Sep 14 2014

Think of a City

Here’s my contribution to the wonderful Think of a City collaborative project.

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The idea behind the project is that each artist participating draws a cityscape or scene that takes place in a city with his or her contribution containing one drawn element and one color from the previous artist’s submission. There’s some pretty amazing artwork already up on the tumblr. Be sure to click back to the beginning–and keep an eye on it for future submissions every two weeks or so.

If you read my webcomic, Oyster War, you will no doubt recognize this particular city as Blood’s Haven. I thought this project would be a good opportunity to put together a big overall drawing of the city that I could maybe use as endpapers for a print edition of the book. The section you see here is the only portion I colored for Think of a City, but this is only the left half of the actual drawing. I have to admit, I had no overall map of Blood’s Haven in mind when drawing Oyster War, so I had to “reverse engineer” this drawing from the story. I had to flub a few things here and there, but it worked out OK. Maybe at some point when I finish the whole drawing I can post an annotated version that shows what locations correspond to what pages/panels in the story.

Sep 11 2014

Talking Comics Terminology on the Deconstructing Comics Podcast

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I was recently a guest on the Deconstructing Comics podcast discussing my recent (and surprisingly controversial?) blog post about using film terminology to discuss comics. I’m hoping that the hour-long conversation here gave me a bit more room to make my case in a more nuanced and thorough way than in the original post. One of the hosts mentioned this in so many words–so I certainly hope so. I do wonder, though, if I communicated as well in my initial writings as I wanted to.  There was a fair amount of talk from the hosts about things like comics formats/trim sizes and people using comics as movie “pitches”–two things that are maybe tangentially related to my original points, but certainly not central. I for sure noted when discussing this verbally that there’s a lot of potential confusion related to the words “terminology” and “language.” In both my original post and in the podcast, I tried to use “terminology” to refer to vocabulary and “language” to refer to the formal visual language of particular media–but I can tell that this is potentially confusing.

Anyway, here’s a link to the podcast. Enjoy.

Aug 29 2014

A Grid of Monsters

Here’s a grid of monsters I drew as a pinup for Jess Smart Smiley’s Kickstarter book, Spooky Silly Comics:

Spooky Scary color

I really love bestiaries and things of that ilk so (after a bit of machinating about other possibilities) I decided that’s the route I’d go here. For projects like this, I like to introduce some randomness–just to spur creativity a bit. What I did in this case was use this online monster name generator to generate 100 monster names. I then rolled two ten-sided die for each slot on the page to determine what monster to draw.

The image was drawn traditionally on Bristol board with dip pens and then colored in Digital Manga Studio. The original will be on display (and for sale) closer to Halloween at a local Halloween-themed exhibition. I’ll post details once I’ve got them.

Aug 03 2014

AlphaBands Wrap-up: 26 Weeks of Music and Musician Drawings

So, here’re all my drawings from the recently-completed AlphaBands project. As is usual with these sorts of weekly drawing exercises, the end results are a mixed bag. Looking back on these, there are some I really like (Karl Bartos, CCR, Hank Shocklee, Woody Guthrie) and some that were obvious duds (Angus Young, Iggy Pop, Marvin Gaye)–with the rest falling somewhere in between the two extremes.

Also as usual, though, I used this exercise not just as an excuse to draw regularly, but also to learn some new tools. All of these were drawn and colored in Digital Manga Studio on my Surface Pro 2. I also started investigating some of Ray Frenden’s custom Manga Studio brushes. The CCR illustration, for example, was colored with his watercolor wash brushes and you can see some of his dry media brushes creating charcoal-like effects in some of the later drawings. If you want to try some of these brushes out for yourself, you can buy them from his shop here. They’re well worth picking up.

Thanks to all the folks that participated in AlphaBands–whether with a single drawing or a full set of 26–and a big thanks to Sam Wolk who was the tumblr admin this time around. I know that’s a ton of work!

(You can right/ctrl click any image and open the link in a new tab to get a bigger version.)

Jul 16 2014

AlphaBands – Z is for Zigaboo Modeliste

Z is for Zigaboo Modeliste

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AlphaBands is a weekly online collaborative project in which illustrators and cartoonists draw a band or musician for one letter of the alphabet each week for 26 weeks. See the art and find out more at the AlphaBands tumblr: http://alphabands.tumblr.com/