Posts Tagged style

Blood

June 23, 2012 at 3:51 am · Filed under Comicblog, Visual ·Tagged , , , , ,

This is my newest picture of Tabitha and Benedict. It really turned out interesting.

I was working on a couple of other pictures of Tazz, but I think I’m going to scrap them. They just don’t look right, and they don’t have the emotional impact that kept me coming back to these pictures I have posted.

I just don’t have enough of a grasp of this style to draw her from any angle but flat profile. I’ll have to keep trying. But anyway I like how she looks here. I am especially proud of the hands. Her hands in this picture are pretty much how I want them to be. Ben’s hands, I’m still fighting every step of the way, but they came out decently.

I experimented with a little bit of texture here. Not sure if it’s quite right, but it’s the first time I’ve tried it, and I think it does add something to the mood.

The mood is definitely my favorite thing about this piece. I’m really starting to feel like a “real artist.” I’ve pretty much always had the capacity to be technically proficient at whatever artistic task was set before me, but I lacked vision. I was a storyteller with no stories. I’m getting a feel for how to grab an emotion and put it on paper so other people can feel it.

Still just at the beginning of this, though. I mean this happened today, and the other day when I was drawing that Avengers art. That was the first time I can remember feeling that my emotions needed expressing in art. Then today, looking at that drawing, I wanted to have the same experience again. I wanted to pour emotion into a drawing.

I think this turned out pretty expressive, and it has the added bonus of featuring characters that I own.

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Stylized Hands

June 22, 2012 at 3:56 am · Filed under Comicblog, Visual ·Tagged , , , , ,

So I talked a little bit earlier about my issue with drawing hands. I’m pretty happy with my default hand-drawing style for my existing comics. It tends to be fairly realistic, and more or less rounded, because I reference my own thickish hands all the time. Since the style for KTPT tends to the realistic and earthy, and all the characters have sturdy working-people hands, it works.

The thing about my new story, The Eldritch Princess of Sunflower, PA, is that it is in a style which emphasizes grace over realism. So I have to learn to draw hands that way. So I’m doing hand studies, not from real life or anatomy books, but from books of art that have that sort of style to them. Here’s my first page of hand studies:

The three down the right side are drawn from a book called Shojo Fashion. The nobbliness and stylized lines are a little more than what I’ll be going for, but still, I need to get used to breaking the rules in these ways. The more thoroughly I break the rules, the better I’ll remember how.

The shaded one is from a painting in a book of Japanese artists. I thought it was fascinating how much space there is between the fingers. I don’t draw like that because my hands don’t do that, but I think thinner-fingered hands might.

The two on the bottom left are from the Uzumaki art book. Naruto is a shonen manga, with a bold, chunky graphic style, so the hands in it tend to be a little more like what I draw – sturdy and thick, the hands of people who do a lot of things with their hands. But he still manages to get them to look elegant and Japanese. I figure if I can learn how he does that, it will contribute a lot to my mission.

But TEPOS is a shojo story, so I need to learn to draw the graceful hands of people who sit around swooning over their impossibly complicated love lives. 😛

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Angsty Ben

June 15, 2012 at 2:21 pm · Filed under Comicblog, Visual ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

I stayed up until 3 last night doing art, but I was allowed because it was not to get a page done for the next day; it was because I was inspired. The things that I allow myself to do in the name of caring for my brain are odd, but they are built for optimal inspiration-driven creation.

Anyway here’s the piece I finished:

This came out a bit more angsty than I was intending. I was going for “grasping his pencil in anguished indecision” but there is also an unintended smidge of “considering stabbing self in heart with pencil.” Although, given that he’s debating the morality of staking vampires, it’s strangely appropriate.

Anyway, one of the reasons I’m not immediately jumping into this project as a comic yet is that I haven’t quite got down the style I want to use. It’s much more manga than pretty much anything else I’ve done, including things I intended to be in manga style but weren’t quite there. I think I’m pretty much where I want to be with Ben’s face here, but I’m still struggling with his hands, and pretty much every part of Tazz.

Pretty much every artist everywhere complains that they can’t draw hands, but I have an extra issue. I can draw chubby hands, because I look at my own hands for reference all the time. But when it comes to slim, graceful, slightly knobbly hands, my hands make really bad reference. And that’s the kind of hands I mostly want to draw on my characters. I’ve made compromises for hands in my standard style that look pretty good with it, but then when I put that into this new style I’m trying to develop, they just don’t have the grace to quite merge into the image.

But I’ll figure it out. I’ve just got to look at a lot of other reference for a while.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun inking this, and I want to show off my inks, but I am pretty much allergic to leaving something uncolored. So here is a paler version of the same pic:

Look how pretty the lines are!

Anyway, soon I’ll ink and color one of my pictures of Tazz, and then you can read my rant about how troublesome it is to finalize her character design.

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The Eldritch Princess of Sunflower, PA

June 14, 2012 at 2:04 am · Filed under Comicblog, Visual ·Tagged , , , , ,

So, I’m working on a new project. I’ve got no plans to start drawing it as a webcomic anytime soon; KTPT was a fluke, and I generally like to thoroughly plan a story before I start drawing pages of it or showing it to the public.  But I would like to give a sneak peek.

The two main characters have been brewing in my sketchbook for some time, and they had names that were only ever meant to be placeholders. I got used to the names, but while I was reading the Twilight series this past week, I realized my vampire had the same nickname as one of those. So I went to my name book and got them some similar but more permanent names.

Here are some initial designs for Tabitha and Benedict:

I’ll give you a few hints about their story. She is a benevolent but influential small-town vampire, and he is from a family of vampire hunters, and has moved to the countryside to have some space to contemplate the life he was born to.

This story seems to have developed some momentum in my creative brain; however, starting a new webcomic is not on my list of things that it would be a good idea to do. So I’ll only start the comic if I absolutely can’t help it. So, probably I will.

What is even more certain is that more pictures of these characters will appear here, on my blog. There’s nothing like churning out five pages of carefully shaded pencils a week to make me miss digital inks. I may not need a new story, but I need these characters to draw. So you’ll see more of Tazz and Ben.

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DNAngel Fan Art

May 28, 2012 at 2:54 am · Filed under Comicblog, Visual ·Tagged , , , , ,

I made some fan art today. Well, I have a little trouble thinking of it that way, because I did copy it from manga panels. But I didn’t trace, and I did tweak, and I only referred to the originals while I was sketching. And anyway I only made it because I really want a DNAngel shirt and I couldn’t find any licensed ones for sale. So I drew this.

I was just planning on doing a sketch so I could copy it onto a shirt with my fabric paints, but then it was so cool, and I wanted to see it colored, and I forgot how much I enjoy digital inking. So I inked and colored and even did some quick highlights.

There are a lot of things I’ve read and seen that have influenced my new comic, but DNAngel played an especially important part, in that I was reading it when I decided “OK, I really need to design my own cool guy character.” So I got out a piece of paper and went about inventing Keller.

I like the art style of DNAngel when I look at it, but when I’m drawing it I realize how odd it looks to me. I’m trying to incorporate more manga elements in my drawing style, but the first rule of my style is clarity, and that often translates to realism. I like how this came out but it was very hard for me to get myself to draw Dark’s hair this way, because it makes so little sense in real world terms.

I’ve talked about the influences for Keller’s character in terms of personality, but not as much in visual terms. Dark was the first push, and that counts for a lot. The Sandman comics are also a definite source for his look. Morpheus is basically one of those pretty long-haired manga guys, except he happens to be in an American comic book, so he’s usually drawn in  a way that’s more similar to my natural drawing style. So that’s been helpful to have around. Also I think that’s where I got the idea to combine that visual type with the big boxy leather coat that looks like it came out of Firefly.

Blythe’s look sort of sprang naturally out of Keller’s, as the character with long dark hair of course has to have a companion with short light hair. I’m not sure how ingrained this is but visually Blythe has actually kind of turned out to be a fusion of the two male characters I’ve drawn most often, Syblai and Mahkai, who both hang around with dark-haired girls on their adventures. So I guess it’s something I do a lot, but at least I switched it up a little this time. And it just makes design sense to have that contrast. I notice it in other people’s work too.

Well, it’s nice to draw in someone else’s style once in a while, and notice both things I wish I could do better, and things I appreciate more in my existing style. So this was a lot of fun and good practice. It’s nice to keep my digital art skills sharp.

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this manga thing

October 2, 2010 at 4:19 am · Filed under Comicblog ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

So I’m working on this manga thing. It really is different and fun and as good as taking a break from the comic altogether. It lets me stretch my art skills without the outside pressure that comes with working on Dragon’s Fall.

It’s a lot to get done in the time that I have before NEWW, but I think I’m going to manage it. I’m making pretty good time so far. Here are the reasons it’s getting done faster than regular comics:

I know exactly how the story goes and I have for years. The scripts only needed a little tweaking before I typed them up. I made sure to thumbnail all the pages before I started any detailed art. This meant I could do the layouts while still in regular comic mode, and then wake up my art brain. I didn’t agonize over the placement of every panel, but I can make adjustments now as things come up.

I’m drawing detailed sketches of panels as they inspire me, instead of page by page, so I don’t have to waste my time forcing mediocre art out until I get to the last few really boring panels. I’m inking them as they are produced if they’re really inspiring. Ink is the star of this comic. After it’s done the comic will basically be done as I’m leaving it black and white.

Here are some of the things I’m worrying about getting done:

I’m going to try to challenge myself to make really good backgrounds – at least in the panels with backgrounds. This is manga, after all.  But I haven’t done all that much and I was going to try to get a few done before I started the figure inking, but I couldn’t wait.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with everybody’s hair. I could fold it all into the inking process and hatch or do a straight black-and-white manga shine effect on everyone, but that would be time consuming. I could use digital screen tones, but I’d need to do that at least twice per page after the inks have been scaled, because they don’t scale well. I could just shade in greys and then see what the page looks like if I separate it into black and white with dithering. I’m not sure how to do that exactly or whether it would look any good. I could photocopy with any of these methods or I could just shade in greys and get it printed digitally. But that will only work if I finish extra early.

Here are some of the interesting things I’ve noticed in the process:

The more I learn about how to draw human beings, the more I can tell the difference between manga conventions that have a basis in reality and ones that are just weird. When I was creating the style for LleuGarnock I picked up a few that made sense to me and that I could use confidently – for example, the manga mouth. This time I’m seeing other parts of the style a lot more clearly and realizing how they can and can’t be used. I put a nose on a face and it doesn’t work. Maybe I need another kind of nose to go with that face, or maybe the face just needs to be more angular to go with the nose. I’m not really good at using manga noses yet, though, so there are quite a few characters with more horizontal noses than you usually see in manga. The way I draw faces, they just don’t work as well with the vertical nose style.

It’s also interesting to be drawing every panel as though it’s a separate work of art. I’ve got a couple of amazing ones that I might expand into paintings or use on the cover or something. It really helps me think of the whole thing as art, because I’m not thinking about getting one panel out of eight done, I’m thinking about drawing a pretty picture.

It’s cool that I’m not going crazy from not writing. I guess it’s like my brain is so busy with art that I can turn off my writing brain for a while. Although clearly it’s not as sensitive as my art brain because I can do something like this blog entry without pining for more scriptwriting or the good old days when Dragon’s Fall was a novel. I think it might just be that this art project is more fun and less pressure than Dragon’s Fall. And also it is a short complete story, so I’m not sitting there the whole time imagining what might happen to these characters later. The story is what it is, and all it needs is some cute art.

I’m really glad I decided to include this story within The Elves of LleuGarnock. I think it’s going to be awesome.

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Map of Influences

September 7, 2010 at 6:20 pm · Filed under Comicblog, Visual ·Tagged , , , , ,

Map of Influences in The Elves of LleuGarnock

Map of Influences in The Elves of LleuGarnock

So I did this map of influences thing. The image labels might look inconsistent, but here’s how I did things. When there is one work that can easily be credited to one person, I list both. When there are two or more works by the person that inspired me, only the creator is listed. When a work has too many creators to credit, only the title is listed.

This is a huge image, because I have lots of influences, and I love these images so I want to show them at least semi-properly. I assume that if you click on this smaller version it will take you to the bigger version. If it doesn’t, I’ll come back and fix it.

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lack of perspective

July 25, 2010 at 2:51 am · Filed under Comicblog ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been pretty good at maintaining a flow of work on The Elves of LleuGarnock, especially considering how much the weather is affecting my ability to think. But being totally caught up in the immediate work has its price. I have no idea what the quality of my work is, because I never get to sit back and really contemplate it.

I make a lot of decisions about how to write each script and build each page, and I’ve trained myself to make those decisions quickly with a minimum of effort.  While I know I can make those decisions better than I could at the beginning of the comic, the quality control is so unconscious that I really have no conscious sense of how I’m doing.

This makes sense for me as I’m creating LleuGarnock, because as you know if you’ve been following my blog, my priority on this project has been timely updates, and ultimately a completed story. The downside is that it’s quite disorienting. From my perspective this story is just speeding by.

It’s not that I have my process completely worked out. In fact I am constantly trying new things in terms of page layouts and styles. But even that is part of my fast-paced decision process. Which is the strangest part for me in terms of how much I am conscious of doing. It leads me to ask questions like, “When did I learn how to cell shade?”

I am really looking forward to the point when I will be able to sit back and consider the finished product – the complete Elves of LleuGarnock. I know that I want to rewrite the first three chapters, but even now I know that if I wait until I’ve completed the story and given the whole thing thorough contemplation, I will be a much more competent person and have a good idea of how to make the story the best it can be.

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a pause for manga?

June 18, 2010 at 2:47 am · Filed under Comicblog ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

The Elves of LleuGarnock has always been a story with many stories in it,  but some of the stories that have been with it from the beginning just don’t fit any more. The longest story has been left out, and its place has come and gone. The second-longest story has its place in the main story probably late this year or early next year, and I still haven’t decided whether to include it.

Of course in written form it seems longer, because unlike my notes on the main story, all its main dialogue is written out, and there’s quite a bit of description as well, which I can leave out when translated into comic. I’ve figured out that I can fit the whole thing into maybe 13 or 14 pages. The thing is, that still means a month and a half away from the main storyline.

I believe in the long term it will add to the story, and after all that is my main objective. It’s not like the pace of the updates now are especially conducive to appreciating the story as it is written. But really, when I’m thinking of whether to include it, the thing that attracts me to it the most is my own desire to draw it.

I imagine it would be sort of like a vacation, not in the sense of being less work but purely because it is so different visually from anything I’ve been doing. The plan is to draw it in a relatively pure manga style. I promise this will make some sense.

I also like the idea of drawing a short story comic that stands on its own. All of the stories that have been inserted into The Elves of LleuGarnock up to this point really depend on the main story, and weave in and out of it. A possible exception is the Corncake Cat, but it doesn’t really benefit from being in comic form.  I mean something that I can hand to people and say “Look what I can do with comics!” without making them read the LleuGarnock archives from their larval form up to this mysterious coccoon-like phase, then leave them hanging…like all you guys.

So for all these reasons, I think I’m probably going to do it. I’m picturing it occurring in November or December, so judging by my past estimates it will probably see updates next February or March. I figure it’s probably better than another breakdown and hiatus from getting really sick of drawing LleuGarnock pages that all look the same. Ok, that isn’t quite accurate, but whatever. Sometimes I just get tired of things and need a change.

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Relativity

March 10, 2009 at 1:03 am · Filed under Comicblog ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Drawing Dragon’s Fall does improve the art for LleuGarnock, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. I spend so much time on a panel of Dragon’s Fall. When it’s done, it’s the way I want it. That just doesn’t happen with LleuGarnock. Now every time I finish a panel of LG I think to myself “I could do so much better”…but I just don’t want to put in the time.

When I think about it I’m pretty sure the page layouts are better than before and the sketch/ink work are at least no worse. The work isn’t any less fun. It’s mostly the quality of the rest of my time that’s changed.

I’m happy when I’m writing, and page layouts are always interesting, but if I’m going to be drawing I’d much rather be drawing Dragon’s Fall. So I’ve been drawing Dragon’s Fall, and when I’m not doing any of those things I’ve been taking breaks and cleaning the house and doing all those other things that are necessary to life yet aren’t comics. So drawing LleuGarnock has taken a hit in the priorities department.

LG fans shouldn’t start to get worried yet. I can guarantee you at least another five months of regular updates. That’s what my buffer is for. It’s because my priorities like to take turns, and I’m sure LG will rise to the top again. January is proof that my enthusiasm and productivity can come back even after an extended absence.

And I mean, I am drawing LleuGarnock. Just a couple of hours ago I was plugging away at the inks for a new page. That’s what made me think about all this. I think I’m getting faster and more efficient, just because I’d rather be doing something else, but I want to get these pages done, so I’m doing more detail with less sketch, for example, and trusting myself to do something that looks all right on the first try.

I’m not absolutely certain the quality hasn’t gone down in some ways. It’s really hard for me to judge. But because my learning focus right now is on page layout and framing panels, I wouldn’t be too disappointed if my inks got a bit messier. They’re still more consistent than they have been for most of the comic, and that’s always been a goal of mine with the art for LG – consistent, easily reproduced character designs.

LleuGarnock is my practice ground. I’ve always thought of it that way. It may not be ideal as a comic, but it has proven to be ideal as a project that I love that gets me to draw on a regular basis and improve. Dragon’s Fall is of course teaching me many new, different and important skills, but it really is more than that for me, and because I care about it first as a finished product, I don’t have the freedom that I have with LleuGarnock to test my speed and efficiency. I need both projects, in order to learn everything i can about being a comic artist.

While I was drawing today, I drew a hand that didn’t look accurate to me, but it looked right, so I left it. It’s evidence of my growing sense of stylism. I hope it will happen more often. This is one of the areas where LleuGarnock is much more helpful to my learning process, because I don’t think as much before starting to draw, so my lines and shapes can be more varied – I can see which variations I like and which I don’t like. I might even begin to develop a language of stylism that is truly my own, and not made up of elements I saw elsewhere and incorporated. I already have my own stylistic tendencies, I realize, but I am only beginning to see and recognize them. Once I do this, I can shape them further and put more appeal into them.

I just now thought to separate my style into these two categories. Now I’ll try to explain what they are and how they’re different. My stylistic tendencies are in the shapes of my characters, their body positions and body language – the more general aspects of how I compose and sketch a drawing. The language of stylism that I use is the specific elements that I use over and over again, especially a remembered pattern or line that I don’t have to think much about before inking. I draw ears in a certain way, a combination of manga ears I’ve seen and my own observation. The same is true for mouths, and certain types of wrinkles on clothes.

What I mean when I say I want to develop my own stylistic language is that I want to make these elements in a way that I think they look good, instead of basing them on accuracy and someone else’s sense of what looks good. To do this, I need to experiment, but I also need to figure out how to tell if something looks good and why.

See, this is the problem when I blog. I try to wrap it up but everything I say just gets me deeper and deeper into the subject. If it were important to me, I would go back and reorganize it into a more rounded, satisfying form. I don’t write well in a linear format such as this, but if you are still reading, you’re interested in the inner workings of my brain, so here you go, this is the order I thought these things in.

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