Pages 'N Pages Book Blog

So it turns out that having a boys’ night out is trickier for comics artists than I’d originally thought.  My friends and I have this ongoing thing where we meet up Wednesday nights at the local art college and do life-drawing.  It’s been a month, and it’s been great, but the big challenge is image.  You see, the whole idea of men being men together is that, well, like our ancestors who’d run after deer or sabretooth tigers, we figured we’d do something macho.  Unfortunately, the models switch between genders, with men one week and women the next.  Schedule conflicts pop up, and there we are: the first two nights I get to go and we’re drawing naked men.

Granted, the second night I went I talked to the model, who was himself a photographer.  What were his subjects?  Why, nude models, naturally.  They were his ex-girlfriends, and gorgeous models; and his photography skills were excellent, as he went to great lengths to get really good lighting and composition.  I like that he had a theme going, the nude model liking other nude models thing.  I like to think they’re all out there, somewhere, running free on his farm together; like the Watcher I don’t expect to ever be a part of their world, but I’m glad they’re out there and happy.

This week was a little different, though, as we finally got to draw an older, overweight woman.  Ever heard of Toni Morrison?  Imagine her naked and being drawn by you.  Yes, that’s what I did last night.

In fact, it was a great class.  I joke, rather unprofessionally, but don’t think that I’m not bending over backwards to get in there and just bloody draw.  Also, all three models I’ve learned something new, and it’s been great.

This time around I was focused on gravity.  This woman was all about gravity and reactions to mass.  She moved with this great weight on her hips, and when she was setting up the seat to sit on she was wide-stance legs and hips straight, vertical, but her upper body leaned forward to do the actual moving.  She had these massive, sagging breasts, really long, and I got a good sense of how they were pulled down by gravity.  Her whole body was set up with gravity in mind, every part of her posture, especially considering her age and the decreased muscle strength that comes from that.  It was kind of cool, looking at things from a mechanical perspective.

Hi again.  It’s been a while since my last post, but I’ve been distracted by life.  I haven’t been totally idle, tho.  I finished a few pages, but as I’m technologically inept, I don’t have word bubbles and I have no idea how to copy them to my deviant art page, let alone here on this blog.  I use ink, not inkspot!

On the plus side, my friend scanned them in for me and they look great.  I really want to get more loose with my style, more natural and more flow; maybe that will come with practice or at least with coolness (ie: I groove more myself, maybe it’ll rub off… I digress).

Also on the plus, JP and Denny, two artist bros of mine, got me to come out to life drawing.  I’m going to do it as often as I can.  The first time was fun, a bit crowded… and the model was a dude.  I mean, he was happy to be there (and I mean haaaaaappy, and I’m not talking about his face), and as a professional who does draw a lot of buff dudes all day, I don’t mind.  The guys and I had fun, but let me tell you it is really taxing to just sit there and draw… some model.  I mean, what am I trying to do?  Just go and draw?  fast, slow, I don’t know.

I tried copying what I saw, and it did and didn’t come out right.  There were lots of people, and I like to think mine were okay; but there was this one guy doing his on dark manilla paper, with different colored conte, and it was sweet.  Very precise but interesting to look at.  Maybe I should try being loose, but eventually work up to doing full on perspective grids and contour lines?  Not with charcoal, though, but we’ll see.  That would be cool.

Next Wednesday I’ll have a sweet new board and paper to do it with, thanks to my mother-in-law who is an art teacher (and proud of me for doing this, so: sweet action!)

Okay, more later.

so I finished page 5, and I’m not unhappy per se.  However, I don’t know what to do about shading.  Thing is, I want to do lots of contour lines, and hatching, but I’m finding that swaths of streamlined inks are not only more shadowy, but do have something going for them in terms of looks.  As well, there’s this one part of the process that I need to let go of: where *not* to shade.

See, inking looks great because it’s the contrast of black ink on white paper.  We get this with our eyes a lot, like how colors are “opposites”: red/green, orange/blue, yellow/purple.  However, with Black & White it’s deeper, more stark, and just works.  I’ve looked at pages of inks and just stared for a long time, because they’re well crafted and because there’s so much going on in my eye when I look at them.

An example: stripes.  Black bars on a white field.  Look at them.  Or at a chessboard that’s black & white.  Hatches of even size, spaced apart, are the same thing, and that’s the effect of inking.  Good inking does this.

However, if I’m going to draw a face, especially a female face, I want to leave off too many lines.  I want a nice nose, some eyes, eyebrows, and frame it with some hair or whatever.  Anyway, I won’t be filling in the face with lots of scribbles; if I do add lines, they’ll be contours, or shading, but I want to keep it clean.

So when I was doing page 5, I found that the walls of the middle panel were just killing me: I wanted to do texture, but I didn’t keep it as smooth as I’d wanted.

Boy do I need help with my city street scenes.  I just don’t do them, y’know?  Not my thing, normally; at least, I never wanted to do an object before.  Props, they’re called. I need to practice with my sketch book.

I’m up to 6 pages of the final product pencilled, three of them inked, and I have to say that not only is it getting easier to do but I’m starting to get more confident.  Pencils I use non-repro blue, and I’m almost out of the mechanical pencil led (woo, shopping!).  Inks I’m using a hodge-podge, and I’m going to keep going until I can find a scanner and print/shrink down some of the product to see how thick or thin a line I can get away with and have look good.  Yeah, I’m blogging without product… but the anticipation!

That’s one thing that’s a challenge: I’ve scanned stuff at a print shop (which I will not name) and been disappointed by the service.  I’m a low-tech kinda guy for someone with a blog, but I have to learn about printing and other computer-related stuff if I’m going to be serious about all of this.  When I trusted a previous project to some guy behind a counter, he scanned it all in upside-down, in an adobe file (so I couldn’t put it online without massive hassle for me) and I couldn’t even open it on my laptop without turning it upside down every single page.  The print outs were even done two copies, but one copy was on the back of another *and upside down*!!!  So I had glossy pages with the other page on the back showing through.  Awful.

Art-wise, I got a picture of how thin lines I’d done wouldn’t show through, or would vanish when shrunk down.  This means I have to use a thicker line when drawing, or spend some time thickening lines on a computer somehow.  Thicker lines when drawing, however, mean less fine detail, which I enjoy doing.  Maybe I need to suck it up, but I like pens/markers better than the brushes I’ve been using.  I have a lot of respect for artists who can do really fine detail with a brush, and I’ll have to work up to being one of them, I guess!

Another thing I’m working on now is perspective.  Never bothered before, but I’m really loving it now.  By the end of the next few issues, I want to be a literal master of perspective.  Right now I’m taking a few steps and seeing what I can do, and hopefully managing to put out good material while I’m learning.

City shots are another hurdle I’d like to turn into a stepping stone.  Part of it is no experience with inanimate objects in my art (just figures I’d made up, nto even life drawing), but another part is just what the heck would look good in this city shot, building wise.  I don’t want to map out Xenith just yet, until I’ve got some landmarks that have come up in the stories I’ve written.

By the time I’m done I’d like this comic to be my audition piece for Thor or Conan, or one of the major comic companies out there that love that Canadian talent (like American, but with that International touch).  That said, I’ve been working to get my art to be more like the comics I enjoy reading: solid forms, solid anatomy, perspective, shading and inking lines, and technique in general.  No short cuts to be trendy, no talking down to the reader with bad art.  Good art only, and fun art.  I want to laugh while drawing every panel, or be on the edge of my seat in anticipation.  I like getting up in the morning knowing I get to draw today, and I want to make material that people are going to get up and be excited because they’re going to read it.

Blog 2

Having started on the comic I’ve gotten about five pages in with the design work.  I’ve got two pages to ink, and touch-ups on the others, but it’s coming along.  There are currently piles of hick-ups, and I’ll list them here so I can get some feedback and comments from you folks.

1)       Scanning them:  I need an 11×17 scanner for the pages, as they’re 11×17!  I have an 8×11, and that’s, um, not good enough.  Maybe I should start designing pages that are easily divided into two halves, so I can scan one, then the other, then somehow paste them together.  That sounds awful, though.  However, it does explain why so many web comics are only three panels in a row.  Other than the newsprint roots, and that they fit on a screen, I’m sure it’s easier to work on smaller pages of Bristol board with a home scanner.

2)      Word bubbles:  I need to add them to the finished pages.  Yes, I am aware that I could draw them directly on the page, but as a fickle person I want to re-write as I go along.

3)      Script:  NO LONGER A PROBLEM.  Well, sort of.  I got a great freeware program that lets me write up my stuff in any format I want, including comics, and it is a huge timesaver.  Before that I was either just drawing ideas or scribbling in a notebook; edits are a pain if you have to write them by hand.

4)      Drawing board tote:  I want to be able to carry one page with me when I go out.  For days at work or school when I’m taking a break, I want to finish more of my stuff.  I’ve lost a portfolio, so I want something that can fit into my backpack.  I don’t want to risk losing everything, so keeping it to a minimum of one or two pages at a time would be best.  Along with that, and as I need a new backpack in general, I want a pack that can fit both my art-board-with-paper-holding-section, and my laptop (for typing up notes and editing the script).  More productivity!

My materials are slowly coming together.  I’ve got a non-repro blue mechanical pencil, which is pure win.  I’ve got some nice pens, and an old calligraphy set from the Mrs, which I’m playing around with.  I’ve got an old drawing board, also good, and a smaller one from my old roommate that is helpful.  I’ve also got my collection of art books, which are so good.  I realize now that reading them is even more helpful than simply owning them, which now that I think about it also applies to school.

Artistically the pages that I’ve done so far are some of the best I’ve ever drawn, but I know I need work on anatomy, perspective, and I’m sure composition.  The inking is also a concern: do I start with the forms like pencilling, or should I start with shadow areas and then do details?  When to hatch and when to fill in with a swatch of black ink?   I am a little worried only about whether I need to use thicker lines when inking: will my work show up when photocopied and shrunk down?  If I use thicker lines, I’m worried that finer details will be lost.  Do I have to use thicker lines and ignore details like facial features?  I hope not.

I’ve been doing these exercises with ink technique, which was the inspiration for page 1, sort of “elements coming together” and breaking the 4^th wall.  Fun stuff.  I’ll try to keep posting more boxes, as a regular thing, to make sure I keep my hand in.  If you think of any other drawing exercises I can do, email me here!

Greetings world!   What you are reading right now is the first post of the fantastic comics blog I’m doing to complement and to commentate on my webcomic “Shattered World”, which Pages N Pages has been kind enough to host for my studio “Fireinthedust Productions”.  Very exciting.

This is going to be short, as I want to post two posts I wrote before the blog went up.  Keeping things in order befroe I go to where I’m at now.  Meh, this can be Issue 0, I guess, I dunno.