2012 February

Isn't it nice when blogs have recent updates?

So, what have I been working on lately (or since June!) well…

Top Secrety Storyboard Stuff: Shhh…trust me it looks cool!

Mogo Charms: Two waves, (a wave being a group of charms.) The charms are for pre-teen/tween-age girls and boys. I did about 12 sets of three. Including a commemorative set for the Royal Wedding. It's the smallest art I've ever done, one quarter inch in diameter! Most people would not know I've done quite a bit of work for the tween-age girl market!

Morty G. Filtercat for Filter Talent: I was brought in to do ideation, character design and assets for Filter's Holiday website, I wound up doing the animations as well. There were nine animations each about 12 seconds long, one for each cat life, and a resurrection animation as well. Plus the cool cat skullz icon. This is the kind of stuff people think I do. Blowin' up cats, tons o'fun!!

Friendly Neighborhood DrawVatar: Worked two events drawing live for Filter! Geekwire Launch Party and the Seattle Interactive Conference. I designed and illustrated the DrawVatar logo, which got me a free lab coat! "Don't forget to tip your illustrator."

Masque of the Red Death: Added color to the black and white version of the story I adapted for Graphic Classics. Also illustrated the back cover. This adaptation was originally in black and white, so I made the black work as red and all the compositions are based on positive and negative space. It was quite a challenge to come back to it and add color, without screwing it up.

The Negro: Two page adaptation of the famous Langston Hughes poem for African American Classics. This was and experiment in completing the art as vector, textures and all. Developed this as an in-class demonstration while I was teaching Design at Pierce College. The challenge was in using this to show off various tools in Illustrator and not have it look all "vectory". I wanted to show my students how to make subtle use of some of the more overlooked and powerful vector tools. I created patterns, imported textures, and adjusted attributes to give the pages a natural African art look and feel.

Fart Proudly: Another adaptation/experiment (!) this time of Benjamin Franklins letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels. Taking into account Franklins wit and sarcasm, this was done as if he had his own daily political comedy show.  Again, I was making use of some under appreciated tools in Illustrator. Also showing how carefully setting up a file at the start can make working quick and give the art a cohesive and distinct look. This is to be published in "The Graphic Canon" from Seven Stories Press. 

Also started and completed (yeah!) a little experiment, "Trapdoors and Whores" on my Facebook page. It was quite a fun experiment using the methods from my storyboard work. Many thanks to the people who liked it. More on TDAW soon in my next post…really!

On-Model, a philosophy of line

I had a good start for this post but, well… Anyway there are few challenges more exacting for a cartoonist than staying on-model. Sure it's one thing to draw your own character consistently. That's more like getting your own signature right. But staying on-model, whole different thing. It's more than just imitating a style. Often you are tasked with creating art with the character in a new pose or setting, that doesn't yet exist.

I've had the great fortune to work on at least there cool on-model projects.  (These illustrations being one.) Cartoony characters are the toughest. You can't hide differences in a field of lines (or "hay" as the old times used to call "hatching".) like you can with comic book characters like Batman, Superman or Hay-Bale Man. There are fewer lines so each misstep is apparently out of line.

There is lots of information on breaking down characters to their basic shapes so you can get a better understanding of them and how they work in 3 dimensional space. But, I think it also helps to understand where the character comes from, it's ancestors, what the original cartoonists were trying to do, and how they worked.

Some things that help keep you on-model are mistakes made early on, short-cuts taken by previous cartoonists and just plain effects from they way they are drawn. Like the character said, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."

For me staying on model is more about getting into the head of who (years of other cartoonists,  a current cartoonist, or a model sheet) and trying to let it flow from there. Like a cartoonist profiler! This goes beyond shapes and form because you want the art to have some life.

When the drawing is done, it's fun to look at and see a favorite cartoon character, in a new pose or setting that you created and realize you made it from scratch. And it looks like the real thing. At least that's my philosophy.

Illustration Robot

Illustration Robot's Arron Petz asked me to do a little show and tell. Sometimes talking about my illustration work is like living a re-run. I like it, remember I liked it the first time around, and so this time I might seem a bit bored, but I'm actually thinking about other things that might be out of the obvious in regards to the illustration. Like a robot with two heads.
Here are seven illustrations I think will show an arc from conventional airbrush to digital airbrush. No matter what I do or what application I work in (Painter, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, or Sketchbook Pro) I try to make the concept/idea most important and not the technique.

 Nora Jones: This was for No Depression magazine. A lot of my editorial work was black and white airbrush, which I really love doing. Well, monochromatic to be really honest. So this is typical of that. I work at a low pressure setting on cold pressed board so there is a nice organic texture to the work in the sprayed areas and in the line work. While working for The Villiage Voice (printed on not that great newsprint) I learned to keep the work to three values, basically. This prevented the image from becoming muddy when printed. I love the graphic nature of working this way.

Holiday Art: Full page newspaper illustration for a Holiday Arts section. This was sprayed as black and white, then I added the colors digitally in Photoshop. Just basic layers set to multiply, nothing fancy, yet. Still playing with how hue affected values, shifting the compositional focus.

Brandy (w/ Timbaland): Florian Bachleda at Vibe gave me a pretty nice playground for doing my conventional airbrush stuff in color. Interesting subject matter and he gave me a lot of freedom, but also pushed a bit to make sure the concept and execution were spot on. I have a so-so color sense. Airbrush required a lot of planning and sometimes working almost blind because of the frisket. But it was like Christmas when it came time to remove all the frisket and see what I got. This is one of my better color airbrush illustrations. Again, mostly one color and the value/shape range is low. I always set it up by shape/areas. Like, "skin", "dress" and background". Each area basically one value with slight variation within. Timbo's face was sprayed in originally, but Florian and I thought he looked to fat. So I sprayed another face and added it digitally, along with the color.

Beth Orton: Grant Alden at No Depression is another wonderful art director. Plenty of great assignments and room to experiment under a helpful/watchful eye. I'm really pleased with the concept on this, which extends into the execution. Her transparent fingers sort of shy and not quite covering her mouth, suggesting how she veils her meanings in her song lyrics. Again this was sprayed with black ink and colored digitally. I made a few adjustments to the values after scanning so the color would show in the darker areas.

India Arie: Vibe magazine. This is again, sprayed conventionally, but there is an equal amount of digital work done. Tweaking the value areas, adjustments to the face and line work. And a lot of layer manipulation to get the color right and allow the texture to show through. Actually did this illustration over from scratch! Got very comfortable manipulating the texture in photoshop.

Ray LaMontagne: So I loved the Beth Orton piece so much I copied myself for another No Depression illustration. If you look you can tell. The difference is that this one is all digital. If you look close you can see tell tale signs, but this is a big leap for where I was heading!

Tracy Morgan: And we arrive back at the start, sort of. Some of my first black and white editorial airbrush pieces were for The Village Voice, and here is a recent one, but this time digital. I created my own texture, and worked in Illustrator, Photoshop and Painter. My goal was to provide my client with art in the style they wanted, but with the speed that a digital work-flow allowed. Ta-da! Some of my oldest art director friends couldn't tell the difference. "The android had successfully replaced the human!"

On editorial work like this, I try to come up with a strong concept, that doesn't rely on style, but takes advantage of it. Like Norah Jones's body being a piano shape. That concept could work in another style, but I like to think that is shows up well in the style I used. Same goes for the depiction of Brandy as a sort of Egyptian Queen/diva, or the happy, glowy, pop feel to the way India Arie is rendered. Even the Renaissance approach to a simple portrait of Ray LaMontagne. Style is subservient to the concept. Or at least that's what I'm aiming for. I welcome any and all comments from blog readers and other Illustration Robots!

Treading the boards

For a while now I've been doing a lot of presentation and proprietary storyboard work. Odd stuff, interesting stuff, speculative in nature, and not always finished. These are bits of the second of a two part project. The nature of the assignment called for finished vector work in three distinct styles. This is the one I had the most fun with. It is reminiscent of old Reader's Digest illustrations in it's rough line and single tone color treatment. I created a few special brushes to work with in Illustrator CS4. (I've since moved on to CS5!) I wanted the style to look rough and coarse as if done on oatmeal paper. We all remember paper, right?

The other snippets are from the other set of storyboards. The style was to be more tech, clear line, and cartoony. We wanted a contrast between the rougher line and the cleaner line. Also contrast in how the overall feel, mood and flow of the boards.

They both were fun to do and took advantage of different features in Illustrator. I wish there would have been time to add color to these, in the vein of "Near Art". We had a bit more time at the start, but the schedule got cramped and one of the designers left half way through the project, so in the end we only completed two of the three.

Anyway the dust has settled on these boards, so it safe to tread.

"Live fast, draw hard."

Sunglasses After Dark cover

Gettin' funky with the warp mesh.

 Hey kids comics! Or at least the cover for one.

Vampires never die. The adaptation of "Sunglasses After Dark" that Nancy Collins (the original author) and I did about 15 years ago will finally be collected and reprinted by IDW in 2011. An exact date has not been set, but the cover is done!

The wheels are in motion, the page art has to be scanned, lettered and colored. I didn't do any of the original series covers, but I did the collection cover.

 Not only has it been 15 years since I drew the character, but for most comic book characters, I'm used to playing off existing art. This time I only had myself to riff on.
My first take on the cover was much more designy, book cover-ish, and minimalist. I wasn't happy with the lack of excitement or interest this cover had.

like some ol' make-up ad!

After that, I went back over my original drawings of Sonja Blue, seeing why I drew her the way I did. I figured I would make some changes, sort of update her a bit, and did a lot of sketches along that line. But the more I drew, the more I realized that over the course of the original mini series Sonja had become fully developed. I didn't need to rethink the character at all. At one point I was even going to change her sunglasses and drew several different pair, but  I wound up using the original (soldering) glasses she had.

"When will you make and end!?!"

"Sunglasses After Dark" has a strong pulp noir feel so I wanted that to come across in the cover.
Once I got on track I did several roughs with a sort of pulp noir paperback look using the exaggerated figure, and low angle, and classic femme fatale stance. As with a lot of my stuff lately it was a complete digital work flow. The pencils were done in Sketchbook Pro, inks in Painter and colors were completed in Photoshop. I added a basic texture background and did my local color over that. My goal was to have an image that was dark but not murky and hard to see. While at the same time had some eye-candy appeal. In the original series Nancy and I wanted Sonja to have Engineer's Boots, this time I made them high-heeled Engineer's boots.

only a few of the roughs done for the illustration!

When the art was finished IDW wanted my input on type treatment, which I was happy to give. I have always had a fondness for the Doc Savage logo type done by Len Leone, which is a classic paperback type treatment that is echoed in tons of covers. So I went with that. I had to restrain myself and keep the warping to a minimum. In the image here colors are roughly chosen, subject to change, but I'm mostly happy with the way it looks. However it still has to pass  few eyeballs before being final. Not sure when that will be, but stay tuned.

Casual Game User Interface

I'm working on a casual game UI piece. I've posted it here temporarily for feedback. Let me know what you think. My usual notes and notes about animation in Flash, with movements done in blue.

All in a day's work.

So, the top image is some of what I'm doing currently. Pretty normal, but along the way I get to experiment in Painter and I've made a nice "felt tip marker" that could yield some nice results, given more time. As it is I'm cranking on these with more of an eye to showing off the product/setting (basic information) than anything else, plus I have lot more to do by tomorrow. It's interesting, I know some illustrators have an aversion to working digitally and I definitely can see their point. But there are some pluses. One un-obvious thing, I put a piece of Bristol board over my Wacom so it feels like I'm drawing on paper rather than a piece of plastic. It even sounds like drawing on paper, which I love, "scritch, scritch, scritch." Any drawing is good practice. Doing this sort of stuff allows me to turn around things like the Sunglasses cover in short time (about three hours for inks and colors, more on the creation of that cover in my next post ). I don't always want to work at that pace, but it's all in a day's work, and sometimes it's like driving a really nice, fast car.

Bob Harper Fitness Illustrations on MSN

Earlier this year I worked on a project  doing fitness/exercise illustrations, 21 episodes with at least three images per episode,  for, "Help Yourself in 5 with Bob Harper, sponsored by Planters Nutrition", a site Bob Harper (The Biggest Loser) has on MSN. I was called in at the start of the development phase because of my visual problem solving skills. This was exciting because both my wife and I are gym rats so I would have no problem understanding any of the exercises or finding models! Well that and I was getting paid!

Microsoft's Branded Entertainment Experience Team had sent me a lot of art with the flavor they wanted. They had a rough look for the site and wanted to add illustrations  that were subtle, tasteful with a little flair. In the beginning we were thinking of bright colors and textures. We wanted an almost retro, 50's look to it. Think Jack Lalanne!

I started in on stye tests, working in Illustrator CS because vector art was needed since this was to be used online and on mobile applications.  The first style tests were too light in line weight and to detailed to really work online and definitely on mobile apps. So, we went to a thicker line with simpler filled areas.  See, I have this thing for actually naming illustrations so we had Betty, Veronica, Kate and Lucy to chose from. In the third real style test (I did a ton before sending any to BEET) we felt "Veronica" was the best. However to use color in the arrow and spot that shows what area is benefitting, (sometime overlapping the figure and working in 3-D,)  I made the figure only black and white. Real old school! The spot and arrow colors would be equally old school, faded colors. I felt that an arrow that moved in and around the figure would better show the movement called for in the exercise.

The art director, project manager and head writer felt we had nailed the style so I got the scripts and started on the final illustrations.

I created a brush and set up a format in Illustrator so that all the line weights and scaling would be the same for all roughly 63 drawings. I pulled together my reference, took photos and made changes. Somethings were not safe and some postures weren't straight so I corrected them, just like yer old gym teacher! My sketches were done in Sketchbook Pro and fired off to BEET for approval. From there I finished each one "inking" them in Illustrator, saving out two versions for web and mobile.

"Ironing Man" (using a clothes iron to do bicep curls) made sneaky appearances before the project went live.

I don't spend ALL of my life in front of a computer and I just got word that the site is live on MSN a couple of days ago. Stop by take a look at all the workouts, and let me know what you think. Do an exercise or two and waste five minutes getting fit, and remember it was drawn by some guys sitting on his butt.

Tracy Morgan for the Village Voice, Liz Lemon!

This is a different conventional/digital mix than normal for me. Being  that the conventional part was done digitally and the digital part was done conventionally.

Jesus Diaz of the Village Voice asked me to do a straight illustration of Tracy Morgan for the Choices section. Specifically he wanted my airbrush style,  which I perfected (or whatever) years ago working for The Voice, and went on to use it for a lot of other clients (Pierce Transit, Vibe, No Depression, BIBR, Dark Horse Comics,)

Originally I was doing this airbrush style in black and white, later I added color by spraying with Rortring Inks (Arguably the best inks that were on the market. Rumor is, they closed a plant rather than change the formula.)

When I started using a computer, I developed a way to color the black and white airbrush so I had the best of both. Nice B&W art for me, and controlled color art for my clients!

I like this style best in black and white, it just looks cool to me.  My last sprayed color piece was an illustration of author Zadie Smith for Black Issues Book Review. After that I only did B&W, mostly  for No Depression.

Then recently Jesus Diaz asked for that ol' airbrush magic. Time was tight, as usual, and I had only done one successful digital airbrush piece, (my jazz Blue Note Santa!) The sketch was drawn conventionally by hand (as opposed to by foot?) on paper over my light table. I scanned the drawing and completed the illustration in Photoshop CS4, making paths the same way I would cut frisket, okay maybe a bit more anally 'cause I'm like that!  The new rotate feature is very handy. The texture is my own special recipe, actually sprayed by hand! Layers were sandwiched and the illo was sent off. In the rush, I forgot to add color but Jesus did that and it looks great.

And now for something completely different…Batman Action Figures

I used to do a monthly or twice monthly single panel comic for the DC Comics employee newsletter. That's pretty fun stuff when I think about it. It was my second chance to work with the talented Dean Motter. I got to poke fun at whatever hero from the DC pantheon was in the spotlight at the time. I remember doing Superman, Shade (the Changing Man!) Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter gags. They're all somewhere in a pile of bristol board.  Recently I heard  (yet to be confirmed) that this Batman strip is in  the "Batman Vault: Museum in a Box"!
So, I thought I'd drag it out for show and tell to kick of a few posts that present a completely different side of what I do.

Alpha Stanta

From the depths of my hard drive, the original Stanta. 

The Stanta Claus, 2009!

Last year because of a typo I made I did a drawing I used as an email signature, "Stanta". Which I can't find. Over the years I have done relatively few Santas. This year I decided to have some fun and do a few more. The first one, above, was a quick run at another email signature image. I had in  mind a photo my old studio partner had of a a New York City cop, dressed as Santa, loading his revolver.

I was not going to do a comic book version, I had done that for the local paper some years ago.

The first Stanta for 2009. Just a quick drawing in Sketchbook pro, that turned into a Sean Connery. The main goal with the Stanta's was to have fun. I wanted to do each in a different style or technique and play around with the look of Santa.

There is Hillbilly Stanta,

 

  Snoop Stanta,

 

and Jazz Stanta

Only got four done. Not bad, each is somewhat of an experiment. I had fun and learned a bit. Hope people got to enjoy them. I think I have a new Holiday tradition.