Sep 03 2012

P is for The Pirate Captain

My other contenders for this week’s “P” drawing were pretty easy to eliminate since I’ve already drawn characters from both of the books they’re from: Pilon from Tortilla Flat and Portunus from Lud-in-the-Mist. That left just this fella:

P is for The Pirate Captain — From Pirates! In Adventure With Scientists by Gideon Defoe

Before anyone starts giving me grief about it, please note that this character’s name in the book is in fact, The Pirate Captain–it’s a proper name and capitalized throughout.

There are very few books I can think of that made me laugh out loud reading them, but Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists is one of them. It’s the first book in Defoe’s series of Pirates! books, the first three of which I’ve read. While I’m sure it’s a comparison that the author has probably grown to bristle at, the tone of these books is somewhat Monty Python-esque; this volume even has an endorsement from Eric Idle on the cover. While all three books are really fun–and hysterically funny–this first one was by far my favorite. They’re quite short, and beautifully designed as well:

The pirates in the Pirates! series aren’t particularly good at the usual pirate stuff–looting, pillaging, etc.–but instead prefer to spend their time sunbathing on the deck, grooming their “luxurious beards,” and eating ham. They’re never referred to by proper names, but rather as “the pirate with gout,” or “the pirate with a scarf,” for example. Their leader, The Pirate Captain, is described as so:

The Pirate Captain cut an impressive figure.  If you were to compare him to a type of tree—and working out what sort of tree they would be if they were trees instead of pirates was easily one of the crew’s favorite pastimes—he would undoubtedly be an oak, or maybe a horse chestnut. He was all teeth and curls, but with a pleasant, open face; his coat was of a better cut than everybody else’s, and his beard was fantastic and glossy, and the ends of it were twisted with expensive-looking ribbons.  Living at the sea tended to leave you with ratty, matted hair, but the Pirate Captain somehow kept his beard silky and in good condition, and though nobody knew his secret, they all respected him for it. They also respected him because it was said he was wedded to the sea. A lot of pirates claimed that they were wedded to the sea, but usually this was an excuse because they couldn’t get a girlfriend or because they were gay pirates, but in the Pirate Captain’s case, none of his crew doubted he was actually married to the sea for a minute.

While I’m pretty happy with the final image here, it took a lot of doing to get there, as this pencil sketch image demonstrates. It took me four “layers” (blue, orange, red, graphite pencil) to get an image I was happy with:

Once I pulled everything but the final graphite pencil out, though, I had a pretty solid drawing:

I inked it in Manga Studio and colored in Photoshop.

Next week: “Q”…

You can find all the AlphaBooks entries to-date at the AlphaBooks tumblr: http://alphabooks.tumblr.com. You can also follow many of the entries as they’re posted in real-time by following the #AlphaBooks hashtag on Twitter on Mondays.

Aug 31 2012

Hellboy!

Here’s a quick ink & watercolor Hellboy I just wrapped up. I just started re-reading some of the early Hellboy comics. What great stuff–and so beautifully drawn and colored!

Aug 28 2012

For Jack Kirby’s Birthday: Lockjaw vs. The Purina Chuckwagon

It’s August 28th–the day Jack “King” Kirby was born back in 1917. Lots of folks will have posts with great things to say about Kirby today, so I’ll let them do the talking. Needless to say, comics wouldn’t be comics without Kirby.

Here’s a drawing I did for today, King Kirby Day. It would have been his  95th birthday. And, yeah, if you get this gag you’re old–like me!

The original art for this is for sale here.

Aug 27 2012

O is for Octavia

OK… Octavia is a pretty minor character in The Hunger Games, but she was just about the only “O” character I could think of from a book that I’d read and not drawn someone from already.

O is for Octavia — From The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Octavia is part of the protagonist, Katness’s, “prep team” at the Remake Center she’s made to go to before competing in the Hunger Games. Basically, Octavia–along with the characters Venia and Cinna–are in charge of giving her an extensive pre-games makeover. The only real description of Octavia is this:

…Octavia, a plump woman whose entire body has been dyed a pale shade of pea green…

The author, though, does describe the attire of people who live at the Capitol as being garish and ridiculous, hence the outfit.

Out of curiosity, I looked up who played Octavia in the Hunger Games movie. I’d love to tell you that I’m surprised that this is what Hollywood thinks of as plump:

Oy… we should all be so lucky as to be that “plump.”

Drawn in colored pencil and graphite, inked in Digital Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop.

Next week: “P”…

You can find all the AlphaBooks entries to-date at the AlphaBooks tumblr: http://alphabooks.tumblr.com. You can also follow many of the entries as they’re posted in real-time by following the #AlphaBooks hashtag on Twitter on Mondays.

Aug 23 2012

Creature Generator! (Contour-to-Character Sketchbook Exercise)

I’ve written before about the three types of drawing I think people should be doing in their sketchbooks:

  • Drawing from life and/or photos (yeah, photos are OK in a pinch–get over it art teacher snobs!)
  • Goal-directed drawings–things like character designs and thumbnails for stories
  • Drawing from imagination/doodling

And, as also mentioned before, the third category–drawing from imagination–is the one that I have the most difficulty doing. I have, though, come up with some sketchbook exercises that help me get motivated in this area. This is one of them. I call it “countour-to-chracter.” Here’s how it works:

1) Grid off a sketchbook page. I usually do a nine-panel grid, but four or six work just fine too. Either use regular pencil or colored pencil. That way you can get rid of the grid if you want to later, either by erasing or by pulling out the color in Photoshop.

2) Draw a random contour in each panel–again, in either pencil or colored pencil. You can either do this just by randomly scribbling in each panel while not looking at your sketchbook, or by looking at some objects around you and doing a blind contour drawing of those in your grid. I did the latter here. Here’s what I was looking at (top to bottom, left to right): daughter’s toy oven, daughter’s toy kitchen set, a Where the Wild Things Are figure, daughter’s Lalaloopsy tree house set, candles, a cat tree, my dog, stuff on the shelf of the kitchen set, and a rocking chair.

Here’s the initial image with the contrast jacked up so you can see the contour drawings well:

3) Then, basically, you just try to tease out some kind of character, scene, or creature from each scribble. I didn’t use every single bit of every single mark, but I tried to stick pretty close to the scribble and force myself to create something from the chaos. I did one a night on and off for about two weeks–starting in pencil, then inked with a Pentel Brush Pen.

Here’s the sketchbook page, now inked:

4) At this point, you could just consider the exercise done, but sometimes I like to clean up and color the image, as I did here. Here’s the page scanned, cleaned up and run through Photoshop’s threshold command. I used Image–>Adjustments–>Hue/Saturation and then the Brightness slider to pull out all the reds and yellows, which eliminated the orange under-drawing.

5) Color: I’ve had this amazing Golden Age story, Mars Mason, by cartoonist Munson Paddock bookmarked for a while because I really loved its limited and super-saturated color palette. I used a few pages from it to sample my colors from. Here’s an example:

….and here’s my final colored page using those colors:

Animated GIF, y’all! Just for fun, I made an animated GIF of the whole process. Enjoy!