Search Results for: log book

WEEKEND SKETCHBOOK

Sunday, March 9, 2008

I don’t crosshatch. I don’t like to put a line through another line.
— Tony Millionaire

Doodling a lot with my sumi-e brush:

sketchbook page

And drawing on the bus with a big, fat chisel-tip marker (keeps you from being too precious with your line):

chisel tip marker drawings

As a woodcut artist, I’ve always been attracted to black-and-white art. I think it has something to do with the rich contrasts. I love a deep rich black that you can stare into, forever. The effect is like our colorful world torn down to its base so that we can read the unerlying message. The truth is always easier to take in black and white. Typography is always more legible in black and white, so why would we be surprised to find the readability of artworks enhanced by those contrasts? Remove the grays and hues, reduce the image to lines and solid blacks, and open up the whites. You have a thing of beauty and simplicity.

Another way to understand our attraction to black and white is through the science of how we see. The human eye consists of rods and cones that process the reflected light of our world. These signals are then translated into color and form for processing by our brain. The rods, which are sensitive only to black and white, are the first components activated in a baby’s eyes. That’s why infants readily respond to high-contrast black-and-white images. We are hardwired to appreciate black-and-white artwork.

—George A. Walker, preface to Graphic Witness

PROCESS: T-SHIRT DESIGN FOR BOOKSLUT

Thursday, December 13, 2007

A few months ago, Jessa Crispin asked me if I wanted to submit a t-shirt design for the literary website Bookslut. So I said, “Cool, let’s do it.” Last week I finally got around to finishing.

I really didn’t want to go for the obvious slutty-girl-reading-a-book theme, so after about a dozen abandoned ideas, I sketched this one:

Decided Jefferson would be my muse (the pixellated color cartoon is from the wonderful 1993 computer game, DAY OF THE TENTACLE):

Tighter sketch:

Carved:

Thought ol’ Tom needed a companion:

Sketched her:

Carved:

No idea whether the design will actually get used, but there you go.

WEEKEND SKETCHBOOK

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it on the toilet, it just weaves itself into your everyday life. It’s about little details. It’s not about grand sweeping dramas. Graphic stories are able to show incidental life without having to describe it.”
— Alison Bechdel on the everyday in comics

I’m passionate. I’m disciplined. I play a lot…[When I sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen,] I do a mark on the page, whether it’s virtual or actual paper. Once there is a mark, there’s no fear of not drawing something. It’s a funny thing, but it works every single time…

— PASCAL CAMPION

The way I work nowadays usually is…I don’t really draw a lot….I’ll go months without drawing, but I do keep a notebook…and write down dreams or ideas I have for stories. I just kind of keep filling in those pages and six months or eight months or twelve will go by and I’ll start to panic and I’ll say, ‘I’m never going to do another King-Cat,’ and then at some point…all this work that didn’t really make a lot of sense the day previously, it all just kind of comes together and I’ll think, ‘Ah, this is what the next issue’s going to be,’ and I’ll sit down and I’ll write the stories. I’m a person who allows myself some leeway. If a mistake happens in a comic or I sit down and draw and it takes me off on some tangent I didn’t anticipate, I’m open to following that wherever it may go. But I do usually have it pretty well thought out. But at this point I just see the comics in my head before I ever draw them. So when I have that thing kind of put together, I’ll draw intensely for a period of a couple weeks or a month or so. My comics are so simple, it’s a lot of work that goes into them before the drawing point, but when I actually sit down and draw them it actually goes pretty quickly. And then I’ll put it together, sit down with the pages, edit things and try to make an issue kind of cohesive. Nowadays, it’s still a kind of random thing for me, but I do try to kind of have the issue be a cohesive thing, like an album where these are independent songs but if you take them as a whole they’re a unified expression.
— John Porcellino

I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves….I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.”
— Daniel Day-Lewis

IN CASE YOU EVER GET BORED AT YOUR BOOK-SIGNING…

Thursday, August 23, 2007

I once saw [Ralph] Steadman at a book-signing: he was getting bored with just signing his name, so he got his cigarette lighter out, set fire to the title page, quickly batted out the flames with his hand, and then the burned edge of the paper into a profile of a drawing.”

– Eddie Campbell in an Inkstuds podcast

Even though I have no interest whatsoever in getting an MFA in creative writing any time soon, Tom Kealey invited me to be a contributor to his MFA Blog on matters concerning comics and where one might go to study them. (Funny enough, Kealey’s great book, The Creative Writing MFA Handbook, was a big help in convincing me not to go for my MFA!) My first posts were on The Center for Cartoon Studies and marriage advice for writers. I really like Tom’s writing, and the MFA Blog has some helpful stuff for people interested in getting their MFA. (It also has a bit of the crap you’d expect from whiny English graduate students, but I won’t be too negative.) I applaud anybody who helps folks navigate those murky waters of MFA-land!