Updated Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Greetings, I'm Jacob. I reside in Tucson, Arizona. I liken Tucson to Tatooine, however.

Since November of 2006 I have been painting at least one new painting a week, but that changed as of October of 2007 when I switched gears and altered my plans to that of 1 new painting a month instead. Nowadays I hope to devote more time to create my very own and comic books.

Please visit My Deviant Art website! I create 1-3 brand spanking new paintings a week (recently revised monthly) and have done so since November of 2006. No, I don't have paintings waiting in the closet as inventory, I wish. It's a personal goal that, fortunately no matter how hectic things get around the house and no matter how much OT I put in being a manufacturing technician, I do strive to create new things while trying to be a gosh darn good hubby and father of two.

Below are several web links that host some of my art work; please be advised that my wife draws and paints too and our work spans at least a decade old. Fair warning, the quality of the works vary. Mostly my wife and I collaborate on painting projects together, but almost never in the same fashion each time. We do not collaborate on cartoons or doodles. Sometimes our painting “Team ups” can be as little as making a color suggestion to one another or as much as passing the canvas back and forth any number of times for various improvements, there’s just no telling and, again, it’s case by case.

Our preferred way to paint is usually done with pencils on canvas board, followed by “inking” with a Sharpie maker, then we add acrylic paint, and finally re-ink the picture. We are interested in other medias, but we’ve done many paintings in this manner and have no intention of quitting. To date, I’ve experimented with almost every kind of media except oil paint. I do own an oil paint kit and have a canvas in reserve, but I'm waiting until both kids are away in school before I tackle that media. Who knows? Someday I might go back to airbrushing again.

On June 17th, 2006 I created a Sketch Blog here. Unfortunately I'll probably only get around to posting sketches on weekends, new or not, because I work full-time to support my family. Admittedly, I don’t focus on posting at the sketch blog as much anyway as I do toward the MySpace webpage where I’m rather current showcasing our latest painting efforts solely. Or you may visit the aforementioned Deviant Art website, which is always just as current as MySpace.

This website features many old and new paintings spread across several pages worth of thumbnails and I'm pretty sure any image can be viewed larger with the touch of a mouse-over-image click. Recently completed paintings, although not necessarily uploaded for viewing yet, include: our individual interpretation of Aquaman and Green Arrow with Black Canary. Note: I do have a Deviant Art account and I suspect when time allows we'll upload our archive of work and transition the pictures hosted from the Angelfire site to Deviant Art.

Back in May 2006 at Brian Michael Bendis' Jinxworld.com in conjunction with Tim Daniel's POWERS fan site I was a lucky recipient of Michael Avon Oeming's original art work. I was fortunate to have won one of several categories in relation to Powers fan art. I had two submissions: here's the first and here's the second. This was stunning to me because I had been out of the habit of drawing for years. I regret the inability to draw for even the smallest amounts of hours of a day (mostly on weekdays) has denied me the chance to see just how good I might become, but please understand I have a family to support and that's my first obligation. Besides, I mainly focus on my writing instead. Anyway, be sure to check out the website nonetheless! Tim’s a fine website designer and it’s the best Powers website bar none.

Once I sort of learned, yet never fully mastered, the basics of writing after high school I received a lot more recognition than I imagined I was capable of. I have had several letters published in various comic book titles and manga anthologies such as Bone and Pulp and I had poetry, art, and short stories published during my Pima Community College tenure. When the Tucson Weekly used to showcase poetry contests, locally, several years ago one of the few poems I submitted got published. I've had my work published in various mini-comics sponsored by local comic book shops (alas, some shops no longer in existence) and I was the editorial cartoonist at Tucson High Magnet School. All things considered, getting assignments for the paper was a pleasant experience. I recall there were occasions a sudden rush was in order and I had to create something new for a late deadline fill-in or missing piece by a colleague.

I'm currently trying to juggle life, full-time work, and raise a healthy family. I spend an outrageous amount of money on comic books. I love comic books. On average I spend $100-$400 a week on comic books, graphic novels, and toys. I have a goal to create a comic book of own, more on that creation someday later, and I'm interested in getting involved with others in hopes of learning, sharing, improving, and making friends.

I've taken several different creative writing and cartooning courses to hone my skills, the latter of which I was a pupil of Staggering Heights' Joe Forkan.

I absorbed whatever good I could from the 4 wonderful writing professors I studied under and I thank them for the encouragement and their unduly patience to take a lost cause such as myself and help break me out of a cocoon of despair and target my dreams, goals, and desires filled with passion and hope.

While I have many types of stories in mind, the one comic book I want to work best, right off the bat, would be an all ages type. (I do have a couple other more mature stories in the drawer.) I can't imagine anything worse than not being able to show EVERYONE the final product. I have major and minor characters designed and some plots mapped out and I should add how my resulting character came about from an assignment from one of the numerous cartooning courses I attended under the guidance of Joe Forkan. The assignment demanded we create and draw a character and be able to draw that figure at multiple angles.

My wife and I are self-taught computer geeks and we have 7 computers between us (with enough parts to make three more if we want to.) We are in pursuit of learning and mastering Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator techniques.

In July of 2006, Jon Morris, put together an online mini-comic book jam. I submitted a 2-page offering of separate ideas, but only one was accepted because of either confusion or a disagreement about how the word “Calamity” was defined, I guess. In relation to the submission that was accepted: my initial idea intended to better fit the theme featuring a lot of chaos with wrecked cars tossed about high in the sky, buildings tilted, and bridges collapsed, but the only way I could achieve what I imagined was if Geoff Darrow drew it and that wasn’t going to happen. My sketch blog contains both images and commentary on my thought process and explains in detail what I wanted to achieve against the final product. Prior to this fun project I had never drawn on a comic book board before and I feared the pencil indentation marks would show during the scan, luckily that was not the case. I suspect I'll also share, someday, my first full-script idea for the project, which was possibly the better idea in relation to the theme and would have taken 3-pages to tell. Meeting the deadline challenge made me understand the meaning of the question: "Do you want it good or do you want it on time?" Even the pros struggle with that one. I regret I was not able to submit a continuous calamity story as I was working mandatory OT (at a former job) around the time the event took place.

The internet has blessed me and countless others to be able to contact our comic book creator heroes. It would be most gratifying to return the favor someday.

I, under the same registered name of jacoblb, often check out these fine message boards where I either lurk or post actively:

Ultimate Brian Michael Bendis
Prolific Greg Rucka
The Independents!
Talented Brian K. Vaughan
The Dude or Dude, Where's My Car?
Look Out, Adults Only, Frank Cho
Great Scot! It's Mark Millar
Pulp Characters Of Comics

Here are a few recommended sites I visit daily. Mind you, I'm sure I'm forgetting many, many, many, important links. If I were to share a list of every creator I adore and follow it would be way too long, ok?

The Beat!
The Pulse!
Newsarama
Silverbulletcomicbooks
CBR
ComicSpace Meet MySpace
My Sketch Blog