Figure Drawing with Periscopers!
I went by Periscope Studio on Wednesday night for a figure drawing session they organized. Surrounded by the greats, it was pretty dang intimidating!
Great model! Though I’m feeling a little rusty. When SNitLoE is done, I wanna get back into figure-drawing regularly.
Theo a la Theo
Here’s a picture I did of Theo and the other characters from Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment in the style of local cartoonist Theo Ellsworth. Consider it my modest tribute to this awesome artist.
I actually got to chat with Theo Ellsworth over burritos last weekend when we were both in Washington for the Olympia Comics Festival. Even though I was bumping elbows with much more famous comics artists during the festival, none of them intimidated me so much as Theo. I feel as though in this candid photograph of the two of us you can actually see the nervousness in my facial expression and posture.
Why would this be? Festival guests Larry Gonick and Paul Chadwick are both excellent artists, but I basically understand how they got that way. They practiced a lot, studied the works of artists they admire, probably read a few instructional books on art or storytelling, or got pointers from fellow cartoonists. By contrast, Theo’s artistic process is completely opaque to me. If his comics are to be believed, he basically gets inspiration by delving into some weird interior mental zone and meeting a bunch of thoughts incarnated as fantastical creatures.
This might be why meeting him in person was so intimidating – anyone else who’s met him can tell you that Theo has about the gentlest, least intimidating personality you could imagine. The cognitive dissonance comes from knowing that his mind is nevertheless capable of concocting bizarre mystical visions, and may be doing so at any moment. As he was talking to me, was he imagining tassled antlers springing from my head or little monster-men driving on my shoulders in tiny cars?
Even though I’ve spent the past year honing my “craft” by studying the Masters, and even though I have a long-standing aversion to the “Vesuvius” school of creativity – i.e. the muse strikes you and you simply spew out its inspiration on the page, there’s something I still seriously admire about this kind of self-taught, highly personal/intuitive creativity.
When I was a younger and less technically schooled artist, I loved putting little weird things in my drawings, cramming every inch of a picture with whatever quirky idea struck me at the time – sometimes without even knowing what to expect would come out of my pencil. I sort of miss that now!
(By the way, don’t take any of this to mean that I don’t think Theo’s work is also technically very good – it is! Nor is all of it psychologically ponderous – it can be very lighthearted as well.)
Olympia Comics Fest 2011
I had a great time this weekend (my birthday weekend!) visiting Olympia, WA for the comics fest. It’s organized by Chelsea Baker who also let me stay at her house and sleep on her futon, and who also draws a terrific daily auto-bio comic that you should check out – it’s totally addictive.
The guests of honor at this year’s Fest were Paul Chadwick, Megan Kelso, and Larry Gonick! Paul Chadwick is extremely charming in real life, a very soft-spoken fella who put up with our sycophantic fawning with dignity and generosity. Megan Kelso is really funny and smart and I’m mad that I missed her panel on feminism in contemporary comics. But the reason I missed it was so that I could attend the hour-long panel with LARRY GONICK!
I sketched Larry while he was giving his slideshow. Until yesterday, it was literally impossible for me to picture the man as looking like anything other than his authorial proxy, the Einstein-haired professor who narrates most of his non-fiction books. The actual Larry Gonick is tall and lanky.
During Q&A, I asked him what he thought was the proper role for a modern Marxist in the world of comics. Larry, who used to be a card-carrying socialist, gave the laudable and succinct answer “to sit back and reconsider,” before launching into a pretty weird biology lecture about kin selection. From what I gathered then and later at the book-signing, he thinks Marxism’s exclusive focus on the economic aspects of life overlooks the importance of genetics and evolution in shaping history. If this is really his view, then I think he’s skewering a straw-man Marx, perhaps his parents’ Marx or the Marx of 1970s San Francisco. And why the evolutionary-biologist perspective? Perhaps this is the logical worldview of someone whose “history of the universe” begins with the Big Bang and the Primordial Soup. I worry that a biologically-based view of class struggle can end up being even more mechanistic-deterministic than allegedly “purely economic” orthodox Marxism.
Anyway, that’s a minor quip. I’m not even sure I understood him properly. And I still agree with Gonick’s politics 1,000x more than last year’s guest, the insufferable libertarian Peter Bagge!
Spent Sunday exploring the sweet town of Olympia. Hey, do y’all remember the comic I did about a time-travelling Olympian back in May of 2010?
Read MoreKaty Ellis O’Brien Coloring Book
My friend and housemate Katy Ellis O’Brien is having a coloring contest to promote the upcoming release of her coloring book. I encourage all of you to enter it. Digitally coloring Katy’s images is particularly fun, since all of her linework is closed, animation-style, meaning you can select areas using Photoshop’s magic wand tool instead of the tedious lasso.
Katy originally drew most of these drawings for her after-school-care kids at the YMCA. Often the kids themselves will request the subject matter, resulting in some really quirky images like a dog riding a motorscooter.
Since I’m pretty certain that, as her housemate, I’m ineligible for the contest, I decided to color this image deliberately in a way that would annoy Katy. She has often expressed her distaste for the current trend in computer animation to apply photo-realistic textures to cartoony, malproportioned characters. I guess she thinks that cartoony characters should be rendered in a smoother, more graphical way. I definitely see her point. When this is done badly, it’s one of the worst looking things you could imagine.
But there are also times when I think it works, and I don’t know exactly what to peg this on. There’s something about that Joe-Sacco-type big-picture-little-picture imbalance that I kinda like, where each little piece of stubble is delicately rendered on a figure who is basically a few squares and circles.
Praise Song for Every Hand-Painted Sign
Today I painted a sign for my friend Rand’s new farm, One Leaf Farm up in Carnation, WA. I can’t take credit for the design though – somebody else created that logo. I think it’s pretty good. Logos for “organic” products are usually characterized by earthen tones and tedious images of red barns nestled in quiet valleys. (Yes, nestled. Always nestled.) This black and white logo will stand out from the colors of the surrounding booths and from the vegetables themselves.
Interesting fact about my friend Rand: the Black Flag t-shirt she used to wear around the farm inspired the one Tonya wears in Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchatment!
Read MoreA few NYC sketches
I visited New York City last weekend and was kept so busy with friends that I barely got to draw at all. But on my last day there I did manage to sketch a bunch of people having lunch in Union Square. I like the quizzical woman in the center – she really did look like that.
And this dog with a tennis ball, and this other guy.
Drawing from life is really fun, and I wish I’d gotten to do more of it while I was in New York. The city is full of such interesting-looking people, even if most of them won’t stand still. These picture all had to be scribbled in under a minute.
Read MoreOn Cast Shadows
“Too late I loved thee, beauty both so ancient and so new!” – St. Augustine
Okay, that’s a little hyperbolic, but it still aptly describes my newfound appreciation for cast shadows. I frickin’ love these guys.
Just so we’re clear on the terms, a cast shadow is dark patch formed by something coming between an object and the light source illuminating it. This is distinct from part of an object being IN SHADOW because part of it faces away from the light source. For instance, if I am performing on a spotlighted stage, the back of my head and clothes will be IN SHADOW, but I will CAST A SHADOW on the wall behind me, and perhaps my microphone will cast a shadow on my own chest.
In real life, cast shadows are everywhere, but in comics, artists often need to reduce their number to keep a composition from becoming an unintelligible mess. Many cast shadows are also distracting and unflattering: the shadow the nose casts on the upper lip at noonday, when drawn in stark black and white, has a tendency to look like Hitler’s mustache.
However, cast shadows in comics can also be used to tremendous effect in any of several different ways.
1.) They indicate a light source. This is pretty obvious, but cast shadows can do wonders to establish the time of day or the location of a lamp, candelabra, etc.
2.) They define the object they fall on. Nothing makes a cylindrical object look more cylindrical than the big ol’ black semicircle of a cast shadow. We wouldn’t necessarily know that a speeding motorcycle has both wheels off the ground unless we saw that black oval on the ground beneath it. Shadows can also describe texture – the shadow I cast on a stucko wall will have ragged edges compared to one I cast on a linoleum floor.
3.) They assist in storytelling. A shadow can function like a big black arrow pointing to the intended center of attention, leading the reader’s eye. A shadow can let us know an enemy is approaching around the corner, and that he’s got a gun.
4.) Perhaps most subtly, they can suggest moods or even themes. When a father’s cast shadow falls across the face of his son, we begin to suspect that his domineering attitude is always with the boy, as if looming over him. A tiny businessman might cast an enormous shadow, suggesting his disproportionate financial power.
As an overall example, check out this panel from an amazing “Mandy Riley” 1983 comic drawn by Ernesto Garcia Seijas:
That cast shadow 1.) establishes the light source as being somewhere outside the hut, to the right, 2.) further defines the location of the wall behind the hero, AND describes its texture as a rough, stone surface. 3.) The shadow helps clarify a rather tricky bit of stage-blocking, reemphasizing that the snake has actually wound partly around Mandy and is now facing his left shoulder. 4.) Notice that, while the actual snake’s head is facing Mandy, its shadow is facing the girl on the left. Thematically, this suggests that, while self-preservation is Mandy’s immediate goal, his ultimate purpose is to protect his benippled friend, menaced by the snake’s shadow. This type of suggestion may only work subconsciously, or it may only work for overanalytical nerds like me.
(By the way, I recommend that you check out the full Mandy story, El Torrente. Every single page is a total work of art. But bear in mind that it is in Spanish. Also, even with my limited Spanish skills, I can tell that it is DEFINITELY sexist and also quite racist. But I am getting desensitized to this kinda crap as I study Caniff, Toth and all these other dead comics geniuses. Unfortunately the best artists also drew some of the stupidest, most bigoted stories.)
Hooray for cast shadows! How many more can you spot in recent pages of Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment?
Read MoreMonsters and Dames
When I was first began drawing this comic in 2009, I was already a huge fan of James Gurney, the creator of the Dinotopia books and the author of the greatest art blog on the internet today, bar none. James very often employs miniatures, which he sculpts himself, to help him get ideas for his fantastical paintings, particularly ideas about lighting. Here are just a few examples – I could post dozens more and they’re all equally astounding:
After reading his superb book Imaginative Realism: How To Paint What Doesn’t Exist, I was determined to adopt this practice. I was barely confident in my ability to draw a human being from various angles, much less a totally fictional creature of my own invention. But I knew that the alien/kachina was going to be a big part of the story, and that I’d have to draw him many times. So I busted out the plasticine and managed to crap out this little number:
A lot of the animal’s proportions changed between the initial model and the final artwork (first appearance, Page 86), so I didn’t end up referring to it all that much. But constructing the model nevertheless helped a lot – it forced me to visualize the creature as a three-dimensional being and not just a series of lines. I brought the model with me from New Orleans to Portland in a shoebox – it has completely fallen apart.
P.S. Seriously, if you an artist reading this, even if you think my art sucks, you should absolutely read Imaginative Realism. If you are in Portland, I have two copies and will happily lend you one.
Read MoreOh %@&$! It’s THOSE Guys!
Just as one more reminder that I am not making this all up as I go along, I’d like to point out that the two soldiers who saw through Tonya’s thin ruse were, in fact, present at the Las Cruces concert on PAGE 13!!! No accidents, people. This is season one of LOST, not season six.
Since I knew the characters would have to be recognizable later, I tried to make them look “distinctive.” But since my art in the spring of 2009 was pretty shaky, my solution was apparently to draw a black version of Ernie from Sesame Street and a man with a triangle for a nose. It was fun trying to update these napkin-doodles into the chiseled specimens of military valor you see today.
In vaguely related news, I have now chosen THE OFFICIAL COFFEE of SAVAGE NOBLES IN THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT. New Mexico Pinon Coffee. This is seriously some of the most delicious s*** I have ever tasted, and I brew coffee for a living. Er, I mean, as a hobby, when I’m not making my fortune drawing comics.
While I don’t necessarily think you should order coffee off their website (that is a might big carbon footprint for a mere Cup o’ Jose), you should definitely see if your local grocery stocks it. I know here in Portland you can get it at Trader Joe’s.
SNitLoE April Fools
For April Fools Day I thought I’d treat my SNitLoE readers to a false ending that was only slightly more of a disappointing cop-out than the final season of LOST. From the writing point of view, I think we can all agree that there’s pretty much nothing worse than the “it was all a dream” ending. Don’t worry, kids, I’ve got a much better conclusion in store.
From the artistic point of view, there are two fun things about this page. I got to redraw Tonya’s bolting-awake pose from page 38. That page was drawn around November of 2009, and it’s pretty obvious my drawing as gotten a lot better.
Tonya’s head used to be basically a guitar pick with a face, which is how I had been drawing womens’ heads ever since high school. I’ve got a much better understanding of the skull now, and I’ve done a good job eschewing the cartoonist’s problem of “chronic C-mouth,” even if many of my mouths still don’t look quite right. My below-the-neck anatomy has improved too, as Tonya now has a torso and not just shoulders coming out of her boobs. In fact, I like pretty much everything about this second drawing better. And I had damn well better, since it’s the result of more than a year’s worth of practice! However, I already see things that need a lot of work in the more recent drawing -the muscles of the arm (I am still faking it), the folds in the sleeve, something about the way the nose connects to the upper lip. There are so many places where “not quite right” is almost worse than “completely wrong.”
There is a panel on this page about which I have no complaints:
Though there are many figures in government I dislike, Jan Brewer is the first politician since President Bush the very sight of whom actually triggers in me revulsion. This has nothing to do with her actual appearance – she’s basically a standard issue older white lady, with perhaps whiter teeth than most. No, my revulsion stems entirely from Gov. Brewer’s passage of the racist SB 1070 law, her inexcusable fearmongering, and her absurd and xenophobic lies. (I also don’t like her regressive tax policies, her cancellation of crucial state benefit programs like AZ children’s health insurance, or her shameless complicity with the private prison giant Corrections Corporation of America, but unfortunately none of these practices make her unique among U.S. governors.)
There are a lot of funny things about Brewer on the internet, funny videos of her getting tangled up in her own idiotic rhetoric, often to the point where she just totally shuts down and stares blankly like a moron… giving a certain Alaskan a run for her money in the race to be the most unqualified gubernatorial ditz.
But remember, George Bush also said and did a lot of stupid, amusing, ridiculous things. Neither Bush nor Brewer are idiots. And as a Christian, I don’t maintain that either of them is in any constitutive sense evil. But they are both totally incorrect in their beliefs. Bush and his ilk wreaked havoc on the last American decade, and it’s people like Brewer, with their careless alarmism, who could potentially destroy this one.
HAHAHAHA SORRY, THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN APRIL FOOLS POST AND NOW ITS DEPRESSING INSTEAD OF FUNNY.
I suppose the lesson I want you to take away is that, if your state elects (or, sigh, re-elects) a governor like Jan Brewer, you should figure out a way to impeach him or her. Failing this, you should draw a comic book where all the bad guys are beefy immigration cops/ corporate prison guards and the good guys are square-jawed immigrant rights activists.
Read MoreEdna Mode Birthday Card
Here’s a birthday card I made for my friend Tamar, who is a big fan of Edna Mode from The Incredibles. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I don’t consider myself to be very adept at drawing characters designed by other people, unlike some of my artist friends who are very good at it. But I think I did a little better here, after scrutinizing some screencaps from the movie and rewatching Edna’s scenes on YouTube.
Of course, Edna Mode is (c) Disney, Pixar etc. But maybe I could make some money marketing this as a birthday card!
Read MoreGoing Off the Rails on a Crazy Train
Though beardless Theo’s confrontation with the railroad men is one of my favorite parts of this story, it’s definitely an example of a place where I could have done more research. The problem was not a scarcity of reference material, but a superabundance of it. The train dorks of America have amassed so much great information out there on the history of U.S. railroads that, rather than choosing some of it, I opted to read none of it… besides, I had a comic to draw!
(a cool map of the now defunct Santa Fe Railroad, from 1891.)
One unfortunate result of my laziness is that the fictional railroad described in SNitLoE is frankly preposterous. At the end of the 19th century, Lubbock, TX was still not even a spot on the map, nor was Tuscon, AZ much better. It is true that a hypothetical railroad between these two nowhere towns would indeed pass approximately through the Las Cruces/ White Sands area, but why would it? An actual ladder into the sun would be more useful.
“I’ve listened to the preachers, I’ve listened to the fools, I’ve watched all the dropouts who make their own rules.” – Ozzy Osbourne, “Crazy Train,” summarizing my comic.
BADASS ST. PATRICK!
BIND UNTO YOURSELF THIS, BITCH!!!
(Before I decided to make this a comic-book cover, I wanted it to be a movie poster.)
“Larry, baby! Got a new idea for St. Patty’s Day. Yeah, I know, who can care any more? He’s an old dead saint, grey beard, lotta robes. The kids ain’t exactly beating down the doors for this fella’s autograph, am I right? So here’s how I see it: we go darker and edgier. Think “300” meets “Anaconda,” in 5th century Ireland! Ol’ Pat himself is three parts Kratos from “God of War” and one part Boondock Saint… a total badass! He’s gotta rescue the pagan princess from the coils of a cobra voiced by Sean Connery – she’s Keira Knightley from “King Arthur,” but with a D-cup. A comical CGI leprechaun? Sure, I guess that’d work. Howabout I give Marlon Wayans a call? Think it over – we’ll do lunch!”
By the way, the black-and-white original for this picture, though flawed (what’s with his right arm? You call that foreshortening?) is still probably one of the best things I’ve ever drawn. Because of this, and because I am broke as a 5th-century pagan, I am selling it on my etsy page for $25. Consider snatching it up! Proceeds will go toward the health insurance I have to buy because I don’t live in Ireland.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. I hope it’s BRUTAL!!!!1!
Read MoreTen Minute Robert La Follette
I’m working really hard on some elaborate SNitLoE scenes and a pin-up for St. Patrick’s Day right now, so I don’t have much to post besides this quick sketch of famous Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette. This guy was amazing! I feel his spirit must still somehow be stalking the capitol building in Madison, as the protesters and workers occupying the building honor his legacy by fighting for union rights, and Republican legislators trample his grave.
Wisconsin brought our nation its first workman’s comp program, its first unemployment insurance program, its first statewide election primaries, and its first state income tax. Looks like it’s your turn to lead the way again, cheeseheads. Stick it to the bastards… the nation and the restless spirit of “Fighting Bob” are watching.
Below: results from the 1924 presidential election. La Follette had 17% of the popular vote!
Eskimo Breakup
I had to take a break from my Years of Rice and Salt illustrations because I was falling waaaay behind on Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment, which is still my #1 drawing priority, at least for another 35 pages, damn it all.
This heartwrenching spread is for the upcoming issue of Stumptown Underground, with the extremely unfortunate theme of “breakups.” Pick it up at a comic store near you and enjoy more mopey, Craig Thomson-y navel-gazing than anybody ever thought you’d need. Then buck the hell up and draw something for April’s issue, which will be about “friendship,” thank goodness.
And just in case you want to still believe in love, check out the hot lip-lockin’ action in today’s installment of “SNitLoE.” Looks like Theo’s found the universal language, ho ho!
See you soon with more art!
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