Dec 01 2010

Indstrial Drawing and Penmanship Workbooks from the 19th Century

I admit, there’s not much point to this post other than, “These things look cool,” but hey, they do look pretty cool.

I’m lucky enough be be the recipient of a slow trickle of old family books, mostly from  the part of my family that originates in the Lancaster, PA area.  I did a post a while back about the fantastic full set of My Bookhouse volumes I received, but since then I’ve gotten my hands on two other items.

The first is a workbook from something called “The Normal Union System of Industrial Drawing.”  A Google search for this turns up a big nothing. It appears though, to be a workbook for students of basic mechanical drafting (entities since replaced by CAD software). It’s filled with areas for students to construct mechanical shapes via elliptical curves, angles, etc. Looking at the beautiful cover of this thing, fans of Chris Ware’s work (and I’m one of them) will immediately recognize the aesthetic kinship between his work and this era of commercial illustration.

The other book, as you can see, is a workbook for a penmanship course. If the word “penmanship” seems archaic, it’s because it is; handwriting and handwriting instruction have been on the decline in this keyboard-centric age. The less-cluttered Art Nouveau-ish cover design of this workbook is really beautiful I think. The typefaces and typesetting alone are worth noting. I love how the “E”s are not consistent. The X-height of the “E” in “vertical” is different from the X-height of the one in “penmanship.” All the kerning here looks like it was eyeballed–albeit expertly eyeballed–and gives the lettering a non-computery, organic look.

Here’s a sample of some of the writing inside, done when my great great aunt Anna Herr was learning handwriting in 1898:

There’s something really beautiful and captivating about seeing those lines and lines of type repeated like that. (And it of course reminds me of the opening sequence of The Simpsons.) I remember as recently (?) as the mid-90s a friend of mine taking a class in typesetting that involved learning how to hand-draw basic serif and sans serif fonts.  I also remember seeing in my mom’s college art portfolio a piece she did for a typesetting class where she’d hand-drawn the lyrics to The Doors’ Crystal Ship in big four or five-inch serif lettering.  (Now that I think about it, I’d love to have that framed in my house.) I know that no one actually has to do this kind of stuff anymore, but it’s something I’d love to be able to do and I think I’d learn a lot about typefaces and typesetting in the process–both things I don’t know much about.

Anyway, end rambling post. Hope you enjoy these dusty old books.

Nov 30 2010

Illustration: Monster Parade

I’ve had monsters on the brain lately. I think it’s because a few weeks ago I posted some art from Drew Weing’s great bestiary, 33 Beasties and at about that same time I placed my own Moleskine bestiary for sale in my store. Whatever the case, I decided it’d be fun to draw some monsters. I began just doodling in my sketchbook, but in a rare moment of forward-thinking, I grabbed a piece of bristol board and did the drawing on that, which allowed me to ink the drawing with dip pen (which would have shredded a sketchbook page).  I switched from brush to pens relatively recently and although I still don’t think I’ve got the hang of it completely, doing a drawing like this is only going to help me improve.

The original art for this is for sale here.

Nov 29 2010

In Memoriam: Irvin Kershner – Empire Drawings

I’m sure I’ve posted some or all of these childhood drawings of mine before, but with the recent death of Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner, I thought it’d be appropriate to drag them out again. While there may be one or two folks out there who’d debate Empire‘s status as the best of the Star Wars films, there’s no doubt that it’s the one that most profoundly affected me. It came out in 1980, when I was ten and starting to really get into drawing. These drawings were likely done from The Empire Strikes Back Storybook, although I remember when I was a bit older getting a copy of The Art of The Empire Strikes Back and devoting myself to memorizing exactly how to draw AT-ATs, Hoth gun turrets, etc.

Nov 22 2010

To Epilogue or not to Epilogue?

I just finished writing the script for a music/culinary-themed graphic novel I’ve been working on called In The Weeds and I found myself wrestling–not for the first time–with whether to include an epilogue.  Here’s the thing with epilogues: whenever I’m reading a book or watching a film and there’s an epilogue tacked on to the end that wraps everything up (as Homer Simpson would say) in a neat little package, I always feel sort of condescended to–as if the writer assumes that I’m too fragile (or just plain to conventional) to deal with a story that has any loose ends.

On the other hand though, whenever I’m writing I always want to wrap everything up. I even had an epilogue scene for In the Weeds tacked up as the final index card on my little plotting cork-board.  At the last minute, though, I decided not to include it. The story just ENDS. The main conflicts have been resolved, but ultimately there are a lot of non-essential things that the reader will probably be curious about that are never resolved. For example, one of the main threads in the story involves a band having to decide whether to jump on-board with a successful but somewhat sleazy record producer, and in doing so betray their current friend and manager. You of course find out what they choose to do, but without an epilogue, you never find out whether the choice they make pans out for them–whether they ever “hit the big time” or not.

As mentioned before, this isn’t the first time I’ve been round and round with how much of the plot to tie up at the end of a story. The last time was a few books back with Midnight Sun. That book originally had a one-page epilogue scene that would have been the first and only time the story moved to first person narration from the protagonist, H.R. I actually drew and lettered this page and had it ready to go to press. Before I send off the files for a completed book though, I like to have one (or preferably more than one) person read through the book and give me any thoughts or suggestions he/she has.

In the case of Midnight Sun, one of the people who was nice enough to give the book a read-through was my friend Craig Fischer. One of the things he reacted to was the epilogue. As I recall, he mentioned the change in narration to first person as well as just the overall “neatness” of having everything tied up in the end via a verbal “exposition dump.” Ultimately (through the Magic of Photoshop™) I removed the narration and ended the story instead with a (nearly) wordless single-page image.

Just for fun, though, here’re both versions.  First the page used in the published book, then the original with the narration:

Nov 18 2010

One-Page Comic Strip: History of the Ukulele

I occasionally do one-page music-related comic strips for a music magazine called Signal to Noise. I enjoy doing work for them because I’m really interested in music and they give me a pretty free rein to choose a subject I like.  For example, one of my past strips for them was about the obscure but very influential local Winston-Salem soul band, The “5” Royales, after whom James Brown patterned his first band.

For the most recent issue (Fall 2010) I did a strip about the history of the ukulele. I’ve previously posted an in-progress (inked, I think?) version of this strip, but since the Fall issue’s been on the shelf for a good while, I guess I’m safe to post the final, colored version of the strip here.  I enjoyed doing this strip a lot since I actually play (albeit, not very well) the ukulele. The song that the kind-of-but-not-exactly-me narrator is singing is the great ’20s tune “I’ll See You in my Dreams.”  I’m embarrassed by how terrible the caricatures are in this strip, but other than that I think it turned out reasonably well. Enjoy!