Sorority Disaster
This is a silly gag that’s been floating around in my head for about a month now. Even though it’s a fairly small cartoon (5″x9″), its composition took me a fairly long time, because there’s so much going on and it has to be chaotic but intelligible. I spent a lot of time trying to get rid of tangencies, spots where the edges of subjects touch but don’t overlap, which confuse depth perception. Of course, tangencies happen all the time in real life, but our brains usually don’t have as much trouble with them then. I wasn’t entirely successful eliminating all the tangencies in this drawing – I really don’t like how the delivery man’s left arm lines up with the passenger-side door, for instance – but I like to think I’m getting better all the time.
I am in constant awe of artists who can create female characters who are simultaneously sexy and funny. As many horribly unentertaining Cameron Diaz pratfalls attest, such a synthesis is much more easily proposed than executed. One of my life goals is to be able to draw a beautiful woman making a funny face. The flecks of bloody gray matter currently clinging to my dining room ceiling are attributable to the mind-blowing art of Jaime Hernandez, whom I am only just now really “discovering.” In addition to doing just about everything else in comics perfectly, J.H. can draw a woman crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out, while still making her obviously beautiful.
This is the first non-SNitLoE cartoon I’ve scanned with my new Mustek scanner. Thanks mom and dad!
EDIT: This cartoon is now for sale on my Etsy page!
Read MoreLife Imitates Art
When my aunt and uncle saw Sunday’s blog post, they immediately realized that the drawing I had done of my father, dog, and grandfather was strikingly reminiscent of a photograph my uncle had taken of the same subject. But believe it or not, I had not seen this photo at all when I drew that picture. I wish I had drawn my dad’s hand on the back of the chair – it would be a better composition.
Also: I realize that a lot of people who read this blog also read my webcomic, but I figured I might as well post this pin-up here as well. It’s a SNitLoE tribute to Roy Lichtenstein!
Tonya Pop-Art Pin-Up!
Even though I haven’t been posting new pages during the year-end holidays, I’ve still been drawing like a maniac. I took a break this morning from inking the fairly intense jail-house drama of Kafir Shahrok to draw this frivolous SNitLoE tribute to Mr. Roy Lichtenstein.
Very exciting adventures coming up in 2011 for the Savage Nobles, and again, I’m sorry to have left everyone in the lurch. Although I hold my brush and palette in my hands, you know my heart is always with you!
My dad, his dad, and my dog.
Though my dog Scallywag is now almost 13 years old and is suffering from arthritis, she is still capable of being immensely comfortable. When she lay at the feet of her beloved, my grandfather “Grandpat,” sunken into the armchair, the two were the picture of contented senectitude.
Next to them was my dad, slightly impaired in the comfort department by his long legs. He can only cross his right leg over his left knee, not the reverse, and even then, his right knee sticks way up in the air.
Read MoreSketching in Church
Though I’m normally a pretty attentive churchgoer, two things get in the way on Christmas Eve:
1.) You’ve already heard this story, this sermon, and these songs a zillion times before. And even though it’s very important to hear the message yet again, it’s not easy.
2.) The pews are generally packed, often with people you have never seen before, or, even more distractingly, people you haven’t seen in years.
The guy at the bottom is Rev. Gene Finnel. I had really wanted to do a full-portrait. Both of Gene’s hands freeze into an emphatic gesture, fingers spread stiffly wide, and they float around like that for the whole sermon, seemingly unconnected to his body by any arms beneath his voluminous black robe. I would describe the effect as “muppetesque.”
Anyway, Merry Christmas to you all, and be sure to check out my Savage Nobles/Three Wise Men crossover pin-up over at Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment!
Read MoreGreg Punches a Scientist (mild spoilers)
I find myself kind of drowning in SNitLoE these days, mainly because I’m trying to complete the whole project on a deadline, and instead of getting faster, I’m getting slower. This is mostly a good thing, as it means I am finally constructing my figures thoroughly and overall pencilling in a much more diligent manner than I used to, as per the advice of Steve Lieber. I’m mostly pleased with results, though my newly discerning eye also spies a lot to complain about – I guess my standards are rising. Three or four months ago I would have been thrilled to bits to have drawn any of the four hands in the above panel (from page 115), but today I immediately notice something wrong with all of them.
I have a New Yorker-style one-panel cartoon in mind which I hope to draw in the next week and which I will post here.
Read MoreThe Education of Hopi, Class
The native American pueblo into which Theo has been welcomed (?) is fictional, but I modeled it after the villages of the Hopi. The Hopi are from northeastern Arizona, so placing a similar tribe in southern New Mexico is a bit of a stretch, but I have been so fascinated by the Hopi since I first read about them in a middle school American history textbook that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to include them in my desert epic. Their art and culture, the songs and dances of their religion, their groovy adobe villages that spring out from the mesas like mushrooms from a tree stump – it’s all extremely cool… you know, when you get past the miserable tragedy. And even if it would remain untranslated, I really wanted to include some snippets of the Hopi language.
I was reading reviews online for the Hopi Dictionary/Hopiikwa Lavaytutuveni, which apparently is one of the best translation-dictionaries of any language in the entire linguistics community. I knew I’d never be able to afford this sucker, but to my delight there was a copy at the central Multnomah County Library.
It is indeed an exhaustive tome. But since it’s only a dictionary and not a book of grammar, I had no way of constructing the sentences I wanted to place in the mouths of my characters. My compromise was to look up individual words that might possibly relate to my desired dialogue, and see if the example sentence could conceivably work. I was expecting “Where is Maria? Maria is in the library.” What I got were complex and interesting sentences which proved surprisingly appropriate to my story. Here are the dictionary example sentences used in my comic, which the elder uses to shoo Theo away on page 96:
“Yupáy, yamáku’u. Nu’ pay son pew Pahanmuy tangatani” – Go on, get out. I’m not going to admit Anglos here.
And which the Indians murmur while gathered around the Theo as he eats on page 97:
“Velakaana? Kastiilam?” – An American? A Mexican? (The Hopi word for “Mexican” is the same as the word for “Spaniard,” and you can see that it’s derived from the word “Castilian.”)
“Pam so’oosouik qömuit akw tsoqa’asi’y tangwu.” – He is painted all over with black body paint. (no, those are tattoos!)
“Pas pam himu son suup haqam nakwhani’y tangwu.” – He’s one who just can’t seem to stay in any one place. (This could be Theo’s entire biography. Or Tonya’s!)
“Puma pas qu atsat lalakharum.” – He is excessively skinny. (fair enough)
“Um okiw hin ewayhoya.” – You poor, ugly little thing. (Hey!)
So hopefully from these few rudimentary snippets, you can see there’s a lot more to this language than the “Koyaanisqatsi” of Phillip Glass’s film score.
Theo’s Tattoos: Ladder of Divine Ascent
I feel bad that I didn’t design this tattoo to be placed in a more prominent location. Unfortunately, at the time I was designing my characters, it had not yet occurred to me that human beings are three dimensional and have sides as well as fronts and backs (okay, that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one). So when I finally placed the tattoo of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, it was divinely ascending into Theo’s left armpit.
The Eastern Orthodox icon is based on the instructional writings of St. John Climacus (7th century AD) and the visual imagery of “Jacob’s Ladder,” a dream which Jacob had in Genesis 28 about a ladder stretching from earth to heaven. I first became familiar with the image from the tattered cover of my parents’ copy of The Great Divorce, a novella by C.S. Lewis.
Cowboys & Aliens?
Readers have drawn my attention to the recently released trailer for “Cowboys & Aliens.”
This movie looks seriously awesome, but I’m not worried about similarities with the comic you’re currently reading. I promise that page 89 is the closest you’ll ever come in this comic to seeing what might be a cowboy fighting what might be an alien.
SNitLoE Car Trouble
Here’s a pinup I did for my friend Turhan Sarwar when he won contest I was having over at Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. After I sent him this black and white image:
I decided to color it, with the following result:
Even though I’m generally pretty pleased with how it came out, I still suffer from that oh-so-common cartoonist regret: that the finished drawing never achieves the wonderful, spontaneous dynamism of the original 2″x3″ pencil-scrawled thumnail:
(when I am thumnailing pages for the main comic, I routinely indicate the character Kafir with nothing but two angry rectangles (his glasses) and a black oval (his perpetually yelling mouth.) Jeff Smith said he designed “Phoney Bone” as a child to be a character with a telephone receiver for a head so that it always looked like he was yelling – which was appropriate, because in Bone, Phoney always is yelling. I think I might have pulled a Jeff Smith.)
Read MoreReligious "Auto-Bio" Comic
The theme for December’s issue of Stumptown Underground is “Religion & Spirituality.” Though I have spilled a fair amount of ink in my graphic novel so far regarding these topics (and will spill even more before it’s done), a lot of SNitLoE’s religious material is theoretical commentary told through allegorical characters. But for this little comic, I decided to do something unusual (for me) and write more in the Stumptown spirit of revelatory auto-bio. And if other zinesters and comic artists can write so frankly about their intimate experiences with family, sex, food, having sex with food, eating their families, etc., then I can certainly tell a little story about my own faith.
Hopefully that speaks for itself, but I feel I should add one thing: This comic is very unfair to St. Teresa of Avila, who was definitely experienced in painful doubt and “the long dark night of the soul” (an expression, incidentally, which comes from the title of a poem by another 16th-century Spaniard, St. John of the Cross.) Really, the whole “the past = faith; modernity = doubt” shtick is incredibly disingenuous on my part, as I know very well it’s not that simple at all. As usual, I think it’s Slavoj Zizek who sums it best in this short video:
I quoted Mother Teresa’s anxious letter, but I might just as well have quoted the earlier Teresa, who wrote:
“As to the aridity you are suffering from, it seems to me our Lord is treating you like someone He considers strong: He wants to test you and see if you love Him as much at times of aridity as when He sends you consolations. I think this is a very great favor for God to show you.”
Again with the aridity! The desert metaphors come fast and furious.
I Use a Ton of Photo-Ref Part 2: A CONTEST
Round about page 35 or 40 of this comic, I started using my webcam to photograph myself for visual reference. Many of these pictures are deleted immediately, as they are embarrassing and weird-looking, but some of them have continued to rattle around my desktop. My friend proposed I make a contest of it, so here we go:
Root through the archives of this comic and match the above photos of yours truly to the images derived from them – it’s not very hard. Send your answers to everett@savagenobles.com, including the word “contest” somewhere in the subject line, and listing page, panel, and character name in the following format:
(example)
A.) Page 34, Panel 7, Ernesto Alvarez
B.) Page 173, Panel 4, Aynot: Tonya’s evil twin sister
etc….
If the character has no name, give some other description. If the page is not broken into distinct panels, describe what general part of the page the image is on.
From every one who responds by November 15th and gets all six correct, I will select one name at random, drawn from a sombrero. First prize will be a new, original piece of SNitLoE art, in black and white. You can request a specific drawing (subject to my veto!) or ask me to make something up. I’ll draw it and mail it to you before Christmas.
Good luck y’all!
P.S. Just for S’s and G’s, here is a reference photo I took last night for page 100. Not exactly a spoiler – I’m merely assuring you that our heroes will still be yelling and freaking out about everything twenty pages from now.
I know you only read this blog for the nudity
Some more life-drawing. By next week I hope to have a few actual comics to show you guys, namely my submission for Stumptown Underground’s Religion & Spirituality issue and my submission for Hazel Newlevant’s “Ultimate Sadness” anthology. I really need to draw my butt off this week.
I’ve really learned a lot recently from Michael Mattesi‘s excellent guide Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators, though I’m still figuring out how to put it into practice. Though I’d always though that, while you’re in the studio, your life-drawing should be as “realistic” as possible, and that you should only “cartoonify” what you’ve learned later on, Mattesi gives the opposite recommendation: cartoon/caricature “as you go” so that you bring out the most important aspects of the model or pose. In that drawing above, I deliberately widened the trunk of the body by about 20%, just to emphasize the smug, masculine confidence of the pose. I also caricatured the face and gave him a cigarette. I think it’s very interesting how you can do this and still be very faithful to what’s in front of your eyes – I feel I’m only scratching the surface here. I’ve only just discovered Mattesi’s incredible video blog and website.
Read MoreTheo’s Tattoos: Daimoku
In March of 2009, when I was putting the finishing touches on the SNitLoE script and designing my Theo tattoo-template, I was also frequenting a meetup.com group of amateur Spanish-speakers in Portland, OR. At the end of one meeting, I found myself being proselytized to (in English, thank goodness) about Japanese Buddhism. The garrulous Buddhist handed me a business card that read “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,” and proceeded to explain each phrase to me, trying to impart the multi-layered meaning of this concise mantra. (He said “Nam” was a cognate of the English “name,” which I am now 99% sure is false.) I think a simple translation is something like “I’m totally devoted to the Lotus Sutra,” but like many mantras, prayers, etc. it’s clearly got a lot of interpretations.
I saved the card and seized upon the Daimoku as a subject for Theo’s left shoulder – already, I had felt that Theo’s tattoos were a little too Abrahamic. The Japanese script is so complicated to write, I have to refer back to this image every time to refresh my memory – but often, a scribble will suffice.
Speaking of scribbles, the only other image on Theo’s left arm I haven’t mentioned yet is a scrawled portrait of the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak.
I Use a Ton of Photo-Ref
Before I started this graphic novel in the spring of 2009, I had been very much of an “it’ll do” artist. If a bicycle looked enough like a bicycle to where somebody reading my comic could tell it was supposed to be a bicycle, I had done my job. I even think I was still quite guilty of this lax attitude in the earlier pages of this comic. (What is up with Theo’s drum set on Page 5? NOT one of my better efforts!)
But after reading (and re-reading and re-re-reading) Scott McCloud’s Making Comics (Talmud to the Understanding Comics Torah), I came to the fairly obvious realization that you should know what the thing you’re drawing looks like. This revelation was later reinforced in 2010 by boatloads of advice from the artists at Periscope Studio.
Generally, a greater specificity of research can compensate for shortcomings in your art. If you just draw “a van”, it will come out looking like a white potato on wheels. If you draw a mid-80’s Ford Econoline (as I did), it will end up looking like “a van”. Set out to draw an Arizona Cactus Finch, and you will end up with a passable-looking “bird.” Draw an Ibanez GSRM20 Mikro 4-string bass, and hopefully people will pick up that it is supposed to be a guitar.
Of course, I don’t live in New Mexico – I can’t sketch an agave plant from life, or conjure up the look of a Las Cruces water tank from memory, and that’s where Google Image Search comes in. I’ve done thousands of image searches online and will do thousands more before this is all over. It’s a little tricky, because if your drawing looks too much like a photograph, people will know. Especially if it looks just like the number one image result for that particular search term. (Unless you are deliberately looking for the most ubiquitous, iconic image, like the portrait of Malcolm X.)
I’ve already downloaded quite a lot of images for parts of the comic which I’ve drawn but which you haven’t even seen yet, and some in preparation for parts I haven’t even drawn yet. Here’s a sneak peak to confuse you and whet your appetite for more SNitLoE!
