Drawing from Life

I have been in Tacoma now for a while, coming up on year 7. Since arriving in Tacoma I have taken part in a few ventures. Tried to open an art space, fail. Partnered with a local coffee shop, fail. Joined a cooperative gallery, Grand Impromtu, then the Grand Cinema wanted it space back, fail. So I retreated for the city and have focused my attention on developing my comic art. Since departing from fine art I feel I have also departed from life drawing. Perhaps one of my greatest passions, I love to feel out the human figure with pencil in paper. I studied life drawing with Karl Gnass, he begins his workshops with how to sharpen your pencil. We would carve out half inch piece of charcoal form the wood sheath, and then polish the lead into a bullet shaped lead brush. Line and value were one and the same. Fat broad shadow strokes would refine their way into knee creases and elbow wrinkles. It has been some time since I formally sat and drew from a model. So I was excited to learn that The Cartoonist League of Absurd Washingtonians were bringing in roller derby girls. Although I missed the event I produced this sketch from the images taken of the Derby Dames. As a artist you should always draw from life, whether for a video project, a dance number or installation art, life offers the most peculiarly interesting things to ponder and wonder.

Judging a book by its Cover

They say you shouldn't "jugde a book by its cover, but a lot of people do." I have been struggling with the cover for my book. It is absolutely essential to have a cover that attracts attention, and projects the right message. The cover for Kat and Bunnie, my first comic, flopped at the con. It was too conservative. So for my next book I want a cover that sticks out, but how the heck do you do that? Whenever I have a question I google it. So I Googled, "Top Selling Comic Covers of All Time." This yielded an array of results, but the pattern I see is that simple and iconic images trump complexity. The goal is to attract people walking through a sea of imagery, and get them to come to your table and flip through your book. Once they start flipping through then it is up to you to make the sale. The Head Trip is primarily about relationships and I wanted an image to convey the struggle between the sexes. Please give me your feed back and ideas. I would love to have some help creating a cover that will help push the book.

Sketch Done with: MyPaint

Inking: Making Confident Strokes

Inking is perhaps the most challenging part of comic creation. Inking comics is the process of going over the pencil work with ink to clean up and refine the artwork. Some people work with brushes, I use Faber-Castell PITT artist pens. I use primarily the fine and small pen for line work and the brush pen for fills. One of the biggest concerns of inking a page is line consistency. Line consistency is the ability to maintain uniformity of the line. The two main factors in maintaining uniformity are the pens that you use and the confidence with which the stroke is made. A hesitant line is shaky and wavy; a confident line is straight and true. Making a slow careful line will more often not produce the desired results. For inking I go to the Jedi and a quote from Qui Gon Jinn, "Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think. Use your instincts." The goal of inking is to maintain the life and energy of the pencil work. Inking is drawing, except for the fact that you are committed to the line you make. It is easy to get lost in all the lines of the image, so it helpful to have someone else review your work. Ink on the page is permanent, and mistakes can test your resolve, but if all fails and you mess up your page you can always redraw. Don't be afraid to destroy your art while moving it forward. Take a chance and you might just make one of those beautiful mistakes that help artist evolve.

Going open source cold turkey

Black Friday 2010, I sat staring at my out of commission mac mini, "What had I done?" The mini was brought down by a very amateur attempt to install Ubuntu, a free distribution of the Linux operating system. For the past 4 years, it's been my holiday tradition to use my time off to move my personal projects forward. This holiday's project is a 30 page comic about a girl band called "Kat and Bunnie: Legend of the Broken Hearts", but without a computer to do the required layout and design or share it with the outside world, I had to find a way to get up and running. With the holiday season upon us, I was not going to fight the crowds to get my mini to the Mac store. So I decided there is no better time then now to go open source.
"Eat your own dog food," is a term use to describe companies that use the products they produce. For the last few years since being introduced to Blender, an open 3D application. I have been developing the Sequential Media Learning Center, a course on the use of free software in the development of products that help support free software. So, I opened the can, scoped out a big spoon full, and bit off way more open source then I could chew. I expected a free ride, free operating system, free software, free media, what I found was humility. For the first time in a long time I was helpless at the keyboard, stumbling through very simple tasks like, installing software, mounting external drives, connecting to the Internet, and even browsing the file system. I felt as though I was pulled back in time to my first computer, a Gateway 400 mhz PC running Windows 95. I encountered a lot of the same frustrations of naivety, unfamiliarity and system issues, but I am ok with it. It is nice to be a nu-be again, and I am excited to see what free software can really do.