for the next couple hours I’ll be digital painting and coloring comics live via my Justin.tv channel!

Watch live video from jembury’s channel on Justin.tv

40 minutes in Photoshop.

figured that I’d set up a virtual table for the upcoming Facebook Comic Convention in March. Head on over to my page and join up, Jason Embury’s virtual table for the Facebook Comic Convention.

not much time for that much rambling right now. Working on Take a Chance #5 right now, as well as starting colors for 1001 Arabian Nights: Adventures of Sinbad #9, cooking dinner and taking care of a sick wife, running kids to basketball games and practices, and trying to find time to get some gaming in still. Not to mention planning out the rest of my year so I can get some personal projects completed too. and boy is that Prince of Persia for PS3 is addicting for some reason (i’ve got to get back to it some time soon here), and I’ve found myself playing some OLD SCHOOL Castlevania lately on the Wii. Who needs sleep right?

I’m groggy this morning. I have a bit of a headache as well, which doesn’t mix with being groggy very well at all. The good thing is, that I don’t have to go anywhere today to get to work. The roads are a mess my wife informed me after dropping the kids off at school. So once I imbibe enough coffee this morning to actually start functioning I’ll be set.

Flipping through a book I just sold on ebay as I was getting it ready to mail out, I came across a great little quote by Normal Rockwell. It went something like this, “Painting is like throwing a ball against a wall, it never comes back to you as hard as you throw it. So throw it hard!” Such sage like advice there.

Colored the cover for issue 4 of my Dabel Bros./Del Rey book Take a Chance yesterday, in addition to more pages from the Grimm Fairy Tales Annual. Superheroes and fantasy in the same day, it doesn’t get a whole lot better than that I’m hoping to get a great deal of stuff accomplished today as well, since I was planning on taking all day Thanksgiving off. Which means I have to work that much harder before and after to make up for that of course.

I’m trying to ignore the news lately, as it manages to frustrate, depress, and anger me all at once. Hard to escape that sort of real life stuff though. What would help is if checks would come in the mail on a more regular basis. Speaking of just such a thing, there SHOULD be a rather sizable check in the mail today, which would make me happy. So I’m hoping when I walk the 100 feet down the driveway through the snow to the mailbox, there’s actually a check in there. Because freezing your giblets off to get the mail, and having it not contain anything to warm you up like money (or the new Victoria Secret’s catalog) feels like a waste, you know?

Alright, not a whole lot else on my mind, it’s sort of cluttered still a bit, and as I said, groggy. I may have to make a second pot of coffee today after I get around here. It just feels like a 2 pot of coffee sort of day today.

not much today. haven’t slept well the last few days, not sure why. surprisingly I’m not a complete jerk because of it.

I’ve been ecstatic with the work I’ve been doing both coloring and painting the last 2 weeks. I seem to have found whatever it was that I had lost that was sucking my energy and life out of my work. Maybe I’m just over being burnt out and that’s it, but whatever happened it was a welcome relief. I’ve always struggled with confidence. I think that might be starting to correct itself, and perhaps the biggest difference in my work is that I’m just more confident, or less scared of my own instincts, and that is the thing that has been showing up visibly in my work. Interesting to think about, being 32 and STILL not being completely confident in my abilities. Strange how life works, I think THAT is safe to say for sure.

a TON, an absolute TON of loose ends to tie up the next 2 days. Hope to have everything down to just manageable by next Monday. Going to be a long weekend. Really hoping that the planets align and the last check that I’ve been waiting on from a company that was due in September finally shows up tomorrow or at the latest on Monday. Was in the mail yesterday I guess, so that is a big improvement from where things have been at the least.

alright, time to throw myself back into some pages today and get lost for a while in them. I’ve decided that, being the huge classical music guy that I am, Fridays and Mondays are the best days of the week for that type of music. I think my favorite classical station right now is WCPE from the iTunes radio section. Not too much talking, or commercials, and a great variety of composers and orchestras as well. ah….Fridays.

Finished up this sketch card of Batman while watching election returns the other night. About a half hour, done mostly in watercolor, with some ink, black prisma marker and a bit of colored pencil. You can follow the link below to the ebay store and bid on it if you’re interested. Hoping to get a few more sketch cards done this week yet, but I’ve got a cover to finish for Zenescope and a 10 page short due before next Friday, in addition to some color studies and some submission pages. Going to be another busy weekend!

Batman sketch card now on ebay!

the first of my series of sketch cards is up for sale on ebay now. Done in colored pencil, ink, acrylic paint and prisma marker, and sprayed with krylon clear coat to prevent smudging, it features YODA!!!! Going to be doing a variety of different cards over the next couple weeks, Star Wars, LOTR, Transformers, HERO BY NIGHT, and other superhero cards as well. If you’re so inclined,
head on over and start the bidding war!!
and here’s a peek for everyone!

few more hours and I’ll be done with my latest painting and it’ll be available to order as a print. here’s a peek at just a small section of it though. enjoy.

Finally found a good printer to produce my digital paintings on canvas in spectacular fashion. I’ve spent the better part of 6 months looking for just the right place to produce high quality work, at an affordable price. There are only 2 paintings up in the store now, however I will be producing on average hopefully 1 new painting each month (maybe every other month) for the rest of the year, most fantasy or sci-fi based works, branching out into different color schemes, themes, etc…..

Visit the store now!

So, the store is now live. High quality canvas prints are available on matte canvas, gallery wrapped and constructed with sturdy wooden frames. Vibrant inks, fade resistant up to 100 years. I’m also going to be offering commissions on various themes, genres, etc….so if there’s a particular type of painting you’re looking for, feel free to get in touch for a custom quote.

Visit the store now!

wow, I don’t know if my life is stuck in a proverbial and sort of mystical projection of a game of chutes and ladders the last 2 weeks or not, but it sure does feel like I’m on a huge game board right now, and the Universe keeps letting me climb up one of those ladders only to find myself sliding down a chute a day or two later. It’s been insane.

So I’m back to coloring things today, and REALLY focusing on painting and coloring this week. I’ve started the wheels in motion for my own large scale, undoubtedly overly ambitious, possibly completely unrealistic project the past few days as well. So far so good. I’m still ironing out the best way to present things and utilize the screen space as much as possible. I’m NOT the best web designer when it comes to implementing all kinds of code and stuff to make the most functional site. But I have been able to utilize iframes and some simple navigation and stylesheets as much as I probably can. Now it’s a matter of getting the updating and “look” of everything just right before I start putting up content. I have plenty of content to get started as well, probably a good 4 months worth of material already ready to go. I just need to find those extra few hours each day to fit in, and right now, they just aren’t there.

Been busy pursuing some other avenues here as well, I’d really like to try and shift more of my work online as opposed to being strictly a print industry colorist. I see lots of successful and semi-successful things out there that makes me think I can bring a lot of my own flair too.

for those of you that read the blog on a regular basis, I had been forced to make the decision to leave the coloring duties on Hero By Night last week. It was the RIGHT decision to make logically. One of those decisions that you make with your head and know is right. Well, over the weekend, seeing how upset my kids got when they learned I wasn’t going to be doing the book anymore….I made a decision with my heart. And sometimes, you need to listen to your heart instead of your head. This is one of those times I’ve realized. So thank you ALL, for your emails, phone calls, and kind words. It’s funny to me to have so many people actually CARE about me and to recognize my contribution to something like that. It’s not often that people in the print industry of comics care so much about someone as far down the totem pole as the colorist. Heck most companies STILL don’t include the colorists name on the covers of their comics. the interesting thing being, comics aren’t colored anymore really. They’re painted. So to ignore the fact that someone is in reality PAINTING work on a book, is a disservice to that artist really I think. And I really do appreciate everyone who not only recognizes my work, but goes out of their way to get in touch and tell me what a fan they are of my work. (and a little hint, for all you fans, you may be able to actually purchase prints and paintings of my personal work in a few months if you’re so inclined )

That is all. I need coffee, and I have some Hero By Night pages to color today