Hidden Influences

India Ink, Colored Pencil

  It's funny how artists subconsciously absorb their surroundings and let it influence their work. I was going through a creative dry spell for a while. Two days ago I went to a local tattoo convention. Being around so many artists with so many styles punched me in the creative gland, and I was itching to draw when I got home.
  This image immediately popped into my head, and I had to make it happen. I don't know where the gas mask idea came from. I didn't see any gas masks at the convention. The convict influence definitely came from my fiance's recent obsession with police and prison documentaries. Overall I really like this, and had a good time letting it out.

Cartooning

Now that my semester of generals is over I'm getting time to draw again. Been drumming along to Ivan Brunetti's course-in-a-book: Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice.

A few single panel cartoons from one of the "homework" assignments. The guidelines were to limit it to one line of dialogue, or none at all. And dialogue was to be in a caption, not bubble. Also it was noted to pay attention to placing black objects in harmony to guide the eye through the composition. The goal was also to not necessarily be funny, but more to express a whole story or concept within a single panel.

Mythology

 

I am fascinated by all theologies and folklore, and love to learn about them. I enjoy finding the similarities, differences, and connections between them. For this project I wanted to illustrate the impermanence of religions.
As time passes, new religions will rise, and the old ones, no matter how strongly they were once followed, will eventually be set aside and labeled Mythology. To name the most common examples, Greek, Roman, and Norse (my personal favorite) theologies all fell victim to the passing eras. In class we’ve been discussing religion and mythology being one and the same, but the word mythology has a certain stigma attached to it that seems to say “false religion from a past civilization.” Put simply, mythologies are stories created by humans to explain the natural and supernatural worlds. Christianity, Hinduism, Islamism, and all other modern religions are mythologies as well, but saying this in a public place is sure to earn the stink-eye, or worse.
Marvel Comics’ successful use of Thor as a superhero shows that after a religion crosses into the realm of mythology, it is fair to use (or abuse) its content without invoking the wrath of the public. Thor was the God of Thunder, Son of Odin the Allfather. To those who worshipped him, he was very real. As real as Jesus Christ, Son of Yahweh, is to Christians today. For the most part, when someone hears Thor’s name in our era, they think of the superhero, not the all-powerful God of Thunder that, for many centuries, inspired fear, respect, and awe in the hearts of faithful Norsemen.
If history is an indicator of what the future holds, the Christian faith will someday be publicly known as Christian Mythology, and Jesus, Adam, Yahweh, and all other characters of the Bible will be open to artistic interpretation. Maybe there will be a Jesus superhero comic book, in which Gentle Jesus, with his Crown of Thorns and Holy Powers, defends mankind against monsters and villains. The idea is sure to offend today, but you can be assured that the brave Norsemen and women of Scandinavia would take offense to depictions of Thor in tights and a silky red cape.

Phil

  I've been writing a little story that someday I'll turn into a graphic novel. After reading Bone I was inspired to write a funny, cartoony, yet still mature and serious fantasy story. It's weird, I've never had an easy time writing a story, but this one is different. It pours out of me like I'm just typing it as somebody else tells it to me. I hope that's a sign that it's good. Anyway, here are some character-creating processes for the three heroes.

Long time no post, long time no draw.

  I recently got a job in construction, and the hours are killing my drawing time. I was always afraid to work construction, because so many people like the money so much that they never leave and get stuck in it for their whole life. I'm glad to announce that I'm not one of those people. I enjoy the hard work, and I don't mind the hours, and of course I enjoy the pay, but it's not me. I'm not drawing and it kills me. I will move on from this job. And eventually, someone's going to pay me to draw. 

  On that note, good news! I'm enrolled for classes this fall. I'll be chasing my BFA in Illustration at Utah Valley University. It's gonna be a long road, but if it gets me a job telling stories with my pencil, every second of struggle will be worth it. I'm very excited.

  I'm sorry for not posting (I like to pretend people read this.) Maybe I should post a sketchdump. At least then there would be some more recent stuff on here... That's it. Sketchdump post coming soon!

Weekly Inspiration 4: Nature

 Taking a side step from art, this weekend I went on a scouting/camping trip. Not scouting like boy scouts, but scouting for game for the upcoming archery hunt. It's so nice to get away from the cities and go back to our roots. When I go camping, I go as high and far away from other people as possible. I take only what I need, and leave no sign I was there.

Filling up my water bottle from a natural spring

  Nature and the wilderness inspire me more than anything else. If you climb high enough, you can find pure beauty that has yet to be ruined by mankind. It's kind of sad to be ashamed of ones' own species... but that's how I feel. When I find an old beer can or a candy wrapper while stalking along a game trail I think I could maim the litterbug without any remorse. How could someone defile such beauty when it's so easy to put your trash in your pocket and take it home with you?
  I'm an outdoorsman. A naturalist. I don't understand why we as a species have separated ourselves from nature. Why do so many people feel it's our destiny to build cities and towns on every square foot of earth? Why do we feel we need to dominate and control other animals instead of live life beside them? We are, after all, just another species.
  It is not man's role to overcome nature, but to live in harmony with it, just as every other species does.

Obligatory Update

Not much has happened since my last post. Lots of work and lots of drawing. Today I hung out with my beautiful girlfriend, Emmalee and her friends as she worked on cutting the script for Hamlet. She'll be directing a high school performance of  it this fall. Gonna be sweet! Anywho, I dragged my sketch book along and got some gesture drawing done while she wasn't paying attention.

Each drawing was about 30 seconds.

  Also, I finally got page 1 of Avalir penciled, inked, and colored yesterday. I still need to letter it, but I feel I made some definite progress. I'm planning on having at least 10 pages finished before I start uploading them weekly to the site I set up. 

  So... yea.

Comic Cover Recreation

When I woke up this morning, I had an idea that I didn't think would take all day, but it most certainly did. I picked out a cool cover from my Daredevil collection to redraw myself. I wanted to practice composition, posing, shading & inking, and color, so I figured a good way to do that would be to copy a pro, and hopefully absorb some knowledge from it. I chose issue 155:

I started out drawing in blue pencil, so the scanner wouldn't pick up the construction lines when scanned in black and white. This took about 2 hours.

Then about 2 hours of inking...

I immediately noticed that, despite scanning at 600 dpi, the scanned image looks much choppier than my drawing on the paper. Damned computers. Next, 3 or 4 hours of coloring in photoshop. Then about 1 hour to cut and paste the title bar and other word effects. TaDa!!!

Not too bad... if you don't look at Beast or Hercules' faces. I wasn't aiming for it to look identical to the original, so long as I got some practice with the inking, coloring, etc.

There ya go, an effective way to spend a day... my butt's a bit sore, though...

Weekly Inspiration 3: Northlanders

  Violent. Gritty. Gory. Yet somehow soft and personal. I love Northlanders. It's a series that chronicles adventures of Vikings, and their unfortunate victims, throughout Europe circa 1000A.D. 

  How does it inspire me, besides just being a beautiful series of comics? The use of blacks. Not making a racial statement here, I'm talking about the inks. I've heard my hero, Ralph Bakshi, say that black is the most important color for a cartoonist, and I took note. But Northlanders really made me see it.  Huge blots of black ink make up a lot of the pages in these books, and it's funny that your mind doesn't find it odd. Black just works. It tells your eye, "This is a dark area," and your mind just fills in the blanks. Definitely gonna look back on these while doing Avalir.

Colors!

  Thinking about all of the work I have yet to do on Avalir, I realized I only had a slight idea of how I was going to color it. I scanned in a recent drawing to play around with it in photoshop. 

I isolated the linework onto a single layer, and filled in flat colors underneath it.

I'm really happy with this look. Early on I planned on coloring Avalir like this, with the inks handling the shading and simple, flat colors to give it the look of old comics. But I kept fiddling and added slight shading with color.

I do think this looks better. More rendered and finished. I guess we'll just see when the time comes to color Avalir. The flat color/inks method still looks great, and is MUCH faster, but I might throw a bit of colored shading into it if another hour shows up in the day.

  Overall I've grown to like this little doodle. It was nice to break out of my comfort zone and play with colors. Thanks for reading. 

OCB and Maus

  A couple weeks ago, I checked out Scott McCloud's book, Making Comics, from the library. Afterward I immediately purchased a copy for myself because of just how valuable it is to me. I could go on for pages about that book and how it helped me. Beneath the invaluable lessons in effective storytelling techniques, it carried a message that hadn't been made quite as clear to me before. Comics is an art form FAR larger and deeper than the action hero genre I've been worshiping since my preteen years. It inspired me to seek out all types of comics with all kinds of stories because, after all, stories are what I'm passionate about.

  I've become best friends with Amazon (one might call it an addiction). It makes it so easy to get lots of books to me quickly, and it's cheaper than a bookstore. Needless to say, the books just keep on coming.

  I started off with a book called Old City Blues, which was a successful webcomic that eventually got published. I love the art in Old City Blues; its what convinced me to buy the book. Sketchy and dynamic lines and inking. It was more of an action book, and the story was a little predictable/cliche, but I still enjoyed it. 

  Next I purchased Maus, which I had heard of for a long time (it won a Pulitzer Prize), and decided now was a perfect time to try it out. Amazing. The story follows the author, Art Spiegelman, as he interviews his father, Vladek, about his experiences in Poland during WWII. Not only are you immersed in the story of the atrocities Vladek endured, but you also view a rickety relationship between father and son. The art is also very good. Spiegelman chose to depict the characters as animals (animal heads on human bodies). Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, and Americans are dogs. It's no surprise this book won so many awards. It will definitely be remembered as a prominent personal account of the Holocaust.

Weekly Inspiration 2: Actors

  This week I read a lot, and was inspired by a lot. But nothing topped tonight. My beautiful and talented girlfriend Emmalee is part of a high school alumni drama performance. During my years with her I've become friends with most of the people involved in the drama department, and they all inspire me greatly. I've also realized that, even though I can't act, sing or dance, we're a lot alike. We all have a passion for bringing characters and stories to life. The only difference is the tool we use to manifest our stories. These talented artists use their bodies and voices to breathe life into characters; and I use pencils, pens, and colors.
  I really respect every person I've met in the drama department. Their passion is an inspiration to me every time I see them on or off the stage.

Weekly Inspiration 1: Lankhmar

  I've come up with an idea that will hopefully keep me blogging regularly. Weekly Inspiration. Every Friday I'll write a post about something I read, watched, saw, experienced, etc. that inspired me artistically.

  As for this week, I just finished reading the first book in the Lankhmar series by Fritz Lieber, Swords and Deviltry. Fritz was one of the early guys to jump on the sword and sorcery wagon started by Robert E Howard (Conan).
  I first was introduced to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the comic adaptation my Mike Mignola (of Hellboy fame) and Howard Chaykin. After reading that great work I had to hunt down the novel. 6 bucks on Amazon and a short wait later, I dove into the story.
  The book was great. A goal of Lieber's was to make his heroes a little more human than, say, Conan or Tarzan, and he did it well. In short, Swords and Deviltry is about two young men, one a red haired barbarian from the north named Fafhrd, and the other a small-framed wizard's apprentice from the south named Mouse, who later calls himself the Gray Mouser. The first two-thirds of the book is separated into each hero's backstory, which end with them each finding a lover an heading toward the great city of Lankhmar. The characters meet in the last third of the book and become companions, embarking on an exciting adventure fighting the city's Thieves' Guild. The story ends with them leaving the city, down-trodden and heartbroken.
  The book inspired me in many ways, giving me a ton of material to apply to Avalir. Everything from Fritz' writing style, dialogue, descriptiveness etc. will have an impact on our comic. I especially loved his sense of character-building.

Silent Progress

  I haven't been posting, but "Avalir," named for the continent in which our story takes place, is coming along very nicely. ...Except for the fact that I haven't drawn a page yet... Let me explain.
  I actually have drawn one page. The first one. And it was so poorly drawn and unstable that I forced myself to a screeching halt, and turned to research drawing. I've been drawing landscapes, villages, villagers, studying and drawing clothing styles, etc. In short: I really need to improve before laying this thing down.
  I needed a more solid model of my characters, and needed to draw them ten thousand times in order to keep them consistent. These are my final say on Ferrit and Owan.

  I've been reading Darkhorse's Conan series, one: because it's freaking amazing(!), and two, to study the cities, costumes, poses, weapons, backgrounds, landscapes, etc. Lots to absorb and apply. But after all of that absorbing, to state the painfully obvious, drawing is the only way to get better at drawing. So hopefully from here on out I can apply the things I observe in my reading to my drawing.

  As for the story, Ben and I revised and reworked the first issue to make it more solid and, frankly, it's pretty damn good. We're constantly workshopping and developing ideas for the future, and I can't wait to get underway. Just gotta keep drawing.

Practice, practice, practice, practice practice! That's what will bring this thing to life.

P.S. On a side note, Today I finished a sketchbook! Sure, I have several full sketchbooks from years past, but this one was the first to be filled with diligent, regular, (almost daily) sketching. I opened up my next sketchbook, and man is that first blank page intimidating.

The Fun Begins.

  Oh boy am I excited about this one. My friend, Ben and I have always talked about writing comics together. We had a few good ideas going (see Cud and BenBen ideas from earlier), but we're really onto something now, and it's moving along at breakneck speed!
  Ben and I are both HUGE lovers of fantasy. Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, Conan, The Elder Scrolls, you name it. Anything concerning swords, wizards, elves, dwarves, dragons, warriors, etc. could (and does) keep us talking for hours, almost as if we leave this world and adventure somewhere else, somewhere better.
   We decided we're writing a fantasy comic. For real. I don't know why it took us this long, but the idea finally punched us both in the face at the same time, and our heads EXPLODED with ideas! We each went home and wrote a few outlines of possible stories. The next day, we settled on a combination of stories we had each written, and Ben went to work writing our first issue.
  As for me, I had a lot of drawing to do. Our story centers around a blacksmith, forced by circumstance to become a warrior, and a ranger, a nomad that travels far and wide with nothing but a bow and his wit.
  First I started with the smith. I promise any resemblance to Ben was unintentional...*cough*

  The smith, Owan, came easy enough, on to the next. I've always favored stealthy archer characters so I couldn't wait to bring him to life. Here are the first attempts.

I really liked this look for the archer, whom Ben named Ferrit, much to my liking. I slept on it, and the next day I didn't like the design anymore. He looked too young, too innocent and fresh-faced, and, well... too much like me. Out with it, I said, and went for an older, more grainy fellow who had been around long enough to be wise and wary.

  After I had our heroes down, of course the next logical step would be to show them kicking serious ass. I made it so.

  I hope you like what you see. The most exciting part of this is that the first issue is completely written. Ben is an awesome writer. And even better, I've got the whole issue blocked out in thumbnails and ready to be drawn full-size in all its glory.

  The story is, and will continue to be great. It's not just action/adventure. Ben and I are story lovers, and a good story has to contain it all. Action, humor, romance, revenge, you'll find it in the yarns we spin. Be sure to stay tuned.

  We'll be setting up a website and uploading our comic to the web, and hopefully in the future, publishing it. Because that's truly how comics should be read.

Drawn to Drawing

  Hey there, world. Long time no post. I've been going through a large creative block recently. But I think things are on the up and up. Emmalee bought me an amazing book for an anniversary gift. It's called 'Kirby, King of Comics,' and it chronicles the life and career of comic book legend Jack Kirby. The book is fantastic, and has revitalized my passion for drawing comics.
  I've realized something about myself, and I'm not sure if it's a good thing or bad. I'm somewhat of an artistic chameleon. When I'm reading a comic book or a book about comics, I want so badly to pencil comics myself, and apply all my effort in that direction. Then I read a good book and want so badly to be a storybook illustrator. Then I watch an animated film and I want to animate, or storyboard, or design animated characters.
  I think what it all comes down to is this: I want to be part of a collaborative effort, telling stories through drawing. It doesn't matter the medium or the industry. I just want to draw for an audience, and share something. Hopefully it'll happen someday.

Bakshi Love

  I'm back into my 'Wizards' phase. I watch this damn movie every night, and can't get sick of it.  I love watching the included featurette, "Ralph Bakshi, the Wizard of Animation," and I've pretty much memorized his entire commentary. I don't know what it is about this movie that I love so much. It's not the greatest film out there, by any means, but it's almost become a part of me. I just love it. And I love Ralph Bakshi.

  The man really is my hero. He embodies everything I want to be as an artist. He didn't care what others thought of his work. If they liked it, great! If not, who needs 'em? He didn't worry about offending audiences or sharing unpopular messages. He just did what he wanted to do with his films. No study groups, no merchandising goals, just pure Bakshi heart poured into a film and sent out to the world. Such an inspiration.