Kris Dresen Draws

I haven’t linked to it on my website yet, but I’ve posted she’s in the trees online in it’s entirety.

I had intended to post it two weeks from now, but I  finished up the work and figured what the heck, just put it up tonight.

Enjoy!

Jeez. I can’t believe that it’s been eight months since I last posted any blind rabbits work. Where did the last year go? Anyway, I have returned to working on this series. Above are numbers 012 and 013. I don’t usually post blind rabbits artwork here, but since their dedicated blog has become a bit cob-webby, these two get to debut here. Click over to see the previous pieces in the series.

More are in the works. Gotta give those .13 and .18 rapidographs their workouts, y’know.

she’s in the trees is a quirky project that wasn’t even on my agenda, let alone in my brain until almost immediately after I finished work on Grace. I was doing some time-killing doodling and the woman you see in the story popped out of my head and on to the page. I liked her look and did a few more sketches to refine her appearance (She was originally wearing a long skirt. Eh.) I had an idea that I wanted to maybe draw a one page comic about this character. When I went to thumb the piece, much to my surprise, it quickly snowballed into a 20+ page graphic short story.

Huh. Funny how that happens.

I really liked  the piece but wanted to do something different with the art. I had been contemplating doing some color work, but not necessarily full-blown color. That can get tedious and frustrating for me. But what about limited color? Say maybe incorporating just reds and grays? And maybe mess around with digital painting, too? Sure! Why not?

I did a few test images and was incredibly happy with the results. So I took a deep breath and jumped into another big project before I even had a chance to recover from Grace. It’s very true that a friend described she’s in the trees as my rebound book. It was a great exercise in a new way of creating images and was a nice way to slowly dissipate the energy I still had stored up from my Grace drawing routine. While I was initially wary of how lulu.com would handle reproduction of the artwork, the proof copies I ordered all look absolutely fantastic.

But what the heck is she’s in the trees about, you ask?

Good question. The best way for me to describe it is with this sentence: What secrets are the crows keeping from her?

Below is a 3-page preview. Click any of the pages or the cover above to order yourself a copy. It’s 36 pages , only available as POD from lulu.com, and will run you $12.99 plus shipping costs.

I’m giving my studio a good rummaging-through and came across this rarity – the thumbnail for of my own will, drawn 10 years ago in the Princerrific year of 1999. This an example of the “comic-improv” method I was so fond of back then. I’d sketch some convoluted layout, draw in key image ideas I had in my noggin, then have to figure out what went in the other panels to complete the story. Somehow they always worked out.

I probably doodled this at work while I waited for something to print. Back then it took forever for our work to process and print.