Armor has gone by many names over the years. But whatever it's been called, it's important to me because it's the first sampled beat I ever made.

Armor by Nik Furious [ 2:50 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It's basically an instrumental remix of James Taylor's "If I Keep My Heart Out Of Sight", made from the acoustic intro and beginning of the guitar solo.

Here's the guy who played beard bass on the original song, Leland Sklar.

To create a totally different (and far less sentimental) banger out of Taylor's vulnerable ballad, I used an mp3 of the original, my Zoom MRT-3 drum machine, and ProTools in Carnegie Mellon University's computer lab.

I don't remember exactly when, but it had to be sometime during the 2003-2004 school year, my final year at CMU. Though I started sound recording classes late in my college career, the audio skills I gained have by far been the most useful part of my undergrad degree.

First the pencils and then the inks and now... the panels???

Yeah, I decided to try something different with this book and add all the panels during the production phase. Here's how they look:

Was it worth it? You be the judge. Me personally, I think it looks pretty damn good!

Anyway, I wanted to have this post up two days ago, but beautiful art takes time. Thusly, be back in two days soon to see a lettered version of this page!!!

Two days ago, I shared the pencils to a page from my upcoming comic book, Time Log. Today I'd like to share my inks for that very same page:

To ink Shawn's pencils, I decided to play it safe and work on a blueline copy of his original art. Then I scanned it in on the "lineart" setting using a large Mustek A3 scanner and... VOILA! INKY!!!

Obviously, something looks a bit messy here, and that's because I decided not to ink Shawn's panel lines when I was doing this book. He's got a very fluid, animated look to his work and I thought that would contrast well with super-straight panel lines laid out in Photoshop.

Thusly, be back in two days to check out this page with its panels!!!