Issue 151

Hello!

It's monsoon season here in AZ which means massive beautiful clouds in the skies and evening showers. I love this time of year because A) we actually get some weather, and B) it means summer is coming to a close and our lows start dipping into the 70's so I can go running in the morning without dying.

Alright, here's 5 things I thought you'd find interesting this weekend.

Enjoy!

1) Recent Spaceships

From the Art Department

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Just a few spaceships I've colored up for the Spaceships book. Been sharing the process art from sketch to final over on the Patreon. I'm so excited to get this book finished and sent off to the printer in the next couple of weeks. Still a lot fo work to do on it, but there's a light at the end of this tunnel.

2) Cryptography Devices

From the Industrial Design Desk

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I love finding art reference treasure troves, and cryptomuseum.com is overflowing with cool looking devices.

If you're curious about cryptography and all the technology that has supported it over the last 80 years then you will get lost on this website. If you're an artist that likes to design odd looking tech that's grounded in reality, these cryptography machines are perfect resource.

​LINK​

3) WW0

From the Concept Art Division

If you mashed a medieval aesthetic with WWI technology and threw in a dash of fantasy you'd get WW0. This is the part time project of concept artist and illustrator Andrius Matijosius and it rules.

Not sure what this will end up being exactly...a film? a game? an art book? a comic? Whatever it becomes it's sure to be some solid escapism.

See all the art here: LINK​

Updates posted on his Artstation as well: LINK​

4) Cistercian numerals

From the Arts and Culture Unit

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I thought this was kind of cool. This was a number writing system created by a bunch of monks 700 years ago so they could write any number between 1 and 9999 in a single glyph.

Not easy for every day use, but when I'm sitting down to work on a comic it's cool to have stuff like this in the back of my mind and look for ways to add texture and dimension to the world I'm building.

Those bottom numbers are the year I was born and the current year. Then I tried stylizing them a bit to see what that could look like. I might start hiding these in my future comics!

Can you find the hidden zero?

More info on it here: LINK​

Speaking of this, did you ever notice I hid a secret message in some of my youtube videos? Here's one of them:

here's another one:

Good luck figuring it out.

5) On being a hero

From the Inspirational Thought Unit

From this interview of George Lucas by Bill Moyers:

That's all.

That's all for this week. Thank you for reading this newsletter and hope you have a great weekend!

-Jake

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