If I were a professional I think I’d be more embarrassed about not seeing this already, but I am an amateur and the experiment has done me more than a little good. I’m at a crossroads currently but have been writing more of the history of Joe’s world and also his next adventure, which was the thing I got stuck on before this boondoggle of a short story. Which, looking at that way, has done it’s job to unblock whatever I was struggling with back then.

I can’t say what exactly that will look like here, but it will probably be more concept art and development sketches like these which I’ll post on Instagram as well. Thanks again for your interest in my work, no matter how many twists and turns it takes. See you next week.

I’m probably an artist because I’m rebellious. I drew in church and school classes most likely out of a natural reaction to do something different than what everyone else was doing around me, and I was more often than not rewarded by those others for creating art, however mediocre. A real win-win.

But now it’s my own authority to escape, and I do quite frequently. There’s no resolve to this, at least not yet, sorry, but I did encounter a frightening picture that’s helped me consider it more in H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds. It’s near the end of the book and our narrator has encountered a clever survivor from the Maritan invasion who seems to have entirely sensible notions of the future, how to survive and eventually overthrow the alien colonists. Our narrator is quite taken in by these ideas and begins to help the man in his scheme to dig into the London drains and set up a new civilization . Their digging work lasts half a day before the dreamer wants to stop, rest, drink champagne, play cards, etc. As the narrator discovers and describes it, there’s a vast “gulf between his dreams and his powers.” The incongruity between the mans words and his actions is incredible. What he proposes he cannot do, chiefly because he won’t, it would be too much work.

This is frightening because I find myself identifying closer with him than our stalwart narrator. I don’t think I’m alone in this simply because artists must have revelations, visions, and dream of great things. That’s a gift I suppose I do grant those of artistic persuasion, it’s something given to us. But the soil upon which those seeds are sown can be drastically different: rocky, weedy, hard, or good. This is how we participate with the heavens and the guiding lights, in the soil of our hearts, in the fabric of our being, but also with our hands, in the soil of the world, in the paper, and the pencils, our shopping browser tabs, photoshop. Our time.

I used mine this week to redo and complete(above) last weeks spread(below). I think it was worthwhile, it felt like work, and the arrival of its completion a kind of fruitfulness, a stay on Calypso’s island perhaps. But though the flame does flicker I remember again fair Penelope and the babe in arms on faraway Ithaca.

Poseidon works against what we work toward and many islands lie still between us and home. Pray for me and I’ll for you the powers of remembrance and the strength to continue the voyage, we sail not idly.

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed how little I talk about the content of my pages, the actual story being written in them. In the fear this could be taken as a kind of disinterest on my part I want to make good my intention of letting the reader read the complete story without my voice shaping the narrative one way or another for them. And while I suppose one could look at what I’m doing and call it “art forward” I assure you the story and the characters are by far what excite me most about it. Creating pictures is so tasking for me that I won’t do it if I don’t believe in the heart of the story. I’m not a artist who passes my time drawing, I’d rather be reading.

This spread continues the story I left off here and feels very much like a stylistic break-through to me. The main contributor, I think, being that I’m finally figuring out how to protect negative space in the composition. Looking back over previous pages may convince you of this. While there’s some fine work there, “crowded, or cramped” wouldn’t be an unfair assessment. While this new pages is busy it does feel better planned. Most likely because I spent more time sketching the lighting/shading of the thing.

Of the previous pages this one(below) felt the most haphazard, understandably as it was the first of this new style. I was feeling my way through it and hadn’t been all that serious about planning and thinking about the grid underneath.

If this is the breakthrough that will characterize my method for each spread, and the book as a whole, I’d like to give it a mantra: Work Now, Play Later. The real labor for me, and maybe most artists, is the composition, the structure, the plan on which to build. It’s 100% thought work, meaning no podcasts, audiobooks, or movies in the background, even most music will take my attention away from what I’m supposed to be doing. Just a slim diet of classical music or crickets in the beds outside my window. It’s work, but if I can do it right the play that comes after will be of a higher quality.

The play is the finish, the detail, the noodling, the podcasts, the audio books and the loud music that can push me into a new zone like a runners high. There’s still periods of doubt, but because I’m spending more time designing the foundation it’s mostly a question of “what to add?” instead of the sinking feeling of “is this working?” I don’t know that I’m entirely done with this spread but like it much more than the first attempt. Show casing the entire figures of the lead actors, getting some of the supporting cast in the mid ground and an albeit vague celestial background have really transformed it. I hope for the better, but you can leave your disapproval in the comments if you’d like.

And thanks Cal for connecting what I’m doing to something Scott McCloud pointed out in his legendary 1994 book Understanding Comics. France’s Bayeux Tapestry is a clear example of sequential storytelling delineated by subject matter, not panel borders. I’ve been subconsciously trying to present this story with a feeling of age, much like the story tapestry featured in the opening of Miyazaki’s Nausicaä. So, a technique found in the 11th century feels good to me.

Till next week! Thanks for your attention and have a great week!

So that’s where I started, the content I chose for all three of my tracks(six students in each) was a chapter from Tolkien’s little known children’s book Roverandom.

They read an entire chapter on the first day and began thinking about what to illustrate. After finding a striking moment that they wanted to illustrate we workshopped some character and environment design ideas. I shared with them a Pinterest board that I had made for the project, a collection of images I considered to be “raw material” instead of the “processed” images you would find by simply googling “Roverandom.” In the case of the sub-board in that collection called Wizard, I collected no images of wizards, but rather men with interesting faces and hair. Raw material, you get the picture? The artist is harvester, thresher, miller, and baker. The value that will set his shop apart from the one next to him is the quality of the basic raw materials and their particular synthesis within himself. I suspect that many artists frustrated with their work have avoided this step and think they can produce work of interest merely by reworking an overly processed idea that’s currently popular. Artists with a sense of individuality have to grow up from the roots, there are short cuts to technique but not to a wholistic quality I would call true art, or art with a particular presence.

The kids did great, working steadily from the textual material to the concept, to the design, composition, and final rendering of the image. Each class period was two hours and while there were definitely students more “into it” than others I was pleasantly surprised that, with the exception of one, they all stayed on target and quietly worked toward the goal. This felt like an incredible ballast to the whole AI discussion: kids who draw like drawing. It is their pastime, a word which actually means pass-time, an enjoyable hobby they pass the time with. AI can’t provide this because it’s major function is reducing the time it takes in order to create something. A true artist’s work is his leisure as well.

Will pole vaulters stop pole vaulting if robot pole vaulters are invented? No, at least not the true pole vaulter. Will there be shrunken souls disappointed by robot pole vaulting because they thought their track to immortality and glory was pole vaulting and now they don’t want to do the hard work because robots can do it better now? I suspect, yes.

The pressure of competition is the litmus test to who is and who is not an artist, or a pole vaulter, or anything else. If you are petrified by the opposition, however strong it is, just leave, go home, hang up your cleats, put away your pencil, it’s over. But do not keep whining about what they’re doing. Consider instead, with great intensity, what you are doing and why you’re doing it. True love is costly and it’s largest demand is time, if you can’t give it, you don’t love it.

This was the image I made from Roverandom. A more symbolic/iconic depiction of the characters and place than literal. I rarely do that much pencil work but thought it needed a more traditional approach. Primarily inspired by Maurice Sendak.

I did something different for our final class after the students artwork was printed and hung for their show. I gave us all a timed challenge to design different mythical creatures. I turned the music up and we drew owl bears a fun change of pace, challenging but fun. Also, I did give them a Photoshop crash course Chris!

The juxtaposition of two very different “worlds” in this image is striking. The staid, routine, inward lifestyle of an older couple at the warm table is so drastically different than the cool, moonlit, and wild room of the young girl. Everything in the image is there because of the artists choice and speaks clearly. For example, the blue room is wild because, yes, the moonlight and the cat looking at us, but also the deer wall hanging behind her, the squiggly lines of the wallpaper, the polka dot pattern of her blanket and the extreme triangular fringe of her bed. (Thanks for find all the artists for these images Anderson Carman!

This one showcases how the size relationship of the people and location can be adjusted in a composition to say something about the world in which the characters live. It looms around them and isn’t altogether friendly as the lighting spotlights them against the darkness and vagueness of dusk.

This one is comic, or sequential perfection, the arrangement of elements clearly telling you what happened not very long ago. Also, I know this is a Japanese artist and so the progression from the top right down to the bottom left is intentional because they read their books from right to left. A westerner would flip it, starting at the top left and moving toward the bottom right. It doesn’t really matter that there aren’t words, we read pictures the same and the flow is important. I’ve heard that even movies work this way, if you want to show progression, which is the usual thing you show in a movie, you have everything moving toward the right of the screen, a sense of regression can be achieved by going left as well.

This one is a knockout for several reasons, but the one I accentuated to my class was how the artists guides our eyes into a strong and resonant feeling. We look first at the woman in red, because well, red! But as we consider her we notice her gaze, not up at the stars or the skyline but, we can only assume, at the two sub-images inside the picture, the two windows showing two clear pictures of intimacy and love. The birthday party at the top is lively and fun and the couple on the couch at the extreme bottom of the image is warm and secure. My heart kinda breaks for our woman in red who either has no one, or no one she really wants to be with right now.

I’m going to keep this one short and sweet because I think the value of actually looking and considering the details of the images we consume is seldom encouraged. I think our eyes work faster than our brains and we immediately like and collect images into folders without actually knowing why we like them. Sure, they’re pretty, or cool, or impressive, but the reflection and consideration of their structure, content, and arrangement is not just worthwhile in a pragmatic way, but for sheer pleasure. It is pleasurable to gaze at a good image for a long time. And I’d actually argue this is the test of whether an image is actually good or not, if it can continue to give you pleasure upon extended, and repeated viewing.

I’ll share more about my class and our collective project next week. I hope this puts some pep in your step for the coming work week, find some great images and start enjoying them more. Also, I’m slowing working through continued responses and critiques for those of you who responded to this post seven weeks ago. I am molasses, but at least I’m oozing in the right direction.

I pursued these two pages, above, with a lot of energy and time and now that I look back on what I originally had, below, I’m not all that sure it was worth it…

If you take a gander at the expense (image below. These aren’t even all of the layers I did redraw) you may feel me.

But still, the experiment is on and I’m in the middle. The nine panel grid is fine, even elegant when done right, but it’s something I’ve seen before, it’s something I’ve done before and I like pushing myself.

So, a nine panel page without the panels. A lyrical collision of icons leading into each other with energy and clarity. Not something I seen often, if ever in a comic, and it’s definitely something I’ve never done before. This kind of thing reminds me of my second post on Substack, it was about impact. New, or challenging things done well have the ability to impress upon the mind of the viewer in substantial ways.

Another good friend and fantastic cartoonist, Malachi Ward, and I were talking a few years ago about the long lasting effects, the impact, of certain stories and images upon our psyche from media that only took a few hours to consume. How does a book or film that only took a few hours to consume lived inside us for years and routinely come up in extremely concrete ways that affect a change inside and outside of my person? Certain Gandalf quotes for example, or even Gandalf himself, are a manifestation of something eternal penned down by a funny Oxford don who tried real hard to make something in his free time. It was time well spent and this is the tradition and the labor of quality, and perhaps, the reward.

I’ll be teaching a summer illustration class these next two weeks at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. I doubt I’ll have too much to share other than complaints until it’s over so we’ll take a scheduled pause and pick back up on Monday, July 6th. (Changing from Fridays to Mondays cause invariably I write this late Thursday night, sleep terrible, and never get to run with my guys in the early morning on Friday, our long, 8-miler run of the week.) Ta-ta till then!

I spent most of my time budget working out the details of the lefthand page and am not crazy about the right. The elements are there, but the gestalt is not gestalting. As usual, I wish I had more to share but I know that for however slow I may be there are way more people out there just absolutely stuck and perhaps a slow-as-molasses pace is what they/you need to see. The pace is not important in the pursuit of great work, the work is important in the pursuit of great work. Start today.

See you here next week!

Obviously not done with these two(above) but happy with them so far. I’ve played it straight with the page on the right. A nine panel grid is just too much to monkey around with the layout like the past pages. I don’t know if this breaks what I have going on or not, or if it can just coexist without explanation. I suppose it’s alright to oscillate between the more difficult pieces to read and the very clear. Variety is something subconsciously I look for when I flip through any comic or magazine. Magazine’s thrive on it but comics, more often than not, seem to get stuck in monotony. Which I get it, the things inside the panels change just like the words inside the balloons, but you have to slow down to actually read it to tell. I’m all for a close reading, but I also want to punch people right in the face with something they’ve never seen before, maybe this is a problem? Who am I kidding, of course it’s a problem! But that’s the whole point of the work, to work out the problems and raise the grade of a medium by doing so.

Thanks everyone who submitted their work to me last week! Responses will be incoming if I haven’t emailed you yet. See you next week!

So, here we go with something I haven’t talked about before: writing for other artists. That probably sounds as anti-climactic as it felt when I wrote it, but it has been on my mind for awhile as both a solution for the bottleneck I’m currently in, and part of a bigger dream.

Simply speaking, the particular bottle neck that I’m in has to do with the imbalance of my speed as an artist vs. my speed at developing stories and concepts for books. The rate at which I can develop a story is far faster than I can draw one, like most cartoonists. And like most cartoonists I find myself routinely having new ideas (good ones, I promise!) without the ability to produce them, considering I’m drawing one comic already.

I’d like to publish my own books in the future, (that bigger dream I mentioned earlier) but am realizing that doesn’t mean I have to do everything on my own. Collaboration has always been a feature of comics and while the cartoonist(an author who can do both) may consider his work superior to the run-of-the-mill company comic it doesn’t preclude some great ones from getting made, Batman Year One for example. Now, I’m no Frank Millar and your probably no David Mazzucchelli, but the truth is we’ll never be if we don’t begin the journey now.

So, without further ado, if you’re an artist interested in drawing comics please consider submitting your work to me at benjaminschipperillustration@gmail.com. Send me any links showcasing your work along with a page rate(how much money you’d draw one comic page for) While I obviously want to see competent, professional artwork I realize that may actually be hard to judge for yourself considering how long you’ve been making work. I’ll give you my honest feedback whatever you send and trust that if you sent it honesty is what you’re after.

If you’re not an artist yourself but know one please pass this along. Thanks for your time everyone, see you next week!

Spring here in upstate South Carolina is typically wet, enjoying what seems to me a three day pattern of gathering clouds, pouring rain, and clear skies. A whirling oscillation of water coming down and going up, coming down and going up, coming down and… But it hasn’t been a typical spring this season and only a few days of rain with long stretches between distinguish it.

Drought. Apparently a severe one comparable to, I’m told, one in 2002 when I was thirteen, living in North Carolina, most likely reading a Redwall novel and trying to convince my parents that buying an ancient Nintendo 64 from the corner pawn shop was a good idea.

How is it that the same boy, twenty four years later, is experiencing the same kind of weather the next state over, while rocking, singing and talking three little children to bed and noticing how dark our hands have become in the rainless days?

I’m reading Hemingway, Walker Percy, and Mikhail Bulgakov this month but still remember with clear delight Brian Jacques’ Mossflower Wood and the abbey jewel.

Time is a thing experienced and the father of it laughs well at our little counting clocks, trying so tirelessly to convince us of the importance of its metric, of itself and not what we do inside it and along it. Age at all times surrounds us and wisdom cries out in the streets but in God’s image we are powerful enough to ignore it and make straight our paths to hell. So that the death died and undied, and the drought are signs of gentleness to look again at the times and notice with strangeness our own participation in it.

This one isn’t done but thankfully getting there after a stack of tracings going back and forth between the prominence of detail and design, chaos and structure, linear and open storytelling.

Thanks all for your attention and interest. And thank you to the few paid subscribers. I’ve turned payments on but don’t intend to put anything behind a paywall and leave any contributions up to the contributors themselves to continue or decline. Everything here will be free for as long as I have control over it.

I don’t know if this is any more or less complicated than the last, but I like them together and am designing them for the printed experience, flipping from one into the next. My hope is that the reader will be arrested(the “captured attention” kind of arrested) with every page turn and slow into an atypical pace of reading, closer to the act of seeing maybe, looking closer. You could call it a kind of reading, but it’s not the treadmill kind modern entertainers stress as dominant.

Because I’m designing for print I actually do print them out. As mentioned earlier I’m certainly susceptible to liking something I made on a screen that won’t translate well to print, so when I do make something I enjoy more in print than on a screen it feels like a big win.

This is may be taking it too far, but getting the camera close enough to register the texture of the printed page felt like a good idea, or at least fun to see. An example of what life outside of a screen can provide, principally: daylight and texture.

I’m only using a home printer on basic paper but already getting excited about (potentially) my first foray into self publishing.

My wife is looking at a lot of Fairfield Porter these days and recommended I listen to this lecture he presented in the 60’s. I thought it was fascinating and also wanted to share some of his beautiful paintings.

Thanks for your attention! And remember, if you’re someone consciously trying to make something good and lasting expect it to feel difficult and probably uncomfortable most of the time. The feelings we want, like happiness, excitement, relief, peace, and patience are the reward of hard labor, they come out of struggle. There never was a master who didn’t first begin as an apprentice. See you next week!

More than halfway through the week I reached this black and white spread(above) and felt pretty good about it before realizing that not a single line held and ounce of personality. Completely appropriate for a compositional underdrawing, but not for one of my finished pages. So…what I had hoped to have finished became a great place to start again. The images below are what followed.

The main attack plan for this first tracing was to enlarge each element that I could, and delete the ones that I couldn’t. The forest on the right just felt too busy in comparison to the pages that preceded it.

Thankfully the bright idea hit me to bring the smoke spiral out to act as the frame itself, and already I’m bringing some texture and richness of detail to those trees.

And here’s where we are now. Still not completely sure about everything but soooo much more excited about the image itself. I don’t know if I can describe what that turning point feels like if you haven’t felt it before…it’s like when the girl you knew as a friend started looking directly at you and you actually noticed her for the first time in your life, and wow, things could happen…couldn’t they?

My five year old son knows my process of iteration and instead of saying, “You’re drawing that again??” he asks me to draw things for him so that he can join me in my insanity. I drew the train in pencil and he traced it three times, the first time with a marker that smeared, so I didn’t include it.

These are the books you’re looking for. Bradbury changed my reading life entirely when I met him in sixth grade and I’ve only just now picked up Hemingway. If you’re tired of lame stuff check these two out.

Thanks for reading and sharing! See you next week!

So how did we get from here(below) to here(above)?

I couldn’t quite say, but here are the sketches to prove it happened. They’ll jog my memory I hope.

Here I’m filling up those blank, negative space areas with smoke and an inner circle of alternating values. This is a contained moment between two characters and an animated object passing from one to another.

I’m trying to walk the line between order and chaos here. I think because this is a silent comic I’m okay with pushing the elements beyond their specific panels, adding complications that the reader will have to solve, or untangle. This is something we all do unconsciously with text any way: decipher, decode, work out all the little series of marks that make up words, that make up sentences, that reveal meaning.

It’s a kind of puzzle style of image making with comparisons going back to Sergio Toppi and contemporary artists like Artyom Trakhanov. Of all the stylistic wandering I’ve been doing since Joe Death and the Graven Image it does feel like a return to my original process. Shape heavy pencil drawings scanned into Photoshop and “inked” or blacked out there. I couldn’t say that I’m spending any less time in Photoshop doing this, which may sound weird considering how I talked about technological over-reach in my last post. The difference is that I’m trying to mimic traditional ink mark making using Photoshop instead of a kind of airbrushed effect that felt closer to a painting or digital animation. There’s a fair bit of noodling in it (the first image here, above) that I think will reward the close reader. I’m using black, white, and two greys and really trying to push the limitations of such a small set of tools

Thanks for reading! Come back next week to see how this one(above) turns out!

But yikes! What is this?? Not even ten pages into this thing and I’m already drastically editing my approach to it. Now, just for my own sanity I’m going to remind myself that this is an “art department” thing, the story is set, I’ve got my thumbnails and I know where I’m going. So why am I tinkering with the execution, the art and presentation of that story?

Let me try to give an answer for this sea change…Looking back on these last 8 pages I’ve started to notice a kind of “technological overreach.” I’m not talking AI, everything here is hand drawn, but the pages up until this point have been more, or less, collaged together. I’ve been drawing every panel separately and Photoshopping them together and digitally “painting” atmospheric effects like the smoke, stars, etc. I’ve liked the results so far, I think they look pretty great on a screen, but now I’m thinking more about the physical product, the printed book and getting antsy as to how it will feel in the hands of a reader.

Let me try to explain a little better. My tools, Photoshop specifically, have allowed me to create something I did want to create. But looking back on these last 8 pages I’m realizing they allowed me to create something that feels closer to an animated movie than a printed comic. I’m more than a little frustrated that I let this happen but also cognizant that this is normal, especially when you’re actively trying to find and hammer out a new approach to your work.

I could talk more specifically about the style and presentation of this newest spread but, as you may have guessed, I write this the night before posting, it’s late, I’m tired, and trying real hard not to feel like Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There’s always next week, see you then!

This is page 6 of my latest comic. If you’re just seeing this now you can see the previous pages in my post last week, here.

And here’s a rough panel from my next page, hopefully all tidied up and in context for next week!

Widescreen panels are doing it for me and I can’t exactly say why. I did just pick up a copy of Tom Scioli’s Space Opera Xanadax and was presently surprised to find it all done in wides and gigantic splash pages. It was extremely flippable, making the visual reading experience very fun. You’ll have to visualize what I’m about to say because it’s late and I’m not going to draw a graph: the readers eye typically goes in a Z pattern across a comic page because the typical comic has a sequence of panels that you read from left to right and then down, but if it’s a stack of wides you can just read it dow—okay, you know what, it is actually easier to just draw this thing:

Unsurprisingly this is exactly how most of us engage with images these days, scrolling down on a feed. It would be easy to rail against the machine for this but honestly I can experience a significant amount of fritzing(frantically searching for a place for my eye to rest) when I first open a comic that just has too much information packed into it. Offenders can be too many panels, too many lines, too many colors, too many words, and limitations on at least a few of those can do wonders for readability.

In other news, this is Holy Week and Easter is on the horizon. My mom sung hymns to my brother and I throughout our lives. Her Dad sang them to her, and I assume either his father or mother sang them to him. I now sing them to my children with the recent addition of illustrating some of our favorites:

If you’re not inside the Protestant American church you may be unaware of the hand-wringing some of these images could produce. These are for children, but no Christian publisher would be able to print them because they’re dark, scary, weird even! My boys love ‘em and when we sing When I Survey The Wondrous Cross they unconsciously make the sign of the cross by point to Christ’s head, hands, and feet when that line is sung. I’m not Catholic and so this isn’t a tradition I pass on, but rather discovered by the physical participation with text and image. Extraordinary, if I do say so myself.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Most of my time budget this week was bringing pages 2 and 3 up to a polish that I felt matched the first page but also expanded this books vocabulary (going from one page storytelling to a two page splash). I liked what I had last week for 2 and 3 but I had forgotten that it’s not just one big rectangular image, there is a middle and that means a gutter for books. So I shifted some rocks around and spaced things out a bit to bring the elements into those two interior blue rectangles. Since I’m doing this full bleed(no white spaces between or around the panels) this invisible border is very important to maintain.

Timothy Samara’s Making and Breaking the Grid has been a good resource to start thinking more as a graphic designer. I love well laid out books and magazines and want to go the extra mile to start putting that kind of thinking behind the artwork and books that I make. The resources are out there, but how many people will actually spend the time investing in themselves this way? I’m going to “soap box” for a second and speak specifically to the artists out there: If you want to substantially impress people with your work you have to make something impressive. Short cuts will not do that, “flashy” style with no structure underneath will not do that, low hanging ideas and immature rhetoric will not do that. You can catch someone’s eye with trash, but you won’t keep their heart or feed their soul with it.

I’m being blunt because there is an enormous amount of “soft soap” being peddled around, most likely by art supply stores and “creative companies” that would love nothing better than for you to believe everything you make has intrinsic value and that you’re an artist simply because you use their products. Escape those lies by choosing a very limited tool belt of materials and pushing them as far as you possibly can to depict something worthwhile for yourself and other people to consider, ponder, enjoy, love, and share.

This last panel on page five is an important one for the story and I hope you can see how effective eye-lines are to create drama within an image. Also lighting.

I liked the first image that I made for this scene but I wanted to make something that fit better in the square panel. I did these, above and below, but lost some of the foreshortening of Yigghelio’s forehead.

I wanted to bring that back and also figure out how to incorporate softer elements with no line at all into the stylistic mix. It’s not done but I’m really happy with the results so far. Getting that hair to both fall back behind his head and the smoke and also to come forward through it is a particular win for me.

Graphite pencil on tracing paper, finger used to smudge.

Lighting reference photo taken at night in a dark room. I hardly ever do this, but it strikes me that your own personal reference photos of yourself, family, and friends are way more effective and fast than scrolling around an internet image search.

Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in these images and want to piece together the story better you can by my first book HERE. Also, I’ve been accepted to Thought Bubble this year! This is a UK comic show in England and I’m dying to visit the place but haven’t paid for my table yet. Can anyone out there convince me I should make the trip? Any cool people in Harrogate with an extra room at a decent price??

This is what comic artists would call a splash page, or a double page spread. One or two images taking up two whole pages of the book. Absurdly extravagant in most mainstream comics, but less so in graphic novels and children’s picture books(more on that later).

But how did I get here considering my thumbnails (above) don’t include this wanton wastefulness?? The answer is pretty simple, I had so much fun making the last page that I wanted to stay in that particular setting. Simple answer, but it does, or can, cut across the grain of “story as king” because it doesn’t necessarily contribute to the plot of the story. In more concise words, it is not necessary. But a quick reflection on our favorite things should yield an abundance of examples of this kind, things included in narrative without being absolutely necessary. (You can insert Tom Bombadil here as a punching bag.) Cartoonists, filmmakers, and maybe writers too, can call this “decompressed storytelling” and each particular artist must say “yay” or “nay” to it whenever they see a vision, a scene, in their mind’s eye. I’ve known myself as an over-analyzer and while I can’t say that thinking is bad, it can be far more indulgent than I ever thought possible, oddly enough resulting in the belittlement of an idea to the point of its destruction before even being created. So, if it’s fun I’ll do it!

I’ve noticed Ray Bradbury quotes and interviews popping off in many online creative circles recently and it’s made me want to revisit him in this excellent two part biography by Jonathan R. Eller. Bradbury is foundational to my reading and writing life. I encountered his “Dark They Were and Golden Eyed,” inside my sixth grade literature book and he was probably the first author outside of Lewis, Tolkien, Timothy Zahn, and Brian Jacques that I later recognized in a library and went on to reading his Fahrenheit 451(a mind-blower for a twelve year old). Reasons abound for his importance of bridging pulp fantasy and science fiction with “higher” literature and it’s been so fun to read about how he came to be him, the circumstances of his life and the many encounters and encouragements of other writers around him. He’s a time capsule that predates the monolithic fantasy/sci-fi epics of Tolkien and George Lucas. An invaluably interesting writer that I believe will endure, encourage, and enlighten the creative person over time. Perhaps you can see his effect on me even in that last paragraph, taking to heart his much lauded and ridiculed, “Don’t Think!” advice.

Before I go I wanted to share some of H. A. Rey’s work on Curious George which I’m sure has been overlooked by many because of its simplicity. This is a larger rant, but I do think many picture book makers are within the title of “cartoonist”. Rey certainly is, especially when you consider that some of his page illustrations are actually split into two different images, no panel boxes, but panels still.

The biggest reason for sharing him here though is his charming way of illustration perspective. The light “groundedness” of his characters by that incredibly effective shadow beneath them. It’s a magic trick, the flatness of everything now coming right off the page with the addition of that subtle shadow!

The image below is masterful. The running man and the black dog at the bottom inform us that there is a ground, their shadows do it. And then we see only two things in the top half that give us the hint of looking up, we see the underside of the traffic light and the canopy of the blue truck. This is the type of thing I want to add to my own work, as perhaps you see in the shadows of the running people of my page 3 above.

See you here next week! I appreciate the follows, comments, and shares so much! If you’re curious about my work and would like a copy of Joe Death my webshop is the best place to get a clean copy.

What you’re seeing is mostly planning, “photoshop painting,” and very little drawing. And although it follows the storyboard(below) closely the real dilemma was how to render the thing. I’ve been at a standstill for a long time loving both three-dimensional atmospheric perspective but also flat, graphic iconography. I’ve wanted my work to incorporate both without feeling out of place. This mostly has to do with how blacks are handled. Take panels two and three for example. Two has very little pencil line rendering and is almost completely flat shapes surrounded by pure black, the forms being suggested by grey “paint.” The blacks in three on the other hand are all from the pencil and help describe the three dimensionality of the rocks with the help of paint behind. I know this probably sounds quite technical, it is, and I apologize for that, but for me it’s a break through. Three weeks ago I mentioned the prospect of placing dark, graphic Mike Mignola panels right next to lighter Moebius ones and I’ve been able to do that to my satisfaction here. But the main win for me here is actually feeling like I’m seeing a comet flying within a three dimensional space, in, around, and through objects. Panel 1) passing overhead and away from me. Panel 2) passing through objects parallel to me. Panel 3) Coming towards me.

If I remember correctly Alex Toth once remarked that things should be drawn smaller than you think for a few reasons. You can’t get lost in the details, and your main priority is composition. He said it differently, but that was my takeaway at least. And it’s something I had to keep reminding myself as I drew bigger over the course of making this page: not to throw away the compositional work done in the thumbnails.

I’ve always wanted to use colored pencils somewhere in my work and never have until now. It was helpful to use three different colors to separate things at a glance.

Here are some quick style tests made along the way. Feeling out how to render with line and paint together. Thanks for reading, sharing, and commenting! See you next week.

And I’m happy to say Jake’s class has functioned in the same way but with someone else telling me what to do next. Keeping me on track through the pipeline of making a graphic novel. I enrolled the last day of the class not necessarily because I was “on the fence,” about taking it but rather I locked on just recently to an idea for an opener to my next Joe Death book. A dream sequence that I’d like to feel, well, dreamy, but also kind of musically inspired, like Disney’s original Fantasia.

These images were made for the class which has a homework platform for show and tell. The community there is a good one, though of course, you’re on your own to fulfill the homework and no one will give you a bad grade if you just blow it off and don’t commit.

I’ve heard lots of podcasts about story mechanics and as that moniker suggests it can leave me quite cold. Plot as mechanism is a bad way for me to enjoy thinking about plot. Character chemistry turns my interest from simmer to boil really fast and I’m enjoying finding that within my own story’s history and cosmology.

I’m also learning how to say “done” to an image that’s not finished in order to press on toward the larger goal. This image below is a good example. I wanted to illustrate a key moment but I also wanted to bring a spacial, three-dimensional, perspective feel to it. I feel like I hit some new territory and typically would want to flesh it out into a finished illustration for myself. But after doing that countless times before I’m starting to remember the sting of unfulfilled aspirations. A graphic novel isn’t just a collection of pictures and if you put too much weight on one image it may actually hurt the whole, the gestalt, of the work.

If you’re in the dark about this story you can purchase my first book, Joe Death and the Graven Image, HERE. Thanks for reading, commenting and sharing! See you next week!