May
10
The show is this Saturday (5/12) from 10 am until 5 pm. I’ll be arriving fashionably late (Apparently, I can’t just leave our four-year-old at home by herself until my wife gets back into town to take over). I’ll be hawking copies of some of my books and doing sketches/commissions… but–most important–you’ll be able to get a copy of the new mini about The Empire Strikes Back that was written by Bret Parks (of our local comic shop, Ssalefish) and illustrated by me. Here’re a few panels from it:
May
07
The new Jack White record is pretty great and I’ve been listening to it (and the new Spiritualized) pretty much non-stop for the last week or so. Just ’cause I had Jack White on the brain, I whipped up a quick illo of him in my sketchbook. It’s not a great likeness, but I do like the pose.
Aside from one recent freelance storyboard job, I’d never attempted digital inking. On a whim, though, I recently purchased Manga Studio and had a go inking with it here. The UI of Manga Studio is pretty dated-looking (maybe it’s better on a Mac?) but the tools seemed to me to be much, much closer than the ones in Photoshop to the feel of physical inking tools. Anyway, Jack White:
May
01
If you follow my ramblings, you know that I love my Rotring Art Pen for working in my sketchbook… except for one thing: the ink refills you have to use for the pen aren’t water-fast, so you can’t sketch with the Rotring and then go over your drawing with sepia wash or watercolor. On the advice of a couple of folks, I bought a “piston converter” for the Rotring so that I could load it with non-cartridge waterproof ink. The results, though, were mixed; India ink just isn’t made to work in a fountain pen.
What I’ve always been after is my “holy grail” sketching pen: a pen that has the feel of a Rotring, but uses water-fast ink. I’ve bought a few pens that purported to be exactly that, but until recently all the pens I’d tried didn’t really make the cut. Recently, though, I saw this post at the ComicTools blog (a blog you really should be following if you draw comics, by the way) that mentioned a “carbon desk fountain pen” that cartoonist Sarah Glidden had recently purchased. Her review is here on her blog. Her portable set-up is pretty much the same as mine–Penel Aquapen for sepia wash over ink line art drawn with a sketching pen–so I decided to give the carbon pen a try. I ordered one from the always-great Jetpens.com, along with some refills.
So, here are some of the sketchbook results I got once I’d received the pen and had given it a whirl:
(Random drawings of things from a recent Vanity Fair – carbon pen and sepia wash & Sharpie.)
(A quick sketch of Ron Paul – carbon pen and sepia wash & Pentel brush pen.)
(Sketchbook page of doodles – carbon pen with watercolors.)
(Quick sketch of Raphael Saadiq – carbon pen and sepia wash & Pentel brush pen.)
It feels quite similar to a Rotring and it performed beautifully–for the most part–when wet media was applied to drawings afterwards. The only time I really got the pen to flub-up a bit was with that watercolor page above. In that heavily-crosshatched image of the guy in the hood, I went in with watercolor almost immediately after drawing him and you can see that a little bit of the black ink bled into the color. Other than that, though, I think I’m a convert. I’m betting if I’d have waited a minute or two before applying the watercolor the ink would have been completely dry.
The verdict? Well, I’ve hardly touched my Rotring since getting the carbon pen, so yeah, I guess I’ll call my “holy grail of sketching pens” a done deal.
Apr
13
Yep, that’s right–my Monster Manuals, Fiend Folio, etc. have all been put back on the shelf… because, as of yesterday, I’ve now completed all 26 letters of the AlphaBeasts project. The project was a real blast start to finish and I’m surely going to miss my regular Friday late-night ritual of rifling through my old TSR books to select a beast to work on throughout the weekend. More than that, though, I’m going to miss seeing the amazing array of creatures that start streaming out via Twitter and Google+ in the wee hours of Monday morning.
I’m hard-pressed to narrow down a few samples of the most impressive complete alphabets from participants, but here are just a few off the top of my head: I loved this elegantly drawn and whimsical alphabet from Amalgamated Biscuit. Project captain and tumblr-er extraordinaire Andrew Neal wound up with a really great-looking gray-toned/screen-toned alphabet. Caitlin Lehman‘s stuff is just mind-blowing. Christian Sager‘s alphabet really stood out to me as far as breadth and depth of concept goes. EC Steiner‘s work is absolutely gorgeous. Henry Eudy‘s alphabet displays both his amazing sense color and of humor. In addition to some pretty great drawings, Isaac Cates‘s blog posts for each entry were a highlight of the project. Joey Weiser turned in one of the best themed sets of the project. Jonathan Rosenbaum‘s drawings were both beautifully-drawn and often hilarious. Kelly Williams‘s combination of beautiful line-work, ink wash, and spot color was something I looked forward to every Monday. Leah Palmer Preiss produced a beautiful themed set of beasts incorporating found snippets of vintage books, magazines, and newspapers. Lupi McGinty’s watercolors were beautiful–and with her kid, AZ, thrown into the mix, they’d often turn in three or four beasts per letter. Sam Wolk’s beasts were always impressive, often showing off some amazing hatching technique.
I could go on picking out alphabets that I like for a while–and there are some pretty impressive nearly-complete ones that’ll likely get wrapped up soon, like Rich Barret’s–but it’d be easier for you to just go to the AlphaBeasts tumblr and check it out for yourself:
My Beasts:
I decided to take all of my beasts from a single source: Dungeons & Dragons. In retrospect, I think this was probably not a great idea, since for each beast I basically just wound up doing my own “rewrite” of the single published D&D image for each creature. As a whole, though, they’re not a bad-looking bunch of creatures. Here’s a full picassa gallery of them A-Z:
(Click through the image for the full gallery)
Note that there are still some good originals for sale at my web store. $12.00 cheap!
And, of course, stay tuned for AlphaBooks…. coming soon!
Apr
09
Clearly this creature didn’t make the saving throw vs. “butt-cut.” I actually didn’t have much choice for my final AlphaBeast: there’s only one non-sentient, non-zombie (I’d also exclude zombies for being humanoid/sentient) Dungeons & Dragons “Z” creature in either Monster Manual or the Fiend Folio that has an illustration… so zorbo it was.
I’m a bit happier here with my spot black experimentation–although the true test of getting used to spotting blacks will be doing so without any sort of a mid-tone/gray in the mix. Once you get a lot of spot black going on, it conflicts visually with gray-tones since both are indicating shadows. Anyhoo… my very last AlphaBeast:
Z is for Zorbo
The original art for this is for sale here.
You can follow the other “Z” entries as people post them to Twitter this morning by following the #AlphaBeasts hashtag. View all previous AlphaBeasts entries at the AlphaBeasts Tumblr: http://alphabeasts.tumblr.com/. You can also find some submission guidelines there, as well as links to bestiaries and lists of creatures.
Apr
02
Here’s the penultimate #AlphaBeast, the Yuan Ti. This one’s not one of my faves so far. Partially that’s because I don’t really dig the character design a whole lot, but it’s also because of my ham-handed spot blacks. Spotting blacks is something I’m really not good at (and never really do), but I’ve been working on it a bit in my sketchbook and I thought I’d try to throw some spot blacks in here. They didn’t work out really well, but hey, that’s how you learn. From the Monster Manual II…
Y is forYuan Ti
The original art for this is for sale here.
You can follow the other “Y” entries as people post them to Twitter this morning by following the #AlphaBeasts hashtag. View all previous AlphaBeasts entries at the AlphaBeasts Tumblr: http://alphabeasts.tumblr.com/. You can also find some submission guidelines there, as well as links to bestiaries and lists of creatures.
Mar
26
From the original Monster Manual, it’s the xorn. I was expecting the “X” entries to be slim pickings–and indeed there weren’t many Dungeons and Dragons beasts to choose from–but, I was excited to see the xorn since I really like the xorn’s creature design. I was pretty happy as well with my interpretation of the xorn at the pencil stage; unfortunately, though, I started into this one way too late on Saturday night (if you catch my drift) and the inking job is the sloppiest of my AlphaBeasts entries so far. I made a valiant effort to try to save the drawing at the ink wash stage this evening. The end result ain’t too shabby, but certainly not as satisfying as the (original now-sold!) wyvern from last week.
X is for Xorn
The original art for this is for sale here.
You can follow the other “X” entries as people post them to Twitter this morning by following the #AlphaBeasts hashtag. View all previous AlphaBeasts entries at the AlphaBeasts Tumblr: http://alphabeasts.tumblr.com/. You can also find some submission guidelines there, as well as links to bestiaries and lists of creatures.
Mar
19
The Harvey Awards is easily the most difficult comics award to vote on. Mainly this is a function of its two-tiered voting process. In addition to the usual final vote where folks select their favorites among a small pool of stand-out nominees, the Harveys have an initial round of voting during which the nominees themselves are chosen–among a pool of every single thing published during the calendar year.
Even if you’re reasonably up the previous year’s reading, it can be a daunting task just to remember what came out when and what the standouts were in each category. If you’re a bit behind reading-wise, it’s a near-impossible task to come up with a list of the best books of the previous year.
So just for fun I thought I’d put out the call on Twitter–one category a day–and see what the consensus opinion was for the categories listed on page two of the Harvey ballot.
First, though, a few things:
1) I only did the second page because the categories on that page are generally the ones that deal with books from 2011 rather than series. Since I tend to read the former, those are the categories I was most interested in. If there’s a good reaction to this post, I’ll consider doing page one as well.
2) This is obviously a 100% non-random survey. The people who received my call for opinions are people who have chosen to follow me on Twitter and (presumably) have some commonality in their tastes.
3) Some categories are more robust than others depending on all kinds of “Twitter factors.” For example, there’s a ton of Manga in the “US Edition of Foreign Material” category because my inquiry about it got a retweet from an influential Manga blogger/reviewer. Even random stuff like what time of day I put out the call affected feedback.
4) I felt weird about including Oyster War in the online comic category, but several people listed it in their replies. They were probably just being nice, but they listed it so I added it.
5) Most important: Let me know your picks in the comments, via Twitter, or via G+ and I”ll add to these!
So, here it is:
Best Single Issue or Story
L&R New Stories 4 – (Whole issue or just the Love Bunglers story) –Los Bros. Hernandez / Fantagraphics
Ganges 4 – Kevin Huizenga / Fantagraphics
Blast Furnace Funnies – Frank Santoro / PictureBox
King Cat 72 – John Porcellino / self-published
Locke & Key: Guide to the Known Keys – Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez / IDW
Spotting Deer – Michael DeForge / Koyama Press
Best Anthology
The Unexpected / Vertigo
Dark Horse Presents / Dark Horse
Astral Talk / Domino Books
Study Group Magazine 1 / Study Group
Thickness #2 / self-published
Thickness #1 / self-published
Not My Small Diary #16 / self-published
Fluke 2011 / self-published
So Buttons #4 / self-published
Best Graphic Album (Original)
Petrograd – Philip Gelatt Jr. / Oni Press
Homeland Directive – Robert Venditti / Top Shelf
Unspent Love – Shannon Gerard / Conundrum Press
Finder: Voice – Carla Speed McNeil / Dark Horse
One Soul – Ray Fawkes / Oni Press
Infinite Kung Fu – Kagan McLeod / Top Shelf
Gingerbread Girl – Colleen Coover & Paul Tobin / Top Shelf
Congress of the Animals – Jim Woodring / Fantagraphics
Habibi – Craig Thompson / Pantheon
Troop 142 – Mike Dawson / Secret Acres
Best Graphic Album (Previously Published)
The Death Ray – Dan Clowes / Drawn and Quarterly
Hark! A Vagrant – Kate Beaton / Drawn and Quarterly
The Smurfs Vol 4 : The Smurfette – Peyo / Papercutz
Donald Duck in the Andes – Carl Barks / Fantagraphics
Mr. Wonderful – Dan Clowes / Pantheon
Big Questions – Anders Nilsen / Drawn & Quarterly
Casanova (vol 1 & 2) – Matt Fraction, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba / Marvel
American Edition of Foreign Material
Color Engineering – Yuichi Yokoyama / PictureBox
The Man Who Grew His Beard – Olivier Schauwen / Fantagraphics
The Arctic Marauder – Jacques Tardi / Fantagraphics
Pinocchio – Winshluss / Last Gasp
A Bride’s Story – Kaoru Mori / Yen Press
Wandering Son (Book One) – Shimura Takako / Fantagraphics
No Longer Human – Usamaru Furuya (Vols 1 & 2) / Vertical
I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow – Shunju Aono (Vols 3 & 4) / Viz
Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths – Shigeru Mizuki / Drawn & Quarterly
Velveteen & Mandara – Jiro Matsumoto / Vertical
The Drops of God – Tadashi Agi & Shu Okimoto / Vertical
Best Domestic Reprint Project
Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Vol. 1: Race to Death Valley – Floyd Gottfredson / Fantagraphics
Pogo – Vol. 1 of the Complete Syndicated Comic Strips: Through the Wild Blue Wonder – Walt Kelly / Fantagraphics
Prince Valiant, vol 3/vol 4 – Harold Foster / Fantagraphics
Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years Vol s 9-11 – Jesse Marsh / Dark Horse
Walt & Skeezix 5; Forgotten Fantasy: Sunday Comics 1900-1915 – Frank King / Drawn & Quarterly
Bob Powell’s Terror: The Chilling Archives of Horror Comics Volume 2 – Craig Yoe/Bob Powell / IDW
Best Biographical, Historical, or Journalistic Presentation
Special Award for Humor in Comics
Ian Boothby – Simpsons Comics, Futurama Comics
Michael Kupperman – The Autobiography of Mark Twain 1910-2010
Sergio Aragones – Sergio Aragones Funnies
Roger Langridge – Snarked!
Best Online Comics Work
Margot’s Room or The Prince and The Sea (Emily Carroll ) – http://www.emcarroll.com/comic/
Bad Machinery (John Allison) – http://scarygoround.com
Sick (Gabby Schulz/Ken Dahl) – http://www.gabbysplayhouse.com/
Oyster War (Ben Towle) – http://www.oysterwar.com
Think of the Children (Christian Sager & E.C. Steiner) – http://comicsmakekidsevil.com
Eldrich (Drew Rausch & Aaron Alexovich) – http://www.heartshapedskull.com/ELDRITCH/
Nathan Sorry (Rich Barrett) – www.richbarrett.com/nathansorry/
Dicebox (Jenn Manley Lee) – http://www.comic.dicebox.net/
Infomaniacs (Matthew Thurber) – http://www.pictureboxinc.com/blogs/muk-luk/
Sacred Heart (Liz Suburbia) – http://lizsuburbia.com/sacredheart/
Le Dernier Kilometre (Julie Delporte) – http://ledernierkilometre.blogspot.com/
Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant (Tony Cliff) – http://www.delilahdirk.com
Special Award for Excellence in Presentation/Art Direction/Production
The Incal Classic Collection / Humanoids
NoBrow 6 / Nobrow Press
Everything We Miss / Nobrow Press
Nipper 1965-1966 / Drawn and Quarterly
Best Syndicated Strip or Panel
Cul de Sac – Richard Thompson
Mutts – Patrick McDonnell
Mar
19
From the original Monster Manual…
W is for Wyvern
The original art for this is for sale here.
You can follow the other “W” entries as people post them to Twitter this morning by following the #AlphaBeasts hashtag. View all previous AlphaBeasts entries at the AlphaBeasts Tumblr: http://alphabeasts.tumblr.com/. You can also find some submission guidelines there, as well as links to bestiaries and lists of creatures.
Mar
15
I may have stopped doing weekly #PortraitNight drawings on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do the occasional doodle in my sketchbook. Here’s one I did last week. As per usual, I grabbed a subject from one of the ubiquitous music mags that are usually piled up on my coffee table. The band here is Falling In Reverse, and the photo I used is from last month’s issue of Alternative Press (posted below my drawing).
The facial likenesses didn’t turn out that well, but I was happy enough with some of the brush-work to scan the original drawing from my sketchbook and throw some quick color on it with Photoshop.
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