Monday Morning Marty & Minnie -- One Defining Line

Which one's Marty and which one's Minnie?

Talk about simplification! This is a good exercise for artists to help define their characters, real or fictional, and help them distill the essence of their personalities: draw one line that best represents the person (or animal) concerned. Can you guess which one is Marty and which is Minnie? (I'm not sure I made the definitive lines for them, but this is a good start.)

Now, unlike other forms of simplification this one may or may not bear any visual resemblance to your subject, though it often can. Your line should bear as many of the same characteristics as your character's persona. Is your character swift or slow? Ambitious or lazy? Focused or all over the place? Honest or shifty? Smooth or awkward? Your subject's determining line should reflect that.

Now here's the payoff: when you draw your subject, try to use this defining line as often as you can. Look for places where the physical likeness and this defining line meet, and accentuate those points as much as you can. You'll have a portrait or a likeness that doesn't just convey the subject's look, but the subject's personality and character.

Stumble It!

Tuesday Tutorial: How NOT to draw Silhouettes

(Click on image for larger version)

When you read most instructional books on drawing, the advice given about drawing silhouettes is usually: draw in your figure as if it's not going to be a silhouette, then silhouette the drawing.

That's terrible advice.

A silhouette has to convey all the usual information about a figure solely through the outline. If you draw in the whole figure you cannot tell if that information is coming through until you fill the whole thing in, at which time it will be too late.

Take your favorite illustration and fill in the figures. Do they still read? Do they still work the same way? Now go find a great silhouette and fill in the details of the figure. Do they make sense?

The fact is, what works as a silhouette may not work as a fully fleshed-in drawing, and vice versa. You need to draw the silhouette AS a silhouette to make sure your pose, your details and your composition all work AS a silhouette. Those interior lines you're relying on are giving you a false impression of what your final drawing will convey.

By all means, if you need to sketch in the rest of the figure to help you figure out proportions or anatomy, do so. But as quickly as you can, get rid of those interior lines. It doesn't matter if the figure looks good with all those interior lines drawn in, does it?

Also: Another pitfall to avoid when drawing silhouettes is looking at the inside of the outline. Most artists, when they draw, they see the inside edge of their outlines as the edge of their object. But when that object is filled in, it'll be the outer edge that is seen. Make sure that outer edge is the one that has all the right details and proportions. Use the thinnest line you can to make sure your outer line is true.

Stumble It!

Tuesday Tutorial: Mock Woodcut

I've shown this technique before, but decided it should be covered in more depth.

This was a job I did several months ago for Miller WhiteRunkle in Seattle. They wanted a woodcut-style illustration of several objects, one of which was a poncho.

I began with this line drawing of the poncho, done in simple brush. I used this drawing as a guide for the final woodcut drawing, so what I needed here was clarity. I kept the lines crisp, and sketched in the shaded areas using an approximation of the line work I'd use in the finished illustration, but not concerned with the line quality.

The next step was to scan in the guide image, and reverse it. The woodcut effect is basically a brush drawing in negative, where the brush strokes you put down in black end up being white, and the white becomes black. So I needed my guide drawing to be in the negative as well. I then turned the image into a very light cyan and white. This made the image visible to me but not so visible to the scanner. You'll also notice I added parallel horizontal lines to the image -- I wanted my hatch marks to be horizontal, and these lines would help me keep them straight.

Here's a picture of the "final" art in progress, with me inking in the blue parts of the image with my brush. You can see the horizontal hatch lines that will look very "woodcutty" when it's all done.

It's at this stage that the tone for the image is determined. A tighter inking job with shorter, thinner strokes can give you a more engraved look, while a looser stroke with a heavier line weight and rougher edges can make a woodcut or linoleum block kind of effect. If more of the latter look is wanted, then I will try NOT to be too perfect with it. The more of those tiny "mistakes" -- ink going thin, stray line edges, smudges -- the more your drawing will look like a woodcut.

It's very hard to think in the negative, even with this close guide to follow. The thicker your hatching, which makes your work look darker while you're doing it, the lighter it will be when all is done. It takes a goodly amount of concentration.

When the image is all inked in, it looks like this on the left side of the final picture: a negative of the final image. After I scan the image in, and create a negative of it, clean it up and add color, we get the final image seen on the right.

Stumble It!

Tuesday Tutorial: Make it dirty!

(This is my first of what will eventually be a regular weekly feature: the Tuesday Tutorial. Because of my aforementioned storyboard job, I can't guarantee I'll be able to make weekly updates in the near future, but I will try my best.)

When you're working with photographs, adding new elements or combining pieces of other images, one important rule to follow is to make it dirty! Photos are never perfectly clean and precise, the way computer-rendered images are, and so it's important to give them the same imperfections as the photo, so they'll blend in seamlessly. We'll follow a rather silly example I've put together to (hopefully) demonstrate what I'm talking about.

1. Add the Additional Element. For this example, I'm starting with a photo of Minnie, after she got her first and so far only bath, above. I'm going to draw a simple cone paper hat onto her, and try to make it look real.

Here is a close-up of the image of Minnie with a simple cone drawn on her head in Photoshop. Though I did a fine job masking out her hair and shading the hat, it still doesn't quite fit in the image. (You may need to click on these images to see the larger versions.)

2. Add Noise to Additional Element. Every photograph -- and this includes photos of paintings and artwork, of course -- has some degree of graininess. This graininess runs throughout the image, and if your additional element doesn't have it, it will stand out.

I went to Photoshop's Filter menu, and to Noise. I added 2% noise to the hat. You'll need to look at the photo up close to see that the amount of noise you're giving matches it.

Keep in mind, it's important to make the hat on a separate layer, and to keep it on the separate layer, throughout this process.

3. Add Blur to Element. Every photograph -- even the world's best photograph -- is out of focus, to some extent. It may be the tiniest amount, but there's liable to be some bit of blur to the image. You need to blur your new image element to match the surrounding objects.

Note that in many photos, the amount of blur will vary from the foreground to background, so the right amount of added blur can help pinpoint the perceived depth of your new element.

I went up to the Filter menu again, went to Blur, and selected Gaussian Blur. I then gave the hat a small amount of blur -- just 0.7 pixels.

4. Do Whatever Else It Takes. As you can see from the finished piece, below, Noise and Blur were all it took for the texture of the image to match the photo. There may be additional steps depending on the photo -- if the image in the photo moved, and has a directional blur, adding Motion Blur may be needed. Sometimes lightening the opacity of the picture -- say, to 95% or so -- will allow background textures to show through. This usually ony works if the background behind it is fairly plain, without detailed objects. You also, of course, will need to make sure the colors work well too. But these first two steps -- blur and noise -- will get you on your way.

Stumble It!

Monday Morning Marty -- February 4, 2008

(Click on image for larger version)

This week I continue on the theme of simplification.

These gesture sketches of Marty (and one of Minnie -- can you guess which one?) show the value of simplification. The idea is to get the gesture, the movement of the dog, not to dwell on details like fur markings or shading. This is a good technique to help learn anatomy and proportion.

I recently learned that some people don't know they can get a larger, more detailed version of the images here by clicking on them. If you don't know that -- you do now!

Stumble It!

Monday Morning Marty & Minnie: Comparison

This sketch was done as a comparative study of Marty and Minnie's chests.

Though they're both roughly the same size, Marty is a lot heavier than Minnie. That's because Marty is solid muscle, whereas Minnie is mostly fur.

In this sketch comparison, you can see Marty's barrel chest on the right. He's got the muscles. His wide chest accounts for his front legs being so far apart.

Minnie's front legs are often far apart, as they are in this sketch, but that's more to do with poor posture than athletic physique. You can see her chest is a lot less bulging, a lot less muscular. And much of the volume that's there is her longer fur.

The odd perspective regarding the legs and tail, etc., are due to the fact that both the dogs were sitting right in front of me while I sketched, so I was looking down at a sharp angle. At first they were hard to keep still, but the more attention I'd give one, the more the other would want it, and they quickly figured out that sitting still was their way to get it. Quick learners, these two.

Stumble It!

Monday Morning Marty -- Woodcut

I'm very happy with this week's Monday Morning Marty.

Years ago, in art school, my illustration teacher Stan Zagorski taught be a great faux woodcut technique. You painted on the illustration board with white gouache, where you want the image to be white. You wait 'til the gouache dries, then cover the surface with India ink. When that dries, you rinse the board in running water; the gouache dissolves, taking the ink on top of it with it, leaving the surrounding ink. It's a great technique; my Storyteller's Workshop logo, above, was done that way -- with a lot of retouching.

Retouching is always a big part of the process, because you never know how well the gouache will dissolve, or how well the surface of the board will handle the water. It's touch and go there.

Well, last week I was working on a logo proposal for Santa Fe's 400th anniversary, and I came up with this new technique. I designed the logo the way I wanted it, then created a negative of it, so everything white was now black and vice versa. I then turned the image into a very, very light blue and printed it out onto card stock. I got out my brush and inked in everything that was black -- or rather blue -- adding lots of stray strokes that resemble woodcut marks. I scanned in the artwork -- the light blue was light enough not to show up -- reversed the image again, and got the woodcut look.

For this Marty picture, I started with a photo that I turned grayscale, then followed the process listed above. The final image wasn't too easy to make out -- I also printed out the photo untouched to help me make sense of it. I had to constantly remind myself that the ink strokes I was putting down would be white, and that the darkest shaded areas would be the lightest in the final piece.

Stumble It!

Monday Morning Marty -- 8-13-07

Here's a Marty comic strip that I drew with my wife, Jennifer.

This was a fun game Jennifer came up with while we were waiting for our food at a restaurant somewhere. Jennifer took the page out of her Filofax, wrote down the title she made up and drew up the panels. I then had to come up with a story to match the title and draw it in the panels.

This is a fun exercise to pass the time, and it also helps sharpen your storytelling abilities. Trying to find a logical reason for each panel to be the size and the placement that it is helps you decide the pace of the story, and that may come before you think of a plot or even a subject.

Stumble It!

Confession: I Draw on Letter-Size Copy Paper!

One of the first things you learn as a working freelance illustrator is when you can cut corners and when you can't. Or more appropriately: What's important.

When I first started out, fresh out of art school, I had learned the importance of using the right equipment, the best paper, the most precise and elaborate methods. We had been indoctrinated from our freshman year in the importance of proper technique. We learned to be precise, thorough and detail-oriented. And, above all, we learned not to cut corners.

Well, those techniques and procedures are fine as a starting point, but over time you learn to develop your own methods and routines, ones that are attuned to the importance you put on things.

In a previous post I talked about the procedure I use to create comic strip artwork. It took me years to develop this technique. For years, concerned with the "proper" way of doing things, I had a much more labor-intensive method; I'd cut down large sheets of Bristol board, used Rapid-o-Graph pens for all the ruled lines and (GASP) the lettering, and everything else was done with a pure sable brush and India ink. Anything else wouldn't be kosher, I told myself; anything else would be a cheat.

Well, thank God I got over that mentality. Now most of the line work I do comes from Micron pens. I still use a brush for most of my more realistic comics illustration, like Jazz Age, but 90% of Annie is done with the pens now. And as I'd gone over before, the lettering is now done in InDesign! The pure Bristol Board has been replaced by 11" x 17" 80-pound matte cover stock and fed through the printer for the lettering and panel boarders.

For most of my other freelance work, I draw on good ol' letter-size copy paper. ( I originally put "typing paper" before realizing that it hasn't been called that in a few decades!) It works as well as any kind of paper for inked line work, it's cheap, easy to find, easy to scan or fax -- the only down side is when the job calls for the original being given to the client, which has happened less than half a dozen times in the twenty years I've been doing this. On those jobs, I break out the thicker card stock. (This, of course, is in the context of the freelance work. For the comics work, I still use the card stock that's very much like Bristol board because there is a market for the original art.)

In short, I figured out what's really important: Do what works. Get the job done as well, as quickly and as reliably as you can.

People are paying me for the digital file of an image. They don't care what paper it was drawn on, or even if it was drawn on paper at all. It doesn't matter to them that I drew it with India ink, or if it was on 100% rag content paper. They want their image, and whatever is the best, easiest way to make it is the proper way.

Stumble It!

Monday Morning Marty 8-6-07 -- Fur

Here's a little portrait of Marty to start your week.

When you're drawing a furry creature, like Puppy here, your pencil strokes can do more than just follow the contour of the general shape -- they can take on the qualities of the fur itself. If you notice, very few of the actual lines in this drawing follow the edge of Marty's head -- they follow the direction and the length of the fur, and the succession of these lines creates the contour. This lets me convey not just the shape of the head, but the direction of the fur, the thickness, and in some places helps suggest the cheekbone and other structure beneath. It's important to be economical in your drawing, and to let every stroke, every line contribute as much as possible to communicating your subject.

Stumble It!

How I Make A Comic Strip

Welcome to my summary of putting together a comic strip. Or at least, my way of putting together a comic strip. This isn't going to be "how to draw" (I'm sure I'll cover something along those lines before too long) so much as it is "how to set up to draw."

Everyone needs a system for putting together a comic strip. Drawing comics is as much a job as it is a calling -- and on days when you don't really hear that calling, it's still a job. And for most cartoonists, it's not a very good paying job. So it's essential that you have a system in place, a streamlined and standardized way of going about the task. I draw seven strips for Annie a week -- six dailies plus the color Sunday strip -- and I need to get that work done quickly and get it out the door by deadline, and still leave time for other freelance work, my webcomic Jazz Age (I'm on hiatus right now, but it's usually a full-color strip written and drawn every week) and, if I'm lucky, my family. I don't want to waste any time here. I need to get the boring stuff out of the way, to give me the most time actually drawing, and get it all done fast.

The system I show won't work for everyone. It may not even work for anyone, except that it works for me. Other comics artists use other systems -- maybe some of them will comment here on theirs -- but this is the one that has evolved for me. Even if none of this is applicable to you, young apprentice, I hope you at least come away with an appreciation for the need for a system.

The process begins with the script, which is written by Jay Maeder and gets to me from my editor, Tracy Clark. the script tells me who's doing what, who says what and what is being shown in each panel. Since we've worked together for some time now -- just over three years -- Jay and I have a pretty good understanding of what each other wants and expects, so his scripts are not very detailed. He trusts me to know the right angles to show things in, and to make the new characters interesting and appropriate.

After reading through the script, I go to my layout worksheet. This is a worksheet I made up that gives me little boxes, scaled-down versions of the individual strips, and lets me sketch out the six dailies on one page. These layouts are loose and sketchy -- since I'm the only one who needs to refer to them and since I'll be drawing the final art in a day or so, I don't need to go into much detail -- I'll remember what I had in mind. The most important aspect of the layouts is to show roughly where all the important elements are.

The next step surprises some people. I do the final lettering. Years ago I made the best investment of a couple hundred hours I could ever have made -- I created a digital version of my own hand lettering, in Fontographer. And I made alternative versions of most of the letters, which you can access by hitting OPTION with the letter, so double letters don't look quite so obvious. I also made up a library of word balloons in Quark -- which I've since transferred to InDesign -- that I can put the lettering into, and which are resizable and adaptable to any need. Using the layouts as a guide, and an InDesign template that has the strip dimensions preformatted, I create the panel sizes and add the lettering balloons, copying and pasting the dialogue directly from the script emailed to me by Tracy.

Why do I do the lettering first? After years of frustration with trying to make lettering balloons fit a tight space because I underestimated it when I drew the panel, or having to cover up some really nice background art I drew with a balloon, I realized that the artwork was more adaptable than the lettering. It's easier, in other words, to make a figure, or a face, a little bigger or smaller in the panel to fit the space after the balloons are put in than to make the balloon bigger or smaller to fit the space after the artwork is put in. A figure, or a face, can be partially cut off and still work -- words are rarely that flexible.

Once the lettering and layouts are completed, I print them out on good card stock. I used to pay a small fortune to buy Bristol board pads, cut them down to size and throw away the extras -- they never did learn to make those pads 11 x 17" -- and then start doing the lettering by hand. Now, I can buy 11 x 17" card stock and print out the lettering, all ready to go, for a lot less! Even before I got my large printer, and had to email the InDesign files to a printer to output onto the card stock, it was still cheaper than buying the Bristol board. And it works just as well for drawing on. Nearly. It's not quite as thick, so it can warp if you lean and sweat on it too much. Oh well -- everything's a trade-off.

So now, with the lettering and panel borders printed on the card stock -- I put two dailies on one 11 x 17" sheet, or half of a Sunday strip -- I'm ready to get down and draw. Which, as I mentioned, I'll have to cover another time.

With the line art all done, I scan the artwork. Until I invest in an 11 x 17" scanner, I have to make two scans of each page and splice them together. Then I clean up the scans, and send the strips to the editor for approval. Ta-daah!

For the Sunday strips, after I scan the artwork, I create a color guide for the print house, which they use to put together the final color files for the newspapers. That'll also be another post.

So there you have it. My system. My regular process for breaking down a very large job into bite-size pieces and taking care of them in order. Like I said, it may not work for others, but it works for me. Every week. Now I feel tired.

Stumble It!

Tutorial Will Have To Wait...

Dad-gum it. Wouldn't you know it?

I was just in the middle of some really good writing, explaining the need for a good comics-making system and outlining the beginning of the process. I was writing about the rough layout stage, and the layout worksheets I use, and was going to scan the most recent one.

Then I realize I'd thrown it out. And it went out in the trash.

Sigh.

I saved the draft, and I'll pick up working on it next week, when I will SAVE the next layout worksheet in preparation for this series.

Boy, it's going to be a good one, though. Just you wait. It really, really is...

Stumble It!

On Being a Comics Reporter

Last week Alan Gardner, the guy who runs the excellent Daily Cartoonist blog, put out a call for cartoonists and people in the comics world to help fill in for him during his vacation, which began yesterday. I wrote in saying I'd be happy to! It'll be good exposure for me, I figure, and it should be fun, too. He says great, thanks me, gives me the login info and all, and off he goes on vacation.

And then it hits me -- I'm supposed to find NEWS STORIES for this blog!

The Daily Cartoonist, for those of you unaware, is a great news source, with all the latest about who's doing what, what comic strip collection just came out, who got fired, who got picked up -- and I'm supposed to contribute to this? Daily Cartoonist is where I find out all this stuff!

Luckily there are two other volunteers who are also filling in for the vacationing Mr. Gardner -- Charles Brubaker and The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon -- both of whom seem more than capable of filling in single-handedly. I've been supplying a few stories so far, and I'm actually enjoying tracking them down, but it's clear I'm not needed for my journalistic sleuthing. I can't compete with these guys there.

But one thing I can do, that neither of them can lay claim to -- I can talk about what it's like to draw Little Orphan Annie!

I'm going to put together a series of posts on the creation of a comic strip, and link those posts to Daily Cartoonist. I know, it's shameless self-promotion -- except that I am, just a little, ashamed -- but that's what I was asked to do, dammit. Daily Cartoonist is a site for fans of, well, cartoons. And cartoonists. And cartooning. Even if you prefer the term "comics illustration." (I know I do.)

So look for those posts to begin some time soon. Maybe in mere moments, depending on who calls me in the next few minutes with work.

Stumble It!

Baldo Artist Draws on YouTube -- and I Open My Big Mouth!

The Daily Blogger has a link to a YouTube video of Baldo artist Carlos Castellanos drawing his character. Well, when I say drawing... He's really just doing the inking, which he does digitally. It's a nice video, but ever since I was a kid, whenever I hear about someone showing how they draw something, I want them to reveal everything. I want to discern all the secrets of cartooning and storytelling and illustration, and all I get is to see someone drawing a picture.

It's a standard no one could live up to. And this wasn't supposed to be a tutorial -- which Carlos himself tells me in his response to my curmudgeonly post. Me and my big mouth, I had to say that I wanted to see the whole creative process in this quick little video.

So now that I've said that, and Carlos so graciously turned the tables on me, now it's on me to produce a video of my own -- one that shows the entire creative process. Are you kidding me? I have to live up to my own standards? What have I gotten myself into?

Well, it's going to be a while, since I don't even have a video camera, and I'm going to be moving cross-country in two weeks, but once we get settled in, and I find a camera, and I figure out how to do this...

...I'll have that video.

In the meantime, some really great stuff happened from all this. I got to communicate with Carlos, who said he liked my work -- cool! This whole blogging thing is already paying off!

Stumble It!

Old Pulp Covers -- Make Your Own!

If you haven't seen my previous post about the old N.C. Wyeth pulp cover, go take a quick look at it. In this post I'll briefly show how I took an old cover of my own -- the cover to Jazz Age Chronicles #1, which came out back in 1990 -- making it rather vintage in its own right.

What I wanted to do was make the cover look like it's 100 years old. I wanted it to look like a beat-up old book cover, so to do that I found a beat-up old book cover. (Specifically, it's an old book of Jennifer's about the Beatles. She wanted to make sure I included that.) It has a blank cover, which is essential here, so the only features on the cover are the wear and the tear:

Now, ideally an old pulp magazine cover would be best -- the wrinkles and tears in an old magazine cover are different from the ones in this hardback book -- but I couldn't find such an item, and pulp magazines with blank covers are a little hard to scare up. So this cover would have to do. And it did.

I sized the cover to fit the original cover perfectly. Then I started with the Photoshop hokus-pokus! My first step was put white in the foreground color palette and go to Select>Color Range, and make a selection of the white tears and peels in the surface of the cover. I played with the value until I was getting most of the white and none of the blue. Then I made a new layer and using Option-Delete, I filled in the selection with the white, making a nice opaque white layer of the tears and scraps over the cover art.

Then, going back to the layer with the book cover, I went to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation (or Apple-U -- get it? U? Hugh? Oh, that one cracks me up every time!) and played with the hugh, and the saturation, and the lightness, until the blue of the cover became a nice yellow-ochre of old, faded pulp paper:

This example shows the cover before I went into Image>Adjustments>Curves and played with the contrast until the outside edges were dark again. I don't have a picture of that, but you're visual people -- I'm sure you can see it in your mind.

Then I set that layer on Multiply, so the original cover art shows through underneath. I added a new layer over all of these others and filled it with more yellow-ochre color, and set it to multiply also. Then I just played with the opacity of all these layers, until I got the final look I wanted:

Ta-daah! Not bad, huh? Now, there are other effects I could have used on this, and have in previous work, such as adjusting the color saturation of the artwork, adding some noise texture to the top layer, "tearing" one of the corners by using the lasso to select it and turning it slightly, or even pushing one of the color layers -- cyan or magenta works best -- just a tad, to make it look like slightly out-of-register old-style printing. I never do the exact same effects every time, and that's the fun part -- improvising and finding different ways to make different effects. But these are some basic steps, one basic approach, and if nothing else, they should help you find your own way to go about it.

Stumble It!