The Hard Way (updated)

So, part of the point of this blog is to share the discovery of my comics-making method -- the "how" part of it.  Since I don't have any art training past high school (aside from a couple figure drawing classes and a half of an oil painting class for which i never really painted anything), and zero training in sequential storytelling, I will be making a lot of mistakes.  But, from what I'm told, mistakes are good, and they are how you learn.

So, I'll be sharing some mistakes.

As you may have seen from earlier posts, the 2nd Visions Comic Art Group meeting was this past Saturday, to which many excellent artists showed up with their two to four page samples from one of the two scripts provided to us.  I got in a bit late, so I didn't get a public 'review' of my work really, but passed around what I'd brought, unfinished as it was.

The first page of my two page sample was a literal hack job -- I've already posted a few pictures of it, and I'll do so again now, just so you can get a look at its horrid glory.

Oh God, what have you DONE?!

That's page one.  I did a rough thumbnail to block out the panels, and the figures and camera angles they would include.  About half the content in the panels changed as things went along (resizing for space, readjusting according to the photo references I was gathering, etc.), but I guess that is fairly normal.   I tried full sized rough pencils on a sheet of drawing paper, but I wasn't really happy with what was showing up on the page -- too lazy, too dry, too loose.  Too rough, even for a rough.

But I thought maybe some were keepers, so instead of just starting over, I decided I'd replace the few panels that could've been better.  A few panels turned into EVERY panel, and I stuck myself with the above.  

At least I was happier with how the images came out this time -- obviously it's constrictive to work within panels, and the way I'd laid things out, I wasn't giving myself very large panels to work within anyhow.  But these roughs seemed better, and gave a better sense of what I should be including.  I told myself this process was practical, when it really may have been more practical just to scrap what I had, start over, and trace the stuff I wanted to keep with the lightboard...turns out I didn't want to keep anything anyway.

And that's how I got to this interesting paneling style.

The next idea in my mind was to do a set of finished pencils, which is what I really wanted to bring to the Visions meeting, however, time for many reasons did not permit.  Even though the meeting's now passed and gone, I intend to finish the pencils anyway, and turn them into something inkable.  

So, I did this next:

lightboard...an elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.

I slapped that page onto the lightboard like so, and dropped a piece of bristol board right into place, first tracing the panel outlines, as seen below...

boom

Then, because the initial unsuitable rough pencils were still underneath those neat little panel-flaps, I couldn't just trace my desired panels straight onto the bristol board -- because i was getting two sets of pencils sandwiched together.  So I removed the panels and organized them onto the lightboard itself.

this took too long.

Then, FINALLY, I started to trace them over onto the bristol.

yeah, that's what it looked like

And now I'm doing "finished pencils" -- first finding the edges of my blacks, and then filling them in...

(disregard my bare foot trying to photobomb this pic)

...while I know I don't have to pencil like this, it's hard for me not to because I am used to inking my own work, so thoughts about that stage really start to take shape here -- "what is this image going to look like in high contrast?" I'm always asking, and that's when I start worrying as I'm laying pencils down...should this be a guide for my inks?  Or should I just be drawing like I draw?  And do I even need this "finished pencil" stage? Can't I just mark out all of my blacks with a pencil and then just ink it and erase later?

Um, technically, uh yes, yes I could. 

I'm just not super comfortable yet.  I want to be at that level, and it would help my speed a whole heck of a lot if I could just go straight to black and white without an intermediate stage, where I deal indecisively with the possibilities offered by a gray scale that I won't translate into inks anyway.

Perhaps I will try the expedited inks thing on the secord page, but for now I'm going to stick with the method I've chosen for this first page, just out of the hope that the extra attention and time invested will help me when it comes to the final product.

We'll see what happens, and as always, I will keep you updated.

===============UPDATE!===================

All right, I've finally gotten around to more or less "finishing" the pencils for the first page, and they look like this:

this is as done as it's going to get right now...

still a bit rough in places but it contains all of the elements I was hoping to get down before I moved onto the second page.  I can't describe to you how much I want to start the process over so that I can hopefully streamline things, and eliminate the redundancies that occurred with the first page.  The roughs for the second page gave me far fewer challenges, and the initial pencils came out pretty clean as it was anyway, so hopefully doing a finished version will be much simpler.  I hope to have some elements for page two down in the near future, and I'll share them when I do. 

cheers.

PB

Rough pencil samples for 2nd Visions Comic Art meeting...

If anyone is interested in seeing the pencil roughs I brought to the second Visions meeting, here they are -- two pages for Carl Doody's "Dreamweaver" superheroine/adventure character.  

I hope to complete at least one page of finished pencils this week, as these roughs are...well, pretty rough.  First page especially gave me trouble, as the script was challenging, but I am happy with what I've done here storytelling-wise with the page count to which I was (not necessarily) limited.

page one: police caught in gang shootout, mist rolls in, gang members hallucinate their worst fears...

page two: policemen look on as thugs are rolling around reacting to some unseen affliction,  they move in to detain them, Dreamweaver casts spell from the shadows, thugs are rounded up, Dreamweaver uncloaks, reverts back to her civilian identity as Aislin Adams.

More thoughts and drawings to follow soon....

in progress

sooooo...hello there.

I have been drawing, I just have not been posting at all.  Lots of legitimate and illegitimate reasons why.  At any rate, I'm trying to get back into the swing of things again here, and with the next Visions comic book art group meeting on the 23rd, I figured now was a good time.

So here's a sneak peek at my process:

Here is a look at my drawing table.  See? I've been working.

Since I've never drawn comics before, I'm trying to work out my process a bit here, with a couple sample pages we're supposed to have ready for the meeting on Saturday.  I really don't exactly know what I'm doing except -- take a story, then make it look like comics.  This is pretty much my rule of thumb.  I have been "studying" the medium over the last couple years, which is to say instead of just breezing through pages, I am actually paying attention to what the artists and writers are doing.

My other rule of thumb is to try to incorporate interesting angles and poses where I can.  It just catches my own eye better, and if there's one thing I know I dislike in comics, it's when an artist overuses really static "blocking" and unvaried "camera" angles.  I don't mean decompression -- which I actually enjoy as a technique.  But one thing I've come to learn from reading some amateur comics in my ComiXology app is that my eyes will give up on artwork that isn't trying.  Maybe "trying" is the wrong word.  Let's say, instead, the work of artists who are content simply to display renderings of muscles and boobs in panel after panel.

I've been chipping away at a retro-style title page for "The Damned," featuring Mothman and Indrid Cold, which I've posted elsewhere, and which you can probably see in the Twitter bar to the right.  98% of the inks are done for that, and I'll finish it with some lettering, and scan it, and probably color it at some point in the future as well.  I am mostly happy with that, and feel like, after a couple years of drawing Mothman, I've just begun to comfortable grasp how to draw his fur.  I looked at the lions in the first part of Hellboy: the Third Wish, by Mike Mignola to see what he did to represent fur in his genius, streamlined style and it helped quite a bit.  I'm not completely happy with what I've done, but I'm happy that I feel like I now have something to reference, and help me "get there."

The rough artwork above is for two pages of a sample script written by my friend Carl Doody for his "Dreamweaver" character, a mystical female adventurer/superheroine.  I have one page of pencil roughs done, and have to have finished pencils by Saturday.  I have been slacking, and need to jump on it.  I am hoping to get the second page of roughs done tonight, and then we'll go from there.

Working in panels is awkward for me, I am discovering.  Which is why you see that every panel on that page in the middle was razored off of another piece of paper and then taped down to the original rough pencil attempt.  It is not a very expeditious way to work, but for the moment it is a method I can wrap my skills around until I grow.

More art soon, I promise.
Back to work.

Some Pencils.

The holidays are over, and thus my last best excuse for not doing artwork has evaporated.  What follows are the (nearly) completed pencils for the first page of House of Asterion.  You can read the script, found in the first post, but the images are a bit abstracted and meant to be introductory.  Again, the panelling here is modeled on the Golden Rectangle.

Obviously the values of the first panel dominate this image, but when I get to the next stage, I hope to push the patterns further into the background and soften them with color.  Very few of the dark areas will be inked, and I'm mostly envisioning the first panel in a sort of David Mack style mixed media/watercolor.  The following panels I hope to turn into moody little esoteric looking Mignola-esque tiles.

I am rather proud of how this first panel turned out, and although most of the pattern work will be covered with text boxes, I think it really grabs the eye, and helps push it to the second panel.  The lettering is mostly Greek:  the first band of letters (moving inward from the human figure) is the ancient Greek word for Minotaur, followed by its Etruscan counterpart (the Etruscans apparently had a less villainous characterization of the Minotaur in their belief system).  The next band in is the ancient Greek for 'Asterion,' and the last band displays the Greek for 'monster,' and the modern Greek for 'man' (because the ancient Greek word wouldn't fit).

So.  With that step done, it's on to page 2, which, if all goes as planned, should be very different but hopefully as visually interesting.  I've got it mapped out already, but I won't know if it works until I put real effort into a finished pencil draft.

Additionally, I've been toying the idea with creating panelled art pieces -- sort of pop-arty -- like a page torn from a comic book that doesn't exist (or doesn't exist YET.)  I'm always interested in the ways that not traditional comic book artists blur the lines between an art piece and a cover or page of comic.  Maybe one of these pages will end up like that, or perhaps something from the superhero stuff that's been gestating in my brain for years now.

We'll see.

As for my next post, which I hope to have ready in a span of time that does not at all resemble the interval between this and the last post, I may throw some sketches of some superhero redesigns I've been playing with, just to mix it up a bit.  Fingers crossed.

Ok, coffee break's over.  Everyone back on your heads.

-P

Christmas link dump

So I had this weird idea for a Hellboy Christmas story in that haze between sleep and wakefulness, the nuances of which were almost all fully formed when it came to me, the plot of which was fairly simple:  Father Christmas enlists Hellboy's expertise as fighter of the forces of evil to help rescue children from Krampus, the germanic Yuletide demon, and save Christmas in the process.

boom.

I'm about halfway through a draft right now, and though I know I will never get around to illustrating it  before this Christmas comes, it's the sort of thing that might make a cool Christmas 'card' next year.

At any rate, this is just a link dump of the research sites in the tabs I have open.  Submitted for your approval:

St. Nicholas (wikipedia)
Father Christmas (wikipedia)
Krampus (wikipedia)
Noel (wikipedia)
Amulet (....wikipedia...)
Ephesia Grammata (yup...wikipedia...)
Magic (yeah...you guessed it...)
seal of St. Nicholas (google image search)
Medieval Christmas Traditions
Fairy Tale Channel
Who was St. Nicholas?

Also, there's an elf named Tollenbeck, the ghost of a thief indentured to St. Nick, and a few various demonic associates of Krampus.

The only thing that irks me a bit is that it's a Hellboy story and I'm not a professional, which means....this is basically 'fan-fiction.'  And that term makes me want to vomit, a little bit.  But pairing Hellboy with Santa to go up against Krampus is just a little too perfect, it almost writes itself.  A very preliminary google search tells me it hasn't been written yet, so...there ya go.

Anyway, enjoy the links.

Merry Christmas.

-P

photoplay

I have been playing with photoshop a lot.

I forgot how fun it is.  Definitely a more productive time waster on the computer than Facebook. 

here's some things:

Bucranium color test -- my favorite tool i think is definitely the 'blur' tool.  i like the stark look of inks, but i also like the ability to soften them, given the gradated look that the colors have.  I played with the background quite a bit before i looked up a photoshop tutorial on how to create textured backgrounds -- the secret? astronomy photos, as it turns out.  the new layer in the background i composited from several nebula photographs, changing them with filters as i went along.    

does anybody remember 'ditto' sheets from elementary school?  worksheets made in a "ditto" machine, before photocopiers were prevalent?  They were purple-y like carbon copies, because i think they used carbon paper.  i tried to recreate a purpley bleed for the inks of the drawing, and then messed around A LOT with background layers and filters and opacity levels, etc. 

its unlikely i'll use these for anything relating to the final draft of 'Asterion'.  the drawings they were taken from are clearly unfinished, but it does make me think about how nice a finished drawing would look with the benefit of some photoshop techniques.

it also makes me think about how finished a 'real life' piece should be before you play with its digital copy.  i am concerned with preserving the pieces of my process many times -- i rely heavily on photocopying before I add, say, watercolors or markers to anything i've drawn.  this, as well as photoshop, make me wonder how a drawing that starts as one thing might end up as several different looking pieces in several different mediums.  I haven't had the opportunity to explore that yet, but I like the aspect of the idea that is 'non-committal' to one single way of working...that a piece doesn't have to be painted, or go through photoshop, or even redrawn in ink to be considered finished, or even to look good.  Again, it's all about options.

Roughs from 'Asterion'; Phi-sop's Phables

I've been trying to do some drawings for 'Asterion' while keeping it playful -- this is kind of the point, right?  To mess around with it and then post here.  But I usually end up building up every simple project into a bloated, massive, Tolkienian epic, and 'Asterion' is becoming no different in my mind -- I'm starting to think this could be a trilogy.  The only thing keeping it from spinning out of control is that I'm actually letting this idea out onto paper, and that is helping immensely.

Also, while I was about to suffer a boring night at work with what would inevitably become a dead phone had I used it in any boredom staving manner (as I normally do while I'm there), I had to ask myself what I would have been doing had I not had a technological distraction.  The answer, of course, was that I'd be drawing.  So, I took the time to scratch out some sketches in ball point pen -- my preferred medium for most of my life.  Just some gestural little jots, and ideas for symbols or repeating patterns that I could include as visual cues and filler for 'Asterion.'  It was nice -- it was a reminder of what I used to do before phones, and before internet.  A reminder of things I could still do, if only I would just put my phone away, or spent less time on the web.

When I got home, I cracked the ol' sketchbook open (the one with NICE paper, of which I've had a paralyzing fear of drawing on all my life because it was so expensive and, well, nice).  The result was a kind of cool drawing, but one that suffered from my use of both India ink and ball point pen.  I love the way ball point has a kind of pencilly looking quality.  I love the penstrokes.  But next to India ink, it clearly isn't a true black;  the coppery glimmer was all wrong when mashed up against a real good solid field of black.

But it was enough momentum to keep me drawing, so the next day I decided to bang out a better pencil sketch of the first page of 'Asterion'.  I thought it came out pretty well.  I am pleased with the attempt at using the Golden Rectangle as panelling, and I like the way the arcs and lines of the panel drawings implicitly and explicitly mimic the Golden Spiral, winding into infinity.

Not satisfied with that achievement for the day, I wanted to make a blog post, too.  I thought this first page sketch was something to write home about, and wanted to share the ball point pen sketches I'd done too.

I'd always marveled at the glimpses offered into a professional artist's sketchbook;  so clean, tight, tidy.  Immaculate, and full of perfect first draft design sense.  Not me.  My books are a mess.  Big cranky strokes of scribbled ink across a figure's face.  Sketches so loose as to be barely even representative of anything.  Overworked renderings of body parts attached to hollow, neglected figures.  It's disappointing.  I figured these blokes must cheat -- they must have someone cleaning up their "sketches" and "thumbnails." Or, at the very least, editing the duds out of the picture.  Even if they don't, I console myself with this thought.  Happening to have access to Photoshop, I figured I'd try this method out for myself, so as to post more impressive sketches, without the blight of my artistic blunders on display.

I got lost, re-learning Photoshop techniques I'd long forgotten, and manipulating my very simple, unfinished sketches into moody, brooding images that, with a little more work, wouldn't look entirely out of place in, say, a panel of a finished page of a comic book I was working on. 

I've always been hesitant about relying on technology, especially when it came to drawing.  But the quality of these images, developed from some amateur fooling around with photos taken off of a cell phone, makes me second guess my hesitation.  I love drawing, and I want to get good at it and be better at it, and I don't want to be a lazy artist.  Yet when it comes to not just getting something done in a certain way, but actually getting something done, Photoshop seems to come in handy.  I can use help in the getting something done department, and that's what this 'Asterion' project is about:  doing something, first of all, as well as developing my own style.  That means no rules, and no self-judgement about what I have to do to get to a final 'product'.  Opening avenues of medium and technique, so I can find a method that is mine. 

So, in a way, this story, which I guess is about the perils of technology, has come full circle, and its point is this:  I should be utilizing technology as a tool, and not letting it turn me into one.

Page 1 layout sketch for 'House of Asterion'.  The panelling is modeled on the Golden Rectangle.

Detail of the first panel.  The figure is Asterion, with his head out of frame.  I am trying not to reveal that Asterion is the Minotaur too early on.  It is a challenge.

Panel 2.  This is Asterion, sitting cross legged.  The final image for Panel 2 will have his face scribbled out in a 'V' shape, or the shape of a three pointed star.

Panels 3 (Vitruvian man), 4 (bull's head), 5 (abstract sun), 6 (crescent moon), and 7 (star).

"Bucranium" sketch, ball point and ink.  The Bull-head I think will end up looking more mask-like than a living bull's head -- I like the idea of being able to incorporate skull like qualities, decomposing flesh, fur, and bits of wood, stone, or shell applied to the head.

A ball point pen version of Asterion with an abstract "three pointed star" head, and the symbol for Taurus as a corona.

an aurora of geometric patterns; this is just a quick doodle to get an idea of what shapes and patterns might be useful for working into backgrounds, or decorating borders.

Got a little carried away with cleaning up the Bucranium sketch in Photoshop... 

My favorite.  Retains the sketchy ball point qualities underneath a layer containing the same lines manipulated to be grainy, heavy, dark.  Sandwiched together, they look good to me.