Comics2 for Me and You

OK, This Is Interesting!

2012-02-17T10:22:00.000-08:00

A firm called Graphicly aims to smooth the way for digital comics self-publisher. You won't believe how low the cost is currently.

I, and most everybody at ye olde Acad, thinks that soon the primary means for first contact between readers and a new comic has to be digital, and that a revolution is coming in the business, with technology lowering prices and printed comics being mainly limited to collections of established hits.

Graphicly might be the outfit to facilitate this change.

JH

Manga Machine

2011-07-09T15:14:00.000-07:00

Look what I'm saying I found in an old magazine! Wow! Interesting. If I lived back then and needed to draw a pie-eyed, soulless kewpie doll, the answer would have been a little machine! Hella crazy.

JH

P.S.: ;D Just kidding, mangaphiliacs. I love ya. You know that!

Sharing the "Wealth"

2011-07-04T20:23:00.000-07:00

Here are some materials I did up for one of my directed study students today. She is someone who is already unusually aware of the little offsets and foreshortenings that make a face work in 3/4 view. The points made in these jpegs were offered as refinements upon that foundation.

I insist that paying attention to this stuff, which is all based on life, can add charm and convincingness TO A VERY WIDE RANGE OF STYLES.

Longtime friends and students may notice that one of these continues my almost-unhealthy preoccupation with eyebrows as indicators of dimensionality or, conversely, unsophisticated drawing.

(I am all about the sophistication, as you can tell by this grotesque kid in particular.)

JH
These are Copyright 2011 Academy of Art.

Hee hee

2011-07-02T14:06:00.000-07:00

http://loopydave.deviantart.com/art/your-future-haircut-199796037?q=gallery%3Aloopydave%2F11702006&qo=11

Can anyone tell me who numbers 3, 5 and 6 are?
JH

A Mere Three Months Later...

2011-06-19T13:24:00.000-07:00

I finally sucked it up and finished this pinup for Chris Mill's Gravedigger book, which, luckily for me, ran late. I am the unproud possessor of a sheaf of papers bearing flat, fruitless, dead-end doodles on the way to this. All things considered, I think it came out fairly well. I like that the cluster of centers of interest are placed assymetrically for one thing. Chris says he'll let me know when the book is out, which I guess is his way of saying that I won't be getting a free copy. Sigh... Times is hard in the comics biz.
JH

After Surgery

2011-05-23T00:23:00.001-07:00

My cancer surgery of last week went well. The surgeon, Mark Singer, is a preeminent, highly skilled guy who also is very good-humored and reassuring--not that common a combination, I'm told and I believe it.

It's a good thing this is basically happening between semesters. I look scary now and my voice is shot. But the body, even the post-middle-age body, is an incredible thing.

I want to thank everybody who shook my hand or sent me an encouraging message through email or Facebook. There's never any need to feel called upon to say something special in such a case; I can tell you every expression of good wishes is gratefully banked and adds to the strength I can bring to bear in the situation.

(But when a friend quoted a line from an old Simpsons episode to me, "Chicks dig scars," that was kind of extra bonus special. :) )

JH

To Inspire... or Repulse

2011-05-13T17:28:00.000-07:00

This is Rob Liefeld's work, the sample that got him his first job at a major publisher. Is it awful? Well it ain't great, but it's neatly drawn, highly inkable, and has a certain grand quality to its figures, and distinctive rendering style. The background, eh...not so convincing, but the strong use of diagonals adds a lot of energy to the composition. The hands and feet are bad.

What does this illustrate?

Maybe "right place, right time," but more than that: in comics, making work that's confident and professional on its own unique terms can be a powerful thing. Everybody says this guy is bad because everybody says he's bad, but how many of us could for sure do something that more people would respond to? Not that is the only measure. But it ain't nothing.

Good luck in your final push, you-all.

JH

Comics' Future.

2011-05-10T20:48:00.000-07:00

An interesting article that raises some important question about the way that the Big Two might react to the increasing obsolescence of the printed monthly comic. Thanks to P. Hari of LinkedIn's comics group.
http://socialwizz.com/?p=4289
The surpassing sagacity and foresightedness of the comments that follow it are due their being written by me. :)
JH

By Request--Fisheye aids!

2011-05-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

Here are those "globe grids" for five point and four point fisheye. Rememeber that four-point is the more complex of the two, as it involves what are essentially three partial globe grids staggered across each other.
These are from Creative Layout, by Joko et al.

JH

ILLUSTRATION CONTEST!

2011-04-08T12:01:00.001-07:00

Chuck Pyle sent this one along. Could be a nice opportunity...
LINK

JH

"New Very Awesome" Comics Job

2011-03-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

So, so impressive when people who post a job listing can't write and proofread. But contrary to the prevailing pattern, this guy says he's paying:

Posted Date: 3/15/2011

Major: Illustration
Title: SUPER HERO COMIC ARTIST NEEDED
Key Skills: Penciling, Inking, Painting, Lettering

Job Description:
New very awesome esoteric group of projects that has lots of potential
and has financial backing.
Looking for artist with the same likes as Todd McFarlane and Dale
Keown (Spawn, The Darkness/Pitt). Love their attention to detail and
style.
Looking to create 3-6 issues of a new type of comic character. Very
very niche but huge potential concept. IMAGE comics connections for
publishing and production. Email for NDA and more info along with your
resume, references if possible and examples of work
Project will start with you as indie contractor and move to fulltime.

Job Qualifications:
-CREATIVE & INVENTIVE.

-We want someone who is daring with imagery and wants to be cutting
edge in the next style and concepts.
-Love comics and have a passion for comics.
-Good at taking ideas and branching off the original but staying true
to the aesthetic.
-Able to be HIGHY PRIVATE AND DISCREET.
-Prompt
-Ahead of schedule
-Laugh at pressure and due dates.
-Discipline and committed

Pay is based per page as is for any comic book artist.

Pay Range: Negotiable
How To Apply:
Email Resume, Company Website

Location of Job: San Diego (but work from home is possible)
Length of Position: TBD
Contact Information:
Company Name: TYME 2 SHYNE ARTISTIC STUDIOS LLC.
Address: 3515 Morena Blvd.
San Diego, CA 92117
Contact Name: Gerald Venditti
Contact Phone: Contact me (JH) for phone number
Fax Number:
Email Address:
Website: http://www.t2sartisticstudios.com
Company Profile:
A new company looking to create a team of extraordinary artistic
individuals in the entertainment industry.

More information available upon request and with a signed and initialed
Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Cashing the Check of Fisheye

2011-03-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

The first photo shows a realtor's use of a wide angle lens, perhaps in a vain effort to make a tiny bathroom appear bigger. Note the slight curving of straight lines near the edges of the photo. Fisheye in action, in a very minor way. Note also the distortion of the squares of the tile floor at the bottom, similar to what we get if we extend a grid too close to the viewer and pass the Station Point.

The second photo shows another example of slight fish-eye-ness in a normal wide-angle picture. Look at the curving of the line above the store name.

Next, an audacious and impressive use of a slight upshot in a fisheye context. The dropped horizon sags justly. Though much informed by fisheye photography, this is a intuitive, freehand approach to perspective, not a technically correct one--but no worse for it. Quite the opposite. I think it's terrific.

Here's a rough for a work-in-progress on a women-in-prison project I'm calling "Women in Prison." It's a WIP WIP. OK not really--it's just a doodle I did for the blog to show the use of fisheye in an indoor setting, and to remind young women of the perils of suburban piracy.

Note that in fisheye all the perspective is forced, comic-book style. That means that apparent scale differences, like between foreground and deeper objects, such the ladies' heads, are maximized. Note as well that our view of the standing woman goes from a decisive down-view of her feet, to a unequivocal upshot of her head. Objects in fisheye are closer than they appear.

(The green projection lines running back to the DVP--not shown--bow outward, away from the center of vision, and that has the effect, I believe, of accelerating the diminution of the floor tiles.)

Here finally below, as promised, the "globe grid" used to make five-point fisheye drawings, presented both singly and in a form for doing multi thumbnails. The center point is a VP and there are VPs at 12, 3, 6, and 9. I am not posting the globe grid for the maddeningly complex four-point perspective (Yes, four-point is more complicated than 5- , oddly.) although I will if you ask me purty-like.
JH

Time Capsule

2011-03-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

This is going to be of interest mostly to my fellow old-timers. I found some notes I made at a comic convention I went to in New York City in the summer of 1975. It was in a hotel attached to Grand Central Station and put on on by a VIP of early comics fandom named Phil Seuling. I saw a panel with Steve Gerber, Howard Chaykin, Jim Starlin, and Berni Wrightson. Al Milgrom too? I can't remember. Thirty-six years ago.....

Jim Starlin, asked about comic books as literature, said that "in 25 years, I think comics will be right up there with Reader's Digest." (A magazine not revered for literary merit.)

Someone asked the panel about all the killing in comics. Chaykin said, "I'm non-violent; I love violence. Movement is beautiful." The violence in his work, Chaykin said, was not about carnage, but action, motion.

Berni Wrightson on Jack Kirby: "His drawing doesn't do much for me." But he praised Kirby for great storytelling. Chaykin echoed Wrightson on that point, but added that he didn't think he personally had learned much of anything from Kirby.

("King" Kirby at this stage was an admired and imitated old pro, if not quite as revered as he became later when I think his age spurred people to consider his place in the pantheon of comics artists.)

In contrast, Starlin said, "everything I learned about storytelling, I learned from Kirby... and Ditko."

Starlin, who was very popular at this point because of his work on Warlock and Captain Marvel, was asked by an audience member for advice on getting into comics, said "Practice, and plan on a hard time." The comics business was in a serious slump at this point and Starlin was probably speaking for a lot of industry insiders when he said it was going to get worse.

With shocking candor, Wrightson, who was also very hot at this point, said that he was only making $2000-$10,000 a year. I suppose this would be like making $10,000 to $50,000 now. One of the panelists said the average monthly book was only making $500 in profit a month. Who knows if there's any basis for this figure. But comics only cost about a quarter at this point and the cost of paper was rising. Television continued its decades-long erosion of comics sales. Videogames didn't exist yet though and many, many titles were selling hundreds of thousands of copies an issue, a level of sales that on a printed monthly book will probably never be attained again.

I didn't write this down, but I seem to remember Chaykin, ever quotable and provocative, taking pains to explain that pro artists weren't really into comics the way we fans were. He got his free copies from Marvel and DC each month and gave them away to kids in his neighborhood.

JH

Apologies for any misquoting or inaccurate paraphrasing. I was 17!

Lesson Learned--Yeah, RIGHT!

2011-03-09T21:40:00.000-08:00

I promised this guy Chris Mills I'd do a pinup of his character of his character Gravedigger. I knew what I wanted to do, something a la Robert McGinnis, with a sleazy early-60s vibe. I kept sketching figures but the resulting compositions were boring. I soon regretted promising to do it.

After sporadic hours of fruitless sketching, I fi-i-i-nally tried practicing what I always preach to you guys: thumbnailing. That gave me the first things that looked like they might become satisfying drawings.

But I still couldn't get the characters to believably cohabit the space. So once again in desperation I tried what I woulda told you guys to do and what I shoulda done from the start:

I.e., perspective: I carefully checked the figure heights against each other and the background, using projection. I think I like it! This is the resulting rough, tones added in Photoshop, as you can probably tell.

JH

Facial Structure Exercise

2011-03-02T11:04:00.000-08:00

Here's the pics I want you guys to select from. Pick one. Please be sure you draw your face from a different ANGLE.
And here is a blog entry that shows the difference between doing this stuff well, and doing what comes naturally.

http://ill193.blogspot.com/2010/02/those-wee-facial-offsets.html

See you Tuesday!

JH

Amusedom.com

2011-02-28T11:55:00.000-08:00

Here's a very international site that touches on things that we're all interested in: Comics, illustration, digital illustration, gaming, caricature, etc. What's more, it has a workable way of letting readers sample and buy digital comics ($.99 to $1.50). It's free to join and can be a place to display your art, like conceptart.org a more professional deviantart.

(To my surprise, I found posted in the Comics section a book I'd colored with the more-than-able aid of a young Jeremy Saliba and Julian Meyer several years back. "Chrissie Claus," if you must know.)

I also "discovered" a couple new artists I admire. Chief among them is Corrado Mastantuono. This guy is incredible! He can do beautifully stylized bigfoot/funny animal stuff as well as virtuoso realistic work. Europe's ability to generate awesome talents who go totally unheralded in the US is astonishing. It is comforting to think that in the coming years, I will increasingly have my own good taste and the internet to thank for my exposure to great artists from the world over, rather than the army of visually illiterate post-collegiate yutzes who edit comics in this country standing as gatekeepers.

And there's Damien Dunn, A skilled digital and pencil artist who does eye-grabbing caricature (See his awesome Jimi Hendrix in the scrolling art on the homepage). He's only in his mid-20s. Ya ask me, he oughta be a little more careful about covering his digital tracks--a lot of his pictures seem to start with his applying the Photoshop Liquify tools to photos. Which is fine. If he didn't have a good eye for creating the distortion, he wouldn't be such a good caricaturist. But sometimes you can spot bits of a piece that are clearly unadulterated parts of the original photo, which casts all his work in a slightly curdled light. But it is fun as hell to look at.

I'll bet there are a lot more great artists to be discovered there, alongside familiar greats like Dave Johnson, for example. It reminds me of the earlier days of flickr.com, when it was still chiefly for pro-level photos and not a digital shoebox for people to hold their drinking pictures in. (Your five fat girlfriends drunk in Senor Frog's, 2005? Fuck, yeah! Load 'em all up!).

JH

Pitch Basket!!

2011-02-16T10:47:00.000-08:00

For those of you who don't want to do either a pet project pitch or pro samples, here are synopses of the various available original pitches. If you choose one, I will contact the writer to re-secure their permission, and find out if they have any interest in working with you on it, giving feedback.

Short Hand -- A young man with psychic powers has Progeria (sp?), a disease which makes you look 70 at age 17. The original "old soul," he helps the police solve crimes. Dialogue-driven, its script is mainly that, running to 10 pp. so far. Very sharp writing.
Capers -- (for kids) three kids find a crash-landed alien ship. The dying pilot gives them amulets that transform each into superheroes that are adult superhero versions of themselves. Their first villain: Two headed crime-boss One-Man Mob. In plot form (Marvel-style), with some early visual development. Would make a good animated series.
Quantum Sue -- Humorous sci-fi with a Jewish female lead. She forms a team drawn from different dimensions to preserve earth life from a marauding agent of universal destruction, ala Galactus.
Human Conspiracy -- A tongue-in-cheek genre-bender; adventure, detective, s-f, western all in one. Full Script.
Brain Suckers of Venus--Humorous retro sci-fi -- full scr.
Null and Boyd -- Bloody, gruesome crime saga set in Boston with a central character who feels no pain, little emotion and should by rights be dead. In full novella form currently.
Andy's War -- AW is the story of a man named Andrew Tillman who has the ability to read the history of people and objects. He's a young African-American guy. Set in Vietnam. Concise full script, currently running to 9 pp., but expandable to a series pitch.
Tiger Moth -- the NYPD, breaking up a gun-running operation, discovers at its center a human with odd powers (superhuman fighting skills, flame touch, rapid healing). She say she's 30,000 years old and the Mother of Man. She takes on a shadowy cult called the Brotherhood which has for centuries been close to the seats of power, manipulating world events for its own gain. She is determined to defeat them, via means fair and foul. Set mostly in NYC -- Exists only as a pitch at present. This is one that a student might have a great role in shaping, esp.visually.
Lizard Planet --Goofy Sci-fi. Space Travelers from the Bronx colonize a distant planet, civilizing the sentient lizards there. full script
Worlds of Blood -- Bloody military adventure with an alternate-earths twist. Full of cataclysm and genocides across several worlds which intersect suddenly. Some of those worlds are semi-familiar, some bizarre and s-f-ish. Robert Kennedy is President of an alternate Earth and is a central character. This is a sprawling thing, like The Ultimates, and calls for an artist with cinematic sensibility and strong design skills.
Lust Among the Ruins -- Frazettaesque space fantasy with robots, mutants, sexy lead characters. Currently exists only as plot for a 7-pp.comic-book story. You and the writer could discuss what elements to keep for an ongoing series.

A few of these have some early visual development work done on them. You could see or not see that material; you are certainly not bound by it.

JH

AH Spills Tricks--A Must-See

2011-02-09T19:34:00.000-08:00

I think Adam Hughes is probably the greatest comics cover guy ever. The only serious rivals I see are Joe Kubert and some of the EC people (Wally Wood, Jack Davis), whose approaches and aims are different. Hughes keeps raising the bar.

So, unbelievably, the online art supply vendor Jerry's Artarama has on their site three videos of AH telling how he does stuff! Free! Another thing that's unbelievable is how absurdly hi-def these videos are. They could be projected onto the moon. They take a long, long time to load.

Winningly, the Master is actually detectably a bit nervous on camera (I can more than relate; I'm horrible on video, but as Winston Churchill might have said, I have much to be horrible about)-- ironic, when you consider his skills and status. (He says "refract" when he means "reflect" for instance.)

I'm still downloading the second and third, but the first, on eyes, was well worth the wait.

JH

It's Worth More Than This...

2011-02-08T08:57:00.001-08:00

Good news from the world of publishing. Great news, really: Andrew Loomis' Figure Drawing for All It's Worth is coming back into print at the end of May! Too late to help us in this semester, but still huge.

This book is as good as it gets for a pure illustrator's guide to the figure -- as opposed to the figure-drawing-form-life discipline, which is of course related, but there are many good books on that. Loomis was an illustrator, meaning that he could work out of his head, but would use photos or models as needed to assure a convincing result. In keeping with the aims of this class, his book stressed the principles and the feel of figure drawing so that one could learn it at a deep level, and thus work from the imagination. It is a wonderful book, as all of Loomis' were. He was without equal as an illustrator's how-to author--the perfect combination of scholarship and virtuosity.

This book has been out of print, in its original form, for many, many years. Surviving copies tend to go for about $300 or more. You can preorder it from Amazon for a super-reasonable $23.08, save a giant 42% and get Poor Old Teacher a little kickback from Amazon by clicking on the link at right!

JH

P.S.: Thanks to my good pal and fellow long-time Elvira artist Ronn Sutton for the tip.

Let's Get Started!

2011-01-23T15:45:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Comics 2, ILL 292, Spring 2011! Please click on this link for details of the assignment and examples of thumbnails and layouts--some by the great Frank Miller! (UPDATE, 5Feb: I have cleared up the image-display issues you may have encountered earlier)

JH

Facial Expression

2011-01-18T10:33:00.000-08:00

The fussy, glossy style doesn't really appeal to me (nor does the surfeit of false modesty), but these expression drawings are excellent, reminiscent of that guy who does Blacksad-- plus there's commendable attention to the underlying principles too.

That artist Tracy Butler begins by knocking and mocking common goofs and cliches ("Smarm Brow" indeed) is a lot more endearing to me than all that affected self-bashing. Ladies, can ya quit this?

JH

LogoRAMA!!

2010-12-14T20:41:00.000-08:00

Thanks for a fun semester, you guys.
WIth apologies for the prepended advertising, here's that film!

Best viewed in full screen mode!
JH

Ink on the original pencils?

2010-11-19T11:10:00.000-08:00

art by Jack Kirby, © DC

Brittany emailed me asking me to clarify what I had said about inking on the originals. Here's my reply:

Hi, Brittany,

You can ink on your originals. It's just very important that you get good xeroxes of them first.

If you don't want to ink the originals, so that you can show both original pencils and inks side by side, then you need to get a scan of your pencils and use Photoshop to make it so that the black lines are blue. You need to have the info palette visible, with CMYK selected in the Info Palette Options. Then in the pulldown menus, select Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation. Put Hue slider to the middle of the scale (not critical to hit an exact number), Saturation to 100, and Lightness to whatever level will make very darkest area is no more that 60% cyan (C). This lays down a pretty heavy blue, one that doesn't quite pick up as black on MY scanner when I scan the inks in bitmap mode (which is how inks are best scanned). You would want to go a lot lighter to get the look, for example, of the inking-exercise boards with the waves, trees and so on that Mick Gray does for his kids. The original will look cleaner if you go for that lighter blue too. But you do want it dark enough to see the details! And be sure to ink with your xerox of the pencils nearby.

You'll need to get it printed out on an 11x17 printer. Most can handle 2-ply bristol just fine. There is even a thick paper setting on some printers, either in the Print dialog box or on the machine itself. Such a printer is a great thing to have, and they are about a tenth the price they were several years ago.

JH

Demo of reflections set up

2010-11-16T21:06:00.000-08:00

Oooops-- I meant to post this to my Drawing from the Imagination blog. Comics students may ignore this.

Note that, as always with 2-point, you must have one or both VPs well outside the borders of the final composition, and neither should be more than a little bit inside the picture, ever.
The oval mirror idea I suggest in the video is not a good idea for this assignment because you have to show three objects in addition to the queen. "Dean of Perspective" Joko suggested to me once that if you draw the reflected objects in the mirror first and then use the methods in the module to place and scale the actual objects in the real world, you can eliminate any trial and error.
Sorry for the video quality. It looks much better playing on my Mac than through the Blogger interface for some reason. I think you can still follow it though.

Here's an impressive version of this assignment by a past student. Sure, it's kinda lame that the room isn't reflected in the mirror (I told you that was a common failing), but she had drawn everything else (except for the head) so beautifully that I let it pass.

This, btw, is the sort of super-competence, like Chad Weatherford's Civil War drawing last week, that entitles you to a certain amount of rule-breaking. If you're not making fairly steady A's, just do the assignment as written, please...

JH

What to watch for in clothing folds

2010-11-04T13:09:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple new videos to help put you touch with the mechanics and aesthetics of drawing clothing folds. Then, a magnificent new illustration by the immensely talented and personable Andy Kuhn. It shows how, once you have some feel for the mechanics of folds and know how to make them follow the form, you can beautifully describe clothes just with outlines, buttons and the shadows under the rolls. Notice how nicely, in this minimalist style, the square ends of the lines serve as those "turnarounds" when a roll doubles back going into a "Y"and the shadow under it stops. Wow!

JH

Rad How-To Blog

2010-11-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

This drawing blog, done by a guy named Rad, has got me thinking: Do I teach too much by picking on people's common misperceptions about how body parts are formed? Does that approach favor surface result too much over process and understanding? And if so, am I short-changing you guys by teaching in a more superficial way than I ought to?

Or, on the other hand, would a deeper approach prove too analytical and intensive for today's students? Too much like the year of drawing plaster casts that used to feature as a prominent and fundamental part of classical art education? (Considering that almost all drawing errors are some combination of misreading the evidence of senses and failure to deal with the implications of 3D-ness, I think more and more that art schools were on the right track a hundred years ago. My biggest knock on current students is that they want to be shown a recipe, a video tutorial, even for things that aren't cut and dried enough to work that way.)

Either way, please check out Rad's blog, which is a sublime combination of sharp-eyed analysis and a heightened feeling for not only figure drawing, but shape design and storytelling. As such, it is very useful to both illustrators and concept artists. And animators really need this stuff as they spend years moving beyond a superficial, shape-driven apprehension of the world.

You know a guy's got a lot on the ball when he's willing to show you his class notes.... Go now, go now!

JH

Costume Carnival! and Other Reminders.

2010-10-27T16:22:00.000-07:00

Costume Carnival is this weekend, Saturday 30 Oct, 10-4 in Bradley Hall, 540 Powell. Great chance to brush up your clothed figure skills in a fun, fanciful, student-directed way.

The Comic Book Workshop is now weekly at 3 on Thursdays in 540, 1st floor, I think.

Ever wanted to be an intern at Marvel? This is your chance to find out if editors return the calls of people who work for them. For free.

Escape from Illustration Island has been going for a year now. It's a great source for tutorials and career tips for illustrators.

JH

Everything I Know

2010-10-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

The key to drawing a thing well is having a strong feeling for its form. And the key to that is getting a workable simplification of it into your blue-pencil underdrawing. Over time you can develop and hold a simple 3D head shape, for example, in your mind, that you can draw from any angle.

The alternative is to have a conventionalized way of drawing a head for each of several angles. That may not sound bad. It worked for years for John Byrne. But it meant that his characters looked quite different when seen from the angles that Byrne didn’t draw as well, and that any two characters, seen from the same angle, looked like cousins, if not siblings.

The little un-glimpsed errors that cling to our work consist almost entirely of shapes and juxtapositions from one view being misapplied to another. All learning artists are accidental Cubists. They unknowingly draw a thing from multiple directions at once.

By the way, these distortions I’m making fun of are come by honestly. These are the mistakes everybody makes in the effort to do something honorable: take what you know and adapt it to a wide variety of poses and angles. The trouble comes from trying to build your general “model” of a body part from the specific surface bits of it or one view of it rather than its actual, overall, 3D shape. What makes accomplished illustration better than amateur is the understanding is that everything in a drawing has to be defined and essentially contained by its capital-f Form.

For example, take this credible-looking drawing of a foot seen directly from the side. Then, a respectable drawing of a shoe proceeds reasonably from the first drawing’s premises. We can see the correctly observed fact that the sole of the shoe rocks up, off the floor, in front.

The trouble comes when one tries to take this flat understanding of the foot into a different view. Let’s go to, say, a more frontal view, from a higher angle--more typical of the way we usually see shoes. The need to foreshorten the foot for this view seems to call us to increase the curviness of that slight S-curve on the top edge of the original shoe. A curious innate human urge to represent the front ends of shoes as puff pastry has given the shoe a distinct echo of Mickey Mouse’s bulbous brogans. Moreover the very slight curving-upward of the sole has morphed into the entire front end of the foot’s hooking mysteriously, painfully, outward. Compared with a photo or better drawing, this is clearly disastrous, yet it is typical of what that we all do before we learn to deal with capital-F Form.

The solution what I’m calling SRSs: Simplified Rotatable Solids.

Heads!

The artist’s need to draw attractive, dimensional human heads from varying angles makes it essential to start with a simplified rotatable solid. Consider for a second the fact that few appealing, believable drawings have ever begun with a charmless, sloppy, skewed or ugly underdrawing. The need for those simple solids, starting with a headshape, should be pretty clear by now.

You can base your default starting headshape on an egg, or a simplified skull, or a sphere with jaw area added and the sides lopped off. These are all workable starts, each championed in different great how-to-draw books. I use something a little different, as you see here. There is a partial flattening of the front and side planes, as is visible by the faint squarishness of the horizontal centerline. The ears are already in place, just a little behind the vertical centerline for the side planes of the face. I can draw this from almost any angle, and still keep its proportions.

When your faces get weird-looking, when you keep having to redraw the features over and over, it’s usually because you’ve lost your artistic connection to that solid, or didn’t make it very well in the first place. Without realizing, you are likely presenting an impossible hybrid view: the different facial features are drawn as if seen from a variety of directions. When attempting to draw difficult angles on faces, do you sometimes get the Quasimodo effect?

To fix it: Erase back to that underdrawing stage, grab your blue pencil and make that headshape work, in its simplest, cleanest form, with centerlines that really hug and define that solid. (Centerlines done in a hasty, perfunctory way are worth less than nothing). When you return to drawing the features, locate them very, very softly and vaguely at first with the blue pencil before you refine them. Remember that the eyes are pushed back a little in relation to the eyebrows, forehead and the bridge of the nose. I recommend trying drawing the nose after the eyes, so you can make sure you have the eyes placed, aligned and spaced properly. If it’s still not working, get out some photo reference of a similar view.

When we forget that the bridge of a nose can block our view of the inner corner of the far eye, or when we fear to draw an eyebrow that wraps around to the unseen far side of the head, or forget that eyebrows are mostly ahead of the eyes, we can easily create little, dead, flat zones in our drawings. And we can be slow to recognize them in our own work. One solution is dutiful, analytical attention to the visible part of the far half of the face in 3/4 view, in photos and life.

When we see a face in 3/4 view, especially in closeup, the far eye is just a little more foreshortened, a little closer to a side view. Thus it looks a tiny bit shorter, less wide across. A little of this is due to the fact that our sightline to the far eye necessarily runs a little more across the eye and a little less at it than the near eye. A little is due to its just being farther away. These differences are greater when the viewer or camera is close up, and when the bridge of the nose is strong enough to cover a little of the far eye. Intriguingly, this is something that some of the very simplest anime and manga styles exaggerate. This gives animators the ability, even in styles of Pokemon simplicity, to draw in a way that heightens the feeling of Form, conquering 2D’s limitations. Ironically, this is something that most anime imitators totally miss, at least at first.

Try this for spacing and placing the eyes in 3/4 views:
1) In your blue-pencil underdrawing, you place that far eye first. Keep it a little shorter on its horizontal axis than you think is right. Use your judgment as to whether the eyeball breaks the contour of the face or if there is a little face showing on the far side of the eye (as with broader faces, slightly more frontal views, anime-derived styles). Forget the nose for now. Loop in a space-keeper “third eye” right next to the far eye. Because it’s a little closer to us and a facing a little tiny bit more toward us, you make the imaginary third eye a little longer, or longer still if you want wider-set eyes or small eyes. Finally add the near eye at a size that looks natural.

2) The far corner of the far eye should be very blunted by the foreshortening of the eye opening and the sphericalness of the eyeball. In fact in some views that approach profile, that little place where the outer ends of the upper and lower lids meet may be “‘round the corner,” hidden from our sight by the eye itself. But the near corner of the near eye will be extended, displayed to our eye at nearly its full length and pointiness. Look critically at the interrelation of the eyes and the face, make any revisions, then draw in the bridge of the nose.

3) Hold on! Don’t draw it as a line--it’s an SRS too, Picasso. Sketch it as a wedge with a flat base. “Glue” that base between the eyes, centered right on the third eye. The bridge of the nose itself will tell you whether it’s deep enough to cover some of the far eye. No need to guess. Working this way saves you from this scenario: You draw the near half of the face with confidence, but lose your way trying to cram the eye onto the bit of the face that exists on the far side of the nose.

4) Now make sure that the forehead and thus the eyebrows are a little ahead of the eyes. The centerline of the eyebrows must be shifted toward the outside, moved out into a “wider orbit” than the plane the eyes are in. Often, very little of the far eyebrow will show and the bit that does will be foreshortened--retreating around the forehead. (This far eyebrow is the area where people most often fall “flat,” failing to reckon with the roundness of the head. For instance, often when a character is drawn with arched eyebrows, their inner ends will be shown curving down to the nose-bridge with two identical, symmetrical curves. This is never found in nature, because of the spheroid shape of the forehead. Check any 3/4 view photo of any person ever.) Refine the nose to a natural shape.

Look for this unequal eye length in photos of 3/4-view faces. You will always see it, even when the bridge of the nose is too shallow to cover any of the far eye.

When the face is shown in extreme up-shot--as when the jaw takes on a W shape --the eyes appear to “sag” slightly at their outer ends.

Upshot or down, it is imperative to visualize eyeballs as spherical. Even though only a fraction of the eyeball is visible, the lids are shaped by it. When you do a downshot, think of the lower lids as semicircular balconies hugging that sphere of eyeball, for example. The lines of the eye opening will only appear straight-ish where they come between your viewpoint and the core of the eye’s sphere. As they bend away from you toward the “horizon” of the eyeball, they will curve more and more, due to the progressive foreshortening imposed by the eye’s sphericity. So if you always draw the eye opening as a leaf shape, slot or oval regardless of one’s angle of view, you need to bring some direction to your approach. Check photos of faces taken from high and low angles, especially ones where the eyes are not wide open, and you will gain that necessary sense of the eyeball as a sphere.

These little site-specific heightenings of Form-awareness, by the way, are not airy-fairy extra enhancements of the existing charm of your work. Rather, they are surface telltales of a deeper insight that separates learning artists from good ones and increases charm and convincingness: an ability to draw from 3D Form. My belief is that paying attention to the specifics, especially with checking against reality and photos, can lead gradually to a heightened awareness of the primacy of Form in general. Some jag-off fine-arts styles may trade on primitive drawing to falsely imply an authenticity of expression. But beyond that insular world, there are very few styles, including those of Power Puff Girls geometric simplicity, that are in anyway diminished by this ability.

JH

Perspective

2010-09-21T17:40:00.000-07:00

The resource I mentioned in class as being especially valuable for perspective has many other valuable insights into drawing in general. Allow several minutes for download.

JH

Ellipses: The "Implied Cylinder"

2010-09-17T14:25:00.000-07:00

You guys, here's a set of very short videos I made just recently to explain how to orient ellipses properly, over on the blog for my graduate Drawing from the Imagination sections.
If you haven't already, please read the announcement following this post.
JH

Comics Workshop is in flux

2010-09-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

Stay tuned for news re time and location of Dan Cooney's Comics Workshop. Up in the air at the moment.

JH

P.S.: I am tracking down the Comics Club. Please leave a comment if you know anything.

After the First Meeting

2010-09-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

Hi, Y'all,
Here's the first, verbal part of the handout, as well as the instructions for the head exercise, now no longer worded as notes to myself!

JH

Comics 2 - ILL 292
John Heebink
Credits: Take the Book off the Shelf, Doll and Creature (Image), Vampirella Quarterly (Harris), Killer Stunts (Alias), Elvira (Claypool), Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (Hamilton), Nick Fury, Quasar (Marvel), Action Planet Comics

PHONE 415 887-
BLOG ill193.blogspot.com
EMAIL penciler@

Category Weights:

Participation (Helpful crits, adding to discussions, readiness to draw)    20%
Homework                                                                                                 35
In-class Assignments, Quizzes                                                                  20
Final Project (pitch pack)                                                                          25

ATTENDANCE
Attendance is required.
Two unexcused lates will count as an unexcused absence.
Arriving five minutes or more after class begins or leaving fifteen minutes or more before class ends will be considered a late.
Three unexcused absences will lower final grade one full letter (B to C, etc.)
Three consecutive unexcused absences will result in a final grade of F.
Four unexcused absences will result in an F.
Excuses for absences and tardinesses must be written and verifiable by phone.

LATE WORK IS NOT PERMITTED
Late work is given an “0” without a written excuse with contact info so I can verify (see Student Handbook for what constitutes a valid excuse--it’s limited). However you may re-do up to four on-time assignments. So your incentive is to turn in work, good or bad, on time, and later re-do the ones you’re unhappy with. Work must be turned in (or emailed to me if you can’t make class) 20 min before the end of the class session in which it is due. Re-dos are due in the 14th week of class.

FOOD IS NOT PERMITTED. Seriously. We have a student lunchroom. Drinks are okay.

DIFFICULTIES. Please see syllabus for available services for when you are in difficulty or have special needs. ARC in particular is helpful: They have motivated, helpful counselors, content tutors and language tutors, and they put on subject-specific workshops. They have a special office for accommodating the needs of students with disabilities (Classroom Services).

Everybody goes through rough patches, periods of adjustment. Please see ARC early if a problem arises that interferes with your work. If your grades drop to D or F, I am required to talk to you about it and urge you to see ARC. Working with friendly, eager ARC counselors earlier may prevent things getting to that point.

Philosophy:
INDUSTRY PRACTICE. This class is modeled on industry practice. Though comic-book deadlines are often somewhat elastic, the career risks of lateness make my no-late-work policy a good practice. Real cartoonists often have coffee and soda in their work area, so it's allowed in this class, etc.

ALL ABOUT THE WORK Most of our aims in this class will be in service of producing a high-quality final product. Please ask questions.

GENERAL-TO-SPECIFIC. The best way to produce professional work is to move, in our work, from big issues to small, from soft to hard, general to specific, taking no more time at any stage than is necessary. Working with blue pencils is key to this, as is breaking out of comfortable bad habits.

THE GOAL of this class is to produce a professional quality comics pitch: Cover, character sketches and 6 pages of inked story art. (Some students may want to design logos and write the verbal component of the pitch, but these are not required and will not affect grade). Lettering directly on the boards is strongly discouraged.

I stand ready to assist you with any problem areas in your work. You can call me at the number above. I highly encourage you to scan and email me your work in progress, so I may give helpful feedback that can save you time and heartache. There may be comics and perspective workshops that can be helpful and fun. I believe they start after the third week of the semester.

Teaching Methods:
Lectures (limited), demos, handouts, homework, class critiques, quizzes, in-class assignments, one-on-one advice from teacher.

Updated Supply list
Pencils, of your preferred hardnesses
Sanford Col-erase Blue or Light blue Pencils . ALWAYS bring to class.
Strathmore 400 or 500 Series bristol board, smooth finish. (Trim down to 11" x 17")
Kneaded and Pink Pearl or synthetic erasers (e.g., Staedtler-Mars White)
30/60/90 triangle--the bigger the better. Look for one with a raised straightedge for inking
Raphael 8404 Series Kolinsky sable brush, size #2 or #3 or #4 , (or the less expensive Escoda 1212 series, size #2 or #3 or #4) available at Pearl Paint and Jerry's Artarama. OR, alternatively, an excellent brush pen: Brush pens can be found at the Kinokuniya Stationery Store , 1581 Webster, Japantown, on the 38 Geary bus line.
Pen nibs and holders (I'd suggest Hunt 102 and an assortment of others. I really like the Deleter nibs and holders from Japan. They are sometimes available at the Kinokuniya BOOKSTORE in Japantown, but it's difficult to find out because a lot of their clerks don't know they carry them. Deleter makes it own holder that fits both styles of Deleter nibs.)
Pelikan Waterproof or Speedball Super Black India Ink (Higgins Black Magic is a passable second choice.)
Pentel Presto or Pro White or Dr. Martin's Bleedproof White or Pilot Correction pen or other correction pen
Micron Pigma black pigment liners, sizes 03, 05 and 08, two of each
Drafting tape or dots
Optional but recommended: drawing board with parallel rule or T-square; stick-style or pencil-style eraser; architecture-style lead holder, leads and special sharpener; sanding paddle for making chisel points on pencils; electric eraser (for erasing ink); French curve, flexible curves, ellipse templates; compass; 2H or 3H pencil (or lead and lead holder) for doing side-of-the-pencil shading and fills of black areas; a 6" metal ruler for ruling backgrounds; light box, tone screens.

Carrying a sketchbook is a good idea.

Always bring blue pencil, black pencil, erasers, paper and a ruler to class!

Welcome to Comics 2, Fall '10!

2010-08-26T16:07:00.000-07:00

Hi, everybody.
We've got a nicely sized section this semester.
This class is about helping you make the best-possible package of pages by the end of the semester. So the amount of work required is not excessive--it's a time-tested number of pages. It won't force you to compromise on quality--if you use your time well.
Another aspect of this class is maximizing what it is that you already do. That makes our smallish class size a true plus, so that you can get enough individual attention to help you deal with whichever aspect of your work is occupying your attention these days.
I'll give you a couple others to worry about as well, naturally!
Good luck, you all. Speak up, both in class and out. From the first day of class you will have my email and cell phone number. Don't be shy--let me know if you are not getting from the class what you want.

JH

Another Challenge: Expression

2010-08-03T18:17:00.000-07:00

THE "25 Essential Expressions Challenge"
You may have seen examples of this one on deviantart. Someone named Nancy Lorenz designed the sheet for it. Not sure why she put a copyright on something she wanted people to copy, but OK, so not everybody gets the concept of copyright.

It's a great exercise, even if some of the expressions are kinda redundant. There are three different flavors of fury, for example.

It's not only an exercise in expression, but a workout for people like me who have trouble drawing a character consistently. I've been sketching out specimens for a vampire pitch I'm working on. I will post them here at some point.

JH

The Page 100 Project

2010-06-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

Artist Jason Turner has started a new challenge for comics artists with a simple premise: You pick a favorite book (prose or, I suppose, poetry) and adapt page 100 into comics form. Turner's effort is shown here. It's from Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union. My fave of those I've seen is the one in color, based on one of the few books on this list that I've heard of and one of only two I've read, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This one is adapted by Mark Oftedal.

JH

Revised Photoshop Primer

2010-04-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

Vampirella Quarterly 2008 Halloween, pencils and colors JH, inks M. Manley

Hi, you guys. I'll see if I can schedule that Photoshop lab day. I've just newly condensed and updated a Photoshop primer for you. Here also is a link to a Photoshop file that shows my preferred file setup and represents a file that is ready to have the modeling done. The advantages of this file setup are detailed in the Primer.

JH

Those Wee Facial Offsets

2010-02-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

These jpegs are presented to help you to a finer handling of the ins and outs of facial structure. I did these a couple years back to help a grad student. He was a good page designer and storyteller, but admitted he'd been forgetting to use all he knew about facial structure. (The school couldn't let him go out with samples that showed such amateurishness, and so he was graduated conditioned upon his making some few revisions to his thesis project based upon these notes.) Click on them to enlarge.

Hope these are helpful for you guys. In the second illo, I'm showing how starting with simple, attractively proportioned structure can allow his own line work to be repositioned into something dimensional and nice-looking. Handling that far half of the face is really tricky, largely because all its surfaces are rounding away from the viewer's eye, and because we unknowingly treat it as flat in places.

Feedback from the Jazzy One

2009-05-29T09:02:00.000-07:00

I recently found my notes from when, years ago, I had then-Marvel Art Director and personal hero John Romita , Sr. critique my stuff. His comments are a valuable list of things to remember in drawing comics, and expecially relevant for those who, like me, have struggled with stiffness in the figures and achieving a Marvel-ready level of dynamism.

This stuff is golden:

Twist hips, shoulders
Avoid parallel lines (it hurts the design of your page)
Figures in groups: Vary angles (of bodily attitudes and body parts)
Vary poses, gestures within the group to avoid repetition
Order large groups into subgroups and vary the spacing between those subgroups
Look at how old pros handle groups
Open mouths of speaking characters more (This one is more specific to me)
Can't over-do the deep perspectives in BGs (so more 1-point persp?)
Avoid the sleepwalking, antiseptic, talking-heads look--more acting!
Push the expressions--boost emotion with dramatic lighting like split lighting
Take poses to greater extremes! Easier for Raiders (art correction team) to tone down excesses than to add excitement where none exists (Romita stood then to show how, when one really leaned into a simple pointing pose, the arm came out of the sleeve a few inches farther!)
Keep a little "air" around figures in action--Don't pin them near borders (esp. don't put figure outlines parallel to nearby panel borders)
Remember to spot room for balloons
Keep individual characters' faces more consistent as to features (e.g., nose long/short), young-looking/old-looking
Keeping individual characters' reactions internally consistent will make the characters live in peoples' minds--making story overwhelm art in readers' mind--which you want!

In this last one, Romita was deeply influenced by Milton Caniff's classic adventure strip Terry and the Pirates, wherein the characters were superbly individuated and true to their own natures--that is, consistent, yet without being predictable. This helped Romita make the Spider-Man cast very human for his readers.

Thanks, Mr. Romita, for sharing your knowledge and undimmed enthusiasm for comics!

JH

The Portfolio Game, Part 1

2009-05-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

It's easy to be nervous about presenting your portfolio to an editor or another artist at a comic book convention. It's easy to delay it, in the mistaken belief that a lot is hanging on this one early incarnation of your portfolio. It's not so. The first convention at which you show your portfolio is the beginning of a process, it's not the whole game. You will very likely not walk up to an editor, wink, say, "Have I got a style for you" and blow him away. Not at the first con and probably not the fifth.

For now, just pick the very best pages you have. The ones that you don't feel you have to make excuses for or explain anything about. Maybe that's just three pages now. That's fine. Your job is not to convince an editor that you are already the artist you secretly hope to be. You need to make the most favorable representation of where you are in your growth now.

Right now, you can only be as good as you are right now. You are accountable for nothing more. Don't wait for inspiration to strike so you can finish that really great page you know you have within you. It'll come out some day. For now, the most important thing is that you get the process started.

Be clear on this: You will only show editors pages with storytelling. No pin-ups, no covers. I should retype this ten times because people always seem to dream up reasons why they should show some single drawing. Don't! Story pages only!

If you are demonstrating inking, make sure that you have xeroxes of the original pencils. It's much better if these are not your pencils, but those of a professional. If you know a comic book artist, ask him or her if you could make copies of some xeroxes of their pencils and others'. All artists have some. You can ink these on one-ply bristol on a light box, with a duplicate on hand to refer to. Or you can scan them and print them out in blue ink onto two-ply bristol on a large format ink-jet printer. Again, have a copy on hand to refer to.

Views from the Top

2009-03-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

Again thanks to Jon Colton and comicscareer.com: more thoughts on getting work, this time from Marvel chief Joe Quesada. (edited by me for spelling and punctuation).
JH

Joe Quesada’s Portfolio Tips
March 19th, 2009

This evening, Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada was Twittering tips for new comics artists who are building a portfolio to show editors. We’ve captured these tweets for your reading convenience. You can follow Quesada’s messages yourself at: http://twitter.com/JoeQuesada.

Okay, how about some portfolio building advice? Grab your notepads and pencils, kiddies.
Okay, first, you’ve heard it before: don’t letter your samples. No SFX either.
Don’t ink your work, unless they are ink samples over someone else’s pencils. Don’t color your own work unless you’re a painter.
Keep it simple, an editor does not need to see a 30-page portfolio. We can tell by the second page whether someone has the stuff.
I see people spinning their wheels doing these gigantic portfolios and I end up feeling bad, because whether they’re good or not, they wasted a lot of time.
A perfect penciling portfolio can be built in 12 pages.
Three stories, consisting of no more than 3 pages each. Three cover samples that relate to your story.
Each story a silent vignette, with a beginning, middle and end. No words, but the viewer should be able to tell exactly what’s going on.
Pick a single character vignette, a team vignette and then one with two people doing ordinary things. A quiet moment.
Artists have it easier than writers folks, there’s no way to sugarcoat it.
However, writers have the ability to make more money than artist if they’re prolific.
Okay, so, out of your single hero and team vignettes, make sure one is DCcentric and the other Marvel. The quiet vignette can be Vertigo.
Your vignette doesn’t have to be a brilliant story, keep it simple, just make sure it’s clear.
Here’s an example of 3 pages and a cover that got me my first gig at DC.
Page 1 Small panel of Supes flying, pull back it’s a TV screen, pull back its Luthor watching Supes on Multiple screens, he pushes a lever.
Page 2 Supes flies, rescues a cat from a tree hands it to a little girl. Something off panel gets his attention. He flies off.
Page 3 Supes encounters a giant robot, knocks it out with one punch, stands heroically on robot's chest. Pull back, he’s on the TV screen.
Pull back and Luthor smashes his fist on his desk as he watches what just happened.
Cover- Superman struggles in the hand of the giant robot.
Simple, brainless story, but the point got across.
I was going to give some writers submission advice, but we’re not accepting writer submissions at the moment.
Marvel was accepting cold writer submissions until it recently became too overwhelming to keep up with. Hopefully we will again.

Great Twittered Tips

2009-03-29T17:41:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of AAU grad Jon Colton, a bunch of Twitters from Marvel's head reviewer of art, C.B. Cebulski. Interesting reading, especially when he mentions how he prospects for people online!

JH

* When and if sending an editor samples pages, always save as JPEGs and keep all files under 300K.

* PDFs are cool too, but try and keep them around 2MB tops. Last thing you wanna do is crash an editor’s inbox.

* And limit attachments to your 5 or 6 best pieces. If the editor wants to see more, he/she will ask you to send more.

* Yes, a link to a blog with your art would always be recommended over attachments to begin with.

* Sorry, writers, but I’m offering advice for artists. Maybe some of the editors here can chime in and help you guys?

* Blogs are always structured chronologically with newest posts first which is another reason I recommend them.

* Yes, it’s definitely harder for writers than artists to break into comics these days, in my opinion.

* And when I say “breaking into comics”, I’m generally referring to working for the more major mainstream publishers.

* Truth be told, it’s easier than ever for anyone to “break into comics” via webcomics and self-publishing these days.

* The internet &/or print-on-demand services mean anyone with an idea, motivation & a little $ can bring a comic to life.

* Barely anyone has “broken in” at Marvel or DC directly. We always say it’s better to be published elsewhere first.

* I always recommend people make comics, whether it’s for themselves or to try and break in professionally.

* It’s easier than ever for writers to find artists, and vice versa, here on the net. (cont.) Like Digital Webbing, Deviant Art, conceptart.org, and lots of creator boards, like Bendis and Millar, to name a few.

* The question of digital art vs. on the board is a question each artist needs to answer for themselves.

* Makes no difference to the editor or publisher really. How you create your art is your business.

* Yes, “good, fast or nice.” If you’re two of the three, you can get a job in comics, as the saying goes.

* I can almost guarantee you that my idea of being “Marvel ready” and an up-an-coming artist’s idea of “Marvel ready” are totally different.

* The two main things we look for are style and storytelling. Speed is something we learn and judge later.

* I don’t really know as I don’t recruit writers or review their work, but I would assume so.

* Bad storytelling is bad even w/ the flashiest finish. Good ST is good w/ a crayon.

* Got my first “where does a nobody like you get off giving advice on breaking into comics” note. Must’ve been from someone I didn’t hire.

* If your work gets picked for review at a con, it means yours was one of the better drop-offs the Marvel editors saw.

* Sample pages = TEST pages. They’re a means for artists to “try out” for an editor. They’re not a guarantee of work.

* If you have published work, it’s better to send the editor the actual books than links to the stories online.

* The most important thing to remember about working in comics is that THIS IS A JOB!

* Your portfolio is your resume. Talks with editors are your job interviews. Be professional.

* Yes, working in comics is a lot of fun, but it’s still work and has to be approached as such.

* No need to dress up to meet editors at cons. It’s more about acting professionally. Showering helps tho.

* Proper etiquette for following up with an editor after a meeting at a con? I recommend the rule of 4 Ps. (cont.)
Be persistent. Be patient. Don’t be pushy. Don’t be a pain-in-the-ass.

* Wait a week to send out your initial e-mail. No attachments. Follow-up two weeks later if you don’t hear back.

* Then just send updates letting the editor know what you’re up to every 4 - 6 weeks. Never more than once a month.

* Yup, everything I say here may be common sense, but you have no idea how many people don’t get it right.

* I’d say the Rule of 4 Ps applies to both artists and writers.

* It’s interesting, in discussing it over beers last night, we all seemed to agree that writers tend to be much pushier than artists.

* We also noticed an increase in the disturbing trend of “editor fishing” going on of late. Editor fishing = Telling Editor #1 you’re coming to the office for a meeting with Editor #2 when you don’t actually have an appointment.

* This done in hopes of Editor #1 not checking with Editor #2, thereby tricking him into letting you into offices for a meeting you never had.
Oh, yeah… people just show up at the Marvel offices all the time. The receptionists are experts at dealing with it!

* Although there was one time Dave Finch dropped by unannounced to drop off pages and they didn’t believe him or let him in.

* You’d be surprised. There’re 2 writers famous for it & always manage to pull it off. They usually pull it on new editors.

* Oh, editors check, but you’ll find comics people are very forgiving of talent and always like to believe the best in creators.

* No, wearing a Marvel t-shirt to a con will not improve your chance of getting a meeting with a Marvel editor.

* You know, this is actually working. Gotten lots of e-mails and replies with intros and links to sweet art blogs. Cool!

* Who knows… maybe Marvel will soon have our first Twitter hire?

* Again, I am not trying to pick on or deny new writers opportunities. It’s just not part of my job. NOT what I do. I’m Marvel’s artist guy.
I come across many new artists via links on creator blogs. So new artists, get your pro friends to start linking to you.

* There have more new opportunities for new writers at Marvel these past two years than ever before. I see a new name at least every month.

* Astonishing Tales, X-Men Manifest Destiny, MCP… almost every issue debuts as new voice that the editors have discovered.

* Looking at the new issue of Astonishing Tales, there are two new writers in there. One who had a short story in MCP, one making his debut.
Marvel also has new writer specific one-shots that they do to test run new writers who they think have the chops to write for Marvel.

* I know for a fact Axel Alonso hired an up-and-coming writer he likes just this past Thursday for a Punisher one-shot of this nature.
He’d been following this writer’s work at few other publishers, read his newest issue, thought he’d found his voice, and called him.

* Yes, these gigs are on short stories, one-shots and maybe not the best sellers, so you might not hear read them or hear about these guys.
But the point is the chances are now out there. Systems are in places at Marvel to get new writers in on a regular basis. More so than ever.

* “New” meaning “new to Marvel”, yes. Which brings up another myth I’ll be happy to dispel re: screenwriters and novelists at Marvel. (cont.)
Just because they work in another entertainment medium, that doesn’t mean they have an automatic in at Marvel. Far from the case.
TV/movie/novel writing is very different from comic writing. Writing for an artist, understand the pacing, etc., are completely different.
And the editors at Marvel know and understand this. Any writer from Hollywood or literature has to try out just like any other new writer.

* Yes, you may see more names crossing over into comics these days, but the door wasn’t magically just opened for them.
Maybe they get more “buzz” due to their other writing, but that’s to be expected. But they now write in comic cuz they KNOW and LOVE comics.

* You know, I’d bet there were more “new” writers than “Hollywood” writers hired by Marvel in 2008. You just never heard of the newer guys.

* Yes, you can sit here and argue and debate every point I bring up about breaking into comics, but really… what’s the point?

* You don’t like what I have to say? Feel free to ignore me. Follow your own path. Break in your own way. Please.

* My opinions and advice are my own, formed from personal experience. I pass it on with only the best of intention. I’m only trying to help.
Oh, I don’t mind. I know I’m just a Marvel corporate stooge to some people, doing spin control to covering up the big Marvel conspiracy.

* “I’ve got the best ideas for (insert Marvel character here) since Stan Lee and Marvel won’t publish them cuz they’re scared I’m so good!”
Oh, you found us out. You’re so good that we’re keeping you down just so we don’t have to fire hacks like @BRIANMBENDIS & @mattfraction!

* None of this sours me on Twitter or the internet in any way. I’ve been getting it for years and expect it. Makes me smile actually.

* And I’m saving it all for my book. The chapter on how NOT to break into comics continues to grow on an almost daily basis.

* Yes, breaking into comics really can be murder.

* Most of the comments I’ve been getting have been via e-mail and DMs actually. I guess people want me to see them but not make them public.

* And as some seem to have missed the point, the tweets about a Marvel conspiracy and me calling my friends Brian and Matt hacks WERE A JOKE!
Woke up to inboxes full of material ripe for Twittering about!

* First and foremost, don’t use the current “global economic crisis” as an attempt to get work. It’s not just you who’s suffering financially.

* Comic jobs are given based on talent, not economic need. Can’t believe I had 2 e-mails trying to guilt me into work! What’re you thinking?!

* There are plenty of already established pencilers who have fallen on hard times and who are out there looking for work as well.

* And we’re more than likely to call up and offer a gig to a pro we’ve worked with before and know we can trust.

* I don’t care if “I’m new and hungry and will work cheaper than the other pencilers out there because I desperately need money to get by.”

* And another thing, if you happen to find out personal details about an editor, don’t try and use them as an in to get work.
(And I’m not saying this about me as I put all my shit out here online and am always happy to talk about anything I post.)

* But I’ve heard from other editors how artists at portfolio reviews, complete strangers mind you, asked about their wife and/or kids by name.
Or knew where they went to college. Or challenged them to a game of one-on-one as they heard the editor liked basketball.

* There’s a line between the personal and the professional. Between being friendly and being creepy. Just know where it is and don’t cross it.

* The number one piece of advice I give newer, up-and-coming artists: stick to the grid! There’s nothing more important in my opinion.

* And for those that haven’t seen it, here’s “Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work”:

* Second piece of advice I always find myself giving newbies: Don’t break the panel borders. It’s distracting and usually not necessary.

* New pencilers often make the mistake of breaking borders to add dynamicism to a page but it usually just confuses their storytelling.

* Third piece of advice, don’t neglect your panel borders and gutters. They are an important part of your page that are often forgotten.

* Fourth piece of advice, don’t forget that word balloons and SFX need to go on the page. Make sure you include them in your initial layouts.
Sounds obvious, I know, but there are even pros I know who don’t always take them into account and complain when their art gets covered up.

* And my last piece of advice for new pencilers today, don’t attempt to draw in any sound effects. They’ll only serve to clutter your art.
Certain artists, like Adam Kubert, are masters at it, but it’s an art to be learned. Tell the story first without cluttering your pages.

* And as I’m just a lowly writer & talent scout, I would greatly appreciate any artists here jumping in with advice/experiences of their own.

* As Hollywood’s invaded and San Diego’s grown, it’s not the best con to try and meet editors and show your portfolio at anymore.

* Unfortunately, there’s no real set answer to that. “Marvel ready” is a subjective term. When I see, I know… that’s about it.

* I discovered @skottieyoung ’s artwork simply walking thru Artists Alley in Chicago, so I always recommend new artists get tables at cons.

Women in art

2007-06-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

Follow this link to a very trippy, beautiful video made by morphing between portraits of women going back to the Middle Ages.

Thanks to Al Gordon for the link.

I did something much less ambitious but similar a while ago when I was trying out a demo version of a morphing program. Recognize the beauty with the ghostly teeth in the illo at left? "She" is a morph between Adriana Lima and Salma Hayek, than whom Nature has provided no greater known exemplar of feminine beauty, IMHO. Click below to see this as a very short movie. I'm not sure how much educational value this has, so please don't watch it more than 7 or 8 times.

JH

That's MISTER Doctor Wizard, if you don't mind.

2007-06-05T20:14:00.001-07:00

So I got all scientific this morning on the question of what constitutes non-photo blue. I decided to find out how dark a blue I could print out for inking over. I printed a "bluescale" on a slightly grubby piece of bristol and scanned it as lineart/bitmap to see what was the highest concentration of blue I could have on a page without risking it scanning as black. The grainy black in the image is the bluescale turned into a bitmap. As you see, the answer is: a little over 60% cyan is the darkest blue you should print on the page. The more purely cyan the blue is, the better, except a little bit of yellow doesn't hurt. A little bit of black naturally would present a problem--too likely to scan as dirt.

So from now on when I convert a grayscale scan of pencils into blue for inking, I use Photoshop to convert it to CMYK, then select Image> Adjustments> Hue/Saturation. In that dialog box, check the box called "Colorize." Then set the Hue to 178-180, Saturation to 100. If you leave the Info palette on top, you get a continuous readout of the concentration of colors where your cursor is, even when you are in the Hue/Sat dialog. Just put the Lightness slider to where the darkest area in your art is a little over 60% cyan. Then hit OK and git ta printin'.

(Don't forget: always scan your inked art as lineart/bitmap, with a high resolution: 800ppi or more.)

It's the optimum combo of "readability" and scannability!! You'll thank me in your heart. It's really helped me in inking Tony Talbert's incredible pages on this pitch we're doing. If you're real nice, I'll show you one of these times!

JH

P.S.: Read DRAW! Magazine Editor Mike's alternate method in the comment below. Thanks, Mike)

Sring Show, Lollipops and Rainbows

2007-06-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

A shockingly upbeat roundup of recent newbits:

I hope you all get to visit the Spring Show (on through the third week of June), which is housed for the first time in a single building. It's at 601 Brannan at Sixth, in a slick Academy Building with an atrium. On the ceiling of the atrium is a meandering track and a little mini-crane that runs along it-- a vestige, presumably, of whatever function the place formerly had.

Tyliea's, Celeste's and Rahsan's work all made the cut. On the opening night, Department's Director Chuck gave his remarks, announcing the awards. Our guy Rahsan won second prize in the Comics category. Chuck mentioned proudly that Rahsan was already working. The word "superstar" may have been used. First prize went to a talented guy in Dan Cooney's class, Ron Anderson, though I of course felt it should have gone to Rahsan. The painted cover of Celeste's book-in-progress book was on exhibit too, huge and great-looking.

The Illustration Department as a whole came off wonderfully again.

*********
My buddy Eric, who was one of the judges, recently showed me a booklet of Student Contest winners from the Society of illustrators. I saw a lot of work I recognized -- because it was from Academy students! The Academy appeared to me to be more represented than any other single school, including Pratt, Parsons, and SVA.

*********

I went to Super-Con in San Jose this weekend. Former ILL193 students Tony and Corey came by to say hi. Corey won the art contest. I think I talked the talented and super-affable Mick Gray into doing an inking seminar for ILL193!

On Saturday night I went out for dinner with a big group of people including our pal Steve Leialoha and Groo writer Mark Evanier, who was an assistant to Jack Kirby long ago, and is a terrific storyteller with an encyclopedic knowledge of comics history. Mark knows everybody in showbiz and comics and has a story about most of them. I was sorry when we broke out and went back to the hotel.

Mark's blog is highly recommended: http://www.newsfromme.com Look for the mention of your dutiful teacher and a nice plug for Dan Cooney's Valentine!

JH

Next entry:
Maximizing your results when printing out pages to ink!

Pay me!

2007-04-27T01:06:00.000-07:00

(Season of the Witch pinup by JH for creator Jai Nitz)

I've talked to you guys some about doing work on the cheap for the experience or the exposure. There are reasons for and against. Number one for probably is that printed work is more impressive than sample pages, and so helps the hunt for paying work. And number two might be that you learn more by doing real work than by doing samples. The linked text piece, forwarded us by Illustration Department instructor Cameron Wasson, makes very strongly the case against.
http://positionrelative.wordpress.com/2007/01/23/craigs-pissed/
The unhappy fact is that almost everybody gets screwed over at least once. I think the trick is to try to manage it so your eyes are open, you're doing it for a reason and it only happens once. A whole lot of artists, myself included, are poor self-promoters and poor businessmen. If you recognize and believe in the value and rarity of what you do, as this piece counsels, you might be on your way to being that rare artist who knows his or her own worth.

JH

Arty Imitates Art

2007-04-27T00:37:00.000-07:00

As we comic book artists struggle earnestly to bring observations about real life into our art, those smarty-pants fine artistes are stealing ideas and devices from comics!
Art Review | 'Comic Abstraction': Visions That Flaunt Cartoon Pedigrees

Thanks to Chuck for the link.
JH

Project Pickup

2007-04-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

You who gave me pages to print can pick up your pages and printouts at the ILL dept office. They are kept in my mailbox, and grouped under your name. Just go the window and ask one of the work study students to grab it. I scanned all the pages you gave me but, for time's sake, only printed the first two or three this week. All your origs are waiting for you in the mailbox.

Warm up and have fun! Keep the original page close at hand so you refer to it for fine details. Think about inking a page then scanning and flatting it for the lab day (see preceding entry, below)! Then you can see if you have time left to ink a second page.

JH

Photoshop Phun

2007-04-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

Hey, Ya'll,
Here's whatcha do to get the most out of next week's lab, which will be held in our usual building.
Save this:
http://www.Heebink.com/ILL193/Photoshop-Primer.wps
OR, if your computer doesn't have the Windows word processor or something more versatile, open this
http://www.Heebink.com/ILL193/Photoshop-Primer.txt
and copy it into the word program of your choice so the lines wrap. Read it, at least through Part 2, if you can possibly find the time.
Then download these two files
http://www.Heebink.com/ILL193/channels-CMYK.sit
http://www.Heebink.com/ILL193/layers-RGB.sit
OR, if you don't have the Stuffit expander, download the slightly larger unStuffed .psd's
http://www.Heebink.com/ILL193/channels-CMYK.psd
http://www.Heebink.com/ILL193/layers-RGB.psd

These files represent the two main ways you can set up a coloring file. Take a look and compare them. If you're scanning in your own art, you should follow the example of one or the other, based on what you decide after reading the Primer. You shouldn't change the mode (RGB, e.g.) or the size of a file after you've flatted it, so it pays to pick a plan and stick with it. The Layers method is easier, and slightly more intuitive. Makes a bigger file though, and can give you a shock when you--well, read the Primer. It defines flatting too, which is not to confused with the merging of all layers near the end of a job. That's called flattening.

Note that in the Channels file, you'll need to go to the Channels palette and click open the eyeball of the Alpha 1 channel, where the line art lives, in order to see it. Don't highlight that channel, you won't be able to work on the color. The CMYK channel must be hi-lit.

These are the files you'll be working on in the lab, unless you provide your own, and I will be grading you on what you produce, so that the whole day doesn't turn into a pointless jagfest. Trust me, it's happened.

I very strongly recommend you get your file flatted (with at least the randomly assigned colors--see Primer), so that what you do in lab will be productive and fun. We'll be critiquing but not grading the inking next week, so it'd be wise to trade away a chunk of inking time to get your coloring file squared away. (BTW, the files above are flatted already.)

We'll meet in our usual room. See you there.

JH

Tan, Exhausted, and Unready

2007-03-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

(Art by Adam Hughes)

I just discovered that the schedule has an inconsistency in it. Rather than go back and sneakily edit "Because You Demanded It..." (2/16/07), I thought I'd bring it to your attention with this new entry. The trouble was that the schedule had us reviewing four pages pp. after only having drawn three. So a new, closely edited schedule appears below.

Let us agree that we (by which I mean you) will return from spring break with three penciled pages. Most of you are pretty close to or ahead of that pace. But this does include revised pages--please show us that you have taken to heart the trenchant yet caring commentary of your fellow students and mine, and made changes to maximize the effect of your pages. No ego-driven coddling of your precious darlings por favor; put the horrid little bastards on a treadmill till they're lean, mean and gleaming. And I mean three penciled pages. If you've jumped ahead and gone to inks on any pages, please provide a xerox or print of those pages as penciled or get yourself busy on making a new penciled page. I'm adamant on this point; I made it clear you were to have pencils and inks to show for yourself at the end of the semester.

Here's the schedule for the rest of the semester, revised.

Meeting 8 (Tuesday27Mar) Midterm Quiz (see details below). Review first 3 pages of pencils. Assign next two pages of pencils (through p. 5), changes to p. 3.

Meeting 9 (Tuesday3Apr) Review next two page of pencils (through p. 5). Assign final page of pencils. Make 100% Xeroxes or PS Scans of all pencils for inclusion in final pitch packet -- BEFORE ANY INKING!! Reminder to bring inking kit and xeroxes of pencils to next class. Then INKING LAB 2. In-class inking exercises.

Meeting 10 (Tuesday10Apr) Final Review of pencils. Bring xeroxes or email jpegs to John. Assign penciling of character sketches, three cover layouts. Catch up for coming benchmark. VIZ TOUR???????????????

Meeting 11 (Tuesday17Apr) Review of character sketches, cover layouts. Final tweaks on pencils in class! New xeroxes as needed. Benchmark: all pencils finished, corrected! Assign cover pencils, optional inking of character sketches.

Meeting 12 (Tuesday24Apr) Review of cover pencils. INKING LAB 3? In-class assignment: inking of provided panels? Assign two pages of inking, plus (optional) getting one's own files ready for upcoming Photoshop lab.

Meeting 13 (Tuesday1May) Review of first two pages of inking. Assign next two pages inking, (through page 4), PHOTOSHOP LAB DAY

Meeting 14 (Tuesday8May) Review of next two pages of inking (through p. 4). Assign last two pages of inking, plus possibly cover inks. Reminder to touch up smears, erase margins, etc. Remind of possible potluck Banquet of Snacks.

Meeting 15 (Tuesday15May) Presentation of Final projects. Turn in Xeroxes of same, including copies of pencils, to John. ALL-POSITIVE COMMENTS DAY. Discussion of approaching publishers, professional conduct, further schooling, written part of pitches career benefits of storytelling skills. Potluck snack banquet? GUEST REVIEWER Chuck Pyle

So... the Midterm quiz: please review this list of terms from the blog of Week Two. You should be able to explain or provide an example of each.

"Drawing Through
""Even if you can't see it, it still shows"
Contrapposto
Canon(s) of proportions
Line of action
Atmospheric perspective
2-point perspective
3-point perspective always involves either the...
zenith or the..
nadir

Establishing shot
Close-up
Extreme close-up
Medium shot
Two-shot
Three-shot
Dutch angle ("camera" is tilted)
180 rule
Prop continuity
"Variety and Unity"
"breathing room" and its close cousin, open areas (white paper)
Eye-path
Shape schemes, ala Frazetta's triangles
FG-MG-BG
Dynamism
Storytelling

Have a wonderful Spring Break!

JH

Pages to Ink, for Practice

2007-02-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

Today I am reposting a small gallery of pages I have scanned in and converted to light-blue .psd's (Photoshop files). If you would like me to print out any of these for you to practice inking on, give me a list of the ones you would like printed and a dollar for each. (I'm about to have a working printer again.) The next class meeting I will bring you back a printout out on 11" x 17" bristol board. I highly recommend you download and print out the black-and-white jpeg that opens when you click on the thumbnails in the gallery. Then you can have that to refer to as you work. The jpeg will scale to print out at 8 1/2 x 11" at a nice high resolution. (I have not linked to, or even uploaded, the bluelines to my site, as none of you have 11 x 17" printers.)

Gallery of Pages for Inking Practice

In a disgraceful display of artistic narcissism, I have led off with a tightly penciled Elvira page of my own, and -- worse -- stacked the deck with more challenging (better, but less finished) pages, albeit without planning to. This may have the effect of channeling you toward whetting your inking teeth on my sterling contribution before perhaps moving on to the golden glories of, say, the great John Romita, Jr.

JH

P.S.: Once you've downloaded the jpegs, you can right-click on the file icon and select "Properties" to view the artist credits and my notes on what challenges each page holds. Apologies for the slow downloads.

Jeep Patriot Comics

2007-02-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

Here is the rare use of comics in advertising that doesn't use comics as a mere motif. Instead of the usual nostalgic Pow-Biff sound effects and big color dots, the people at Jeep actually made a comic that reflects the way comics look now. Then they built a racy Flash interface around it and invited our participation in determining where the story goes from here. Note that you can even view the pages in their penciled and inked-but-uncolored forms.

It's remarkable that Jeep presumes there are a lot of potential customers who are not just receptive to comics as a medium but interested in its creative process. The brave Comments and Submissions counters will tell the tale. It goes to show, not only the rising cultural currency of comics, but also your potential for landing similar gigs when you leave the good ol' Acad. As a rule, advertisers pay a lot better for comic-book art than comics publishers do, you know.

https://www.patriotadventure.com/

Thanks to Chuck for the link.

JH

Because You Demanded It...

2007-02-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

..Another list, of a sort. Here's our schedule for the rest of the semester. Uncertainty as to actual date is signaled by question marks, e.g., on such items as Guest Speaker Day!

This week's illustration is by the late, great Wallace Wood, ghosting Will Eisner in The Spirit Section, a 20-pp. comic-book insert for Sunday newspapers in the '40s and '50s.

SYLLABUS/schedule
Meeting 3 (today) Review "Vegas" penciled page. Assignment: thumbnail and lay out first 3 layouts. clean--With indications of centerlines on major forms, backgrounds and perspective. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Meeting 4 (Tuesday20Feb) Review layouts in relation to variety, unity, eye-path, diagonals, breathing room, shape schemes, depth, storytelling, perspective. Assignment: final three thumbnails and layouts, changes to first four.

Meeting 5 (Tuesday27Feb) Review last three page layouts. Troubleshoot as necessary. Discuss perspective, working method, materials. Assign changes to last three layouts, and first page of pencils.

Meeting 6 (Tuesday6Mar) Review first penciled page. Benchmark: All layouts done. Discuss use of black, line weight. Assign next page of pencils, changes to p.1.

Meeting 7 (Tuesday13Mar) Review pp. 2 revised p. 1. Assign pp. 3 of pencils, changes to pp.2, study for midterm quiz. Happy Spring Break!

(Spring Break)

Meeting 8 (Tuesday27Mar) Midterm Quiz. Review first 4 pages of pencils. Assign next page of pencils (through p.4), changes to p. 3. GUEST SPEAKER DAY???

Meeting 9 (Tuesday3Apr) Review of next page of pencils (through p. 5). Assign final page of pencils. Make 100% Xeroxes or PS Scans of all pencils for inclusion in final pitch packet -- BEFORE ANY INKING!! Reminder to bring inking kit and xeroxes of pencils to next class. Then INKING LAB 1. In-class inking exercises.

Meeting 10 (Tuesday10Apr) Final Review of pencils. Bring xeroxes or email jpegs to John. Assign penciling of character sketches, three cover layouts. Catch up for coming benchmark. VIZ TOUR????

Meeting 11 (Tuesday17Apr) Review of character sketches, cover layouts. Final tweaks on pencils in class! New xeroxes as needed. Benchmark: all pencils finished, corrected! Assign cover pencils, optional inking of character sketches.

Meeting 12 (Tuesday24Apr) Review of cover pencils. INKING LAB 2? In-class assignment: inking of provided panels? Assign two pages of inking, plus (optional) getting one's own files ready for upcoming Photoshop lab.

Meeting 13 (Tuesday1May) Review of first two pages of inking. Assign next two pages inking, (through page 4), PHOTOSHOP LAB DAY

Meeting 14 (Tuesday8May) Review of next two pages of inking (through p.4). Assign last two pages of inking, plus possibly cover inks. Reminder to touch up smears, erase margins, etc. Remind of possible potluck Banquet of Snacks.

Meeting 15 (Tuesday15May) Presentation of Final projects. Turn in Xeroxes of same, including copies of pencils, to John. ALL-POSITIVE COMMENTS DAY. Discussion of approaching publishers, professional conduct, further schooling, written part of pitches career benefits of storytelling skills. Potluck snack banquet? GUEST REVIEWER Chuck Pyle

For Love of Lists

2007-02-06T18:02:00.000-08:00

SECOND WEEK
Reminders:
Free admission to SFMOMA for AAU students;
Spring Show; 540 showcases;
Illustration Town Hall Meeting, 3pm. Thu. 8Feb, 540 Powell. Air your hopes and gripes!

Summary of voting:
Yes to covering Photoshop coloring, Yes to lettering.
No to live model, Cartoon Art Museum.

Hey, y'all...
Here are the key concepts and terms we reviewed in class today!
...And if you're not going to do your own pet project for the pitch that makes up the bulk of this semester's work, then check your options in the "Pitch Basket" below. Yet another option is doing a retro script on an existing comic--working with popular existing characters, in other words. Up to you. Next week is decision time!
"Drawing Through"
"Even if you can't see it, it still shows"
Contrapposto
Canon(s) of proportions
Line of action
Atmospheric perspective
2-point perspective
3-point perspective always involves either the...
zenith or the..
nadir
Establishing shot
Close-up
Extreme close-up
Medium shot
Two-shot
Three-shot
Dutch angle ("camera" is tilted)
180 rule
Prop continuity
"Variety and Unity"
"breathing room" and its close cousin, open areas (white paper)
Eye-path
Shape schemes, ala Frazetta's triangles
FG-MG-BG
Balance: black=weight
Dynamism
Storytelling

Pitch Basket: Alternatives to doing your own idea. Here are the different pitches I've assembled from the writers I know. It's actually a deeper and more impressive list than I thought we were going to be able to come up with. Please be thinking of which two, if any, you would like more info on. Each one will only be assigned to one student.
Basket of ideas

Pro Art for Inking Practice: I'll be posting jpegs and .psd's of professional penciled pages for you to print out on bristol board. They will print out in non-photo blue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ADDITIONS (Great books to have, for info and inspiration)

Writing for Comics with Peter David, 2006, Impact Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-58180-730-1ISBN-10: 1-58180-730-9
The DC Comics Guide to Penciling Comic Books by Klaus Janson, 2002, Watson-Guptill
ISBN 0-8230-1028-7
The DC Comics Guide to Inking Comic Books by Klaus Janson, 2003, Watson-Guptill
ISBN 0-8230-1029-5
The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comic Books by Mark Chiarello and Todd Klein, 2002, Watson-Guptill
ISBN 0-8230-1030-9
The Art of Comic Book Inking by Gary Martin, Dark Horse Publishing

JH

What's that smell?

2007-01-23T10:06:00.000-08:00

It's a new semester abornin', teens! That means this first blog entry is filled with long lists and boilerplate, rather than my usual oh-so-stimulating and brief musings about drawing and the comics biz.

I do this blog for two main reasons:
* Providing ILL193 students a place to access information and images relevant to class
* Providing myself a forum (and you, if you care to respond) to air ideas and reactions to things going on in our field. In this, I have the help of our department head, Chuck Pyle, who sends me all manner of interesting links.

Feel free to check out past entries.

Now, however...

Link to Statement of Class Policies and Philosophy (Please read)

WEEK 1-- Policies, Materials List, Assignment and Supplemental Art!

Updated Supply list

* Pencils, of your preferred hardnesses. ALWAYS bring to class.
* Sanford Col-erase Blue or Light Blue Pencils. ALWAYS bring to class.
* Strathmore 400 or 500 Series or Utrecht 14" x 17" bristol board, smooth finish. (Trim down to 11" x 17")
* Kneaded and Pink Pearl or synthetic erasers (e.g., Staedtler-Mars White). ALWAYS bring to class.
* 30/60/90 triangle--the bigger the better. Look for one with a raised straightedge for inking
* Raphael 8404 Series Kolinsky sable brush, size #2 or #3 or #4 , (or the less expensive Escoda 1212 series, size #2 or #3 or #4) available at Pearl Paint and Jerry's Artarama. OR, alternatively, an excellent brush pen: Brush pens can be found at the Kinokuniya Stationery Store , 1581 Webster, Japantown, on the 38 Geary bus line.
* Pen nibs and holders (I'd suggest Hunt 102 and an assortment of others. I really like the Deleter nibs and holders from Japan. They are sometimes available at the Kinokuniya BOOKSTORE in Japantown, but they are a bit difficult to find because a lot of their clerks don't know they carry them. Deleter makes its own excellent holder that fits both styles of Deleter nibs, but their nibs seems to fit fine in traditional holders too.)
* Pelikan Waterproof or Speedball Super Black India Ink (Higgins Black Magic is a passable second choice.)
* Pentel Presto or Pro White or Dr. Martin's Bleedproof White or Pilot Correction pen or other correction pen
* Micron Pigma black pigment liners, sizes 03, 05 and 08, two of each
* drafting tape or dots

Optional, recommended, and ultimately indispensible:
Drawing board with parallel rule or T-square; stick-style or pencil-style eraser; architecture-style lead holder, leads and special sharpener; sanding paddle for making chisel points on pencils; electric eraser (for erasing ink); French curve, flexible curves, ellipse templates; compass; 2H or 3H pencil (or lead and lead holder) for doing side-of-the-pencil shading and fills of black areas; a 6" metal ruler for ruling backgrounds; light box, tone screens.

Carrying a sketchbook is a good idea.

Always bring blue pencil, black pencil, erasers, paper (such as a sketchbook and a ruler or triangle to class!

In-class assignment: two panels with figures, in perspective

Homework Assignment#1:

Due 6 February.
Do 6 thumbnails and layouts for the attached 3-pp. script. Thumbnails (two alternate versions for each pages) can be tiny doodles. Choose the better thumbnails to develop into layouts, one for each page of script. Layouts should be 10"x 15" (original art size) on tracing paper or other paper. Pencil is fine, ink only if you want to. Examples of layouts are provided here.

You decide where in the action to put the panel breaks, that is, how much story you can tell in each panel and how many panels to have.

"Retro-script"

The Setting: Interior, a diner in a city in the American Southwest, just before sunset.

The Characters:
Vegas --Ruggedly handsome guy, about 34, with beard stubble, long sideburns and shaggy medium-length brown hair. He's wearing a dirty overcoat and looks like he might be homeless. He is subject to vivid but fleeting visions and has a paranormal power: He can create sudden good luck for himself, but it's always at the cost of bad luck for someone innocent nearby.

Charlene -- Waitress at the diner

The Padre --A skinny old white man in a tattered dark, western-style duster or long coat. He has a wild, insane look in his eye and carries an old revolver similar to the ones Clint Eastwood had in The Outlaw Josie Wales. He has long hair and a beard, as if he'd been wandering in the desert for years. He is an arsonist -- and mysteriously immune to the physical effects of fire.

p. 1
In close-up, Vegas is startled out of his thoughts (a flashback shown on the preceding page) by feeling the Padre's gun barrel on the back of his head.

Pull back to reveal that Vegas is seated at the counter. Panicked diners flee. (Any exterior shots of the diner should feature an empty police car.)

There follows a couple panels' worth of exposition by the Padre here. He's talking about how unhappy he is that Vegas survived a fire earlier in the story, and that he has been following Vegas. Someone named "The King" has no further use for Vegas, the Padre says.

In an extreme close-up (of his hand), Padre cocks the revolver, by using his thumb to pull the hammer back.

Vegas uses his power as the trigger is pulled and the gun explodes in the Padre's hand. Vegas ducks in that instant.

But the zero-sum game nature of his power takes its toll: Behind the counter, Charlene falls back, wide-eyed and panicked, shot in the chest.

p. 2
Again Padre's thumb is on the hammer of the intact gun. (We realize that the foregoing violence was just a passing vision of Vegas'.)

As the unhurt Charlene stands frozen and almost cowering behind the counter, The Padre still has the gun to Vegas's skull. The diner is now empty except for these three, with cups and food wrappers scattered . Vegas' hands are up and he says gravely, "I deserved to burn in that fire. I still do."

The Padre looks shocked and inspired by this. He lowers the gun a bit and eases the hammer forward, saying "amen to that." Vegas' words of contrition have bought him a little time. (The Padre discards the idea of executing him on the spot, but we don't know what he's up to yet.) His hands still held up, with great sadness in his eyes, Vegas quickly says "sorry" to Charlene. She asks what for.

He starts to say "For whatever happens to you" (because of the use of his power), but The Padre cracks him on the head with the butt of the pistol.

p.3
Some minutes or hours later, Vegas' consciousness returns from blackness. We see him in extreme close-up, looking very bleary and disoriented. Basically face down on the car seat, he has bled from his nose and mouth.

He discovers he is handcuffed to a rail in the caged-in back seat of a cop car, driven by the Padre.

The cop car zooms across the nighttime desert, on a dirt road, past rock formations and some of those oil wells with the see-sawing pumps on them.

The Padre has a lit cigarette lighter in his hand "God has given you a fine day, Vegas..."

To Vegas' alarm, Padre throws the lighter onto the front passenger seat, where it instantly spreads. "A fine day to die!" (The Padre himself cannot be harmed by fire, and tosses the lighter casually)

For this week, just thumbnails (two per page) and layouts, for all three pages.

MORE-- examples of page layouts to clarify the concept and maybe inspire!

NEXT WEEK: Review of key concepts, deciding what to do pitch on.

This personal website is not created, managed or maintained by the Academy of Art and exists solely as an aid to John's students. The Academy bears no responsibiity for anything contained herein.

One "Minx," un-saucy

2006-11-25T16:53:00.000-08:00

During the energy crisis of the 1970s, Toyota was suddenly kicking ass here in the US. GM was blindsided by consumers' sudden desire for smaller cars. Unable to instantly retool, GM tried to spin itself as the small car expert--which claims rang hollow, as most of their lines comprised two-ton metal slabs.

DC Comics, having noticed that girls are flooding bookstores to read manga, has now moved to better exploit that new market--even more nimbly than a capital-intensive, risk-averse Rust-Belt conglomerate like GM.

For years, people in mainstream comics pulled their hair trying to figure out how to bring young women into the comics market. Given that most comic book stores then (much as now) were the personal feifdoms of socially stunted male nerds, the outlines of the marketing challenge were as expansive and unmistakable as those of the bloated razor-phobic cranks behind the cash registers. Everybody in the business knew girls were capable of enjoying comic books, and not just because they had in the past. And everybody knew girls wanted comics about people in relation to people, rather than weapons, costumes, powers, things. The chicks are koo-koo that way.

And DC came closer to cracking the code, early on, than other publishers, with their Vertigo line--specifically with their Neil Gaiman--luring in bright, artsy, self-consciously alternative readers of both sexes.

But for some reason it took the largely inexplicable (to me) allure of the cookie-cutterish Japanese approach to comics to lure in massive numbers of young female readers. Surely the sunny, standardized sexlessness of the art helped. And to the surprise of probably no one but me, it happened in big bookstores.

Take a few minutes, if you would, to read this article about how DC is planning to get in on the action. See what you think of first comic of their new Minx line, unwinningly entitled Plain J.A.N.E.s., like some lame spy spoof in a second-tier porno rag. Me, I think it looks like a non-artist's attempt to emulate Dan Clowes, with pacing that would make me lose interest in about six pages, were I still a wee teen. Should it really take one whole page to set up a commonplace situation, exchange three tiny balloons' worth of dialog and muddle through a couple largely indecipherable expressions?

New York Times article on DC's Minx line

Thanks to Chuck for the link.

See you Tuesday. Bring your inking kits again!

JH

We're famous!

2006-11-08T23:41:00.000-08:00

The folks at Newsweek lovingly created this slick little slideshow giving an overview of comics--much of it shot from the original art. Thanks to Chuck for this.

Newsweek slideshow

(Art by Jack Kirby)

Two of the best

2006-10-30T19:17:00.000-08:00

Today, I 'm recommending to your attention the work of two stellar draughtsmen, Jerry Ordway and Sean Phillips. What's to be gotten from these guys? A whole lot, but I want to concentrate on three aspects.

1. Check out Jerry Ordways' masterful handling of folds. With decades of experience, he has a great grasp of

the physical, shadow-casting thickness of folds--in accordance with the thickness of the fabric,
the direction of folds in relation to stress points, and of
the effect of gravity on clothes. Observe how the lines of the pants are increasingly busy and horizontal as gravity pulls them down onto the tops of the shoes.

Jerry was kind enough to grant me permission to show you guys these gorgeous pencils for his DC project Red Menace.

2. I'm adding a new blog link today. It's that of the very talented Sean Phillips, who is my favorite example of an artist who makes great use of photos without making the art look stiff or traced. His inking is rich and spontaneous-looking, and he doesn't seem to let the facts of the photos push him around. He never forgets he's making comics, that his fidelity is to making the stuff read, not to recreating the photo.

Just as a skilled inker can make a pen line look like a brush line and vice versa, Phillips can often leave me in doubt as to which panels he shot ref for, because he lets the photos inform his approach to drawing. He absorbs the feel of them. This stuff from the book Criminal is his best yet, for my money.

Check it out! http://www.surebeatsworking.blogspot.com

3. Note the fantastically skilled use of shadow on the Criminal pages in particular. He adds much depth solidity and a heavy mood to his panels with black. I like the dry-brush edge to some of the black areas.

Work that shop!

2006-09-27T23:50:00.000-07:00

(apropos of nothing, the wonderful art of Denis Bodart)

This was an interesting surprise. I didn't really know how to teach a workshop so I just taught in my normal way, and people were surprised that it was, for all intents and purposes, a class. I was surprised because most of them weren't in comics classes.

Since most weren't in comics courses, this was just an enhancement to their Academy experience, and I ended up covering stuff that you guys largely know well:

Comic Book Production,
Marvel style vs. full script
Head and Hands (just various points to remember, goofs to avoid),
Finding the horizon in relation to characters,
Basic rules of perspective
Some common perspective errors,
Using side of pencil, blue pencil, stiff wrist to lay out,
Line of action,
Contrapposto,
Uses/benefits of spotting blacks,
Spotting blacks by keeping it simple, consistent, vis-a-vis light source,
Avoiding "Twins, "
My "Three Masters" shtick (the need to simultaneously serve gesture, volume and shape in figure drawing).
Drawing "Through"

All in one free three-hour session! Such a deal! Next week is an inking lab, probably with some more on perspective thrown in. I can't imagine everybody not benefitting from this. After two more weeks, the Wonderful Mr. Dan Cooney steps in for three weeks.

Try to come next time! Maybe I'll even get it together enough to warn you in time.

Photoshop basics

2006-09-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

Today's illo is a demonstration of 3-point perspective I made in Adobe ImageReady out of an ad from a travel flyer. Dig that implied zenith, everyone!

Here's where I provide you all the basics for turning your scanned art into a beautiful Photoshop-colored comics page. The text file linked to below will help you decide whether to work in big, bulky layers or sleek, time-saving (but more complicated) channels. This document also discusses how to choose whether to work in RGB or the larger, slower CMYK. It has all the basic steps for setting up and finishing a comics page in Photoshop. And as I mentioned, you can always call me with questions at 362-5633; I love thinking and talking about Photoshop.

Download Bink's Photoshop Primer (pronounced "primmer," BTW) You will probably need to copy this into a new text doctument so the lines wrap.

For our Photoshop lab day, you will need to work with one of these two files, linked below, or bring in one of your own that follows their example. So either way, you'll need to download at least one. They are meant to show the difference in setup between the two methods. If you want to keep things more simple and intuitive, use the second. If you've got a solid grounding in Photoshop and want to color like a pro, use the first. BTW, I would never recommend working in layers and CMYK, because that would be the biggest, slowest-saving file possible. So my specimen CMYK file is in channels, leaving layers for RGB, though one could just as well do RGB in channels too. Confused yet?

Download Bink's CMYK-channels sample Photoshop file
Stuffit of same (quicker download)

Download Bink's RGB-layers sample Photoshop file
Stuffit of same (quicker download)

I will also have these ready for download in the computer lab on our Photoshop day, projected for 5 December. But to get the maximum learning (and grade) from Photoshop day, you would be well advised to download them well before then. That way you can either finish flatting one of these, i.e., replacing the random placeholder colors with your choice of colors, OR following the example of one of these files to set up a file with a scan of your own choosing, ideally your own work.

The text file linked above explains how to finish the flatting process. I'd like to devote the lab time to the second step, modeling aka rendering, aka painting, rather than mere flatting, which is monkey work.

We're confirmed by Dax for a clothed figure drawing day, 17 October. Model will be Frank, who's good.

See you Tuesday,

JH

The Big Look Back

2006-09-19T15:57:00.001-07:00

Thanks, you guys, for another thoroughly enjoyable class--during which we managed to cover or review a lot of ideas that can make our pages better.
Here they are again, a little better organized than on the handout:

Reviewing key concepts

"Drawing Through"
"Even if you can't see it, it still shows"
Contrapposto
Canon of proportions (7-head, 8-head)
Line of action--I FORGOT TO COVER THIS ONE. DO YOU KNOW IT? This Tarzan figure by Kubert is a lovely example of how line of action can apply to a figure not in motion
Helical perspective/atmospheric perspective
2-point perspective
3-point perspective always involves either the...
zenith or the..
nadir
Establishing shot
Close-up
Extreme close-up
Medium shot
180 rule
prop continuity
"Variety and Unity"
"Breathing room"
Eye-path
Shape schemes
FG-MG-BG
Balance: black=weight
Dynamism
Storytelling

Pro Art for Inking Practice:
In the next couple weeks, I'll be posting jpegs and .psd's of professional penciled pages for you to print out on bristol board. They will print out in non-photo blue. You can use them for fun, practice, or pro inking samples.

P.S.:
Here is a link to some really good portfolio pages. The faces are mediocre and there's one-point perspective in the first panel where where there should be two-, but otherwise I think these are stunning, A-level work, much better than the Vampirella entries.

http://www.drawingboard.org/viewtopic.php?t=46939

Vampirella contest

2006-09-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

It's all over but the groaning now, but Harris Comics just ran a talent competition. They furnished a 6-page Vampi script; contestants did their best rendition of same. This young woman made the final five.

http://www.drawingboard.org/viewtopic.php?t=47905

I don't know how long she took to do it. It looks like she spent her time well. The work is detailed and very finished. But there are some major drawing problems. What do you think? What grade would you give it?

(You may need to register with the board to see the art; it's easy, free and well worth it.)

JH

The singer AND the song

2006-09-16T11:54:00.001-07:00

(Page by Alary)

Nice quote a friend sent me, from an artist who goes by "Moma":

"I was at a party last year and a little girl drew a picture of all the guests round the table except me. I pretended to be offended and drew myself into her picture, but she ran away screaming and bawling. I had to erase my self-portrait before she'd calm down. That says it all. Our little pictures and our little songs are more important to us than the life they occasionally portray. The world in the end is beyond our control and doesn't care about us. But in our pictures we have the illusion of making sense of the world, improving the world, taking control of it. And suddenly it's no longer either the world or our vision of it, it's a new world, a thing in itself. The drawing comes to mean more to us than the scene it depicts."

It Blogs!

2006-09-15T13:38:00.000-07:00

Hey, you lucky few.

There's a riddle that runs, "What does a redneck say before he injures himself?" "Watch this!" I may lack the drunken self-confidence to say "Watch this!", but I think the worst thing that could happen here is my appearing foolish as I try to catch up to 2002. Which is not too bad. This blog might be helpful despite my technolaggardry.

Here's a link to the original post, for Week1-2, which was done as a conventional website. Here you'll savor the standard first-week policy boilerplate, irresistably teamed with the materials list, and so on, as well as links to online art suppliers and some great examples of page layouts.
http://www.heebink.com/ILL193

And here is the finalized schedule for the rest of the semester. I hope it's demanding enough to keep you warmed-up and busy and to avoid overthinking, but lax enough to actually be doable. It starts with our third meeting.

REVISED SYLLABUS/schedule
Meeting 3 (Tuesday26Sep) Review "Vegas" breakdowns. Assignment: thumbnail and lay out first 4 layouts. Tight!--With indications of backgrounds and perspective.

Meeting 4 (Tuesday03October) Review layouts in relation to variety, unity, eye-path, diagonals, breathing room, shape schemes, depth, storytelling, perspective. Assignment: final four thumbnails and layouts, changes to first four.

Meeting 5 (Tuesday10Oct) Review last four page layouts. Troubleshoot as necessary. Discuss perspective, working method, materials. Assign changes to last four layouts, and first page of pencils.

Meeting 6 (Tuesday17Oct) Review first penciled page. Benchmark: All layouts done. Discuss use of black, line weight. Assign next two pages of pencils, changes to p.1. FIGURE DRAWING DAY

Meeting 7 (Tuesday24Oct) Review pp. 2,3, revised p. 1. Assign pp. 4 of pencils, changes to pp.2,3, study for midterm quiz. GUEST SPEAKER DAY?

Meeting 8 (Tuesday31Oct) Midterm Quiz. Review first 4 pages of pencils. Assign next two pages of pencils Through p.6), changes to p.4.

Meeting 9 (Tuesday7Nov) Review of next two pages of pencils (through p. 6). Assign final two pages of pencils. Make 100% Xeroxes of all pencils for inclusion in final pitch packet!!

Meeting 10 (Tuesday14Nov) Final Review of pencils. John to collect, scan pencils. Assign penciling of character sketches, three cover layouts. Catch up for coming benchmark. Reminder to bring inking kit to next class.

Meeting 11 (Tuesday21Nov) Return of pencils. Review of character sketches, cover layouts. final tweaks on pencils in class! Then INKING LAB 1. In-class inking exercises. Assign cover pencils, optional inking of character sketches. Happy Thanksgiving!

Meeting 12 (Tuesday28Nov) Benchmark: all corrections to pencils finished! Review of cover pencils. INKING LAB 2. In-class assignment: inking of provided panels. Assign three pages of inking, plus (optional) getting one's own files ready for upcoming Photoshop lab.

Meeting 13 (Tuesday5Dec) Review of first three pages of inking. Assign next three pages inking, (through page 6), PHOTOSHOP LAB DAY

Meeting 14 (Tuesday12Dec) Review of next three pages of inking (through p.6). Assign last two pages of inking, plus cover inks. Reminder to touch up smears, erase margins, etc.

Meeting 15 (Tuesday 19 Dec) Presentation of Final projects. Turn in Xeroxes of same, including copies of pencils, to John. ALL-POSITIVE COMMENTS DAY. Discussion of approaching publishers, professional conduct, further schooling, written part of pitches. GUEST REVIEWER Chuck Pyle

See you Tuesday!
JH