who've read the comic know that she came from the Dark Universe to Mastorism Universe to become a Mastor, but got rejected, and has since joined up with (everyone's favorite) Z-Squad.  So, her costume was always a tad of a knock off of the Mastor uniform as a nod to this fact.  Here I've more or less done the same thing.  The Mastor uniform got an upgrade, and so has DJ's outfit.  Blatantly showing off my laziness, you can see that I gave her different pants/boots.  I'll likely switch that up to better match the Mastors.

I've purposely made her outfit a closer knock off of the M uni because I think it fits an interesting conflict within her character, and also makes for an interesting contrast between her and Ash.  Ash, the former Mastor, will have completely un-identified herself with the Mastors.  DJ, who's long been bitter with the Mastors at this point, still considers her role with Z-Squad as a consolation prize for not making it as a Mastor.  So, some of this will play out in the story.  Should be interesting, to say the least.

Well, that's it for now.  More fun stuff coming your way soon!