Feb 21 2011

Richard Scarry: an Appreciation

Richard Scarry is the “Kashmir” of children’s book illustrators; he’s so ubiquitous it can be easy to let rote familiarity blind you to how good the work itself is. Like any child who grew up in the 70s, I had a Richard Scarry book or two. My recent re-exposure to his work, though, is via a few books of my wife’s that we brought back home with us from a recent trip to her parents’ house: What do People do All Day? and The Great Air Book. I’ve had (to put it mildly) ample opportunity to get reacquainted with his work since my daughter has since become infatuated with those books and has asked to have them read to her ad nauseum. So, a few rambling observations:

Richard Scarry is a truly amazing character designer.

Right about the time I wound up reading Richard Scarry books over and over to my daughter, I started teaching a character design class for the Savannah College of Art and Design. This put me in a mode of hyper-alertness for all things related to character design and as I read these two books over and over I came to really appreciate Scarry as a top-notch character designer.

His animal characters actually look like animals. Don’t all animal characters? No, not really. Many of them look like “furries”: a human body with an animal head stuck on top and a tail. Scarry’s characters, while anthropomorphic for sure, definitely retain a lot of their animal trappings, which is why he can pull of such a dizzying array of odd-ball animals–from goats to hyenas and everything in between.

This goat and fox are fantastic design-wise. Their faces have character and expression and they’re walking upright, but they’re still clearly animals: they have haunches, hooves, antlers, snouts.

Another great example here. Anyone who’s ever had a cat recognizes how purely cat-like those hands and feet (or “paws” more accurately?) are. Yet this character is clearly operating a spinning wheel, turning cotton into thread.

Amazingly, even within the confines of these characters’ decidedly animal-like designs, Scarry can depict a broad range of emotions. Whereas most artists would rely on a very human-like visage “grafted” onto an animal-ish head, look how Scarry is able to show the whole gamut of expressions here on a character that’s got a full-on fox snout.

(The middle image above also exemplifies another thing I love about Scarry’s drawings of Busytown, the fictional town where these characters live: his drawings make it look like there’s a near-constant low-level explosion going on. The whole town is drawn as if it’s going to burst apart at the seams from pure, unbridled excess energy at any moment!)

Richard Scarry is a damn good illustrator. Period.

Scarry’s not someone whose name immediately comes to mind when one thinks of drawing “chops”… but he’s got ’em. Click through to the full-size image of this amazing illustration of the goings-on in an ocean liner:

This is just a straight-up beautiful cut-away drawing. Every room is packed with fun, interesting stuff and he’s done great technical drawings of things like the pistons and crankshaft cams, valves, air intake/exhaust, etc. Richard Scarry don’t play; note that the four pistons are drawn such that they sequentially depict the stroke cycle of a four-stroke engine: intake, compression, power, and exhaust.

Richard Scarry has a great sense of action and timing.

Scott McCloud be damned; you don’t need sequential drawings to depict the passing of time comics-style. Look at the amazing sequence of events that Scarry masterfully shows here in this single image:

Left to right, just like reading words on a page, Rudolph Strudel crashes his plane… which makes the food fly out of the salad bowl… both of which send the female bear bursting off to the left… which prompts the male bear to run in, clearly moving left-to-right.

These old Scarry books are sometimes hilariously non-P.C.

For the time they were written, I actually think these books are fairly progressive, but you definitely catch some things that make you double-take occasionally. My favorite character, for example, is this guy, “Wild Bill Hiccup”:

I can’t really articulate it exactly, but I’m pretty sure in a modern children’s book you couldn’t have a character named Wild Bill Hiccup who’s a raccoon dressed like a native American and who rides around terrorizing the town in his “Buffalomobile.”

All of the flight attendants are “stewardesses.” All the doctors are men, all the teachers are women, and in stories about families the dad goes off to work every day and leaves mom home with the kids. Ah, the 70s!

This image is from a story from the Great Air Book that’s all about the negative aspects of smoke and pollution, but still:

Uh, yeah…

Special bonus!

I noticed two character names that are also the names of bands I like: Dr. Dog and Janitor Joe.

Feb 16 2011

Portrait Night 2/15 (Tom Waits)

Continuing with my music-themed Tuesday Twitter #PortraitNight, here’s Tom Waits. This turned out OK, but not great. I have a history of mediocre attempts at drawings of Tom Waits. Here’s one I did at a convention for a Waits-themed sketchbook a while back. I like the diaper/”I don’t want to grow up” bit, but the drawing itself is unfortunately not great. Anyway here’s what I came up with:

If you’d like to suggest a subject for my next #PortraitNight, just let me know via this blog’s comments section or message me (@ben_towle) on Twitter.

Feb 14 2011

My “Cover” of Machine Man #2

Well, it’s been up over at the Covered blog for three or four days, so I guess I’m safe to go ahead and re-post it… If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the Covered project, it’s pretty simple: much as a one band might cover some other band’s song, on the Covered blog cartoonists and illustrators “cover” (duplicate in their own style) comic book covers (meaning the actual cover of the book).

For some reason, when I went to select a cover to do, I was in 80s mode. It came down to either Strange Days #2 (the one with Johnny Nemo on the cover) or the one I eventually settled on: Barry Windsor Smith’s cover for issue two of the Machine Man miniseries from 1984. I remember really, really loving this series when I was a kid. I’m sure it would be pretty painful to re-read now given the era it was written in and the general plot of the story–which as I recall takes place in some imagined-in-the-80s future where everyone plays Atari all day while wearing parachute pants.  The Barry Windsor Smith artwork, though, is still really great-looking.

Anyway, here’s my “cover” of Machine Man #2 with the original below:

The original art for this is for sale here.

Feb 12 2011

How-To: Pre-Coloring Photoshop Actions

I was talking recently on Twitter about how much I love the convenience of custom Photoshop actions for performing routine tasks and I had a request to do a quick blog post about how I use Photoshop actions to get my pages set up for coloring. In reading about how various cartoonists color their work, I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is no “right” way to do it. Everyone seems to have his or her own idiosyncratic way of setting up and coloring. The method I’m using here is one that I settled on after doing art for Ameila Earhart: This Broad Ocean. It’s an amalgam of techniques that’s about half stuff I came up with from just muddling through, and the other half stuff I picked up from series editor Jason Lutes. So anyway, here goes…

This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get

First, it makes sense to define what I’m starting with and what I want my end results to be:

Starting with: I’m starting off with a freshly-scanned TIFF file of my original, inked artwork. I’m scanning this at full size (13 in x 18 in) as full-color artwork at 600 dpi, which is the highest (non-interpolated) DPI my ancient scanner will handle. Here’s a sample of what that artwork looks like:

As you can see (click on it to make it bigger) the inks here are somewhat splotchy as far as how fully-black they are and in the inset there you can see that my light blue under-drawing is still quite visible.

End results: What I want once this is over are two files – a layered lower-resolution PSD file that I’ll use for coloring and a single high-res TIFF of the line art that’s been converted to just black and white pixels. (I use InDesign later to “composite” the color layer from the PSD file under the TIFF of the line art and to output a finished print-ready PDF.)

The coloring file: Here’s what I want my coloring file to be set up. (I threw some color on the color layer just so you get the idea…)

This file is 300 dpi (I use mostly flat color, so this is plenty fine resolution wise) and is actual printed size–in this case 7.5 in wide. It has three layers as you can see.

  • Ink – Opacity 60%, set to Multiply, locked. (Opacity is 60% so I can see that I’m getting color under the black ink layer. This is important in some printing situations but not in others. I just go ahead and set it up like that.)
  • Color – Clear, unlocked.
  • White – Filled with pure white, locked.

The line art file: This is pretty straightforward. I want a 1200 dpi TIFF that’s been converted to all pure black or pure white pixels by means of Photoshop’s Threshold command.

Additionally: I want each of these files to be named appropriately and saved in the correct folders on my computer–all while preserving my original scanned file (I don’t know why I keep this file… I just do.)

The Action in Action

So obviously, doing all this setup work for every single page of a 100 pg graphic novel would be really, really tedious. So, the obvious thing is to set up a Photoshop action to do all this for me. I’ll walk you through it step-by-step. Even with all the steps expanded out in Photoshop’s actions palate there’re some settings that it doesn’t show for some reason, so I’ll note those.

First, I make sure the name of my starting TIFF is the page’s number. So, for page 25 of a book, the file is 25.tiff. That way, my resulting two files will also have the page number as their file names.

1) Resize and upsample

In the first step here, I change the image size from actual drawn size to the final printed size of 7.5 inches wide. It’s important that I don’t have it resample the image when it does so (you have to uncheck this in the image–>size dialog, since it’s checked by default). Basically what this does is tells Photoshop to make the image smaller, but to not throw out any pixel information when it does so. So, the printed size of the image is getting smaller, but the DPI is getting higher as a result. Imagine smushing up a loaf of Wonder bread; it gets smaller, but denser because you’ve changed the size of it but not thrown out any material.

In the next step (also in the “Image Size” dialog) all I’m doing is changing the DPI to 1200. Since the “smushed up” DPI is around 1000, what I’m doing here is called upsampling–and it’s something you usually don’t want to ever do. Basically, you’re telling Photoshop to just make up pixel information that’s not really there. Given what’s going to happen to this image in a few steps, though, we can get away with it.

2) Get rid of the blue underdrawing and change to CMYK

The first part here looks complicated, but really all it’s doing is going to image–>adjustments–>hue/saturation and turning the brightness of the Cyans up to 100, effectively erasing all the light blue underdrawing. Then I convert the image to CMYK since it’s (presumably) going to be printed at some point in the future.

3) Generate and save the line art TIFF

Again, this looks like a lot of complicated stuff, but it’s really not. First, I’m using the Threshold command to change everything on the page either to pure black pixels or pure white pixels. I’ve done this by eye manually with the slider enough to know that 148 is in the neighborhood of what I need to mimic my linework as it looks on the physical original page.

At this point, though, there’s a problem: when you use Threshold on a CMYK image, Photoshop changes things to CMYK black which (as you can see above) is C, M, and Y of zero… and K (black) of 100. That winds up being a murky-looking black and it’s not a good color of black to print with, so I need to change all the black on the page to what’s known as “rich black.” You can Google for more info on that, but in the step labeled “color range” above, I’m selecting all the CMYK black (which is all the black on the page at this point), then in the “set foreground color” step I’m changing the foreground color to a rich black, and finally in the “fill” step I’m replacing all that CMYK black with the rich black.

Edit: Since originally writing this post, I’ve eliminated the above step. The line art should remain as a 0/0/0/100 black, since the image winds up being “superblacked” (meaning: all areas in the color layer under the line art get filled in with a 60/40/40/0 undercolor) at the very end of the process. The 0/0/0/100 black layer over the 60/40/40/0 superblack on the color layer creates line art that’s 60/40/40/100, a “rich black.”)

In the last two steps you see here, I’m deselecting and then saving the file as it stands now as a TIFF in the “ink” subdirectory. That’s one of the two files I want to end up with. Now…

4) Start making the coloring file

So here, I’m into the image–>size dialog again. I’ll I’ve done is change the dpi from 1200 to 300. (The whole point for me, by the way, of having a separate file to color with is that my computer will really grind to a halt if I start making Photoshop do work on a multi-layered 1200 dpi file. Maybe with some new fancy computer you wouldn’t even have to bother?) Note, though, that not only is it resampling the image here but it’s using the non-default interpolation method “nearest neighbor.” What this does is makes sure that as Photoshop changes the file it’s not anti-aliasing anything–it’s keeping all the pixels either pure black or pure white.

5) Set up coloring layers

There are a lot of steps here, but all I’m doing is setting up my layers. I call the first one “ink” and set its opacity to 60% and set it to Multipy. (Looks like I made a mistake and accidentally set it to 6% first… I should delete that step.) Similarly, I’m just creating my color layer, labeling it and positioning it behind the ink layer… then making my background layer, labeling it white, filling it with white, and then moving it to the back.

Finally I save this layered file in a the “color” subdirectory and close the original scanned TIFF file. Note that when I recorded this action originally, I answered “no” when Photoshop gave me the old “do you want to save your changes” dialog. That way, my original scanned TIFF remains looking just like it looked at the beginning–and I’ve got the two other files saved in their respective folders as well.

See it go!

So, here’s what it looks like in action (you should probably click through to YouTube to see it a little bigger):

For what it’s worth, you’re welcome to download the action itself as an .ATN file that you can import into your own Photoshop actions set: OW_setup.atn. Note though that this won’t work right out of the box since the directory paths used in the “save” steps on my computer won’t match those on your own computer. (Also I’m using a 7.5 in page width, which you probably aren’t.) You can easily modify these–search for “edit Photoshop actions” and you’ll find plenty of tutorials–but you’ll probably want to build your own pre-coloring setup action yourself–one that’s particular to your own coloring method.

Feb 11 2011

Portrait Night 2/07 (Nick Cave)

Well, I’m obviously slacking off on blog postings since the last thing I posted was also from my Twitter #PortraitNight.. but, here’s another one. This time, my subject is the young Nick Cave. I made a conscious decision last week not to choose a musician, but this week I’m back in music-land again:

Here’s the original non-Photoshoped drawing from my sketchbook:

And, finally, the photo I used for reference. This is from Henry Rollins’s book Get in the Van: