Almost done. But instead... Anecdotes!

Today I am starting the second to last page of my book. And that feels good. I have to keep reminding myself that I still have to iron out the writing, draw the covers and inserts, and fix whatever mistakes in panels that I feel are unworthy of publishing. But still, it's very exciting. Since I don't post very often though, I will share a few anecdotes about art instead, and not rehash my entire previous post about milestones.

A New Brush For Eric
One of my precious tech pens (my smallest and most precious actually) recently broke on me and I learned a few lessons.

One. When your tech pens clog, do not become frustrated with them and resort to violence, even if they already may be permanently destroyed. If you destroy them, you will never know.

Two. Tech pens are the most expensive drawing implements money can buy. There is a chance that you could find even more expensive brushes made from the hairs of moogle pom-poms, but I wouldn't know where to buy them. ( I hear it takes one hundred moogles poms to make a single brush.) So given that, brushes (even the best) are cheaper, not being discontinued anytime soon, and do not need to be attained from Europe via e-bay.

Three. Brushes are hard to use. They require focus and concentration, but they can produce lovely effects. I first decided to make the switch to avoid having to purchase another tiny tech pen that would only break. However, I have decided I would like to fully integrate brushwork into my style so that I can use a brush for those fine details, which tech pens are too costly to afford, as well as for more organic forms. Ideally I would like to transition to using brushes entirely for my figures and natural subjects and tech pens for manufactured materials such as buildings, and machines, as well as for textures. Stippling is almost impossible with a brush, and quite pointless when you have tech pens.

Work takes time.
Did you know that when you are working forty hours a week, you cannot be drawing during those same hours? Somehow I had forgotten this. Now that I am again gainfully employed (yay!) I am remembering how much time that a job consumes. If you have somehow forgotten how much time a full time job takes, I will take it upon myself to remind you.

It takes a lot of time.

About forty hours a week actually! They call it full time because it is full and not part. The result of this has been that I am now again struggling forward on my book at a working man's pace, and not flying along at three pages a week, as I managed to do for one glorious week of my unemployment (the one week when I was not actively looking for work).

Words on Pages. A Perspective Lesson!
I Do not normally trace images into my comic. I feel that doing so clashes with the flow of images that are otherwise run through the filters of your mind and hands. The only big exception that I make with any kind of regularity is text. Creating text fonts, and calligraphy are two massive undertakings in and of themselves, and are also disjunct skills from illustration in many ways. I resort to tracing text into panels at times because it allows me to preserve the identity of a specific font while giving me the control to micromanage the font to suit my needs exactly.

I recently had an instance in my comic where I wanted to have a label attached to a file that was laying flat on a desk in perspective. To do this properly I would have to trace the letters. But how to put them into perspective? I first designed the stamped seal in Illustrator, then printed the stamp out so I could lay the piece of paper flat on my desk and take a photo of it from the appropriate height. I then brought the image into Photoshop and reduced it to black and white and shrank it to the size of the file in my drawing. I then printed out the picture of the text, now in perspective, and placed it under my drawing where I used a light-box to trace it into the panel.

And you know what? It looks great.

Well that's all for now. If I don't get down to work I won't ever get done. And I won't have anything to write about in the future.

Till next time friends! Ciao.

Watching things come together.

I enjoyed a truly amazing artistic experience recently; something I have never had the chance to experience before. I scanned all my pages, approximately twenty at this point, and got them all cleaned up and laid out in InDesign. Suddenly I went from having pile of loosely connected ink drawings to having a nearly completed book. And there it was in front of me, the page spreads opened wide like the welcoming arms of a long lost friend. As I scrolled through the pages it really struck me for the first time how much work was sitting in front of me. Each of these pages takes me somewhere between twenty and forty hours of work (forty is a very unlucky page, twenty is the goal that I'm working towards for all my pages) and there they all were, starting to look like something that might get finished someday.

Some context is in order to explain how this experience had never come about before. About six years ago I wound up putting together thirty of more pages of work of comic strips for a newspaper comic that I created. They were roughly connected and certainly never put together into any kind of a book. During college I had a number of classes with large portfolios of work that were almost entirely unrelated except that they were mostly done in the same medium. I suppose finishing a sketchbook does also contain some of that same satisfaction but it isn't nearly the same in terms of impact. And late in my college career I completed forty or more pages of work for a web comic that I created which has now also gone the way of the dinosaur. It also was never collected into a book of any length, although looking back on it there was a lot there that I am still proud of. But still, it had no real plot structure. There was a small story arc contained in those pages and I suppose if we want to stretch our imaginations we could all play pretend together that there was a complete thought in there, but without the help of a certain someone I don't know if even I am that creative.

So why all this backstory? Simply to illustrate the point that, until now, I had not worked on a project for this long that had this much focus, and now that I'm approaching a truly significant milestone it is really quite rewarding to have stuck it out. Seeing those spreads is what brought it on home to me and I wanted to share that.

I'm not there yet though, so you can expect that by sometime next month I'll have noticed that I haven't posted for a while and I'll come back and give you an update on how it all comes together.

Momentum

I must admit that I expected the results of my hiatus from drawing to be more drastic than they were. Please do not misunderstand me, I am not complaining because I didn't lose all of the ground I have worked so hard to gain. Still, on some level you could say that expectations were disappointed.

This is a bit of a hard feeling to define, but I think that I will go ahead and try anyways. We all want our lives to be epic. I mean, people in general want to feel that what they do is an accomplishment. That somehow they have overcome insurmountable odds to do something truly noteworthy. I am no exception to this rule. So I must confess that, not only do I find illustration to be challenging and at times brutally difficult, I want it to be challenging and brutally difficult. As a result of this, and also because I have experienced this in the past, I expected to have a lot of ground to make up when I picked up my pens again. And I didn't really.

So why be disappointed?

Well in part because I feel robbed of the epic struggle that I was sure was going to ensue, but also because I still did lose something, albeit less tangible, that I will still have to struggle to regain and it isn't an epic battle. It's more like overcoming the desire to hit the snooze one more time. Now I grant you that this isn't easy some mornings, but it also rarely brings the same satisfaction you get from the end of a long bear hunt.

Sitting with sweat dripping down your naked chest, covered in war paint and blood, you pull your hand made spear out of the stained, matted fur of the grizzly's throat and you feel the first shudders of the adrenaline high stealing your legs out from under you. You laugh, confident and reassured in your masculinity.

Instead of an epic struggle I have simply lost the momentum that takes so many small efforts of will to gain. It isn't that I have slid backward, I simply have to redo all the work that it took to go forward. Perhaps I should be happy that I have reached a milestone in my journey that marks a real, significant step towards professionalism in art, but right now I still want to hit that snooze button one more time.

(Languidly throws off the sheets.)

Sigh. Time to get to work.

Getting into the swing of things.

For the moment, we will lay aside the fundamentals of page development and look at some of the issues that I have to deal with in the creation of individual pages. Right now the biggest issue facing me is getting back into the swing of things. A bout of unemployment and a long job search have made some alterations to my list of priorities over the last couple months, and as a result I haven't done a lot of work on the actual production of comics. Now, with uncertainties looming ahead I pick up my pen and sit down to work on my comic. But as I put my hand to the paper, I falter. Something is wrong.

My art muscles have atrophied.

Yes, that's right. My art muscles. And you to, just like me, have art muscles that need working out if you want them to stay in shape. Any long period that passes without a substantial amount of time being spent on the creation of art results in a temporary loss of the progress you have made over your developing career as an artist. Your muscles grow weak and frail and naught can restore them but a healthy program of steady drawing, or perhaps the promise of a trip to a mysterious chocolate factory.

Learning to draw takes time and practice and even after you make progress you can't stop because, unlike a bike, you can't just hop back on and ride. It is a use-it-or-lose-it skill, and it doesn't take long for your muscles to weaken. My next few posts will focus on the rehab program I set for myself so that you can follow along from home on a miraculous journey of heart, determination, and self-discovery.

A few words about inking before we move on to annecdotes.

I'd like to take a few words to talk about the process of inking before we move away from a strictly linear approach to discussing the creative process. Thus far I have been trying to cover the process involved in creating a single page from start to finish. Inking, at least for now, will be the last chapter in this saga.

Inking is for me the longest and most involved stage of the process. It involves a good deal of precision in the hand and eye as well as focus of mind. There are a lot of choices that I make in deciding which lines to keep and which lines to throw away. Those choices ultimately determine whether or not the drawing will succeed. Success is a combination of two factors. The first is maintaining the spontaneity and energy of the sketch. The second involves adding stability to the composition by making some tough decisions about where to place your solid blacks. Lets look at maintaining the sketch in more detail first.

Maintaining the sketch means moving quickly with your instruments in some cases, in order to keep the variety of line width necessary for visual energy, and in others not making any lines at all. In some cases lines can be omitted entirely because the form is suggested by other parts of the composition. This is the hardest thing for me to do in any specific drawing. I like closed forms. They are neat and orderly.

It makes it easy for me to color within the lines.

It is also boring. Open forms imply the lighting and atmosphere that mesh together all of the distinct forms we see into a single impression that we call vision. It adds a layer of realism. Also where light "washes out" the lines it leaves room for our imagination to fill in the details and breaks the hard paths of lines that our eyes will imprison themselves to if we let them.

Leaving room for the imagination is also one of the primary benefits of large areas of solid black. Solid black is intimidating because, especially with ink, it is final. Absolute. But it is also one of the benefits that ink gives you that you cannot achieve with pencils or chalks. It is a two-edged sword because, once down on the page it cannot be revoked and the contrast is creates cannot be ignored. But that contrast is exactly what adds visual interest to the composition as a whole. Remember as a comic artist you have to think about the compositional sense of all the panels, not just the one. And, as I mentioned earlier another of its primary benefits is that it is impenetrable to the physiological eye, but not to the psychological eye; the minds eye. This leaves the reader's imagination to fill in all the details contained within the void, and as an added bonus the details you add with your own eye are usually better than anything the artist can portray.

If I cared about the "avant garde" I would tell you that this encourages reader participation and makes the creative process a shared experience ultimately resulting in the death of the author.

But I don't care about the avant garde.

Actually sketchy business this time.

When sketching I prefer mechanical pencils to wooden pencils because the sketch itself is not the finished product. My only real requirement of my implement is that it be sharp and mechanical pencils are good for that sort of thing. I start with some light establishing lines just to get some marks down on the paper. The hardest part of any stage of drawing is to get over breaking the visual tranquility of that smooth white sea of paper. Once this is done the image begins to take shape and it becomes easier to do your thinking on the paper.

The early stages of the drawing are also the place to introduce perspective. There are two ways of going about this. The first is to simply draw the perspective points and lines directly onto the sketch. This can create a lot of visual clutter and is only advisable when the perspective needed for the scene is going to be simple and direct. The other way of going about perspective, recommended for shots with complicated angles and intricate detail, requires a light box and a perspective template. This allows you to simply place the perspective lines beneath your sketch and work from there. This keeps the clutter down and allows you to see the "clean" version of your sketch simply by toggling the light box on and off. The down side to the second approach is that perspective templates are so exact that they can be intimidating. You can often over-do the perspective in a simple view that didn't need very much perspective to begin with.

I won't go into the mechanics of perspective now, and probably not later either. People have written whole books on proper perspective and the subject is simply to large to cover adequately in any fashion here. I can recommend "Perspective! For Comic Book Artists" for those who are interested in knowing more. It has been very useful to me.

With perspective established and some simple layout lines down it becomes easier to concentrate on individual areas and flesh them out as you go. I find that the sketch, clutter or no, becomes very messy at this stage and I find myself erasing a lot. I often make the same line several times, gradually getting closer to what I want each time, shelling my target like a battleship. I then go back in and clean up my mess with an eraser. I recommended a simple kneaded eraser for this process as it leaves behind no residue and usually erases cleanly. Sometimes the drawing has simply turned into one block of graphite and I feel more like a sculptor carving away my lines like a two-dimensional Michaelangelo. The effect produced is hardly displeasing however. The better the sketch is the better the finished piece will be.

That idea should hardly be revolutionary.

Sketchy Business.

Going from the thumbnail to the sketch is, for me, the hardest part of the process. In this step I have to resolve my issues with perspective, finalize all of the designs for everything that appears in the panel, and settle on the final composition for the scene. Also, this is the part where I need to be able to draw. Since this is such a big step in the process I may take several posts to cover it all. We'll just have to see how it plays out.

There are a few ways to go about doing this. One of them, which works only seldom, is to just go ahead and use your thumbnail sketch. Every other blue moon I spend enough time on a particular thumbnail study with my trusty Bic that I grow attached to it. This can be bad.

Oscar Wilde once said, "Sometimes you have to kill your little darlings." I think that often holds true with sketches, at any stage of the process. You can easily become attached to a sketch that has a good characteristic about it but is not compositionally sound or is not right for the scene. At these times, as much as you love your pretty little thumbnail, you have to take it out behind the shed with a shotgun. It's a tough choice, but that's what artists do. Artists make choices.

Every now and then you don't have to do this thing, and when one of those times comes around it is a kind day. I take this stellar pen study and I scan it onto my computer at home. Then I import it into Photoshop and I blow it up to the size that the panel will be. After this step I print it out and just use it in place of a sketch. All of my sketches wind up on computer paper one way or another. I then get to use my three-hole-punch (for future reference abbreviated 3HP) to collect them in a binder, the nefarious purpose of which we have already spoken.

Before I use my trusty 3HP though, I usually tape my sketches to the back of a sheet of bristol board, on which I have already drawn out my panel borders, and I place them on a light-box to be inked. After all that is what they are there for. But I digress.

In most cases I don't have that perfect thumbnail to work from. In truth you can only use thumbnails in panels where the subject matter may allow. You could not, for instance, use a thumbnail for an establishing shot. The reason for this is elementary. An establishing shot has far too much detail to be captured properly by a thumbnail. Thumbnails work well for figures or actions that are drawn in close, emphasizing character and motion over texture and detail. I also find myself using them for scenes of chaos, aka explosions, crashes, etc... because what you want for those images, more than anything, is dynamism. In order to get this effect you have to surrender some control, which is exactly what thumbnails take away.

In most cases, however, these specialized circumstances do not occur and it's time to bust out the pencils. I really didn't mean to run on this long about using thumbnails in stead of pencil sketches but there you have it. Welcome to the land where the tangent is king. Next time. I promise we'll get there next time.