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.