It’s a quick tutorial on how I added tones to some of Jonathan’s AMERICUS pages using marker paper overlays.  So click here to read about how the magic happens! Though hopefully, if you’re reading this blog, you’re already reading AMERICUS and know all about this post.  If not, then head on over and start reading Jonathan’s first graphic novel!

And of course, thanks to Jonathan and MK for the opportunity to lend my nutty typings to their website.

Here’s the illustration I busted out:

Shorty after I finished the illustration, I got a call from the art director, who had just got word from the news editor that the article had changed and that Kitzhaber had just received a large donation from the labor unions. The news changed in the time that I had gotten the job and finished the article!

Now we had to think of a way to salvage the illustration with a pretty quick turnaround and the least amount of reworking on my part. Luckily, with the way I had drawn the illustration [and the anal retentive way I tend to save a different file for each major step of my work] I was able to do so without much of a hassle.

Here was the fixed illustration that ran in the paper:

Not to shabby, given the turnaround time and what not, if I may say so myself. Also, I got to draw a politician eating bananas with a gorilla.

—

In other news: I’m soooooo close to finishing Americus. I have two pages left to tone and we’re brainstorming the cover design now. I also started writing and thumbnailing out the first couple of pages on my next project. I CAN’T WAIT!

‘Till next week, fair readers!

Anyhow, this week is the New York Comic Con. I am not able to make it, but First Second asked me to design a poster promoting Americus for the convention. Like the emblematic image they had me do, it was sort of left up for me to come up with something. MK had suggested that I do the image that is hanging in the library advertising Book VII of the Apathea series.

Being under a somewhat tight deadline, and not having time to brainstorm something else, I thought I’d go with that. Here’s the image I came up with.

The most critiques were having so much brown in it, which I could totally understand. In my head I was trying to go with an old 70′s fantasy poster, but all that brown is a little boring.

Calista, the head-honcho editor on Americus, had some other problems with the image – she didn’t think that the image represented the theme of defending books as well as the emblematic image I done the previous week,  that Apathea’s cloak took up too much space, and that the angle of Apathea’s head was confusing. All of us discussed it a bit, and in the end, we decided to recycle the emblematic image in the design element of the frame that I came up with for the original poster.

When it was all said and done, this was the image that was decided on to be printed as posters for the NYCC.

Something that can be frustrating as an artist is that sometimes when you get attached to an idea or an image, it can cloud your judgment and make you reluctant to let go when changes have to be made. The amount of work that has to go into the reworking can also make it frustrating. With this image, because we were on a quick deadline, and because I had a lot of impending work, I had to basically come out and say, ‘What’s the compromise we can come up in which the changes you want can happen that involves the least amount of work?’ I feel bad having to ask stuff like that, because it makes me feel unprofessional, but sometimes them’s the sticks

I still think that the original image is a good image for a poster, though I agree that the colors need to be changed and that the drawing could be tweaked a bit, but I think the new image looks really good. I wish I could see it as a poster! [If you're at the NYCC, take a picture of it for me, would you?]

—

It’s usually pretty hard for me to get projects over the weekend because I work at Powell’s Saturday & Sunday – last week was particularly hard because as I mentioned before I had two projects due on Monday. One of those projects was the cover for this week’s Willamette Week. Unlike the last time I did a cover, this went a lot smoother. The story involves the closing of one of the public high schools in Portland as part of the restructuring/redesign for next school year. You can read the article here.

Since I had to juggle this with another project, my approach to the work was pretty straightforward to try to cut down on communication & time.

I did a tight sketch/thumbnail for the art director to look over and see if there were any changes needed to get made. Because he wanted the guillotine to cover part of the header, I went ahead and drew the illustration directly on a printout of the layout of the cover to make sure I got the proportions right.

After I got the changeshe wanted, I sent him the latest sketch for approval. Once that got the green light, I blew the final sketch onto 11 x17 and then lightboxed the drawing onto bristol board. After that I just needed to tighten up the drawing & then color it. [Sorry for the bad photo]

And here’s the final image:

That’s all for this week. Americus is due next Friday! Wish me luck!

Some more random work: (a) Some character designs of nerds… for the COMIC NRRDS VS THE BIBLE strips I posted a couple of weeks ago. (b) A dubiously agile T-Rex.  I’ve been inking sketches I like with the ole’ brushpen lately.  (c) Drawn straight to brushpen… Rubbery face! (d) Donatello, posing with his bo staff.  And if you’re asking why his bandanna isn’t purple… Sorry. You’ve lost the game.

Drawing Donny got me in the mood to do more Ninja Turtle sketches.  I made a few bad ones attempting bad ass ninja poses, when I decided to just draw them skateboarding.  I always liked that the Turtles had a hobby outside of punching ninja and aliens, so why not celebrate that.

However, that ended up becoming a bunch of quick sketches of Turtles wiping out:

Nothing against any skaters reading this, but when I watch people skateboard, I see a lot of spills.

I liked the sketch in the bottom corner of one turtle nursing his knee and showing off his still bloody tooth-gap, so I tried making a more finished version:



This was just a quickly drawn ink sketch.  Some of the poses are a little screwy, but it might be fun to rework into a full color piece.  Actually, Turtles taking spills off skateboards would be a fun series of drawing…  if I can ever find the free time that is.

MK and I will be blogging along with the pages and we’ll also have guest bloggers swinging in to post as well. I’ll be in charge of blogging on Wednesdays, so mark your calendars.

I’m  a little nervous about the blogging aspect because I’m afraid I’m going to either a.] be at a loss of things to talk about, and b.] keep talking about the same old thing and bore the hell out if people. If you have ideas of topics or aspects of the process that you might want to hear about, please let me know.

The concept we went with for the website design was that it was created by the main character, Neil. If you check out the website, you’ll see that we have a big splash page that directs you to the main blog, with Neil working on the website, while being surrounded by some of the drawings he’s created for the website.

Similar to how I do major corrections, I just did a normal ink drawing of Neil, and then took some tracing paper and drew ‘his’ drawings over it.

I then scanned in both images, layered them into one, and then went ahead and colored the illustration. Here’s the final piece:

All right, even with the blogging duties starting over at Save Apathea, I’m gonna try to be posting here regularly again.

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].

—

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.