jerry’s who i nominated to follow me on jp anhonen’s comic co project. and man, did he do an awesome job! i love how he’s continuing the story and his take on the characters. i’m also even more excited now that’s he’s a part of parable! go read his page right now (comic 3, page 4).

and jerry, if you’re reading this you need to email me with some coloring tips :)

today’s cow & buffalo is my 100th cow & buffalo strip i’ve ever done. i’m not sure if that’s really that big a deal or not, but it does makes me feel good to know i’ve kept with this strip from week to week without any stumbles. in fact, i’ve been really happy with these last couple months worth of strips so that’s personally a nice feeling as well. i’ve been told i should have done something special for this occasion, but i was sort of in the middle of a storyline and didn’t want to pause or distract from it. who knows? maybe i’ll do something special for number 200. :)

i’ll be enjoying some time with family and friends today as i more appropriately celebrate my birthday from yesterday. i suppose i can secretly celebrate this little feat as well.

well, today is my golden birthday as i celebrate the past 27 years of my life. how am i celebrating? well, i’m at work today and when i get home i have a cow & buffalo i need to finish for tomorrow. there’s some freelance stuff i need to finish up as well and i’m really eager to start sketching out some stuff for parable. so well, i guess i’m celebrating by enjoying business as usual and that’s just fine. i did take some rare time off and vedged on the couch last night while watching four episodes in a row of catscratch. i’ve never caught the show but recorded some the other day since i realized it was created by doug tennapel. and it’s funny. some of the things that happen on that show are just absurd and there’s some subtle lines that are just genius if you happen to catch them. i think waffle would have to be my favorite character. one episode i watched, waffle and gorden (the round orange spotted cat with a think scottish accent) are running to put put out what they believe to be a fire and gorden yells. “HOLD ON TO YOUR WEE ONES!”. later waffle- “gorden said to hold on to our wee ones”. funny.

speaking of waffles, jen was extra sweet this morning and made some for breakfast. usually, i’m the one doing the waffle making so that was a nice birthday morning surprise. and then she gave me a fun birthday package of the complete season of undeclared, season one of samurai jack, the 50th anniversary edition of the muppet movie, a new shirt and some new boxers (that last one wasn’t that exciting but probably needed). thanks, baby. i love you!

now time to get back to work…

i scanned a couple more seed related sketches this morning. once i do get around to woking on seed again, chapter three will actually pick up a few months after the events of chapter two. nafae and paxhia’s hair will be a bit longer, their clothes a tad more tattered, and nafae will be shoveling coal.

the page of paxhia there is just some mindless doodling.

some of you might be wondering when i’m ever going to update seed again. well, um… i sorta jumped the gun on it i think.

when i started seed i didn’t have a lot going on. i was able to work on it freely with out much else to think about creatively. and considering how it was really my first comic endeaver, thought things came out fairly well. but now, with quite a lot more things i feel i should spend my time on, i just haven’t had the chance to sit down and start working on it again. which is a shame, because i love these characters very much and know what’s in store for them. but i don’t want to screw the story up by not giving it the focus it deserves. so unfortunately, until i get to a point i feel i can do that, seed will be on an indefinite hiatus. i’m still sketching pax and fae (and occasionally mab) every so often though and here’s a few older ones from my past sketchbook.

well, heavy freelance work is just about behind me (for now) which means i can finally start catching up on things. there’s a few things i want to prepare for the san diego trip this summer and then i’ll be starting work on my story for parable (which i’m really excited about). this morning though i scanned in a few pages out of my last sketchbook so i could start start posting some of ‘em. over the next week or so, i’m going to post a bunch of these sketches that were done over the course of the last few months so this buffalog starts feeling a bit more like a skech blog again (not that it ever really was, but that was its original purpose). most of these pages are stuff i scribble pretty mindlessly over tv or while at work so hopefully this won’t be too embarrising.

first up- one of the projects i was feverishly trying to accomplish recently was a five page little story at the end of caleb monroe and noel tuazon’s redchapel #3 (out in july). redchapel is a wonderful all ages comic and i encourage everyone to check it out. the story i worked on, called listen up, was off of a script by jay busbee. before the script though i had a rough concept to start thinking about. the main character is a boy named tommy who causes “strange things to happen when he listens to music”. my first impressions were of tommy being a pretty young kid, but jay decided to go a different rout. these pages are some of those first impressions.

and since i’m posting some children sketches, i thought i’d show this random sketch of some treehouse builders i drew around the same time. it has nothing to do with listen up, i just wanted to draw a scene like this.

first mike kunkel, now jeff smith! i must be in blogging heaven.

(link via kazu kibuishi)

also, i really hope scott visits somewhere near tampa…

(link also via kazu kibuishi. he’s much better at this then i am.)

cow & buffalo is up. actually it’s been up for about eight hours now, but i keep forgetting to mention it since i started writing updates on this blog.

jen and i saw the da vinci code last night. i kept trying to make time to read the book before i saw it but just never found it. we did see it with someone who did though and he said it stuck pretty close to the book, which i guess just added to some of my frustrations with the movie. i mean it was a decent movie, not great, but entertaining enough and with a terrific cast (i just love audrey tautou). and i love treasure hunt tales and searches for the holy grail and stories of that nature. but the way so much of the story is routed in supposed truths just made a lot of what was said difficult to swallow. and yes, you’d think this would be because of me being a christian, and i’m sure part of it is, but it really had more to do with what i’ve studied in art history and particularly of the last supper. i mean, seriously, right off the bat here- why on earth would da vinci paint only eleven disciples? i mean, if he was commisioned to depict the last supper, don’t you think he’d include john instead of mary? was this the master artist i studied for his keen grasp on persepective or somebody more intent on leaving secret messages in his paintings? and if he wanted to conceil a hidden meaning to be preserved throughout time, why would he experiment with tempera? i don’t know. i didn’t know him. neither did dan brown, but he sure seems to assume a lot of what he did and what da vinci believed in. and that’s kind of the problem. it’s clear mr. brown does believe these accounts and theories presented in the film and he roots the basis of his storytelling in these “facts”. if i felt like i was only watching a fictional thrilling mystery with all these facinating puzzles to solve, that would have been great! i would have loved that. and i would have no problem with some of the religious theories that dan brown has. but don’t present them as based on fact. don’t presume i’m going to accept what you say is true because of your “research”. the fact is that the story depends on the reality of these pesumptions to feel credible. and not buying in to most of them really took away from some of my enjoyment.

ack! i’m rambling. i really did enjoy the movie. i enjoyed how the story unfolded, the inclusion of past events, the history, the conspiracies and the mysteries therein. but i enjoyed them as pure fiction. unfortunately, i don’t think dan brown sees things that way. hopefully, audiences are a little wiser.

aquaman was the theme for yesterday’s drawer geeks. here’s mine:

if you aren’t familiar with the dailies, that’s sherman, from jim toomey’s sherman’s lagoon.

and here’s some before hand sketching:

and now jen and i are off to weeki wachee to see if we can catch us some mermaids.? wish us luck!

i just found out that mike kunkel has a blog! i’ve been a huge fan of mike’s work ever since herobear one, but haven’t seen much from him since he started doing a lot more production work. so this is great news! it looks like he just started posting pretty recently, but he’s already got some great sketches, some terrific character designs from juniper lee (like the ones above), and even a page out of superman/batman #26 written by the late sam loeb. looks like i have yet one more website to add to my already long list of places to click to when i’m hungry for inspiration.

a received a link from my friend megan dailor today to this fantastic display of talent.

and while i’m posting, i wanted to share some amazing artwork that my friend matt smith drew on the back of some post-it paper a little while ago. i don’t think he’d consider himself an artist seeing as how he rarely ever draws. in fact, i don’t think he ever draws. but this work of pure genius says maybe a career change is in order. his name is simply pigeon-man:

here’s some fan art i did for him. it doesn’t come close to the level of quality and creativeness that matt’s drawing has, but i thought i’d share it anyhow. i payed extra special attention to make sure i got the pigeon logo just right:

who knows? you might see more of pigeon-man one day. this character is sure to take off.

dean trippe, who draws butterfly and is also part of parable, is out of the country this month. when he get’s back he’ll be doing some sort of alternate earth tale with alternate butterflies. joel carroll, fellow floridian and pal of ol’ dean, started a fun thread over at the drawing board with a whole bunch of alternate butterflies and i wanted to add to it. nothing as exciting as some of the stuff over there- i just parodied my ridiculous muscular superheroes i’ve been drawing lately- but i still kinda like how it turned out.

i decided he’s from “after school special” earth, where butterfly discovers steroids. this is the moment of joy for him before his slow decline into depression, more drug abuse and emabarrising man-boobs which lead to more of the latter two. eventually knight-bat and birdie pull him out of it and everything works out just fine.

happy mother’s day, mom!

this week’s cow & buffalo is up. i just realized that two weeks from now will be my 100th c&b strip. two weeks from now will also be my golden birthday (i turn 27 on the 27th). had i realized this earlier, i would’ve planned something special for my two bovine counterparts. as it is, i think it’ll just be business as usual. well, us usual as you can get when you’re stuck in the prehistoric. but, man! i can’t believe i’ve drawn this many ridiculous little cartoons about these guys. time really does fly.

i just wanted to take a moment to mention how awesome my dad is. and that may seem kinda odd considering what day it is tomorrow, but i’ll say something nice to mom tomorrow.

my dad is awesome because he introduced me to the david crowder band. and i know this album came out last year and they’ve been around a few years before that, but i’m just now hearing about them. when did christian music get to be so good? i’ve been kinda out of the loop for the past few years because for awhile, it just.. wasn’t. but i’ve been listening to a lot more christian music lately thanks to a terrific radio station we have here in tampa, and things have changed. a collision (or 2×7+14) is seriously the best album i’ve heard in a long time. it is just on so may different levels, teetering at the beginning on alternative radio friendly rock (the first four songs just grow on you) then taking a gradual turn towards some southern gospel moments in the middle and then just accelerating non-stop for the second half the album with some of the most powerful, melodic sucession of songs i havn’t heard since, well, i don’t know since. i’m not a music reviewer by any means. i won’t be able to explain to you why i think certain music is good (or bad). but i do know i love this album, and i encourage everyone, christian or no, to at least check it out.

on the secular side of things, i’ve had the new flaming lips album for over a month now and i’m still loving it. then again, i love everything the flaming lips do. and i just got the new snow patrol this week and am finding it to be a great follow up to final straw. not sure if it’s as addicting as final straw, but still good. kinda like dcfc’s plans after transatlanticism.

sorry for the lack of posting lately. i’ve been finishing up a big project this week that’s causing this week to fly by me faster then when the wild hit theaters. though, i finally took a break from the drawing table/photoshop last night to spend some much needed time with jen. yesterday was our third anniversay and we celebrated by going out to a nice dinner at roys, a delicious, semi-fancy, hawaiian themed seafood and steak house (though what we mainly were going there for was their chocolate souffl?. mmhmm!) we then decided to go see mission impossible three. not the most romantic thing to do, but it seems we rarely get to go see movies like we used to. despite thinking the last two were pretty mediocre (actually, no. that was the first one. the second one was just ridiculous), we mainly wanted to see this one because of jj abrams. and i’ve gotta say, he did a pretty good job with it. i was kinda sleepy at the beginning but found myself feeling pretty tense and awake about mid way through. there were some script issues that caused some eye rolling, but enough twists to keep me entertained. i’m not gonna say anything to ruin it for people, but i’d definetly say this was the best of the bunch.

so for our first anniversary we took a boat out to an island, went snorkling and had a nice dinner. for our second one we stayed at a disney resort for a couple days and had a nice dinner. and this time around we had a nice dinner and watched tom cruise stare intensely at things. so again, maybe not as romantic this time around, but i love jen three years worth of days more then when we got married and that always makes for a perfect evening.

on a completely separate subject, i did manage to scan a couple more pages out of my sketchbook. so here’re some pirate girls. enjoy!

i just realized that i went through most of the day without mentioning that a new cow & buffalo was up.? i’m not sure if it’s really all that necessary anymore though.? at this point, it should just be assumed that there’s new one up each sunday.

drawer geeks was new yesterday. this week was thor.

and some before hand sketching…

comic co is a fun online project started by jp ahonen. the idea is to create three 33 page comics with each page being done by a different artist and with that artist having the opportunity to decide who they want to follow them. the fun part is that the first page of all three comics is the same but because of the multiple involvement there’s no telling where each story will go.

i recently added to all the fun. click on the panels above to see the full page, but you have to read the pages before mine first! i followed up jouni nummela on comic 3, page 3.

this is what i donated to the walk for t-shirts and posters and whatever. my mom recently fought breast cancer so i try to do what i can to support causes like this. plus, their team name is udder utopia! how could i not do something?