As you get older you start to pay attention to things like perspective and proportions or what not. You know some of the rules, but you’re not aware of all of them. So when trying to draw like a thirteen year old, I found it hard to forget or ignore some of the rules ad techniques that I’ve spent my whole life trying to learn and master.

It made me think of a book I read recently, Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It is coming of age story about an kid who decides he wants to go to the white school across town instead of on the reservation. The main character, Junior, is a cartoonist and throughout the book Ellen Forney did the illustrations and cartoons that Junior has ‘drawn’. She did a really good job of getting into the mind and skill level of a thirteen year old. Here’s an example:

And here’s a collage of images I did for the background of the site. I think mine look a little less convincing, but they work in the sense that you understand that someone younger and less refined has drawn them. What do you think?

Anyhow, besides doing little illustrations like this, I’ve been busy doing menial work like reformatting pages and relettering the first chapter. It’s coming along. We were going to try to have things up in a couple of weeks, but now we’re shooting for early August so it doesn’t get lost in the Comic Con media blitzkrieg.

Hopefully once we get this all done, I can post some personal illustrations or drawing [like finishing A Date in Time and Space!].

But today I have some piping hot artstuffs fresh from the oven.  Join me as I put them on the counter to cool…

Inked, lettered and toned pages to follow.  Stay tuned!

Also, I should mention that Jeremy has inked and lettered the first few  pages of AMATEURS, which he has been posting on his blog.  Check ‘em out.

Sometimes I’m amazed you can be hired to draw crazy stuff like this…  Below are some process bits.

A rough sketch I sent to my editor.  Originally I had the Mayor running from the carnage at City Hall, but I was asked to focus on the background scene instead.

A scan of my inks and pencils… Usually on tight deadlines, I just fill the black areas with Photoshop to save time.

This week I felt like trying to knock out an illustration as quickly as possible.  I’ve been wanting to do another pin up of an AMATEURS character, so I did a few sketches and went with my favorite idea.  I decided to post progress shots since a lot of Photoshop work went into creating the final image.

I like the concept of this image, though I think I could have executed it better.  I’m not too upset though, since the point was to have something finished at the end of the day.

Okay, that’s a bit of a lie. I finished doing all the initial drawing of Americus last week. It’s still not ready to be sent to our big cheese over at First Second, Calista Brill, to begin the major editing process. Right now I’ve still got to clean up some panels and do some editing on the last two chapters I just finished. I thought that maybe this week I would show everyone how I go about doing that.

Since the chapters I’m working on now are sort of the climax and resolution of the story, and I don’t want to spoil any of it, I pulled some pages from a couple of chapters ago that needed some editing to show you how I go about doing it. [I apologize ahead of time for the crappy quality of the photos].

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So here we are with two pages that had the same issue – its the introduction of a new character, and it had been so long since I drew her that I had kind of forgotten what she looked like. Admittedly, I should have referred to the initial character sketch I had done before I started drawing her, but sometimes I get lazy and try to wing it…

Now it might seem like a small issue, but basically her hair looked too normal and cute. This kind of issue is pretty easy to address – even though there’s some redrawing it’s simple enough that with the help of the computer I don’t have to completely redraw the panels. Anyhow, this kind of work calls for a some new tools – I bust out some Beinfang Designer Series Marker Paper [which I guess I forgot to mention in last week's post], which is basically like fancy tracing paper.

As you can see it’s translucent so I can just place it over the panel that needs the fixing and draw the what I need it to look like right then and there. I treat the corrections like I would regular drawing – I pencil it and then ink it. The nice thing about the marker paper is that it can take ink without buckling or warping like tracing paper would.

This set of pages is kind of funny because even when I was doing the editing, I caught myself making the same mistake over again. Her hair was a little more crazy, but not crazy enough. So I had to go back with another sheet and redraw the corrections again.

Note: In the first image you can see some of the other edits from the chapter. I try to fit as much as I can on one sheet so I don’t have to do a bunch of scanning.

After I have the corrections scanned, I open up Photoshop and erase what needs to be fixed and basically just drop the scanned correction in as a new layer. Anyhow, below is a side-by-side comparison of the original page and then the page with the correction. Like I mentioned before, it might seem like such a small thing to be fussing over, but having her hair the way it’s supposed to be really helps define her as a character, though it might be hard to see it in this short scene.

Anyhow, this is what next week or so looks like for me. I’ll be doing a lot of this, and then straight up redrawing of panels that are too complicated for me to do some quick fixing like this. It may be tedious, but all this little drawing is relatively easy and each bit brings us closer to finishing.

‘Till next time!

Don’t eat Taco Bell around Michael Caine. He will cold smack you.

While I’d love to ride the Caine-Train from here to Partee Citee, that’s not how one becomes a Prince of Maine or a King of New England.  No, no. Rather, it’s time to awkwardly pull myself back onto the old blogging horse.

Here’s how I start planning a page:

Each comic, for formatting purposes, is built on a 16-panel grid.  In my sketchbook, I rough out 16 panels and quickly sketch the major “beats” of the story.  Once I’m sure my idea will fit the allotted space, I scribble in the text of the comic to see if it will fill up too much panel space.  While imprecise, this does let me know if I need to start editing down the text.

Now this is where computer lettering has helped me with these comics.  Using a 16-panel template in Photoshop, I add the text from my layout.  Now I know just how the lettering in the comic will look.

Other advantages to this method is that this gives me a readable draft that I can send to my editor.  Also, when I draw the final comic, I can just paste the drawings into the template, and presto– instantly lettered comic!  How ’bout them apples?

AMATEURS updates will probably take up the majority of my future postings.  There’s a lot of pages to draw, and Jeremy and I want to get this book to the people as soon as we can.  Unfortunately, the Fan Art Apocalypse of January taught me I don’t have time to draw the comic, and extra stuff for this blog…

Last weekend I went to see UP IN THE AIR, which completes the triumvirant of George Clooney movies released this past holiday season (the other two being FANTASTIC MR. FOX, and THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS for those who may not know).  Instead of going into a lengthy review of each film, I thought I’d sum up my feelings in a humble illustration:

I’d hoped to close this post out by mentioning a movie that George Clooney and Michael Caine had done together (we in the blogging business call this “bringing it all home”), but it turns out there are none.  Their closest connection is that they’ve both been in Batman movies.  Perhaps the world isn’t ready for the team up of Sugar Caine and The Clooninator.

Just to post something today, here are the two illustrations I posted last week with a little color to them.

Just basic flats on this one.  There’s not much to do on the characters aside from shading, though I’ll try to add some texture to that background.

I’m playing around with atmospheric effects on this one, trying to figure out what works best.  There’s still a lot to do on this, but I think it at least captures the feeling I’m going for.  Not sure if the fog looks to cheesy… will probably play with it some more later.

As for the illustration I’m working on, I’ll just post this teaser sketch for now:

Oh goodness!

Have a fine Thanksgiving everyone.

Not much to say this week.  Two more calendar images drawn. I’d hoped to have some color on these.  I’ll probably post that next week.

For some reason, I had some problems trying to draw these at full size (approx. 10″ x 13.5″), so I worked out the compositions in my sketchbook:

I then scanned them, tweaked and cropped them in Photoshop, then blew them up to full size and printed them out. Finally I traced the printouts onto bristol board and did the final pencils over those.

It’s a simple trick, though one I’m slow to use.  I guess part of me wants to conquer the challenge of drawing at a larger size.

Good-night, sweet prince;  And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Edit: In the comments, Jeffrey pointed out a good way to extend the life of the pencil, so I guess its work isn’t done after all.

An example came up in one of my calendar illustrations. It features a yeti, and when I did my first roughs of the drawing, I didn’t give much thought to the design of the creature.  I was drawing it as sort of a giant white ape-man…. sort of a standard look in my mind for a yeti… however, I was becoming dissatisfied with this depiction.  I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel on yeti design, but I wanted a look that was a little more distinctive.

For inspiration, I decided to look through pictures of animals, and the first image that struck me was that of a gorilla.  My initial yetis wear lean in build, and the larger mass of the gorilla seemed more imposing.  Still. this wasn’t very far from where I was when I started conceptually.

Then the thought came to me that yaks are prevalent in the Himalayan region, and including some of their features might make for a more interesting yeti (Just adding horns seemed like an improvement).

I did a few sketches testing combinations of these animals and picked out the design that seemed to worked best.

Looking back at the finished drawing, I can see lots of things I might change about the yeti’s design, but they’re mostly unimportant.  What’s important for this illustration is creating an imposing monster, and I think I accomplished that.

(Apologies for yammering on about the creation of an image and not showing the final piece.  I’d prefer to wait until I’m finished before I post it, so hopefully I’ll have it ready to show off  next week or so)

Here’s one extra bit before I sign off… a quick study of Mongolian armor that I did for the warriors that appear in the background.  Of course, they end up being barely an inch high in the drawing… I guess my over-laboring ways aren’t completely shaken yet.  In my defense, I originally planned for them to be more prominent.

l8r sk8rs!

I don’t have the coloring quite done yet, but I’ll update the post if I can get it done before I leave on my trip east. Which brings me to…

I will be crashing the last stop of the Punchbuggy Tour at Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn on Sunday the 11th of October at 5 pm. I’ll be reading some old One of the Johns material, as well as an excerpt from the graphic novel I’ve been working on with MK Reed, Americus [to be published by First Second Books 2012].

Be there!

And one more thing – we’ll be drawing the names of the winners for the September’s raffle and post them on Monday, so stay tuned!

(I don’t want to fill this entry with too many parenthetical asides, but Brandon’s livejournal is a freakin’ treasure-filled cave of obscure art and comics, not to mention his own great art.  I highly recommend visiting if you’re a fan of having your mind blown.)

Soon after, Joseph Bergin (another stellar artist: Hyperactive! Say Uncle Comics!) decided to ink these pencils and posted it on his livejournal.  I thought it was a neat exercise, so I decided to give it a go myself:

I don’t think I’ve inked somebody else’s pencils since college.  It took me some time to get comfortable (this was actually my second attempt at inking this picture), but it was pretty rewarding in the end.  It sort of felt like I got to glimpse some of Kirby’s thought process when he was drawing this… seeing how seemingly random lines defined form, or the way he uses shading and spot blacks.