And inks are done (4:30PM).
This marks a bit of a milestone, because come Monday? I transition into my Japan scene that I've been contemplating since at least last year. Excited to finally get to it (and see what the results are)!
Still no rest for the wicked though. Gotta draft tomorrow's newsletter still, and do a couple thumbnail sketches for the commissions I'll be doing over the weekend.
Haven't exercised all week, but come tomorrow I'll work it into my daily routine again.
Two pages, fully penciled by 9:00PM. Not bad considering I started a little late today, at noon. Had I started at 9:00 in the morning, wouldda been done by 6:00.
Early start tomorrow. đ¤
I've read a lot of how-to books on comix. Stan Lee and John Buscema's HOW TO DRAW COMICS THE MARVEL WAY my old man got me when I was... maybe 14-15?
Eisner's COMICS AND SEQUENTIAL ART several years later when I was in college, along with McCloud's UNDERSTANDING COMICS, and probably a bunch of reads along the way. All very good books that deal with the craft of making comix, but I've read nothingâabsolutely nothingâon what it takes to actually bring a comicbook out into the world.
Enter Dave Sim's CEREBUS GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING which I only scored a handful of days ago. It's full of gems! Take this bit on time management for example:
âThere are things on any given page that you know how to do, and there are things you don't know how to do. You have to do the things you know how to do smoothly and efficiently to buy yourself enough time to solve the problem you don't yet know how to solve.â
And then later:
âOnce you have done everything on a page that you know how to do, the parts you don't know how to do become a surrounded enemy.â
Genius.
It's an odd psychological trick that really does save you a shit ton of time. Oh the number of pages I'd attempted to solve the difficult parts on first, pages that would take up an entire week to finish. Stupid, stupid.
Y'know how there's a story-writing rule about making sure that by the end of your story, your characters have gone through big dramatic change from where they were at the beginning of the story?
Yeah, I'm kind of applying that rule to every single page of the graphic novel now. Whereas before... I could have an entire page showing a character running. Multiple panels of a character running, and that is it (page 22, I believe?). Mind you, that particular page I'm shaming is a beautiful-looking page, but if I could have a do-over, I'd probably at the very least show the character run from a significant point A to a significant point B. I s'pose that's part of why I ended up with 38+ page chapters!
Chapter 5 will likely be my shortest chapter thus far, no more than 20-22 pages, even though it covers a lot (i.e. Earth, the Moon, and Mars! đ¤Ż).
What a very long, extensive learning experience this has been (But that's good. If there isn't a degree of learning experience in any project I undertake, I'm not so sure it's worth it).
2:15PM, and I've only finished rough pencils on a single page. Late start today. Will move onto the second before tightening up pencils on both. Should be plenty of time.
Finished my 2 pages worth of inking at 11:30AM today!
Waking up at 5:00AM does have its perks. Been working from 6:00AM with only one half hour break for breakfast and coffee-brewing. Just got my shower in, and will whip up a little lunch and read me some comix before getting on with the second half of the work day: art things in the garage studio, packing orders, and a bit of writing.
Also doing a Zoom discussion with Elliot Colla and Molly Crabapple later today. About WE ARE ALL THINGS for Printed Matter's website.
Inbox at 44, which I should also get to, maybe tomorrow.
I could also do with a haircut.
When I started to fall asleep at 9:00PM last night, I thought to myself: okay great, my body's finally going to make up for lost sleep from the nights prior.
Nope, by 12:00AM I was wide awake. It is 2:00PM now and I have yet to crash.
I think my body's just training itself to deal with the first few weeks of impending fatherhood?
On the upside, finished a page and it's only 2 o'clock, so plenty of time to get started on (and finish) the next.
I lied; I couldn't let it go. Cut out the two figures that were bothering me the most and I think the page is now much better. Will probably redraw them and paste directly onto the original pages (because I hate having sub-par originals).
Tried the thing I wanted to do with the gutters and I think it works (Although, what is included right now is just some preliminary text for a quick mockup, just to get a sense of the look of the thing). You get a real train-of-thought vibe, like this character's mind is really at work and he just can't shut it off.
My initial idea was to have it all handwritten instead of typed, like such:
Looking at both of them now though, I can't quite decide which one I like better.
Not the best to be honest, but it's one page in a 400+ page book, so I may have to learn to live with it.
There's an exhausting idea I'd like to try out with the gutters, but that may have to wait till Monday. A bunch of house-maintenance stuff to do this weekend.
Coffee is shaken, not stirred. That's what creates the foamy top, together with a tablespoon of coconut oil and a dash of goat's milk (I used to take my coffee extra sweet for years, but I've been off sugar for two months now and the coconut oilâalthough nowhere nearly as sweet as sugarâcuts through the bitterness some).
It's time to ink today. For which I'll be using a series 795 Round Loew-Cornell #2 brush for the first time (I usually use Trekell's Kolinsky Sable Round 7000 series in a size #3 for brush work, Zebra's G nib for, uh, nib work, and Staedtler pigment linersâmostly 0.3 and 0.1âfor straightforward âcleanlineâ styles).
(Which should not be confused with the European âLigne Claireâ approach, which still offers a degree of line-weight variation. That's what the Loew-Cornell is for, it's what Chris Ware uses. The Kolinsky #3 is what Eisner used, and offers thicker strokes. G Nibs are used by Naoki Urasawa (I think?), and pigment liners are used by Mignola.)
Excited to see what the Loew-Cornell will do.
My good friends at the Boulder Weekly have decided to publish my demented vision of the future and use my art on their cover this week.
Still working on that cursed âisometricâ page in THE SOLAR GRID. It's coming along rather well (albeit a little slower than a âstandardâ comix pages).
Elsewhere in the back of my mind, I'm thinking of the weird surrealist art that used to adorn many science fiction paperbacks of the 60's and 70's, and that maybe, just maaaaaybe... I might like to do something along those lines for THE SOLAR GRID once complete and collected.
Not a good day for migraines, not when I'm drawing something that requires a high degree of precision.
This kind of isometric perspective that is typical in the work of Chris Ware doesn't come naturally to me, mainly because... well, I hate rulers. Not as much as, say, Paul Pope (who draws buildings and stairwells and cars with the same organic brush-strokey energy seen in his figures), but still; this kind of approach is all rulers.
To be fair, a facet of all my work is probably the tension between âaccuracyâ and its complete opposite.
Good things can come out of migraines btw. There's this page in Chapter 1 that I distinctly recall being hit with a migraine attack the day I was working on it.
In fact, that particular page wasn't even planned at all. I only included it because of the attack. And it's probably the only bit in the entire chapter infused with a degree of humor. ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻ
I was living in LA at the time, which, shit already feels like a lifetime ago.