Posts made in April, 2010

From SNitLoE page 68

Posted by on Apr 30, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments

I am still caught up in Spider-Man stuff and chores around the studio, so nothing new today. However, here’s a quick scan of a panel from a very recent page of Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment.

Hippies! Goats! Don’t you wanna read this book?

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Look Out!

Posted by on Apr 29, 2010 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

Okay, so I am pushing my own envelope and trying to draw a popular superhero character, not because I actually like that kinda thing, just because I want to learn from it. These are NOT YET but are GONNA BE pages 8 and 9 from Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man #58. The script was provided courtesy of its writer, the generous Paul Tobin. It was professionally penciled by Ben Dewey (who finally has the website he deserves- keep refreshing the homepage!) I have made a point not to look at Ben’s art though, yet.

Professional opinion seems to be that the layout and storytelling are pretty good, but the figures need a ton of work and Spiderman’s shoulders are really narrow. I’m gonna take some photo-reference tonight and try to get better-proportioned people and more believable poses, and I’ll post it again when it’s inked. Coming up with something to post every day is HARD.

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The Supreme Anarchist Council

Posted by on Apr 28, 2010 in Blog, Uncategorized | 0 comments

NOTE: The color errors in yesterday’s post have been amended!

Here’s a group portrait of the Supreme Anarchist Council from G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday:

Back Row: Gogol aka “Tuesday,” Pole who does not enjoy “goncealment.” “…out of this collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle, and they were the sad eyes of a sad Russian serf.”

“The Secretary” aka “Monday” “…his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right scheek and down in the left.”

Front Row: Dr. Bull aka “Saturday” “They took away the key to his face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant… Those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead… Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too frightful to see.”

Professor de Worms aka “Friday” “…as if some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse… it did not express decrepitude merely, but corruption.”

Gabriel Syme aka “Thursday” Not an anarchist – an undercover agent for Scotland Yard.

The Marquis de St. Eustache aka “Wednesday” “the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe.

For this image I forwent the brushy ink style I naturally favor and tried thin lines, artificially colored. I’m shooting for the look of animation on this one.

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Me & Edith Head

Posted by on Apr 27, 2010 in Blog, Uncategorized | 1 comment

Here are some pages I drew about a month ago of Sara Ryan‘s story Me & Edith Head. This was just for fun, sort of a diagnostic essay for the Periscope people, since Me & Edith Head had already been published, illustrated by Sara’s own husband Steve Lieber (a Periscope member). Without ever reading Steve’s original, I set about illustrating the first four pages of the story.

Even though I feel I’ve come quite a ways from here, this project was a lot of firsts for me. First time illustrating somebody else’s script. First time using blue non-repro pencil. First time using a mechanical pencil. First time coloring digitally. (Edit: the colors now appear correctly on the internet.)

It’s also my first time lettering digitally, and as you can see, I still haven’t completed that part, which is why there are no captions or dialogue. So you might be kind of confused. Here’s a little summary of what your missing.


Page 1 – Katrina has just tried out for the role of Queen Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” She’s daydreaming about how nice it will be, but the sound of her parents’ bitter arguing in the next room sours her mood.

Page 2 – The next day, Katrina nervously waits to see what role she got, and found out that she has been assigned “costume design,” a role she considers herself totally unfit for. She has to go see Gabriel Chang in the costume room. He explains that costume design is all about mixing and matching and considering “juxtapositions.” Katrina takes a utilitarian view of clothes and isn’t buying it.

Page 3 – Katrina impugns that Mr. Chang is a costume man now because, like her, he was once turned down for acting roles. He says no, and in his office pulls out two books, “How to Dress for Success” and “Edith Head’s Hollywood,” a biography of the famous costume designer. He tells her to read them.

Page 4 – While her parents put together a slap-dash meal, Katrina reads Head’s book. Edith, in a very 1950’s way, says that a wife must continue looking as well turned-out years into her marriage as she did at the beginning, and not “as if she had been shot out of a cannon.” This leads Katrina to picture first her mom and then her dad, well…

Over the rest of the story, which I won’t draw, Katrina gets more and more into costume design, and starts taking better care of her own personal appearance as well. Meanwhile, her parents keep fighting and end up getting divorced. She designs a terrific costume for Titania and the cast, and even though her parents sit separately in the audience, they’re both proud of how self-assured she’s become.

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Lucian Gregory

Posted by on Apr 24, 2010 in Blog, Uncategorized | 2 comments

Okay, so I fell through on my promise to post something every day, and pretty quickly. Sorry! But give me a break; the Stumptown Comics Fest is this weekend, and in addition to helping everyone around the studio get ready, I’m putting together my own portfolio to show editors and stuff. Very intimidating!

Lucian Gregory is a character introduced in the first pages of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. He’s an “aesthete anarchist,” and a delightful straw-man, who falls into an ideological dispute with the protagonist, Gabriel Syme, who, along with the narrator, is basically Chesterton by a different name. But shortly thereafter, the rebellious poet introduces Syme (an undercover “philosophical policeman”) into the company of the world’s most dangerous ring of anarchists!

Here is GKC’s opening description of Gregory:

“…the red-haired poet was really (in some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one laughed at the end of it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was literaly like a woman’s, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. from within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.”

My picture is not worth a dozen, much less a thousand, of Chesterton’s words, but my hope is to at some point illustrate in comics form a scene from this book, or at least draw a decent pin-up of it’s seven main characters (code-named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday). Everything I’ve ever wanted to say, Chesterton has said it already and better. For months now I’ve been dreaming of writing a story where the characters were purely allegorical and had no personalities beyond their respective ideologies, but in Thursday I have already just that.

edit: I will say I’m proud of Gregory’s gesture. My original conception was to having him point up a finger, mid-tirade. Way too Platonic. This way, he looks more like he’s shaking his fist at God!

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