Jan 21 2010

Amelia Book Launch at The Center for Cartoon Studies 2/19

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I’ve added one further event to my already busy Amelia weekend extravaganza.  Before hitting Chapel Hill Books for a signing there on Sunday the  21st of February, I’ll be appearing in White River Junction, Vermont at the Center for Cartoon Studies, along with Amelia Earhart – This Broad Ocean‘s writer, Sarah Stewart Taylor, for a book launch on the 19th.  This will be my second visit to CCS and I’m really looking forward to it.  Here’s the official press release:

Amelia Earhart Returns
to White River Junction

Announcing the arrival of a graphic novel
celebrating an American icon

White River Junction, Vermont – Seventy-five years ago, Amelia Earhart visited Vermont for the first time, her plane touching down at the airport just minutes from where The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) campus now resides. Earhart is returning to White River Junction, this time as the star of the fourth of a five book graphic novel series by CCS featuring the lives of remarkable Americans.

Novelist Sarah Stewart Taylor and cartoonist Ben Towle will launch Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean at The Center for Cartoon Studies, 94 South Main Street, White River Junction, Vermont on Friday, February 19, 4pm. The creative team will discuss the life of Amelia Earhart and the process of producing a graphic novel. Original sketches and drawings will be on display. All ages are welcome. A book signing will follow.

In Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, Taylor and Towle focus on Earhart’s triumphant crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, offering a glimpse at her relentless ambition and tireless will to promote women’s rights. But above all, author and illustrator leave us with a sense of her deep-rooted desire to touch the sky.

“All of CCS’s graphic novels are well researched and beautifully produced, but most importantly they get kids immersed in history by telling exciting stories” says CCS director James Sturm. “Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean is an important and inspiring chapter of Amelia’s storied life.”

Sarah Stewart Taylor was born in 1971 and was educated at Middlebury College and Trinity College, Dublin. Her first novel, O’ Artful Death (2003) was nominated for an Agatha Award. In addition to writing mystery novels, she teaches at The Center for Cartoon Studies. She lives with her husband, Matt Dunne, and their two sons in Hartland, Vermont.

Ben Towle had an early interest in comics as a kid, but it wasn’t till after he studied philosophy, joined a rock band and toured the South, before he committed himself to comics. He made his debut with Farewell, Georgia (2003) and the graphic novel Midnight Sun (2007). Ben Towle now lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Published by Hyperion/Disney Book Group, CCS’s award-winning line of graphic novels are celebrated by librarians, educators, and young readers and have featured Houdini, Satchel Paige, and Thoreau.

For more information, visit: cartoonstudies.org

The Center For Cartoon Studies is America’s premiere cartooning school and studio, located in the historic village of White River Junction, Vermont. Faculty and visiting artists include many of today’s most celebrated cartoonists. CCS has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, LA Times, and The Washington Post. CCS is a driving force behind the recent revitalization of White River Junction, bringing jobs, students, and art to the village.

Jan 18 2010

Amelia Signing/Event – Chapel Hill Comics 2/21

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I’ll repost this once we’re closer to the event, but I’ll be appearing at the fantastic Chapel Hill Comics on Sunday February 21st to do a signing for Amelia Earhart – This Broad Ocean.  I’ll also be using some of the artwork from the book to do a basic “How Graphic Novels Get Made” talk.  Come one, come all…  From the Chapel Hill Comics posting:

February 2010 at Chapel Hill Comics is going to be chock full of great signings! Here’s the next one!

On Sunday, February 21, 2010, from 2pm until 4pm, Chapel Hill Comics will host Ben Towle, artist of Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, published by Hyperion/Disney and presented by the Center for Cartoon Studies. It’s a graphic novel aimed at young readers, which was written by Sarah Stewart Taylor and drawn by Mr. Towle. It will be released this February.

In addition to signing copies of Amelia Earhart; This Broad Ocean, Mr. Towle will also give a presentation about the process he used to create the art, which should be highly interesting both to people who want to learn about how a professional cartoonist works, and kids who want to see how the book they’re reading was made!

Want to know more about the book? Here’s the publisher information:

“Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.” — Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart developed a love of flying at a very young age…and she wasn”t about to let any man get in the way of her dreams. What began as a simple joy became something much deeper — a commitment to open doors for all women. As Amelia built a name for herself in the field of aviation — breaking numerous records along the way — she paved the road for future trailblazers, women like Danica Patrick, the first woman to win an Indy car race, and Eileen Collins, the first female space shuttle pilot. In Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, Taylor and Towle focus on Amelia’’s triumphant crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, offering us a glimpse at her relentless ambition and her tireless will to promote women’s rights. But above all, author and illustrator leave us with a sense of her deep-rooted desire to touch the sky.

In addition to copies of Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, we’ll also have some copies available of Mr. Towle’s previous works, Midnight Sun and Farewell, Georgia, both of which were written and drawn by Mr. Towle. We’re very much looking forward to this event!

Jan 16 2010

Sketchbook 1/16

One of the things I struggle with the most with my drawing is the level of of abstraction, of “cartoonyness” (for lack of a better word) for my characters.  The sorts of comics I enjoy reading most tend to be almost exclusively ones that one would describe as “cartoony,” but for whatever reason (most likely a youth heavily steeped in How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way) when it comes time for me to design characters I find myself always fighting the urge to base my characters on the generic egg shaped head.  To fight this tendency, I sometimes do sketchbook grids of heads and faces like this and try to push myself to distort and exaggerate things more.  I don’t usually wind up with a very favorable usable to unusable ratio, but it’s good exercise I think.

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Jan 15 2010

Count of Monte Cristo 5-Page Sample – Complete

Well, here it is: the five finished pages of The Count of Monte Cristo I’ve been tinkering with on and off for a bit.  If this ever became a real Count of Monte Cristo graphic novel project, I’d likely hand-letter it (or at least get a font made of my hand lettering) but for purposes of getting some sample pages out there, I’m fine with computer lettering.  I just wrapped up coloring these this afternoon, so I really haven’t had much of a chance to sit back and do much of an evaluation of the final product, but I think they’re reasonably solid.  I’m sure, though, once I’ve lived with them a bit, I’ll find some stuff that really bugs me and I’ll have to go in and tweak things a bit.  Anyway, here they are:

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The original art for this is for sale here.

Jan 09 2010

Count of Monte Cristo: Finished Inks

These sample pages for The Count of Monte Cristo are still coming along, albeit somewhat slowly.  One thing I really like about small projects like this five-pager is that they give me the opportunity to try out new process tricks that I’d not really be willing to commit to for a bigger project without some testing.  In this case, since my “roughs” were actually pretty tight, what I wound up doing was: changing the roughs to non-photo blue (~15% cyan), resizing the pages to 10 x 13.5 inches, and setting them up as a PDF.    I then trimmed down some big sheets of 500 series Strathmore bristol (which is what I usually work on) and took the sheets and the PDF to my local FedEx/Kinkos.  I suspect that most Kinkos folk would balk at this sort of thing, but luckily I know one of the managers at my local shop and he’s used to (and surprisingly accommodating of) the oddball jobs like this that I often send their way.

So, they ran the Strathmore board through the color copier and printed my roughs on them in NP blue.  You can see it here beneath the ink:

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This worked out really well, actually, and I was able to reduce the penciling stage to just doing some pretty quick tightening up of things.  I made the prison look more like the real Chateau d’if–although I really exaggerated the rocky island it’s on because I wanted to emphasize the falling scene.  Other than that, there weren’t really a whole lot of major, major changes.  Anyway, here’re the inks.  Next stop: color!

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The original art for this is for sale here.