Page 5a

This half page took about 3.5 hours with breaks to schedule clients, wash clothes, and cook. I'm still having technical difficulties which are aggravating to the max. For some reason I'm obsessed with speed; if I were to slow down and enjoy the process my output might improve. Why speed? I'm staring at 500+ half pages (many alien pages are not even written or sketched yet) of rough drafts that need to be printed as empty text/panel pages, inked by hand with pencils, light table, and fine tip fountain pen (fun but labor intensive as I'm still fleshing out each character [costume, physiognomy, age, skin color, size], scanned, colored (fun and highly labor intensive as I continue to flail around in the deep end of this digital pool), shaded (not fun as I haven't a clue at what I'm doing both technologically or light/shade and value-wise), merged, and posted. If I increase my speed to 3 hours per half page (an ambitious estimate at this point) that's 1500 hours. If I work 25 hours a week that's 60 weeks. Even though I've been hacking away at this graphic novel for 15 months (with a 3 month hiatus), can I sustain interest for another year+? Speigelman took 11 years to draw MAUS but he was young when he started. I'm racing against my biological clock which, once the alarm goes off, I'll be infirm, decrepit, and unable to conceive--IE., manipulate pens, mouse, touch pads, scanners, etc. Also, there's a weird symbiotic relationship between my wife's deteriorating health and my obsession with mental challenges. Distracting myself with 101 tasks of creating a graphic novel is therapeutic, or so I like to believe.

Page 3

Dr. Q has entered the building. Still no gradient fills in the background; this quest is maddening. These first postings are still tentative. I anticipate at some point reaching the tipping point where I'm no longer experimenting with software, tweaking techniques, and fumbling with tools. This page took two days (6-7 hours total) but will (he said optimistically) be shortened as I increase in skill. I can't want until I can do one page per hour. I often chuckle when agonizing over minute details that readers of this graphic novel will spend about 3 to 5 seconds per page. I suppose this is the essence of art. Weeks, months, and years of producing translate into mere moments of consuming. What eggs me on is the hope that there will be many readers spending those moments in consuming. One artist spends 360 seconds creating a page in hopes that 360 readers will spend at least one second reading a page. Do other artists make these calculations? 

Gradient example

Look at that glorious purple background. Darkish on top, lightish on bottom. How can I do this without spending $500- $600 for new software? My Corel Painter Essentials 4 does not permit such colorization. Here's the extent of what it can do. Don't look directly at it; you may go blind.

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! 

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.

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).

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.

Project Management

Working my way out of the quagmire I got myself into requires outlining my project's next tasks step by step. Here's my outline (subject to adaptation if necessary). Before posting any new pages on my other blog (click here) I need to complete the following tasks.

1.  Continue to write/insert new narrator rough draft pages in the first 35 pages (which comprises  Ecclesiastes 1 & 2). Those pages comprise what I've been calling Draft 5 (but viewers of that other blog know only as the first draft). I've yet to find the narrators' voice, father and son alien observers of Ecclesiastes University. They riff on the students' riffs on Dr. Q's lecture. It adds a layer of complexity AND clarity. Somebody's got to make sense of what those students are jabbering about. Once I've caught up to page 35 it's time to....

2.  Create model sheets for the 20 or so key characters. For your information, here's what a model sheet looks like for one famous cartoon character.



I need to nail down what each character looks like in various poses. Those model sheets will "force" me to be consistent as I draw the final draft, "force" me to clarify the appearance, facial expressions, and stature of each student (and Dr. Q and the aliens), and "force" me to slow down. I'm eager to tackle inking/coloring but I MUST hone the penciled roughs first. Once those characters are fleshed out then....

3. Print hard copies of the polished, edited, and "finished" (will I ever "finish?" I'm constantly tweaking) pages (which will probably end up growing from 35- 45 pages) of dialog in Publisher on card stock.

4. On that card stock I'll sketch with pencil the characters, setting, interior of the classroom and space ship, folds in clothing, props, costume, and visual details. Here's an exquisite pencil "rough" from MAD artist Tom Richmond. Here's a link to his fabulous web/blog.



5. Ink the penciled rough in black. Here's the above drawing "inked."



Using Tom Richmond as my inspiration is a fool's errand; he's the industry standard for cool, creative, and technically savvy. I am but a lowly left-handed Norwegian therapist/skeptic/theist prone to melancholy. Nevertheless, my motto is: "shoot for the moon; you may hit the fence."

6. Once "inked" I'll re-scan the pages into a digital format on a yet to be purchased gadget (Adobe Illustrator? Corel Draw? Bamboo Tablet?) and color it. Here's Tom's finished cover.




Having never created digital art before there's going to be a massive learning curve (do these technical learning curves ever stop?). But my goal is to draw the old fashioned way and then color and shade on a tablet. The class I took last February with Jason Seilor was digital and mind blowing. (I was born 40 years too early to "get" digital life but if Ecclesiastes 3 is correct it was meant to be). Those posted pages will be a new and improved First Draft but behind the scenes I'll call that Draft Six.

7. Once pages 1-45 (Ecclesiastes 1 & 2) are complete I'll slowly post them for First Readers to scrutinize, evaluate, and critique.

8. Unless audience feedback is entirely negative I'll then revert to adding new "rough sketches" for the remainder of the book for First Reader feedback. I can produce rough drafts faster than inked/colored drafts and want the entire book to be semi public before I ink/color the finished work.

As mentioned before, the reason I'm inking/coloring pages 1-45 before re-posting them is to introduce First Readers to the alien narrators with as much visual verve as possible. I'll unveil them with fear and trembling; if they "work" I'll receive a major deposit in my enthusiasm bank. If feedback is negative it'll be a huge withdrawal and completion will be laborious.

From this vantage point I'm determined to complete this work sometime in 2013. If the feedback is lackluster I'll grit my teeth and still produce a work of art that others ignore. I'm determined to finish this graphic novel regardless of audience appreciation. Some of my biggest heroes are those who forged ahead when popular opinion was against them--Galileo, Kafka, Dickenson, Van Gogh, Col. Sanders, and Henry Dargar. My book will hardly revolutionize cosmology, existentialism, poetry, painting, chicken, or illustrated novels, but again, shoot for the moon....

Random Observations about Cartooning

With as much effort as I'm putting into this graphic novel the thought has occurred to me more than once, "Buy a computer soft ware art program for the finished product." It's not the $600 price tag that deters me, it's the learning curve. Drawing on a tablet just doesn't seem right to this old time ink-slinger. Yet, the colored pencils and colored markers I've been using look terrible. Granted, I'm knocking out talking heads at this point rather hastily simply to give the dialog a mouth from which to emanate. But the Platonic graphic novel in my head looks much better than the way Draft 5 looks on the screen or on hard copy.

I just finished page 33 (66 half pages). The changing background color is working for me....but I've yet to crack the following problems:

1. How do I help readers keep the many characters clear? At least I haven't given them Russian names. I actually haven't given them any names in the text yet. Do I add a "Cast of Characters" page? If so, up front or in an appendix? Or sprinkled throughout the text when they each make their first appearance?
2. Do I need a background? All those photos of the university class room may be pointless since the talking heads take up almost the whole panel. 
3. What will sustain readers' interest? It seems at this point only a very dedicated student of Ecclesiastes would stay focused. Everyone else's eyes will glaze over given the monotonous repetition of panels, layout, and talking heads.
4. Do I cite references, days, name of lecture? I do on the blog where I'm posting the rough draft (click HERE). But readers of the final product will not have access to additional factoids.
5. Is there a way I can leverage 2000 talking heads to my advantage? Rather than trying to break up the monotony with a sly inclusion of field trips, long shots, Power Point and lap top screen images (pretending that 2000 talking heads in a comic book is normal), maybe I can claim the talking heads as my raison d'etre. I'm not interested in changing the name Ecclesiastes University, but maybe I can add a tag line letting readers know I'm including 2000 talking heads on purpose, with artfulness, and with existential intention. Now to come up with such a tag line: 49 University Students Recoil from a Socratic Cattle Prod, Ancient Existentialism Unleashed on One Hundred Fertile Cerebrums, or, Be Glad I Didn't Draw Each Synapse. I'll keep working on it.

The pace of production is slow, slow, slow. But it's a zen-like, pleasant slow. I doodle alone in this big house sans five kids and loving wife. I'm somewhat astonished that I can sit in silence (apart from the melodic noise of our neighbors chickens and horses) for five hours scribbling, inking, scanning, and uploading. If I were under an editor's deadline I'd be in big trouble. But as it is I'm progressing at a pace that fits my work load, energy load, and interest load.

Which raises this important question: is there rhyme or reason to the ebb and flow of one's focus? For the first time since last December, earlier this week I spent two days not working on Ecclesiastes University. I wasn't depressed (I don't think), bored, or passionless about this project. I watched TV, Netflix, read good books, cleaned the house, washed clothes, went to work. But I couldn't muster the oomph to put lines on paper. If I knew what factors deterred me from productive labor I'd know what to avoid. 

That facial expression book I bought a while back is helpful. As are the reference photos I've been taking of hands, body language, etc. I don't draw from nothing; I use reference materials. 

I perused a collection of a reprinted newspaper comic strip called Foxtrot. It's consistently funny in 4 black and white panels. It's hard for me to be objective about my humor since my humor-o-meter is distracted with the other meters against which I am constantly measuring myself: philosophy, character development, drawing facial expressions, and many more. My First Readers are giving consistent feedback that my book is not funny and I believe them. It's in my mind to rework the dialog once I complete Draft Five: inserting jokes into a narrative flow will be easier than adjusting the narrative flow around the jokes. Or so I tell myself.

Detail, page 29

I cut and pasted friend Mark's old caricature here which is illustrative of the style of drawing I anticipate using in the final draft. It also demonstrates why I'm so unhappy with the rough cartoons I'm using in Draft Five. I'm working with drawings that are only weak approximations of what I envision the finished product to look like. But even with shaded caricatures like this I'm not sure good drawings are enough to sustain readers' attention. I'm zealous to write dialog that is sterling in its own right, the addition of well crafted drawings only adding value. 

No wonder my lawn gets mowed so infrequently...I'm obsessed with this project.

Draft Five, Pages 11-14

These four pages include text from Ecclesiastes 1:12-18 which is the end of chapter one. There are twelve chapters in Eccl but this does not mean each chapter will have 14 pages. I break down the text into even smaller chunks which translates into approximately 214 pages total. 

I experimented with adding background color (to indicate change in day, change in lecture, change in seating arrangement and clothing). 

There must be a better way to scan than what I'm doing. The originals look crisp, sharp, and less blotchy. Must continue to tweak the tech end of comic production.