Drawing Comics: 2015

Really amazing video that breaks down how to price yourself as an illustrator. It pains me to think how often I've screwed this one up, but I guess I'll be a little better prepared to make a quote from now on!

Daily Sketch - February 26, 2015 at 09:47AM

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Sunday, February 15, 2015

Daily Sketch - February 15, 2015 at 11:40PM

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Monday, February 9, 2015

Daily Sketch - The First Fire

My first real fire as a member of our department was in a dark, crowded basement, full of smoke, and bathed in 16 inches of water. A real eye-opener, and nothing at all like the training I'd yet been exposed to.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Required Reading - The Sculptor, by Scott McCloud

Just finished this incredible novel by Scott McCloud, of Understanding Comics fame. Five years in the making, The Sculptor is a story about art and love and death and wonder and failure. The main character is an artist, in whom a colossal arrogance and terrifying insecurity coexist. He wants to make great, objectively good art, art to be remembered. But when the most common (and probably accurate) advice that the world give us is: "create what's inside you," it's easy to despair - who of us has penetrated that labyrinth?

McCloud has a couple interviews where he discusses his comic-making process, and I think it's pretty unique - He created all his roughs on a gigantic photoshop document (which he shows on his blog page) and used that to edit and move around - this gives him incredible control over the pacing of the story. Which moments are emphasized? How do page turns affect them? After spending years writing the book (literally) on how comics work in the mind of the reader, it's easy to see that every tool has been brought to bear. It reads perfectly, easily, and emotionally.

Incredible work.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Daily Sketch - Amherst Coffee Bartending

Purchased the Higgins neutral grey ink, trying it out in a water-brush for quick sketching

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Daily Sketch - Amherst Coffee Late Night

Daily Sketch - Amherst Coffee Yawn

Friday, January 23, 2015

Daily Sketch - Amherst Coffee

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Daily Sketch - The Roost

Character design for Herb, part of a potential project.

Trying a different method - I want a more brittle, energetic line, so I worked it out in pen, then filled in with brush. The tooth of the paper is great for these dry brush effects, which makes it easy to switch between hard and soft edges - imparts an energy that I don't feel with the more delicate feathering methods.

And the final image - I rather like this one!

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Daily Sketch - The Hobbit

Watched the Battle of the Five Armies last night. No comment.

Starting inks with the brush pen

Erasing the under-sketch.

Watercolor pencils and water-brush.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Daily Sketch - High Horse Brewery

Friday, January 16, 2015

Interviews - Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils

Zen Pencils, Gavin Aung Than from anotherbeautifulstory on Vimeo.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

More Inking Practice

The Art of Comic Book Inking by Gary Martin with Steve Rude

When I finally get around to a full rundown of inking and the books on inking, I'll get more in depth about this volume, but right now the focus is on the specific practice of inking - a skill that is easy to underestimate. For those of us who are used to simply rendering with pencil, there is an art (no pun intended) to creating dimensionality and clarity with only black and white. Your options range from careful crosshatching, (most common to american comic books) to the simplicity of fluctuating line widths and spotted blacks. (Jeff Smith's Bone, for example), or from super clean lines like Burns' Black Hole, or Blutch's drybrushes.

Either way, the basis for all inking is control - even the most uncontrolled masters merely make it look that way. In his book, Gary Martin says it took about 3 years to start to feel like he could really control his brushwork. And in the section on Getting Started he reproduces some feathered lines for practice.

"Practice them over and over again until you're sick of doing them - then do some more!"

The nice thing about these is, you can print them out and copy them, so that even if you're not in the middle of an inking project currently, you can at least make yourself do 10 minutes of practice every day. You can also use them to practice inking on the tablet, or warm yourself up before tackling your next page.

Here is an inking practice from a couple of weeks ago

And here is a page I made today:

I encourage you to check out the book, and then just print out a bunch of scans of his practice lines, in light grey, and copy them as exactly as you can. Go slow, and do as good and as patient of a job as you can. The results might surprise you.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Process - A New Project, and New Processes on an Old Project

I've been in discussion with a local writer about re-working one of his unpublished novels into a comic, so I thought I'd try and track some of the progress that goes into building a new project. I've been working on some sketches of the main characters, and at this point I think I have enough that I can bring them back to the author for discussion. If we can settle on a look for the book and the characters, he's going to re-work it as a script.

In the meantime, my other comic project is nearing completion of the first issue, and among the laundry list of edits, I've got to re-draw three pages. Which makes this a great opportunity to refine the process.

I work up thumbnails on paper and then develop them into these roughs for critique.

It takes maybe half an hour of thought and sketching on scratch paper, then another hour of drawing on the tablet.

Then I can quickly email them to my writers to make sure that the dialog is flowing, and that the action is clear. For a larger book, I can print out all of the roughs, lay them out, and make changes easily, before moving on to refining the drawings and inking the finished pieces.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Required Viewing - 4 Artists Paint A Tree

Walt Disney introduces 4 of his animators, first discussing their styles, using Sleeping Beauty as an example - check out those studios - and then each artist narrates their process as the four of them paint the same tree.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

A Birthday Gift - For a Friend.

Here's a little project I've been working on. There are still a few bits I need to clean up - erasing the pencil sketches and some white-outs, but it's almost finished!

Still trying to discover the best way to create subtle shading on a face with a brush. I'm more satisfied with these than with previous attempts. Is it possible to have an inkling of what your style might be someday, even if you can't manifest it now? Or will I always feel that way?