Eric Zawadzki

Ballad of Sang

This is a pin-up I did recently for Ed Brisson for his Ballad of Sang project. He’s gotten a bunch of his friends to do pin-ups for it which he’s displayed over on his site. There’s some good work over there by Johnnie Christmas, Justin Greenwood, Vic Malhotra, Shari Chankhamma and Ramon Villalobos.

This has been a good year for me creatively. I got to work with a lot of good writers on some small projects and I finally launched The Ghost Engine, a project I had been working on with Danny Djeljosevic for quite a while.

Ghost Engine #3 just wrapped the other day. Me and Danny are taking a small winter break. Issue #4, our concluding chapter will launch on January 4th.

In the meantime, I’m working on projects with Patrick Meaney and Ryan K. Lindsay. I’m also in the early stages of development on a follow up project to The Ghost Engine with Danny.

I’ve got quite a bit planned for 2013 and I expect it to be an even better year for getting my work out there. I look forward to starting off the first part of the year with a bang by attending Emerald City Comicon in March. I hope to meet up with a lot of the creators I’ve met through twitter over the past year and find more artistic opportunities for myself.

Ryan Ferrier recently launched Challenger Comics, a creator owned comics imprint that acts as a hub for short stories. There’s some really cool stuff to read over there.

A couple of days ago, they debuted a short by me and Ed Brisson, of Murderbook and Comeback fame. Be sure to check it out!

Chapter 3 of The Ghost Engine has begun! This means we’ve reached the halfway point! I remember first getting the script from Danny Djeljosevic for this chapter way back when and absolutely loving it! He really upped his game from the last two parts.

Wow. It’s been almost six months since we launched.

So what have I been up to?

I’m still moving along colouring Ghost Engine pages. I also completed a pitch recently with a writer that I’m a fan of. I don’t normally do pitches, but it was an offer I couldn’t pass up. I really want to show off the work for it, but it’s probably not wise to do so.

My Occupy comics short with Patrick Meaney has been published to! You can purchase it at their site.

I’m also currently lining up some projects for when I’m finished with The Ghost Engine. 2013 is looking to be an exciting year for me.

I’ve been keeping very busy this summer on various comic projects. Me and Danny launched The Ghost Engine several months ago and we’ve been slowly building an audience. In between all of that, I worked on several short stories.

I worked with talented filmaker, Patrick Meaney on an Occupy Comics 4 page short. The Occupy Comics anthology had a very successful Kickstarter campaign last year. I’m not sure when my story will be published.

I did a 5 page short with Ed Brisson. Mark my words, Ed is going to hit it big in the next couple of years. So make sure to pick up his Image book, Comeback, which comes out at the end of the year. I can’t say where this short is getting published as of yet. But it should be soon.

I got a chance to draw one of the eight stories in “Continuum: The War Files”, based on the showcase TV show. It was coloured by the very talented Paul Little.

And while all this was going on I was finishing up colouring The Ghost Engine. I had it all inked a while back, but the final colours have taken me quite a while to go through. I’m almost done, though.

I’ve been working on 3 projects at once over the past month (I’ve got a bunch of things coming out soon!) and I’m burning out badly, so I took a break and did a sketch of the girls from Morning Glories. This is one of the few series that I follow monthly. Joe Eisma and Nick Spencer have created a fun, addicting comic!

The Ghost Engine #2 has started! I’ve been just barely keeping up with the art chores on this webcomic (written by the very talented Danny Djeljosevic) while juggling numerous other projects. In the coming months I’ll have a bunch of interesting and exciting things published and ready to show off.

So this is what I’ve been working on for the past year. So far, all I have is a ‘coming soon’ image, but there should be a full site soon. “The Ghost Engine” will be a regularly updated webcomic starting sometime around April.

This blog has been pretty quiet for the past year because I’ve been so busy trying to complete a big project. I’m a very patient person, so my original plan was to just illustrate all four 22 page issues and then figure out the marketing and distribution later. As a result, I had a sort of tunnel vision focus on just illustration. I wanted to get everything done in a year, but I was still new to lettering and colouring (and drawing on a cintiq) so I’m now a year and half into it with a couple of months left to go. It also didn’t help that I work a nine to five and only really have the chance to work on this is on nights and weekends. Throughout that time, there was a lot of trial and error, start and stops, redoing portions of pages and just a lot of refining my process. All the while I was trying to take enough time to make myself happy with the work, but still work at a quick enough pace that I’d be able to get it done within a reasonable time.

Striking that balance between producing work that I’m happy with but at a quick pace was very difficult and I still haven’t quite found it. If I were ever hired to do freelance work, this would definitely be a big hurdle for me. Especially considering the bulk of freelance work being published today is what I coin as ‘deadline work’. Whenever I hear someone comment on how a certain artist on a particular comic is terrible, I try to give the artist the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that it could just be ‘deadline work’. At the end of the day, the work needs to be delivered wether the artist is happy with it or not. I’m very envious of artists like Stuart Immonen and Chris Samnee, who seem to produce fantastic work at such a regular pace.

A big help during the last year I was working on this project were Jason Brubaker’s and Nate Simpson’s blogs. Their blog’s proved both inspiring and educational. I believe that Nate Simpson’s writings in the past couple of years have a universally relatable quality for artists. I found myself relating to a lot his struggles and I highly recommend reading it if you’re working on a long comic project by yourself. I also appreciated Jason Brubaker sharing his learnings throughout the production of his comic. Considering most comic artists tend to sit alone while producing their work, it’s much appreciated that someone took the time to write honestly about their process.

My goal this year is to be better with updating this blog and getting my work out there. I plan to outline my process for producing this comic sometime over the next several months as well as get it up as a webcomic and eventually start documenting the production of my follow up project. In the meantime, here’s a preview of some pages for this project.