Required Viewing - Kim Jung Gi's Drawing for Christie's

A Poem - Head and Heart, by Lydia Davis

Amanda Palmer (via Brain Pickings) gives us the following:

"You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected."

How unexpected and fantastic, then, to open a book and be brought to tears in a moment.

Lydia Davis’ “Head, Heart,” from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, handwritten by Maira Kalman in her new book, My Favorite Things (via)

Happy holidays everyone!

Inking Practice

Practice Inking over Ryan Ottley's page from Invincible #83

As something of an interlude from the existential crisis of the past few posts, I spent the night practicing inking.

While thumb-nailing and penciling are mentally intensive, inking is about patience and mood.  If you're willing to put in the time, extraordinary results are pretty easy to achieve.  Start a good CD, audiobook, or podcast, and start cranking.

How to find resources to practice on?

Inking Pencils from the Web

Check out Ryan Ottley's Deviant Art page - he regularly posts pencils from Invincible, among others, that he encourages people to ink over.  He pencils extremely tightly, so you don't have to try and interpret anything, you can just copy if you like.  Or, you can try the same page multiple ways, and attempt to ink in different styles as well.

You can also see some great work-in-progress shots:

INVINCIBLE 112 cover processby Ryan Ottley

Michael Lark and Greg Rucka's "Lazarus" is one of the best comics I've ever read, and recently they held a kind of open competition for the position of Lark's inking assistant.  They give you all the digital files, just as if you were actually working for them.  They are layered out, and easy to print.  http://familycarlyle.tumblr.com/post/90190924284/open-call-for-inking-assistant

Copying Inked Comics

If you really want to understand something about how the guys you admire are inking their work, it's easy enough to scan it and copy it for yourself. You can find black and white inked pages in the back material of many of the trades, anniversary books, art-of books and whatnot, and it's easy enough to scan them and print out your own copies for practice.

Remember, when you finish with your scanning, or pick one of the sources aforementioned, you can print it out in non-reproduction blue quite easily.  Open the image in Photoshop, then go up to the layers menu.  Create a new adjustment layer of the type Hue/Saturation.  Change the Hue to 200, which will bring the whole image into the blues, then change the Saturation to 60, which will make it a light blue, and then change the Lightness to +75, which will make it faint enough to easily be knocked out if you were to re-scan the image.

For more inspiration, watch inker extraordinaire Scott Williams

Notice, when he drops the speed to real-time, how slowly and carefully he works.  Each stroke is deliberate!

Now check out Johnathan Glampion, who has a number of great little films on inking the comics page.

 

Required Viewing - Rabbit and Deer

Rabbit and Deer (Nyuszi és Őz) from Péter Vácz on Vimeo.

Thanks to Teoh Yi Chie of Parka Blogs for the link.

Required Reading - Paul Graham on Doing What You Love

For years I've been preoccupied with figuring out how I should be occupied.  Today I discovered an essay by Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, called How to Do What You Love, and would like to share some thoughts.

Defining "What You Love"

"It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no."

This distinction is critical - it seems all too easy to decide that all you want to do is relax on the beach, and you should just accept that work will always be unpleasant.  We all know people who feel this way, right?

"The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

[ . . . ] 

You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken." 

So when the mindless pleasures become unsatisfying, what will satisfy you?

"To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool." 

There are lots of ways to lead a fun life, but given the choice, wouldn't you rather create or at least contribute to something magnificent?  (And this isn't a choice, because magnificent things are usually fun too!)

Discovering "What You Love" 

"That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies." 

Uh oh. Time to think hard - have you been pretending to be something you aren't?  I have just realized that I might not be a writer.  In fact, I've never written a story in my spare time.  How foolish!  But better late than never, I suppose.

"Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof." 

So.  Think - whatever it is, this work that you love, it has to be something that you are willing to do even if you aren't paid for it, in your spare time.  Ask yourself if you can narrow it down.

In the past 10 years, I've discovered that procrastination is the most obvious indicator.

1. I thought I wanted to be an architect.  When I landed a job designing custom homes, I procrastinated for weeks on end.
2. I studied ceramics in college,  built a ceramics studio in my garage after graduation and took 2 years to create one kiln load.
3. In 2012, I decided to make comics my career, and I am procrastinating on the final edits for our first issue AT THIS VERY MOMENT.

BUT.  I'm procrastinating less on this third option - which means I'm on the right track, I think.  If it's not comics, it's something close.
. . .

. . .

. . .

Note to self:  think on this one more.

Getting The Job

Further down in the article, he describes two options for getting into the career you love - the "Organic" method and the "Two-Job" method.

If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.

I'm most familiar with the "Two-Job" route, but I haven't really looked for "Organic" routes into the industry.  What would be an ideal situation?  To get started as an apprentice, inking backgrounds perhaps, developing technical skills in the process?

Maybe this has been discouraging.  But this too can be overcome, if you follow Jimmy Valvano's advice:

• Remember where you were
• Remember where you are 
• Remember where you want to be.  

As discussed, even if you don't know where you want to be, figuring that out is actually the hardest problem that we face.  The agony of not knowing is drastically worse than the agony of working hard at your passion.  But take heart.  Remember where you were.  Are you closer now than you were 10 years ago?  or 2 years ago?  or 1 month ago?

Daily Sketch, Boone NC

The road is starting to wear on me - homesickness is closing in, but there's only a few days left. . .  I wanted this one to be more successful, but it feels like it's borderline overworked already.  I tried to accelerate the process by doing a lot of fills with the watercolor pencils early on, which allowed me to lay in a bunch of color quickly, but I think it lost some of the magic.

Also, I used a lot of black, which is a point of contention among many artists - those who say black should never be used, and those who believe it should be used judiciously.

In this case, I think the black flattens it, and muddies the colors, which would compliment better.  This may have something to do with this particular black, I know there are subtle differences between the various ones.  

Read on for the expert opinion:

James Gurney on the use of black in painting

Drawing Pictures and Writing Words

Or "Why Drawing Is So Much Easier Than Writing"

I have to confess - I find drawing and painting to be relatively simple.  Let me clarify - I find drawing to be far more novice-friendly than writing.  Beginning visual artists usually focus on arrangements of household objects and copies of old masters' paintings.  This is a great set of training-wheels, because the Old Masters already did all the hard work of deciding what to put where, and how to apply it - the part that I find the most challenging about the drawing process.  And almost any arrangement of objects will look pretty good when rendered.

As your foreknowledge grows, it becomes easier to notice the little details that make a scene more accurate to life.  And as you develop your skills, you become more adept at recognizing the thought that went into those masterpieces, but even in the very beginnings of one's "art practice," it's encouraging to finish a piece that actually looks good.

Where is this sort of encouragement to be found in writing?  Do we copy the short stories of master writers?  Would we learn anything from doing so?  Not in any class I've taken, or book I've read on the subject.  Maybe you work from a prompt, saving yourself from having to think of whatever question is at the core of the piece.  Maybe you try and write "from life" or "stream of consciousness," but that can be pretty turgid stuff, in my experience.

Thank god I don't have to be a writer only (though maybe someday. . . )  Thank god I can dress up a mediocre story with attractive pictures.  This seems to be the default mode for a great many writer-illustrators, unfortunately.  Some of my favorite comic artists are covering for a weak story (and vice-versa.)  Some, like Craig Thompson, can do both with equal alacrity, but how do you get that good at both?

I'm coming to suspect that my assumptions about the process need revising - instead of spending an hour practicing illustration, and another practicing prose writing, I should two hours doing both simultaneously.  Because comics is neither writing, nor illustration, but something altogether different.

Daily Sketch - Izzy's Coffee, Asheville NC

Asheville might be my favorite city in the US.  The hills surrounding the city are home to thousands of potters and craftsmen of all types, and the city itself is incredibly welcoming to artists, with little bookshops, coffee houses, and any given night you can find fantastic local music echoing out the front doors of the bars.  The city is remarkably committed to local businesses and food - when I last visited about 3 years ago I enjoyed some incredible meals across all the price ranges, usually with all local or organic ingredients.

As soon as I finished this painting, a gentleman who had been sitting nearby asked to buy it.  Everyday people invested in supporting local artists, and artists who are receptive to it - what a thought!

Process Notes:  

I first sketched it briefly in pencil to get a decent perspective, then followed up with a line drawing using the Pentel V5 Precise Pen.  It's a little bit water-soluble, so it runs a little when the brush goes over it, but I really like the line it gives, and as I've mentioned before, it's supposed to be archival.  Then I started filling in, almost haphazardly, using the watercolor pencils to put in large areas of color, and refining with the portable paint set and the water-brushes.  I filled in the darks with the Pentel Brush Pen, and re-added accents with a white-out pen. (I used Bic, but Presto is another good one.)

Daily Sketch - Brash Coffee, Chattanooga

This guy made killer pour-over coffee.  One of my favorites so far this trip.

On Teaching Yourself Art

Jolie, 2008, University of New Mexico

Art School Vs. Self-Taught

Creative work is fantastic - no-one cares about your certifications or degrees as long as you create phenomenal work.  Put thus, why would you go to art school?

"By their own estimation, the cost of a four year education at RISD is $245,816. As way of comparison, the cost of a diploma from Harvard Law School is a mere $236,100." 

-Noah Bradley

Required Reading - IMHO, Don't Go to Art School by Noah Bradley

Or maybe it can help.  Or do go to art school - just use it effectively, something I worked at with perhaps 50% success.

"As a student who wants to train in avant-garde cinema, video art, and photography, let’s consider what I’d like to have to shoot one short film: 

Sennheiser MKH416 Shotgun Microphone: $1,000 

Sound Devices 702T Audio Recorder: $1,975 

Associated grip equipment: About $5,000 

Sony F3 Digital Cinema Camera + Lensing: $20,000 

Production Assistants, DP, Grips: I don’t even want to think about it." 

- Mark Kammel

The rebuttal - IMHO Go to Art School, by Mark Kammel

Teaching Yourself - Resources

If, like me, you are currently choosing NOT to attend art school, realize now that you can teach yourself anything you want to know - we literally live in the Matrix.  Remember how psyched you were when you saw Neo being jacked in and learning kung fu?  Well, we're basically there.

There are so many resources out there, and bloggers like Karen Chang are even nice enough to organize them for us.

Do you want to become a graphic designer?  Listen to Karen, who taught herself design, left her job at Microsoft and started making a living doing something she loved instead of something she tolerated.

Karen Chang - How to become a designer without going to design school

Want to learn to draw?  Refer to Noah Bradley's post above, and in addition, check out this post on the fantastic blog "Lines and Colors" by Charley Parker

Charley Parker - Learning to Draw

Teaching Yourself - Beginning at the Beginning

Now that we have the resources, every expert in every field agrees:  Do whatever it is every day.  No matter what.  Which must take a lot of discipline - certainly it seems impossible to me.

Or not.

"People think I have a lot of discipline because I danced every day for 365 days in a row. But the truth is, I have no discipline. I never did anything else for 365 days before. Dance was different because I loved it the most." 

- Karen Chang

Karen Chang on Discipline

The hardest part about making a living doing what you love the most is discovering what that is. What do we love so much that we can practice every day?  If you are one of those lucky people who already knows, I think you might be a rarity.

When we see a performer, or look at a painting, all we see are the results of the work, not the work itself.  We don't see those "10,000 hours," that Malcom Gladwell talked about in Outliers (Still the best book on genius and success I've ever read).

"If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it." 

- Ignacy Paderewski, Polish pianist and politician.

Where To Go From Here

Okay.  You've figured it out!  Congratulations, you've just begun a terrifying journey.  There are a number of pitfalls you'll encounter - usually entirely of your own devising.

This quote has been floating around for a while now:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass

I hope this helps a little bit, I know I'll keep writing here about motivation, about process - all the better to stay focused on the goal - to create really awesome sh*t.

Some of my other posts on the subject

On Resistance

Ryan Ottley on Breaking into Comics

Daily Sketch - Raining

Woke up this morning to a vague drizzle, and attempted to capture this:

Midway through the painting, it started raining harder, making further progress impossible, but also leaving an interesting pattern of splotches all over the sketchbook.

I went back in with the watercolor pencils to try to add some darker values that had gotten wiped out by the rain.

I can't decide if it looks better this way, or if there might be something fundamentally different that I need to work on with my process.  With oil paints, you can block in large areas of value, but if you try to do that in watercolor you obliterate your ability to add highlights.  I know some painters use gouache and go back in to add them on top of dark areas, but I think that might be a fundamental impossibility with the water-brush approach.  Maybe I should have just brought some regular brushes?

Daily Sketch - Thinking About Snow

Pencil, Pentel Brush Pen, watercolor pencils and water-brush.

Concept art is a thing that people do, I guess.  I usually feel too lazy to put a bunch of time into a single pin-up style image.  I wonder why that is?

Daily Sketch - Chattanooga Coffee Shop (Again)

This gal stood in the shadow of the  coffee shop for just a moment, and was faintly illuminated by the overcast sky.  I don't know how much it really looks like her, but I think it captures the pose, which is more important when you're trying to sketch moving people.

I'm a little bit jealous of people who live where there are trains and subways - every subject is trapped there for at least a few minutes.

I drew the whole thing in pencil, inked it with the Pentel Brush Pen, and then filled in the grey with a black watercolor pencil.  When you go over it with the waterbrush, it is awesomely versatile.

Daily Sketch - Cumberland Trail Sandstone

The past few nights we've been camping near Chicamauga Creek outside Chattanooga.  The sandstone here is unreal - laced with these iron bands, and colored grey orange and pink.

As I look back on this one, I see that it all seems to be in a very narrow value scale.  I suspect part of the problem might be that the waterbrushes inevitably dilute whatever color mixes I've created, so they're excellent for washes on the lighter side, but I need to figure out how to augment it with darker values.  I picked up more cartridges for my brush pen, so maybe some India ink will help.

Also, it turns out water is super challenging to observe, let alone paint.

Required Viewing - Wanderers

How have we lost this vision - what could our future hold, beyond this planet?  For anyone interested in Speculative Fiction.


Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.

Daily Sketch - Stone Cup, Chattanooga

Didn't have much time on this one - I barely finished the pencil sketch before my subject got up and walked away.  Luckily a couple of gals sat down maybe 15 minutes later, so I stole their shadow patterns and colors to fill in the watercolors.  Later that afternoon I picked up some supplies from Art Creations and spent about 20 minutes chatting with a kind fellow who turned out to be the owner.  I thanked him for still being in business - Amazon and the big box stores have pushed out so many small art stores these days that it's a pleasure every time I run across one.  When I first began painting in college, I spent hours at our local store, and the manager there gave me so much advice - I learned most of my painting materials knowledge from him, over the years, and that's something Amazon can't give you.

Required Viewing - Playground

Maybe you've heard about this, it's been posted on all the cool art blogs lately, but if you haven't, watch this incredible animation.  Here's what you can do with a story.



PLAYGROUND：あきちあそび from Ryosuke Oshiro on Vimeo.

Daily Sketch - Harley asleep, and the best watercolor instructional video.

I grew up watercolor painting, but stopped for many years.  Since then, I've been trying to re-learn the techniques, mostly using library books and Youtube.  The best resource I've found is the recently released "Watercolor in the Wild" video by noted author and illustrator, James Gurney, of Dinotopia fame.  He updates his blog daily with new sketches, tips, and links to other illustrators.  

Check out the trailer for his instructional here:

The blog post where he discusses the materials he uses:

Watercolor in the Wild Materials

And the video that accompanies them:

Last, his two books are required reading for any aspiring illustrator or comic artist. (Click on the images to be taken to their Amazon pages.)

Daily Sketch - Bradley Int. Airport, CT. And Some Thoughts on Resistance

Writing, like sketching, can feel almost impossibly difficult.  Whenever I have a spare few hours to write or draw, I'm faced with that familiar feeling that I'm sure most of you are aware of - the terror of the blank page.  I call it "resistance," though I'm sure there's a better term for it.  It takes an odd kind of courage to sit there, waiting, trying to think of what to write or draw.  It's far easier to find yourself browsing the internet, or picking up a book - anything to avoid the agony and fear of creative work.

It's far too easy to find yourself rejecting idea after idea, either because you're afraid that you won't be able to execute it well enough, or because you think it's a dumb idea.  As a result, it's easy to find yourself writing or drawing only that which you're most comfortable with, which defeats the purpose of sketching or free-writing in the first place.

On the positive side, there are a couple of ways to push through this resistance, but the biggest thing I've learned is that it's only that - resistance.  If you can sit for the 10 or 20 minutes required to think of something, you get this kind of mental explosion, where the floodgates open, and all the stuff that you were thinking about has an opportunity to make itself known.

In Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Abel and Madden discuss this difficulty in their section on sketchbooks.  They recommend drawing spirals or some such, anything that's pretty mindless and can serve as a kind of a wedge to break that dam open.

When I'm writing, I find that it depends on what I'm planning on writing.  If I want to come up with a new story, I remind myself to start at the beginning, open up a new bullet point in Workflowy (the best brainstorming and outlining and list-making program ever), and just start throwing down words.  Okay okay okay okay okay, here, here, here, here, here goes.  Starting at the beginning, I try and think about characters, themes, (I find that I can't easily think of a plot without these two items first), and then I just write, and try to avoid self-censoring too much.

Daily Sketch - Jonah on One Hundred Years of Solitude

Happy Thanksgiving!

Daily Sketch - Rocky Mount, NC

We drove through the night, arriving in Rocky Mount at 4:00 AM.  This was painted the next evening, using the Windsor-Newton Cotman Watercolor Field Box

Windsor Newton sells two small portable watercolor sets - the Cotman set, which is about half the price of the "Artists" Set is designed for students and uses hues in place of the more expensive pigments.  This is all the better, since the hues work fine for sketchbooks, and if you really want a specific color palate, you can obviously fill the pans with any tube colors you want.  There are subtle differences between pan and tube colors, but the vast majority of artists find it simpler to just refill pans with tubes.  If it works for them, etc etc.

You can bring your own brushes if the included travel brush is insufficient, and the top makes a good water container, but my personal preference is the hottest new tech on the block - water brushes.  Thankfully, these can be found at most art stores, but they are super cheap from amazon, and they're the most versatile art tool I've ever seen.

You can fill them with pigments such as colored inks for fountain pens, you can fill them with pre-mixed ink and water for grey washes, you can fill them with water and use them on top of watercolor pencils (something I'll go into in a further post), and, in the case above, you can use them with the field box set to paint very easily.

You will find that they differ from traditional watercolors in a couple significant ways.  As you grab pigment from one of the pans onto the mixing surface, the more you work it, the more it becomes diluted - this means that you have to be careful not to overwork a pigment puddle, or you'll lose it entirely.  Second, as you are putting the paint on the paper, it will become lighter and lighter as the water continues to dilute what's on the brush.  That means you have to work from dark to light, at least on the small scale. laying in your shadow edges and then blending it back, rather than vice versa.

Here's a link to the brushes,

And here's a link to the watercolor set. again.

Daily Sketch - Mean Mug Coffee, Chattanooga TN

Here we are in Chattanooga.  Still struggling to stay focused, keep motivated to sketch and observe.  Drawing is easy when it's subject matter that you're good at, when it's an image that you've drawn before and like drawing.  Drawing other stuff, like a bunch of bricks in a wall, is significantly more difficult.  There's a story in "The DC Comics Guide to Inking Comics" where Klaus Janson recalls another inker who preferred to go through the job, inking their most preferred subject matter first, leaving all the most boring inking for last.  He warns against this, rightly, because who could stand to look at 20 plus pages of inking buildings?  Other than someone who loves inking buildings, I suppose.

So part of the struggle, then is finding something to appreciate in subject matter that isn't what you prefer.  Observing something even when you're already bored of it, already trying to find shortcuts to avoid drawing it.  A toxic combination of boredom and fear of drawing poorly, I find, is what makes me run away from the blank pages of my sketchbook.

Instead, read this - and see how beautiful it is, for someone who finds the beauty in the boring things.

Everyday Matters by Danny Gregory

Daily Sketch - On the Road, Tx - and some doubtful musings.

About midway through a 22 hour drive.

Travelling is always a weird experience for me - I always leave with the expectations of accomplishing a bunch of different goals, considering I'll "have all this spare time," but it inevitably condenses into a kind of super-focus on one or two things.  I admit that I intended to get a bunch of comics work done, a bunch of sketching and a bunch of writing, and have mostly done none of them.  The doubt creeps in - does this mean I don't have what it takes?  "Draw every day" is the advice I most often hear from artists, with the notable exception of Sean Gordon Murphy.

Or maybe it's something different.  Maybe everyone has their own environment where they work best.  And though we'd all like to be Jeff Smith and be so psyched on what we're doing that we work for 24 hours straight and have to be reminded by the doctor to blink more often (true story - check out his segment in the cartooning documentary "Stripped"), most of us aren't.  I can't seem to stay in one place for longer than a few hours at a stretch, something that makes it hard to produce that much work.  Did I make the wrong decision?  Should I be content with comics art as a hobby?  If so, how will I ever develop the necessary skills to tell a great story?  Not by making one sketch a week.

Or maybe it IS environmental.  Thanks to my buddy Jonah (of Under the Radar, a bouldering blog) for reminding me, but for most people who aren't Jeff Smith, motivation is the biggest struggle we face, and the easiest way to remain motivated is to surround yourself with motivated people.  That's why college can be such an efficient way to develop, if you use it properly.  That's why art collectives exist, and despite what I've always tried to tell myself, maybe I can't do it alone.

When in doubt, here's Jimmy Valvano, on motivation and success.

Daily Sketch - Michael Thomas Coffee Shop, ABQ NM

I'm back in Albuquerque for a visit, seeing the family and reconnecting with friends.  This place used to be a sort of fancy tea house, but it's now converted into quite a nice little coffee shop.

Process - Tracing Paper - Analog and Digital

(Book available at http://pigeon-press.com/)

On page 57 of  Madden and Abel's book Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, inker extraordinaire Charles Burns discusses his process:

"After I've worked out the flow of my story and written the basic narrative and dialogue, I usually begin by creating a rough thumbnail of my page so I can plan the size and configuration of my panels and where I want the lettering to be placed.  Based on my thumbnails, I rule out the borders on what will eventually be my final board and then I tape down a sheet of tracing paper and start a rough, generalized drawing of the entire page using a soft pencil.  Some of my drawings at this stage look almost abstract--I'm not interested in the details; I just want to define the basic shapes and work out the design of the page.  At this early stage I can also cut out portions of the drawing and re-position them or even re-size them.  I continue by laying down new sheets of tracing paper and refining the drawing.  At some point I usually flip the tracing paper over and do another drawing in reverse so I can look at it with "fresh eyes" (try looking at your drawings in a mirror and you'll understand what I'm talking about).  The final stage is transferring the tracing paper drawings to my Bristol board by using a light box and a pencil with hard lead (I don't have an image for this stage. . . it's been inked over)."

This method is the analog version of what Freddie Williams II talks about in "The DC Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics," a great resource that not only discusses digitally drawing comics, but has tons of useful information on every step of the comics process.

Freddie uses this same method in his own workflow - he begins with the script, taking notes and making small thumbnails as he goes along.  Then layer by layer, he refines his thumbnails into pencils.  Using Photoshop, he can easily convert the black lines that he's drawing to a faded blue, and then draw in black on another layer above them.  Though he doesn't mention it, it's extremely simple to just flip the page horizontally and do another trace over, which will help you notice awkward poses or anatomy.  When he's ready, he has every line where he wants it, he can go back in and Ink the page either digitally or physically.

Required Reading - Paper Wings Podcast

One of my favorite resources - especially good when faced with a long inking session - is the Paper Wings Podcast.

Lora Innes, Justin Copeland, and Chris Oatley are co-hosts of a fantastic podcast on visual storytelling, applicable to comic artists, illustrators, and aspiring film-makers.  In their most recent podcast, they interview the fantastic Brian McDonald, writer of Invisible Ink, a book about finding your theme in screenwriting.  The stories that last, argues McDonald, are the ones with a strong foundation, a strong theme.

Required Reading - Ryan Ottley on Breaking Into Comics

Space Grub by Ryan Ottley - December 8, 2013

Today I was pleased to discover this great little post on the process of breaking into comics by the phenomenal Ryan Ottley - you may know him from "Invincible" with Robert Kirkman.  Ottley has a great, whimsical style that makes Invincible my favorite superhero comic in years.  It strikes all the right notes without taking itself too seriously, or (for the most part) becoming too melodramatic.  I admit I haven't kept up with recent issues, but the first hundred or so were fantastic.

Anyway, here's a section of the post that really resonated with me:

"If you want to get into comics, I wouldn’t recommend college. I know, parents hate hearing that. (And probably colleges too) But accruing that kind of debt for schooling that you could learn on your own might not be the best start for your comics career. And really, if you don’t already have a talent in drawing, schooling won’t help you much. Ask anyone that went to an art school, you will see plenty of students that lack talent and took school to make them better. And guess what, it didn’t work. But then there are those that were already talented that took schooling and they used that time and the assignments to get even better. Well, you can do this on your own. There isn’t tons of secrets to good drawing. It’s talent plus skill. And skill can be learned by doing."

And here's where you can read the whole thing:

http://ryanottley.tumblr.com/post/100575725712/meaty-message

Further links:

Check out Ottley's Blog for great works in progress, sketches, and thoughts. 

Check out "The Bog" - Monster illustrations from Ryan Ottley and James Harren

Building a Webcomic with Wordpress Part 3 - Inserting your comic

Let's inspect our website:

Open up the developer tools.  In Firefox you can use a plugin called firebug, in Chrome you can use the built-in developer tools by pressing Ctrl + Shift + i.  This will pop up an invaluable little window at the bottom of your browser, that shows the code for the page you're viewing.  The little black arrows next to elements indicate nested bits of the page that you will have to navigate into to find where to place your comic.

Here, we're going to place our comic above the main section of the website, and below the navigation bar.  That means we'll have to find the space between the helpfully labeled "masthead" and the "main" sections in the code.  I first checked in the index.php file in the twentythirteen folder, since that's the main file that controls the page, but couldn't find the beginning of the "main" segment - it just begins with the "primary" div.

That means the place we need is in the header.php file.  Go into the twentythirteen folder and find the file called header.php.  Right click and copy the file, then go into your twentythirteen-child folder and paste it there.  Again, we're only going to make changes to the files in the child folder, so as to preserve the template theme.  Open up the header.php file in your child folder and you'll see at the bottom, a space between the masthead div and the main div.  This is where you're going to paste your comic code.

I gave the comic area its own div element so that I can make changes to it in the style.css folder.

Next, open up the style.css file in the twentythirteen-child folder, and add the following:

#comicarea {

margin: 0 0 0 0;

}

This isn't really necessary, but it gives you an idea.  Now if you wanted to make adjustments to the placement of the comic, you could come in and change the margins on that div in the style.css file.

Now you just need a comic, something that will allow you to really see where we're going with this tutorial.  As mentioned in the previous post, we need to think about the size and layout of our comic.  According to the w3schools, the most common screen resolutions are now 1024 x 768 px. You don't have to worry too much about these numbers at the moment - Comic Easel will resize your comic for different resolutions, but you do want to think about them as a proportion.

Open up whatever image editing software you use and create a new file.  I rather arbitrarily created one that was 900px wide by 706px tall.  I filled it with a color, and then added text to the middle, of varying sizes, like so:

I know it's really garish - this will hopefully force me to replace it quickly!

Now go into your dashboard on your new wordpress site.  If you've enabled the Comic Easel plugin, you should see a catagory for comics.  Click through there to add a new comic.  In the upper right hand corner of the screen, it allows you to add a featured image - that's going to be your comic.  Add the above file, then give it an arbitrary title and some arbitrary text.  You can even play around with some of the other options if you'd like.

Finish adding your comic, then scroll down to publish it.

If all has gone as planned, your webpage will now look like this:

You'll see that the image could be a lot wider, in my resolution, but what about someone with a smaller resolution?  The easiest way to check is to go into your computer's display properties, and drop it down.

Here we are at 1024 x 768.  You can see that there's still room for the image to be a little wider, and a little shorter, in order to all fit on one page.  Also, you'll notice that in my image, the smallest text size that's still readable is the 12 point - This will be hugely important when we're scripting and composing, because we won't want to make the dialog text any smaller than that.

See you next time!

Building a Webcomic with Wordpress Part 2 - Child Themes

With our new private web server, we can practice developing a functioning website.  In the planning stage, we want to think about what we want our website to look like, what we want our comic to look like.  One will dictate the layout of the other.

-- Begin Digression -- If you are used to working in that vertical format that is traditional for American comic books, you'll want to design your website around that.  As a cautionary note, however, when you look at most webcomics, they prefer a horizontal layout.  There is a strong consensus that whenever your layout forces scrolling down or clicking to read the comic, you immediately lose a percentage of your possible readership.

So maybe a horizontal layout would be more effective?  But if you aren't writing a gag comic strip (like me), it might be more difficult to compose a readable page - you might have readers questioning whether to go left or right, like so:

You could overcome this by avoiding panel layouts like this one, or you could split the difference and go with a square layout, like Kazu Kibuishi does in the webcomic Copper.  --End Digression --

Adding Plugins and Editing Stylesheets

So when you logged into your dashboard at the end of the last tutorial, you probably looked at your site, and it (as of this writing) probably looked like this - I added a test post to give myself a better idea of what multiple posts would look like.

In order to put our webcomic on here, we're going to need a plugin called Comic Easel

In my opinion, this is the best way to display a comic on your wordpress site.  There is a theme called Comic Press, made by the same developer, and it would be much easier for a first time user, but also more limited in its display options, and if you want to have a website that is uniquely yours, I recommend the plugin version. Under the dashboard, go to plugins, add new, and search for Comic Easel, then install and activate.

Next, to have a comic display in your theme, you will probably need to ad some code to the website - a few themes have native Comic Easel support, but the one I'm using in this demonstration, twentythirteen, does not.

--Begin Digression -- Having first tried by creating my own wordpress theme, I can say from experience that unless you already are a Wordpress wizard (and in that case why are you reading this?), it is far easier to modify an existing theme, especially one such as the twentyfourteen theme that has a lot of options and full support from experienced web developers. -- End Digression --


We are going to modify our theme using a concept called a "Child Theme"  Rather than modifying the original files on the theme, we will use this ability of Wordpress to only make small modifications in their own folder.  That way, if the developers release an update for the theme we are using, we will be able to incorporate it into our site as the parent theme, without having to re-code our entire site.  This makes it much more portable, and much safer.  If you want a better explanation, head over to http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes.

Following their instructions, we will add a folder to the wordpress themes folder, calling it twentythirteen-child

Next, use a text editor such as Sublime Text to create a file that will be called style.css.  Paste into it the following lines (straight from the Wordpress Codex).

/*
 Theme Name:   Twenty Thirteen Child
 Theme URI:    http://example.com/twenty-thirteen-child/
 Description:  Twenty Thirteen Child Theme
 Author:       John Doe
 Author URI:   http://example.com
 Template:     twentythirteen
 Version:      1.3
 Tags:         any, descriptive, tag, you, want, about, the, way, this, theme, looks
 Text Domain:  twenty-thirteen-child
*/


/* =Theme customization starts here
-------------------------------------------------------------- */

Any changes you want to make are going to go underneath these lines of code, so you only need to change it as much as you want.  Then, go into your browser window, go to the dashboard, and check the themes folder.  It should now have a theme called twentythirteen-child.  Activate it, then go look at your site.  But wait!  It doesn't look right:

We need to import the parent stylesheet to give it the default look. You will see most websites recommend that you import it using @import in the top of the style.css file, like so:

 Text Domain:  twenty-thirteen-child
*/

@import url("../twentythirteen/style.css");

/* =Theme customization starts here
-------------------------------------------------------------- */

This will work, but it is not recommended by the folks over at the Wordpress Codex.

 "@import should not be used to import the parent stylesheet into the child theme. The correct method is to use wp_enqueue_style() to enqueue the parent stylesheet, using this code in your child theme's "functions.php":

Instead, you want to create another file in your child theme's directory, one called "functions.php."

For further information on child themes and functions.php, I direct you to http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes#Using_functions.php

To simplify, however, you can just create a new file (I just create a new file in Sublime Text), type in the following:

I've left the bulk of the code below so you can copy and paste, but the php tag at the top won't show up in Blogspot's software, so add that php tag to the beginning of the document, paste in the code below, and make sure it looks like the image.

//Here's the custom functions for twentyfourteen-child

add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'enqueue_child_theme_styles', PHP_INT_MAX);
function enqueue_child_theme_styles() {
    wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-style', get_template_directory_uri().'/style.css' );
    wp_enqueue_style( 'child-style', get_stylesheet_uri(), array('parent-style')  );
}

Then I save the file as functions.php into the child theme's directory, like this:

Now go back to your browser window, refresh your website, and it should look just like the parent theme, the difference being that now we can easily make changes to it.

In the next post in the series, I'll go over adding the webcomic via Comic Easel.