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? 

Pages 1 and 2

When I was a kid my biggest problem with drawing was clogged Rapidographs. I dreamed of the day when I'd master those exquisite but leaky pens. Alas, I never dreamed someday I'd be drawing on a tablet and painting digitally. My quandary these days is finding a tool that'll let me insert gradient fills for backgrounds. Add to this the learning curve of file management, .jpg vs. .xcf files, scanning dpis, canvas sizes, and color management. For reasons unknown the scanned word balloons in these drawings came out extremely fuzzy. Oh to be 20 again and have the time to leisurely explore and experiment. I'm still hoping to one day become proficient enough with these new techy tools that I can whip out several pages per day. For now, I'm slow, slow, slow. 

2 pages down, 448 to go. (Notice: I redid the bottom half of page one....).

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! 

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.

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.