Meet Karenoia

Karenoia. 22 year old nursing major. Receded chin, hair in bun, big black glasses. High anxiety, plagued by worry, fear, and panic. Can't make or take a joke, is at the mercy of circumstances none of which are pleasant, and is in a constant state of hyper-vigilance since the universe is such a hostile place. Dr. Q's pessimistic lectures definitely do not help.

15 Characters

Each of the following characters have names and histories and model sheets. I post them here without those details (and in varying degrees of shading) from a weird obligation I feel to dispel the imaginary assumption I believe readers may have that my recent infrequent blog posts are due to inactivity. In actuality, I've been feverishly chipping away at creating these characters. There are five more yet to create, including the main character, Dr. Q. (I work on this project in between running a private practice counseling business, visiting my ailing wife in her nursing home, and washing the accumulated dishes in my kitchen sink).

Color Me Purple

As I continue to familiarize myself with this new WACOM digital tablet I realize how little I understand light and shadows. To teach myself the ins and outs of painting with pixels I feed my eyes with the art of experts. Here's a clip from a Tom Richmond spread from MAD magazine. Study this and I'm sure you'll be astonished like me at the profound technical proficiency of his skill. Ignoring for the moment the spectacular amount of detail in this cartoon, I'm blown away by the 3D effect his shading's had on this guy's face (and clothes and hands). Copying this is very difficult. 

Tom Richmond once told me his inspiration was Mort Drucker. He didn't paint digitally and look at how well he colors.

Here's today's attempt at coloring with the "airbrush" tool. The number of decisions one makes to color as Tom does above is incredible. What palette color, what brush, what blender, what layer, what highlights does one use? For me it's trial and error. At this point, mostly error. 

Never one to let a challenge like this daunt me, I pulled out my notes from the digital painting class I attended with Jason Seilor last February. I attended that lecture to learn about caricature and paid little detail to the intricacies of digital details. Pity. He did however recommend a book which I just purchased on Amazon. The reviews for James Gurney's work are spectacular. I want to learn from the best. Let's hope it works! 

Tasks Out of Order

From Toon Art by Steven Withrow (p. 22)

After ten months of work on my graphic novel I stumbled onto this. It gave me a chuckle. The order of my tasks is very unlike Withrow's. I barged into the world of graphic novel-dom with eagerness but no map, all sail and no rudder, flailing about as a novice without the aid of a mentor. 

My order is as follows.

WRITING A STORY LINE: Write rough draft script (I originally toyed with writing a play but chose cartooning instead). Edit script, dialog, and the content of random word balloons. 

CHOOSE FORM: Choose format (page sizes and panel distribution). 

LETTERING: Data entry (creating and filling word balloons with text). Editing data entry (recreating word balloons with different font). 

CHARACTER DESIGN: Choosing shadowy characters who will speak the text in those word balloons. Assigning individual characters to each quote. Grouping like minded quotes into a narrative flow and continuity.

COMPOSITION: Printing further edited versions of text. Adding characters while improving characters. Drawing and posting on line rough draft for first readers. Stopping at page 35 and doing further character design. Adding narrators and 15+ more pages of rough draft. Sketching rough draft and coloring digitally.

Still to do: SKETCHING BACKGROUNDS AND COMPOSITION, COLORING, ALTER DIGITALLY, POST/PRINT

Creativity isn't easy to plot!

Two Aliens Before Breakfast

As my speed at digital painting increases I'm applying short cuts, tips and tricks, and training my hands and eyes to work simultaneously. The nearest analogy I can think of is playing the guitar: right hand strums, left hand fingers the fret board. With this WACOM tablet, my right hand manipulates the keys on my lap top key board while the left monkeys with the stylus. Here are two coloring jobs I did before breakfast this AM. I'm still learning how to adjust pixels and resolution sizes and not even attempting shading yet.

First Half Page "Flat" Color

First attempt at full color (half) page. (I plan on combining half pages so the book is taller than it is wide).  The number of decisions required to produce this page was enormous. Trial and error, scouring manuals and chat rooms, watching Youtube videos, and more trial and error and here's what we get.

I've abandoned shading for the time being. Adjusting pixels, brush width, scanning resolutions, gradient fills, remembering colors so skin and clothes don't waver, and a zillion other tasks were technical  challenge enough. Once I'm relatively facile with drawing with a stylus, managing files, and so forth, and then I might return to Art School 101 and study shading, light, highlights, reflected shadows, again. However, I'm not going to live forever and this project already is ten months in the making. Even doing flat colors is arduous and time consuming. I estimate about 450 half pages are to be drawn, scanned, colored, and posted. It just doesn't seem right to me that, should this take ten years, a seventy year old man is still drawing comic books.

Reflections on Coloring

When my efforts yield less than ideal results (as my wonky skills as a colorist attest) I rationalize as follows.

This amateurish coloring job would surely get me fired in any Third World graphic novel mill. But maybe I'd escape the pink slip because I can do character design (albeit also abysmally amateurish). But my character design skills (especially at rotating heads) are weak, weak, weak and surely any animation studio would give me the boot.

"But wait!" I plead with the unhappy boss in my head. "I can also string nouns and verbs together and write sentences." The HR boss wavers momentarily and says, "You're no Jack Kennedy. Get out."

In an act of desperation I quickly add, "You're right, I can't speechify like JFK but I have another trick up my sleeve, I can tell jokes."

"Try me," he says.

"Um, one of the characters represents aggression and domination and I describe him as a veteran of wars in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Cost Co parking lot."

He stares at me blankly and says, "What's a Cost Co?"

"It's a perennially crowded big box store in our town about which everyone complains."

"Dumb. Get out."

"Wait! I know I can't color, design, write, or tell jokes like the pros but I can add value to your comic factory because I can do story boarding. I can pencil out the settings, props, costume, facial expressions, staging, and camera angles in sequential art."

"I've seen your work. Too many talking heads. Beat it!"

"Please sir, I know I'm new at this but I'm begging for another chance. I can bring a philosophical and theological savvy to your project. I grapple with life's injustice and the problem of evil often and I believe grasp of Qohelet's angst better than most."

I see him waver momentarily. "Can you type?"

"Like a pro, sir."

"Okay, get back to work. And when the studio department heads complain about your shoddy work tell 'em you're here to make coffee."

"Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you."

"Get off the floor and quit kissing my feet. I've got work to do."

The boss leaves and with spirits high I shout Sally Field's Academy Award speech to him, "You like me, you really like me!"

Three Characters in Color

Qohelet wrote, "What is crooked cannot be made straight." I believe it. 

Vicki and I once read and applied assiduously the principles of de-clutter king, Don Aslett. In his humorous and helpful book CLUTTER's LAST STAND he wrote something to the effect, "Writers are notorious for saving their rough drafts as if they'd someday need proof that they actually wrote their book." Sadly, I'm crooked that way and despite Aslett's best efforts, I still save my rough drafts. He couldn't straighten me out.  

Take these for example. They're the halting, amateurish, scribblings of a novice colorist and do not deserve to be saved much less posted for the world to see. And yet, in this memoir blog of the evolution of my first graphic novel I feel compelled to document every stage in the process. Forgive me, Don. (This female pose is a swipe from Tom Richmond).

Speedy Caricature (2006)

Just for fun I include this video clip my son Elliot made when he was 14 (six years ago).

Second First Color Job

Every journey begins with a first step. Here are my first steps applying color. I begin with faces traced (from a model book) with black fine tip pen, scanned at 600 dpi, and uploaded to COREL Essentials. 

 I use the paint bucket to apply solid colors on the guy's face and shirt. So far, so good.

Then I leap into the unknown and fling paint everywhere applying shadows. You should see my living room; there are spattered pixels all over my rug, walls, and shirt. (My first digital joke). These shadows are haphazard, helter-skelter, and savage. But I gotta start somewhere.

My quandary: do I postpone drawing pen/ink finished pages until I gain competence as a colorist? This means coloring all 22 characters before drawing any pages. That will require weeks of coloring before drawing any pages.

Or do I start drawing finished pages (I've got 50 pages scripted, blocked, and ready for images) and  learn to color as I go? The problem with that plan is that as my technique improves the finished book will be of uneven quality. The earlier pages will be amateurish while later pages become less amateurish.

I think I'll keep improving my coloring technique. Certainly I can exceed the level of skill on display above. This'll put my schedule off once again...but since I'm really under no deadline I can putter at a leisurely pace.

I do have this fear somebody, somewhere on the planet is working on a comic book based on Ecclesiastes and every day I delay publishing they get closer to beating me to the punch. This was Art Speigelman's challenge when Steven Spielberg was coming out with An American Tale. Art was halfway through MAUS when he got wind of Spielberg's plan to use immigrant mice with nasty cats in 1890's NY city. So he published half of his work (Jewish mice; Nazi cats) before completion. Hey Spielberg, you got any plans to do a film about Ecclesiastes? Please don't. 

First Color Job

Arturo Alfredo Giovanni, 21 year old exchange student from Tuscany who is studying culinary arts. His
heroes include Bobby Flay, Gordon Ramsey, Rachel Ray, Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck,and Epicurus. 

The things about the project that give me an overload of delirium and joy: 

1.Tapping into the part of my brain that controls eye/hand coordination. Moving your hand on a tablet while the drawing appears on a screen is a weird disconnect. 

2. Learning about layers, blending, eye droppers, and a zillion other tools is an unending swim in bliss. 

3. Marveling at the creative genius of the persons who invented digital art--every move I make causes me to gasp in disbelief. 

4.  The stylus that I draw with has no batteries, no wires, and get this--when you turn it upside down you can erase with it. This must be what it's like when aborigines see aircraft for the first time.

5.  The range of possibilities is infinite which again causes me great joy because I get to be a decision maker. Do I color this thing in plain colors like Tin Tin?

Or do I mush and blend like master craftsmen who paint with pixels? Look at this digital painting and gasp with me.

The amount of work that went into the shading of fabric and facial shadows certainly paid off. This is brilliant. My optimistic brain tells me, "If this person learned how to do this I can, too." But then another part of my brain says, "Dude, you're 60 years old and you don't have time to invest learning how to do this."


Then there's MAD artist, Tom Richmond. Look at this exquisite spread.

I feel like the desert crawler who stumbled upon a drive through coffee stand offering free Italian sodas in favorite flavors. Choices, choices, choices! 

Digital Drawings, Here I Come

Last Sunday I finished drawing my 22nd model sheet. Twenty-two main characters now have names, shapes, philosophical orientations, and turning heads. Having failed at coloring with colored pencils and felt tip markers (they just didn't transfer to blog postings well) I took the plunge and bought this:

It's a WACOM Bamboo tablet with which one can do this:

I'm intentionally not spiffing up this terrible image because I'm too excited. To add colors with a click is breath taking. I plan on printing my Publisher page panels, penciling and inking them the old fashioned way, then scanning them into this program for coloring, shadows, and highlights. I'm giddy as a school girl.