Copyright Nicholas Rubatino
nicholasrubatino@gmail.com
Now that I have some momentum my goal per day is to complete one page in pencil and one in photoshop. That's the aspiration but it depends on how complicated the scenes are, if they can share backgrounds, if I can manage to draw what I want how I want it, et cetera. Anyway it is moving at break-neck pace compared to The Satan Killers and lightspeed compared to how The God Labs had been going 2017 to present. I'm at about page 12 in photoshop and page 58 of finished pencil drawings, of ~725.
Another Cover Idea, looking at the God Labs tower in the reflection of Remus' helmet. I was thinking of making all the covers all have a reflection of the tower, but I'll probably do a variety instead.
Another cover idea. Like the monolith except with the sun coming in from the bottom instead of the top. I finished roughing in all the pencil drawings for chapter 1 and am about half way through cleaning them up, started working on the photoshop paintings too.
My friend Jon asked our friend group to write something about Devin for a book he is putting together of his artwork, here is mine:
I knew my friend Devin (It is spelled with an 'o' but I always insisted on using an 'i' for some reason) since we were five or six years old and in kindergarten. He came over once, ate his sandwich weird, played a gameboy game, and his mom was weird. He always sat next to me on the bus but one day he got on and walked right past and sat in the back. When I looked I could see him peeking back through the gap between the seats and the windows smiling. Don't know why he did that.
He didn't like me and actively made fun of me after that. I remember we were at a mutual friend's birthday party and he asked when I was going to leave, he found me so offensive. Called me fat, interrupted me talking to a friend so he could talk to them. He remembered this when we were in our twenties and sincerely apologized, he didn't know why he did it either.
We didn't start hanging out again until we were around fourteen. I invited him over to watch The Matrix and he skateboarded down and we watched it. That was the first of a long tradition of watching movies, anime, shows, playing video games, and analyzing the stories while coming up with our own. An activity our growing friend group would be largely based around. Some of my favorite memories are of watching or playing something for a while, then pausing to go outside and smoke cigarettes and talk about the story or gameplay thus far.
The whole rest of the time I knew him he had his sacred “Gadium” project. A story that changed names and concepts so many times that I don't even know what it is or what medium it was intended to be made in. There was a core of Kale (who was Devin) Tida (who was me) and Leona (who was usually a fantasy girlfriend for Kale) but the story always morphed dramatically after he saw an anime or played a JRPG he really liked.
I watched him descend into drugs and alcohol. I went over to his house after he caused a problem while drinking the night before. He was drunk again and sat down on the front steps and said “Of course I hate this.” All I said was “I believe you.” and his whole demeanor changed, like he was expecting me to lay into him or chide him for his choices. The only advice I gave him was maybe sometime before getting drunk take ten minutes first to write down what was coming up for him, maybe find for himself some glimpse of why.
He lived with his mom behind an abandoned empty grocery store next to the coffee shop where I went to draw so I saw him everyday for a time. He'd come in and ask if I wanted to sit with him outside while he smoked and I always did even though I didn't smoke anymore.
Watching him become homeless was like watching him die in slow motion. When he had nothing, even though I hadn't accomplished anything with my art, he said “But you're doing it, you're doing what we all talked about doing.” That always meant a lot to me. I think about it all the time. And I repeated it while I lowered a handful of his ashes into the water in the bottom of a hole I dug at the edge of the tide on a beach whose water he always admired.
A week ago we spread my childhood friend's ashes at the beach we all spent a lot of time talking about stories we were going to make. This was one of his, "Air" or "My Air Myra." I don't remember what it was about but the girl always wore oven mitts and a dog came out of her leaving a trail of rainbows. I always thought his art had an interesting and unique look, even his final drawings still had his familiar style, just much scribblier.
The God Labs opens with a touching and beautiful Satanic Funeral Service. I like that you only need to know the title of my last book to have most the context for this.
Been meeting my quota to finish 2 pages of the pencil drawings per day, and working on a cover here and there too. I call this the "Cool Fiona" cover.
I thought it might be good to start with introducing the characters in a Pseudo Tree of Sephiroth style. When I looked up Köse I found it meant 'beardless' and then the next link was for a Turkish hair replacement guy, so I thought that was appropriate. Kelvin is from my favorite Tarkovsky movie Solaris.
It is written. 8 years late, but The God Labs is finally written. I counted, and at the cinematic 3 panels per page I'm planning it is 725 pages in 10 chapters + a coda. I'll be doing each page in pencil then doing photoshop paintings from that. Trying to figure out how to do it as efficiently as possible, it is going to take a while no matter what, but at least now it is finally written.
It's amazing how long it takes my hand to feel better, then how quickly it hurts again when I start using my tablet. Working on writing the last few pages of the last chapter of The God Labs
Did a drawing of a lady at in IBM terminal in the 70s thinking about how I'm going to do all the technogarbage in the background of The God Labs and still have characters legible in the foreground. Then I got bored and drew a sharkgirl. I'm a little over halfway writing the last chapter, it may be too long and I'll have to cram some stuff from the beginning into the end of chapter 9.
Converted my thermometre to Kelvin, which I think should be the standard, that way no one is happy!
Just started writing chapter 10 of The God Labs, which will be the final chapter. I thought about opening it with a dream of a line of people jumping into a Hellmouth in the woods rather than The Gate to Heaven. Donno who's dream, but that's where this little non sequitur comes from.
Another Piece of vintage The God Labs Prelim, Long Stephen, who since being introduced has shown up in every chapter. I just started writing Chapter 9, think I'm a little over 500 pages so far.
Remade my desk again. Last year I found a convertible standing/sitting desk on the road and put my old desktop on the legs from that, but I wanted to make one from scratch to fix some things I didn't like about it. Tested ink stains, ended up going with a mix of purple ink, sumi ink, water, and gold paint, which turned out almost exactly how I wanted it. Two problems arose, the topcoat takes forever to fully cure in winter, and modern plywood is shit. Almost $100 for this sheet and the plys were coming apart because it isn't properly glued together.
Couple test panels for The God Labs. Original plan was to do photoshop paintings from ink drawings like I did with The Satan Killers, but it is a lot of cleanup in photoshop and my hand still hurts from finishing that months ago. New plan is to do full size pencil drawings from the ink thumbnails then paint under that in photoshop like I did with Red and the Wolfe. And since I'm changing that up I'll try some colour too.
I'm just finishing writing chapter 6 of the rough script of The God Labs; it is about 350 pages and counting so far. I'm doing 3 panels per page, and each panel will be in 4k resolution, which is way WAY bigger than I'll be able to submit to Kindle but I'm making this with the future hope of publishing elsewhere also. Red and the Wolfe was only 250 pages and that took me 5 years rough script to final chapter published, so this will take a while.
Testing the amp and speakers I made for my dad for Christmas 2024. He gave me a sheet of LM386 chips and I've used them a ton for hi-fi amps, guitar amps, and guitar effects. I found a basic amp stripboard layout and redesigned it to be as small as possible because I was fitting two in an enclosure to make a stereo amp, so I'm sharing my redesign here (get a dual gang pot for a stereo amp so you don't have to adjust each volume independently). Testing this particular amp the unshielded wires picked up some strange conservative talk radio station I had never hear before...
