Hellboy Art

Back in April of 2014, Multiversity Comics held a competition celebrating 20 years since Mike Mignola first created Hellboy.  When my freshman year roommate first introduced me to comics (later than most, I know), I immediately fell in love with his powerful graphic art style, and swashbuckling storytelling.  The competition would be a great opportunity to assess my progress.

After brainstorming through a number of thumbnails, I settled on a drawing depicting Yggdrasil, the legendary tree of life from Norse mythology.

Neil Gaiman’s version from American Gods struck me particularly, so I first envisioned Hellboy bound to it

As I researched the poetic Edda, however, I thought perhaps a more subtle moment might describe his first view of the tree, with serpents at its feet and the symbolic animals in its branches, heralding his arrival. Certainly a future visit to the zoo is warranted, but Google Image Search had to suffice for now.

Next came the drawing stage, which I neglected to photograph, followed by inking. I wanted to distance myself from Mignola’s style, and work in a more detailed pen style, using the Pentel V-Precise, which apparently uses an archival ink (via Freddie Williams II’s video on materials)

In a future post I want to go through the coloring process, but here’s the finished work.

June and The Bee Poster, Continued

An update on the poster - In the original when I got to the hair, I slipped into some old bad habits, and I finally had to swallow my pride and re-work it.  The great part about this hybrid setup that I'm developing is that when I want to make corrections, I can mask it out, print the whole thing in blue, and then re-ink problem places.  It was also the right time to add the poster text.


"Alphonse Mucha - Job - Google Art Project" by Alfons Mucha - gAGlllq_JU7ILQ at Google Cultural Institute, zoom level maximum. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Since I'm terrible at sign lettering, I tend to use photoshop as a crutch, laying out text in a font that I like, working it into the design, and then (again) printing it out in blue line to ink over, so they have a more organic feel.  I'm sure there are resources out there for how to really do a kick-ass job of lettering a sign, especially given how long it was considered a critical part of an illustrator's education.

All that's left now is to lightbox it onto watercolor paper.  I think I can get that lithograph look by compositing the watercolors behind the inks.

June and the Bee Poster

I was commissioned to do this poster by an awesome band  - you can and should check out their site - they're about to release a new EP very soon!  Anyway, I had to get this one out on the quick.

I think I broke about 10 of those pilot color eno leads.  I ordered a bunch of neox ones from Jet Pens - here's hoping they hang together better, because it feels like a stiff breeze would snap these ones.

I'll leave it with the final inks for now, I'll update with more color and Graphic Design issues in a future post.

Crack Babies Issue 2 Teaser

As we near the end of the final revisions on issue one, we're already starting to think about issue two. . .   This illustration is an allusion to the parallel story that will be interwoven around the comic itself once it gets released on the web.  Keep an eye out - though each story will be self-contained, you might find some hidden crossovers!

Crack Babies Issue 1 Cover

The final cover?

My only concern is that the title might not be as readable as it could be - Magazines obviously pull this overlap trick all the time, but they rely on having readership that is familiar with the basic look of their magazine to easily identify it.  Do I really want to make them think this hard on the first issue?

The Writing Process - Part 1 - The Notecards

The Notecards

Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black goes over his process in this video, and I love how he takes processes that I've read about, and attempted to implement, but makes them concrete. 

 His focus on research and specificity is incredible - that to make interesting, believable characters, you have to make them very specific - and those specificities will make them universal!

Second, his notecard process - He begins with some basic notecards, bringing in research, trying to think of interesting scenes, etc, and then he lets it evolve. Obviously, even people with no experience screenwriting are familiar with laying out notecaards to begin a story - but what I saw in the video that set it apart was his stacking of them. by tying them into little bundles, he can keep key elements, but lets them have their own kind of flexibility.

Third, he reads the script, watching the movie over and over in his head.- throughout this process, I'm usiing screenwriting terminology, and I've done the majority of my research into the writing process in screenwriting. Unless someone has a compelling argument why this should not be the case, I believe that as a visual medium, comics have the most in common with movies, and writing story for comics is almost entirely the same.

After struggling constantly with trying to assemble my ideas into something that resembles a 3-act form, I let myself in to the restaurant early and spread out on the bar

Notecards are expensive, and we've got a lot of paper lying around, so I broke out the paper-cutter and divided some old menus into 8ths.

 For the purposes of this post, I've got a comic idea that I've been working on based around my first real firefighting experience.  I wrote out some of the basic plot points, and tried to build them into something that had a kind of rhythm.  I don't know about you guys, but even when interesting things happen to me, I rarely feel like they fit into a reasonable structure.

I still feel super intimidated by writing - I've spent years working on my art, and still can't help but feel like I've got so much further to go, and I know that this is another process that takes aspiring novelists and screenwriters decades to perfect, so for the moment, I'm just working on developing ideas, becoming more comfortable with the process.  

Does everyone feel like there's a story inside them?  That all you need are the tools and the confidence to let it out?  When I read a really beautifyl story, that inspires me to write my own.  Austin Kleon in Steal Like an Artist says "Write the book you want to read."  Like most simple things, this one is the most frightening.  I suspect you can never truly reach that height.  It will never be as good as the story in your head.  but maybe it will be close enough to make a connection with a reader.

In a following post, I'll try to follow my own advice, and bring a story past the card stage.

Crack Babies Issue 1 - The Cover

Where does a cover come from?  

The cover has to sell the story by telling one of its own.  It has to ask a question, one that the viewers can't resist.  Crack Babies Issue 01 is a story about one person, Nadja.  What kind of person is she, and how can she be used to symbolize the story?

One of my favorite resources is The Sartorialist, in which photographer Scott Schuman documents the multitude of fashions he encounters in cities around the world.  As art students, you spend years working from nudes, but most of the time we move through the world wearing clothes, and to avoid falling into repetition, you have to be constantly exposing yourself to new fabrics and fashions.

In Schuman's book "Closer" I found an image of a woman wearing a fur coat, leaning against a railing, that somehow seemed to speak Nadja to me.  Her up-tilted face spoke of a haughty pride that would persist in spite of a harsh and desperate world.  Using that as my inspiration, I acquired a model and a fur coat, and spent several hours developing a pose.

Thus, the preliminary pencils for the cover of Crack Babies, Issue 01  I used my mechanical pencil with the Pilot Color Eno, Non-Repro blue leads.  They work pretty well, but they require some adaptation, which I'll certainly go into further in a later post, but briefly, they are much more fragile than equivalent leads in graphite, and (not surprisingly) much lighter.  I spent the first few months using them being frustrated by how difficult it was to see the lines I was laying down, and honestly, I'm still not thrilled by them, but they definitely beat having to erase pencils!

I'm planning on trying out a couple more options before I settle on these for good, but for the moment:

With the coat in a pile in front of me on the drawing table, I was able to develop a believable texture

And here's the final scanned image.

Next up, coloring, compositing, and developing all the graphic elements for the cover.