comic tools

2012-01-29T21:27:00.008-05:00

This week: I can tell your characters aren't where you say they are.

I've been commuting a lot for work, through all sorts of weather, in the morning with the sun in my eyes, and at night in the dark. Driving through so much poor weather I've become very aware of visibility, and it's led me to think a lot about how when we draw, we often clarify s0 much that we don't depict visual distortions like the way headlights will sprout hundreds of tiny whiskers of light in some conditions, of how abstract and unresolved night driving in foggy conditions really is. I've been doing sketches for a webcomic about these sorts of things in my spare time before work. Thinking about this led me to thinking about a pet peeve of mine in comics and movies, which is the tendency of people to depict characters in an environment, but forgetting to show signs of them interacting with that environment.

Two scenes have always epitomized this for me, the two worst offenders I've ever seen.

First, watch this scene, which is infuriatingly also my favorite scene, from Peter Jackson's King Kong:

Notice anything missing? You can't see their breath. Jackson's team went to great lengths to depict the snow, to depict the slipperyness of the ice, to depict the effects of wind and movement on fur- but they forgot, somehow, that when it's cold out, you can see breath. Especially, one would think, the breath of a giant, warm, humid thing like Kong. Actually, no one aknowledges the temperature outside at any point in this scene or after. Later on, she's seen comfortably gripping the burningly coldsteel rungs of the sides of the Empire State building, and not shivering despite being outside at a high elevation in a very windy place in the middle of winter. Because of these omissions, I can tell the actress never left a green soundstage. The illusion is ruined for me. Instead of Kong's hand, I can only picture her embraced by foam coated in a green sheet.

Let's look at another example.

Actually, first, I want you to do something. I want you to put all your winter clothes on at once. Everything you have. Then I want you to exert yourself heavily for a few minutes. Lift some stuff, move some furniture, dance around, whatever.

If you can't exert yourself for medical reasons, then watch an episode of the Food network show Chopped. Look at the contestants after only five minutes of competition. Now watch this clip.

Notice anything missing? Not a goddamned drop of sweat. If you cook for five minutes in a hot kitchen you have to dab a constant dripping waterfall down your face. These guys fight so long it makes the fight from They Live seem brief, climbing and running and leaping, all the while surrounded by temperatures that must easily be skin-scalding. Ever been near real lava? I have. It's uncomfortable to bare skin from ten feet away. These guys are, on a few occasions, a couple feet from a river of it. The soles of their shoes should be melting. Their hair should be plastered to their heads, and they should barely be able to see through the stinging salty sweat pouring into their eyes. Again, you can tell they never left a green sound stage.

The worst part is, all those things that would have grounded the scene would also have increased the drama. In the case of the Kong scene, curls of breath would have enhanced the beauty of the scene, as well as completing the illusion. The problem is that when you're imagining a location instead of being in it, it's easy to forget these things, even for brilliant people.

Cartoonists can have the same problem. We imagine all our scenes, and I daresay we haven't been most of the places we end up drawing. Putting yourself into a scene so much you can feel it, and smell it, and feel your body reacting to it, is therefore of great importance.

Watch this scene from Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark:

Notice the lengths they went to to depict the cold of the Nepalese winter? The the snow steaming as it melts on their hats, his shaking voice, their bundled, pained body language, the contrast with the smoky, firelit interior? How shitty would this scene have been if Lucas did it now? We'd have had a gee-whiz exterior shot of the Himalayas, and they'd have walked in the door looking as comfortable as men in an air-conditioned California studio. Watch Fargo sometime to see what a cast looks like when they're really, for reals, balls-reascendingly cold. The weather is as much a character as any of the actors.

In other news, people who draw crazy costumes should bookmark this terrific tumblr of old clothing, Old Rags, which is searchable for people doing period clothing research. The author of the tumblr also takes written requests and questions. Even if you don't draw costumes much the site is a frequently updated visual feast.

I was fascinated that this image by Jillian Tamaki was drawn completely digitally:
Chris Schweizer is selling paper dolls of his Sherlock Holmes drawings, and he included a bonus one of Sherlock and John from the BBC series! EEEEE! Go buy it!

2012-01-18T20:59:00.003-05:00

This week: HOLY CRAP HAVE YOU SEEN THIS ZYGOTE BODY THING?!

I recently updated my operating system, because the only things it was working with were my out of date software. My browser didn't work anymore, nor my email, nor parts of many websites. But it's not exaggerating to say one thing that pushed me to spend the money was my desire to test out Zygote Body, formerly Google Body Browser. It's a fully rotatable, searchable, zoomable, fadeable, and layered human body that you can search much like Google maps. Programs like this used to cost $6,000 , and they weren't usually this good. This costs nothing and it's fucking amazing. Even the fact that my old copy of Photoshop doesn't work anymore doesn't bug me because I have access to this amazing resource, and now I can share it with those of you who haven't been using it for months already.

In Zygote Body you can rotate the figure:use a slider to fade through several layers of muscles, or organs, or whatever, depending on the body system to choose:
You can select any muscle and it will identify it with a label, single it out, and from there you can still rotate it to see the muscle from any angle, allowing for an incredible level of understanding of where and how it fits into the rest of the body. No physical model could ever allow you to see the underside of every muscle while also allowing you to see that muscle in the context of the rest of the body, at the same time. It's incredible.

Even some organs are fadeable into different layers. Yes, that's the MOTHERFUCKING VENTRICLES OF A HEART, WHICH YOU CAN ROTATE AND LOOK AT FROM ANY ANGLE. HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

This is knowledge that Leonardo da Vinci spent his life trying to catalogue and STILL didn't get it all right, for FREE. This is a goddamned miracle, it's the sort of reason the internet should exist. There mere existence of something like this is like a gleaming trophy for hundreds of years of work by thousands of scientists all over the world. If they could have swallowed the idea that something like this would ever even exist they'd have cried and/or gone insane with joy, which is basically how I feel. If you don't spend hours just playing with this you have no soul, and if this doesn't become one of your most important resources you're a fool. This is the best tool I've ever reviewed, period.

But that's not all this week!

Illustrator Yuko Shimizu interviewed some other illustrators about illustrating!

Look at these amazing webcomics! They're so good just reading them is an education!

I love the different kinds of drape in the fabrics of the different pants in this drawing by friend of Comic Tools, Joe Lambert. I also love all the different shoes.

See you next week!

2012-01-09T22:45:00.008-05:00

So, after several days of lettering, and as a result of the temporary financial (and therefore mental) security of having a job, I was able to dip into my head just far enough to start doing anatomy studies. I have several anatomy pieces in the works for Comic Tools, and one in particular is a lesson on the pelvis, so I doodled stuff for that. Nothing emotionally involved, so I was able to concentrate and draw.

After awhile of that, I started feeling secure enough to dip down slightly more and start working on the likenesses of characters in the story I'm working on with my friend Emily. I hadn't drawn in some time, so the results were crude, but my hand was loosening up. I still couldn't draw for very long without sinking into my head and being caught in the gravity of the unapproachable ball of sadness, but still, some work is more than no work.

Things went on like that for awhile and then around Christmas I started having an idea for a story set in the world of Emily's stories, so I bought a little notebook and starting taking down every little thought that came. The following two pages describe the premise of the story. While it does address my own breakup and my feelings about it, which in recent months I've been slowly able to approach, it also concerns friends and family members whose lives were altered forever by the effects of losing a lover. It's sort of a theme in my family, not ever fully recovering from these sorts of losses, and one I wanted to explore visually.
Lately I've found that the bakery near my work is a great place to get drawing done, and every time I have a late shift I arrive early and draw a page's worth of anything, and send it to Emily. My hand still keeps trying to make marks like I'm drawing Acorn, but slowly my hand is drawing more and more like it's supposed to for this story.

Comic Tools always follows close behind whatever I'm doing with my comics. I'll hit a problem, overcome it, and then write a tutorial. The anatomy entries were the product of my frustrations with the anatomical teaching materials available to me. And it will be like that with this project. As I go along, the things I teach will likely follow close behind the obstacles I overcome in making it. For now, my obstacle is making it through every day with less pain and more art, so that's what I'm posting about.

2012-01-09T12:13:00.004-05:00

So, long term readers of this blog may recall this post on June 7th, 2010. What you might recall about it is that I didn't post a damned thing again until this post on December 12th, 2010. Then I posted some stuff for a bit and disappeared until this post, following which I've been posting regularly, if less energetically than in what might be referred to as the blog's "heyday."

Well, as you might suspect, it all ties into a time line of events you weren't privy to. To put it succinctly, I lost, in part through my own fault and in part through circumstance, three of the most important things to me in the world, in the space of a year. Failed at them and lost them, to be exact. And in each case I caused harm not only to myself but to the other parties involved. Financial, as well as emotional, in two cases. That first post came right after the first, and the second most painful. I needed a jolt of money to have time to do finish the next step in my work on Acorn, the book I was working on, and had been working on for four and a half years. And right then came a project from Patton Oswalt, who, as you've seen, I'd done some posters for. He wanted me to do a comic for his first book, Werewolves and Lollipops. I saw my chance, asked for as much money for it as I could, and being the always good patron of illustrators that he is, he paid me well for it, in advance. About a week and a half later I started suffering from what would become dual illnesses that had me literally bleeding out of my head and my ass at the same time, and that's not even slightly getting into the gross parts. I drew a fevered, unpublishable version of the comic, then drew another, spending so much energy on it I wrecked my recovery and went into remission, and had to finish it sick. It's in his book now. It was a month late, it's the worst thing I have ever drawn, and a man who is a hero to me, who was always nice to me, who gave me a chance, paid dearly out of his own pocket for that piece of shit.

And the worst part is it wasn't enough. I was so late with the project I had to get a job, and I couldn't continue on the book. I was demoralized, more ashamed than I have ever been, and still pretty physically crappy. That was when I made the first post.

The second post came awhile after I'd been kicked off a project I started off on as an ass kicking deadline hero, having not turned in any work to speak of for...many months. And there was certainly no sign I'd be able to for...years. It didn't hurt as much as the Patton thing, because at least I owed the publisher a shitload of money, and I never turned in bad work to them ever. That's how bad it was, that owing them $17,500 made me feel BETTER. But at least I still had my girlfriend, right? Well, you'll notice the posts stopped again.

And let me tell you, those are only the top three things out of a year that would have sucked without them. Psychopath boss at a job that made me miserable, landlord who didn't heat our apartment for the better part of 2 months, to the extent that it went repeatedly got down to the high thirties in our apartment, room mate drama, friends moving away... And this was all after the bitter failure and financial ruin of my move to Portland, which I still haven't gotten over, emotionally or financially.

It wasn't even just that I had nothing in the tank. Writing something, anything, involves settling down into your own head for a bit, and I absolutely could not be alone with my thoughts and emotions. The breakup was the last straw. I marvel at it- it wasn't even a bad breakup. It was about as good as could be hoped for. And I've been through a lot of tragedies and rough spots in my life. I've lost friends and family to untimely deaths, been attacked by gangs and hired thugs in school, helped drag my father's body off a couch so my mom could do CPR while I flagged down the ambulance and then had kids say to me "Ha ha, your dad died!"...All pretty bad stuff. And like I said, fairly good breakup. But I have never, ever been in that kind of pain, ever. It was, and continues to be, much worse than I anticipated. I still haven't cried about it. The rest of my life collapsed around me before the breakup, and until I set it back to at least stable, I'm like a paramedic, staying frosty and trying to contain myself until it's safe for me to react to how I feel about what's happened.

The inside of my head was a no fly zone for months, not even for a second, and that definitely meant no writing, no drawing. Hardly any thinking, really.

It's been almost a year now and you were the first to know when the logjam cleared enough for me to write. For several months now I've been able to feel joy, and I spend less and less time each day feeling terrible. I don't feel as good as I used to- the untouchable ball of sadness is still there, waiting for me to make things safe enough to come out, and it's presence dulls all my feelings. But things are better. And I am, at last, starting to work on comics again.

It's that process I'd like to talk about.

Before I could be in my head enough to post here again, I still wanted to make marks. I'm an artist before I'm anything else. Even rendered incapable of doing art, I have to make something with my hands. So the first thing I did was lettering. I knew my lettering hand would be rusty from disuse, so while I was working in the Shaker store this summer I wrote down all the lyrics from the Shaker songs, words from packages on the desk, whatever sentences came to mind. I filled pages with just solid text, trying to make it as even and perfect as I could. It wasn't art, but at least I could feel competence and confidence come back into my disused hands.

This post is getting pretty long, so I'm gonna continue it in another installment. Before I go, though, here's a video of Fabio Moon inking. Christ I love videos of cartoonists inking.

2012-01-04T21:01:00.003-05:00

This week: Happy New Year!

First, two great posts about pricing your work from two talented illustrators, Koren Shadmi and Jessica Hische. How much should you ask for for a job? Bookmark these for wherever you'll have to ask that.

I participated in The Beat's annual year-end survey, and you can see my responses here.

This photo is hilarious:

See you next week!

2011-12-28T20:57:00.002-05:00

This week: Recommended animal anatomy video

You all should all already know about this week's topic, which I heard about on James Gurney's blog, because I've told you many a time about how great and useful James Gurney's blog is. I post things from it all the time, it's in the links sidebar, and any of you who aren't subscribed to it are fools shooting your artistic education in the foot.

So, being as you already read this post this morning when it popped up in your blog reader, I'll skip to saying that it intrigued me so much that I bought the video and found it to be worthwhile enough to recommend that you do the same.

Yes, I know, it's 39 bucks. Yes, that's a lot of money. Last year was the first year in three years I had to even file income taxes, having made an average of $8,000 a year after gross adjustment in those years, and this year I'm a clerk working for $9.75 an hour, so I don't wanna hear any clamouring about anyone else's budgetary constraints, especially not from anyone with a smartphone, or who buys coffee with any regularity. For 39 bucks you're getting more information than you'd get in three decent hour-long collage classes, from a very gifted professor, for way, way less money than you'd pay just for the lecture time, let alone the cost and time expense of putting together the graphics for the videos. These are worth the cash, if they suit your needs.

The videos do for basic animal anatomy what I endeavored to do for human anatomy in my anatomy posts (and will continue to do, several more coming at an undetermined time), but from someone much more expert and gifted than myself. His insights into simple but profound differences in quadruped and biped anatomy were revelations to me, in that way when you hear someone perfectly articulate a concept you've only barely understood by instinct. After watching these videos, I will look at animals and my approach to drawing them on a wholly different way.

I have a small issue with his basic shape exercises. I notice that he has a tendency, like many instructors, to assign beginner students different basic shapes for learning anatomy than they themselves use when drawing, which I feel hampers rather than enhances understanding of shape and ability to construct. However, he makes up for it by reversing the usually backasswards process I see in so many well regarded and in my opinion useless how to draw books by encouraging you to start with a gestural sketch, and use basic shapes to help you true the parts that seem off. Or, to use them as a separate intellectual exercise altogether. He's also very clear that you may use any basic shapes you like that help you understand your drawing better.

He's a gifted instructor, and it shows in his student's work, which is sprinkled all through the videos. You can tell he's taught them to really SEE differently. The music in the videos is ridiculous, but evidently it was composed by his son, so what can you do.

If you're someone who's ever had trouble drawing horses or realistic cats, which is everyone if we're not lying to ourselves, you really should invest in this tutorial.

Speaking of horses, I love these drawings from Fabio Moon showing the thumbnail drawing for a panel and the final artwork. This is what it means to take an adequate composition and push it into a good one.

Mark Kennedy posted this great analysis of how one out-of-place element in your art can throw your entire reality out of whack. Seriously, what was the artist thinking with those damned stars?

Finally, Kate Beaton did some great holiday comics. Yes, I know it's redundant to day she did some great anything.

See you next week!

2011-12-21T09:39:00.000-05:00

This week: Your hand doesn't bend here.

So, it came up several times this last week with several coworkers, who in my case are artists, that they didn't realize the bones in your hand don't bend in the location illustrated in the title. I can sort of see why someone might think it, so I'm just gonna toss this out there for people. In fact, your bones don't bend at either that line, nor the line seperating the palm from the fingers. The pad at the top of your palm actually comes both a little above and a little below your knuckles. Your knuckles are roughly in the middle of the pad, as you can see in the illustration:

So when you bend your fingers down, the pad, which makes the bones in your palm appear longer than they are, gets bent down. This makes the palm seem to shorten and makes it look like the palm bones themselves must be bending. The phonomenon is easier to understand from the side:

If you really want to prove it to yourself, fold your hand while looking at the back. You will see that the back does not change in length at all.

Knowing that the pad comes above and below the knuckles also helps you draw palm lines more accurately. I can't tell you how many students I've seen draw a hand with the top fold line in line with the knuckles, who then try to fit the lines of the palm onto a palm that's too small to fit them into. It's especially a problem for young artists who draw "realistically", meaning they hatch and shade too much and observe too little. It is a problem 100% of the time for those guys who seem to know how to draw every single gun known to man, in perspective, but can't draw a back three quarter view of a head or a garment that hangs naturally to save their lives. Those of you who have been to art school know the ones I mean.

Oh, and check out this recipe comic from Laura Park! Isn't she the best? That's a rhetorical question, obviously she is, duh.

See you next week!

2011-12-14T20:19:00.003-05:00

This week: Assorted Tips

Cleaning out nifty links I've been saving:

If you don't read Brandon Graham's blog you should. He has fantastic taste and insightful comments about comics. I was particularly struck by this bit in one of his posts:

For some reason BPRD feels to me like watching a good tv series. It might be the episodic breakdown of the thing and the multiple writers. One thing I noticed is Guy Davis panels almost read like tv.

"I thought this scene where this old woman is talking through a child was done how you would see it on tv. --with the woman starting to say the words and the little girl finishing them--seperate panels seperate baloons. I photoshoped, on the right what i'd look like if both characters spoke through the same baloon, with 2 tails.

(click image to make it bigger)

I like how a small tweak like that can effect how it reads.
I think the original lettering does make the old woman and the girl seem farther away."

Chris Schweizer is always posting some awesome shit on his blog. Here's a fantastic (illustrated!) post on avoiding tangents of all sorts.

And here is a short but useful post on how clothes drape from the always educational Gurney Journey blog.

Illustrator, cartoonist, and teacher Jillian Tamaki made a student FAQ page for her website. It's great! Go read it!

After Completing Habibi, Craig Thompson is now working on three books at once. That all ages one looks absolutely delicious.

And finally, Kate Beaton's Hark, a Vagrant! collection made it into Time's best 10 books of the year!

Have a good week all!

2011-12-07T14:20:00.005-05:00

Potpourri

No specific topic this week, but rather a smattering of fascinating things. I'm gonna kick it off Elanor Davis and the interesting method she used to generate this image:
Elanor uses guache to make color paintings a lot, so I thought nothing of seeing a two-tone drawing from her, until I saw a series of tweets from her, which she meant to send to meg Hunt, but mistakenly posted to all, saying that she'd actually just altered an ink wash drawing to make this and other illustrations. I was fascinated, and asked if she'd elaborate, which of course she did:

Hey Matt!

Ha! you caught those tweets - I meant them to be @meg and mis-sent them, then threw my hands up at the whole thing. : )

Yep, that's a greyscale piece I messed w/ in photoshop. I don't have a good method for going about this process, there surely is an easier way to do it. I basically just do it for limited color printing processes; I don't think I would do it for any other reason, it's a hassle! : p

Make two separate files. Keep one greyscale.

for the other one: Image > mode >duotone

choose monotone; choose red (or whatever)

Now turn it into CMYK. Copy paste the greyscale file on top of the red version. They should line up perfectly. Then erase whatever parts of the grey layer you want to be red.

You can also monotone both w/ different colors. This image is 2 colors, for a process where the 2 colors combine into a 3rd. Just make the top layer transparent.

Finally, select the erased sections of the grey layer, inverse the selection, and delete that part from the red layer.

Thanks for asking! I hope you're doing great! : )

Eleanor

Isn't she great? Feel free to thank her by buying all her work.

Next up is a review of a device I hadn't even heard about until this review, the Wacom Inkling:

It sounds neat, but I was disappointed to see that the scanner gets less accurate the farther away from it you get, so you have to use a fairly small drawing area. So, no good for full-size pages, but maybe good for scaled down thumbnails. I'd probably just get a pad myself, but Crabfu makes the point that this now gives him original art to sell while simultaneously creating a layered, colorable digital file. Original art sells for more than prints, and that means more income, so it's not a trivial consideration. The alterations you can make to the line quality after the fact is pretty interesting too.

John Martz did a drawing of all the stuff he used to draw, for the artist's space porn tumblr Where They Draw. I don't know just why, but I LOVE seeing people's studio setups.

Alec Longstreth finally finished the final chapter of Basewood! As some of you may know, Alec resolved not to shave or cut his hair until this task was completed. Well, here's what he looks like now:

As you can see in his post about it, he'll be cutting his hair at the release party. Alec has been a friend of mine as well as Comic Tools blog, and is himself a great comics teacher, so I'd have posted about this no matter what, But as it happens, Alec gave me a flimsy premise to call this a tool related post with this comment to his post:

Yes, I will be donating my hair. That would be funny to make a brush from the beard hair - maybe it would have magical comics power in it! :P

Finally, nd totally unjustifiably, mega-super friend of Comic Tools Blog Hope Larson is making crazy-ass ice creams and posting photos of them: Ice Cream Log

See you next week!

2011-11-30T09:53:00.007-05:00

This week on Comic Tools: Oblique Nib Holders
James Gurney did most of my work for me this week posting about oblique nib holders. (He says pen holder, I say nib holder.) It's the tool to use if you want to draw lots of slanty lettering without ruining your hands. He even carved his own out of wood so it's fit his hand better:

It turns out, a company named Yoropen makes oblique ballpoint pens and pencils:

According to testimonials on the site, oblique pens and pencils have distinct advantages for many people. In the case of left-handed people, they allow the writer to see their work, and to not have to hook their hand over awkwardly as they write. They're said to promote a more correct grip in small children learning to write, and aid in letter formation. Their ease in grip is also said to be helpful to people with weakness in their hands, such as stroke victims, and people who suffer from writing strain. I'd like to get ahold of one sometime to try it out. I'd also be curious if an oblique nib holder helped left-handed cartoonists ink better. Anyone out there tried it?

They also make oblique nibs (also called elbow nibs) that fit in a regular nib holder. They look like this:

And now for some extras:

One of my favorite things on the internet is Vera Brosgol and Emily Carroll's series of drawings called Fashion From Old People. This blog is a fantastic resource to see how to really dress characters in clothing. They take a real dress from a photo, and then fit that dress to a cartoon character. I save every other drawing to my morgue (That's an old-fashioned illustrator's term for an illustrator's personal catalogue of reference and inspirational images) because I have trouble drawing overly generic clothing on characters, and seeing the different body shapes and types Vera and Emily fit the dresses to, and how the woman and the dress change one another, is always an inspiration to me.

Another one of my favorite things on the internet is when cartoonists post video of themselves working. Well, here's two great tastes that go great together: Vera drawing one of her FFOP posts. There's a LOT of great process stuff here, especially for people who draw all or partially digitally.

How ballsy is Schweizer's inking in this panel:
See you next week!

2011-11-21T21:19:00.001-05:00

This Week: Escoda Brushes
So, many of you will remember the post where I retracted my endorsement of Rosemary's brushes, after several readers who had purchased from her reported a precipitous drop in quality to the point of being unusable. You're better off buying the cheapest nylon brush rather than a bad sable brush, and with Japan making those insanely resilient and sharp pocket brush pens, a sable brush had better be good for the money you pay.

In that same post I actually did review an Escoda brush, which I'd totally forgotten about. I got it on my trip to SCAD Atlanta, liked it okay, and suggested it for people as a possible alternative if Raphael brushes weren't available. I haven't drawn with brushes for awhile, so I totally forgot about it.

My current workplace sells Escoda brushes, and they're specifically mentioned in our training video on brushes. The owner, Larry, who travels all over the world to meet his suppliers and see their factories, talked in the video about what makes a brush good and why some good brush companies have lost their way *cough Windsor and newton cough*. Basically, what it comes down to is time spent in a single location. Brush making takes years, even decades to learn, and making the kolinsky sable brushes is the hardest, requiring workers who've been brush makers for 20 years or more. If a brush company moves it's facilities, (W&N), and the brush makers don't or can't follow, their experience is lost, and therefore the quality. You do still see, every so often, a decent W&N brush, but the rarity of them leads me to conjecture it may be as little as one person making those elusive few. I imagine an old man, surrounded by fumbling whipper-snappers, weeping to himself as he places each of his perfect brushes on a conveyor belt alongside their splaying messes of expensive hair.

Larry chose Escoda because their factory has been in the same place since 1949, 18 years longer than Raphael, which seems to make some of the consistently better sable brushes these days. I tested 3 of the brushes in our store to decide what size I wanted to buy to test for Comic Tools, and all of them came to a sharp, single hair point. THAT was encouraging- I wanted this company to be consistent, not just good, if I was to recommend them to my readers. I selected a size 4 to test.
I love it. It's better than Rosemary's best brushes ever were. It has great snap, which I prefer to the well-formed, but to my hand mushy-feeling Raphael brushes. (I don't want to seem like I don't like Raphael brushes, By the way. Habibi was drawn with one for chrissake. I just don't prefer the feel of them.) I compared it to my trusty W&N #3 brush, and in doing so a sense memory came back to me. It doesn't feel like my W&N brush does now (which I still prefer), but it does feel like what my W&N felt like new. I could feel the Escoda pushing my hand into making the sorts of movements that led to my inking style when I drew my first book with my then brand-new W&N. How's the tip? That's a hair from my head next to those lines: Can it do drybrushing well? Yup:
Wispy lines? Uh huh:
Fiddly things like eyes and faces? Yes, and well: I look forward to using this brush and seeing how it ages. Now, there's another lovely characteristic to Escoda brushes, probably having to do with being made in Spain as opposed to Britain or France: They're relatively inexpensive. My W&N #3 cost me around $30 new. My Escoda #4? $16.40. No, really, go see. If you buy some from Artist and Craftsman, put a note in your order that Comic Tools Blog sent you, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt my standing with the company. I should tell you, however, that Blick has a better price. Buying from your local art store, if possible, is always best, especially since you can test the brushes, but if not, I feel obliged to ask that you consider Artist and Craftsman, a Maine-based and very fine art supply company, for your Kolinsky needs.

On another topic, it seems Amalgamated Biscuit has started something. Now Comic Tools reader Kat has made this adorable Totoro ink well as a more stable platform to resist upset by cat:

You can see more photos in her post about it. This is the inkwell I've been using, given to me by a friend:

(Remember, never dip your brush more than halfway if you can help it, and rinse it immediately if you do.)

See you next week!

2011-11-13T12:03:00.004-05:00

Home made inkwell

Comic Tools reader Amalgamated Biscuit just showed me this terrific inkwell he made:

From his post:

"When my ink runs low I have to fish around at an angle to get enough ink on my nib and I usually end up covering my pen and hands. So I created this inkwell which is just deep and wide enough for my biggest nibs."

Too cool, right? Though I feel it's seriously lacking in a pair of googly eyes. The bottom in-action photo is slightly obscene, which I also feel googly eyes would help. Not help make it less obscene, mind you, just more hilarious.

Thanks to Amalgamated Biscuit for sharing!

2011-11-13T09:11:00.006-05:00

Best nib holder I've seen:

T achikawa Comic Pen Nib Holder - Model 36 - White Grip

No surprise it's from Japan, where drawing with ink tools is still so large an industry that nibs and other inking tools are still made with quality. I have several friends who've switched to this and they just love it. One really cool thing is it accepts crowquil/mapping nibs, which have round, circular bodies like this:
as well as regular nibs, which are concave troughs of metal like this:
Most nib holders can only accept one or the other, and the holders for mapping nibs tend to be thin, exacerbating strain during fine work when using a tool used almost exclusively for fine work. The Tachikawa's thick body reduces wrist strain, and the rubber grip makes it easy to hold. Nibs sit securely in it, but the plastic isn't as rigid as on a Speedball holder, so you don't have to jam nibs in or strain to pry them out again.

Jetpens.com also has a fantastic selection of Japanese cartooning nibs, the best money can buy, unless you go antique hunting. (Fun fact about the two brands of Manga "G" nib: they're literally made across the street from one another. Both factories buy the same steel, mill it on the same machines, and put different brand stamps on them. They're otherwise identical, sort of like Olfa and NT blades, also made in Japan in neighboring factories using practically identical methods. NT's cutters are way better, though.) They also stock the sometimes hard to find Pentel Pocket brush refills at a not-bad-not-amazing price, and sell the brushpen itself at a pretty amazing price.

The Tachikawa is well worth the six bucks, being comfortable and well made, and would be the only nib holder you ever had to buy in your life.

2011-11-13T07:59:00.003-05:00

Hey everyone, Comic Tools is now on Facebook and Twitter!

Both featuring my new, more dressed icon photo:

My old icon photo, which was actually my first photo of the face rig I use:

2011-11-13T07:58:00.001-05:00

This week's title is a video:

Start at 6:32

Wow, I still have 237 followers? Why? Did you all forget to unsubscribe? Well, either your loyalty or your laziness are to be rewarded, because I'm starting again.

It's funny, you know what the impetus was, the thing that finally broke the intertia? I'm working at an art store now, and some old man came in having had trouble with his nibs, which he is new to using. I was explaining to him what he was doing wrong and how to fix it, and then driving home that night it hit me: I can't really deal with giving advice to strangers who walk in the door, and not my Comic Tools readers, who have truly done for me in the past. And besides, my broken life is finally back together enough that I feel like I can bust out a column about something regularly.

So, Hi! Surprise! And let me start my being back with the advice I have this old man: keep your nib clean while you work, always move it towards the concave belly, and always clean it when you're finished.

And Happy Birthday, Rivkah!

2011-02-21T08:32:00.001-05:00

Gerhard. Gare-hard? Jer-ard?

Sean Michael Robinson at The Comics Journal did an exhaustive interview with Gerhard, Dave Sim's background artist on Cerebus. It's a must read for every cartoonist who cares about technique, as the Robinson asks Gerhard about specific pages throughout the comic's decades-long run, with Gerhard talking about everything from his preference to toothbrushes over airbrushes for snow effects to showing photos of the models he built ho help him draw rows of houses on slanted streets.

Gerhard with his models.

Gerhard is one of the best draftsman in the last 50 years of comics, and this interview is one of the richest resources I've ever had a chance to bring to your attention. Read, and watch as a man grows from a talented amateur into a true virtuoso, sharing his secrets with us.

A floor plan to a room in Cerebus.

Jesus, I love how loose Guy Davis' pencils are. I always learn something about keeping freedom in my inking looking at them.

Oh, by the way, I'm selling some clothes on Ebay, if anyone's interested:

Rare Red Swiss Army coat
Green double-breasted jacket
Tailored brown suit

2011-02-13T23:47:00.001-05:00

GRR INTERNET

My internet's been spotty all night, and now it's late, so I'm going to bed and writing this thing Tuesday night. (Monday is Valentine's dinner with the lady.)

2011-02-13T23:31:00.005-05:00

This week on Comic Tools: Futzing with nibs

I'm insomniac tonight, so I'll type this sucker up now:

A few weeks ago MK (Remember MK? Started this blog? Wrote the fantastic comic Americus, illustrated by Jonathan Hill, to be published by First Second later this year, which you can now read in webcomic form? That MK.) wrote me with this:

"Hey Matt. So possibly right under your feet all day at work are these scroll nibs, which are usually used for making filials and jazz for fancy calligraphy. Also, at the very bottom, is a thing called a music nib, used for making musical notation lines, it is made by Brause, not Mitchell, so it won't be in the kit. I got mine from scribblers in the UK after seeing them in someone else's catalogue, and I assumed they must be hackable for cartooning short cuts. Double vision, quicker hatching for bgs that must be covered in them, plaid shirts, checkerboards... the list is not gigantic, but you can get some interesting results. I'm not entirely certain that they are in NY Central, but I believe I saw mitchell caligraphy kits hanging over the doorway to the little room the G nibs are stored in, so if you see them, you could probably come up with some ingenious use for them that I am missing. I've used them for a bit of grass in the new comic already, and it was delightful to use something a little different."

She included this photo:

Indeed we do have these nibs downstairs at New York Central. If you walk straight into the store about halfway, you'll see these cheesy looking beige cardboard bubble packets sitting way up high where the managers sit:

You'll have to ask for someone to help you reach them, unless you're seven feet tall. These are what the packets look like up close, and what they cost:

New York Central got the whole lot of them in a buyout of another closing supplier, so once these are gone, they're gone. Fortunately, for anyone who might want them, they don't seem to sell well. Anyhow I've got them back at home now, and I've been playing around with them. I've narrowed it down to 8 that produce various effects I like, and I've been futzing around with them, like MK did.

My first impressions are that either these types of nib are either all made of unusually crappy and thin steel, or that the tinyness of the individual nibs having to share the space makes them weak, much like too many babies sharing a womb, or that this particular brand may just be crappy. I don't know, but nonetheless I've found some uses for these that might induce me to buy more anyway.

The nibs with evenly spaced, equal-sized points make hatching large areas really, really easy and SOOOOOOO much faster. They also make great speed lines.

The evenly spaced nibs with one point larger than the other make pleasantly dynamic and perfectly spaced pipes, dowels, poles, and rope. If I wanted to to an entire series of knot-tying illustrations, one of these nibs would very possibly save me from insanity.

The nibs with multiple slits cut going to the same point hold extra ink like a lettering nib while remaining flexible like a quill, and so far the best use I've found for these are really fantastic willowy tree limbs that you can draw with the line variation of a brush, but with a line quality that is unmistakably of a nib.

Anyhow, I'm gonna mess around with these some more and then do a proper post on them.

Finally a link: A fantastic interview with Mike Mignola about setting and architecture. One lesson learned: you neither need to like drawing, nor even actually draw, straight lines or perfect perspective in order to draw houses, cities, and other settings in a convincing and lively way. Slanty lines and age are your friends.

See you next week!

2011-02-06T16:26:00.005-05:00

This week on Comic Tools: Eraser Showdown 2!

As I've mentioned before, I currently work at New York Central Art Supply in the paper department. Downstairs on the side of the checkout counter alongside all the other impulse buys, they have a bunch of little bins with erasers in them. There were three I'd never seen before, so I decided to buy them and test them out against the current champion, the Tombo Mono eraser.

The new contenders are:

Pentel Hi-Polymer
Faber-Castell "Dust free"
MOO eraser

Unlike in the last test, all of these erasers erased a well dug-in line cleanly and completely. None of these products fails in role as an eraser. That leaves us with the next characteristic, amount and size of dust. This is how each of them fared with each eraser brand-new, using the corner to erase the line:

It seemed like a pretty clear-cut win for the Tombo, with the MOO a close second. My next test was to see how they affected ink, whether they'd lift your drawings off the page. Some erasers can be so aggressive that they remove not only pencil but ink and paper fibers, like an art-destroying tornado. All of these performed roughly the same in that test, but as I used them to erase over the ink with their now ground-down corners, I found that the two really dusty erasers were now producing snakes, as they should. I made new pencil lines and tried again, with these results:

The scale of these photographs is slightly out of whack, as the Tombo's snake of dust was actually smaller than the Faber-Castell's. Nonetheless, with a blunted corner all of them performed adequately, and certainly better than the losers in my previous test. Now a new problem revealed itself, namely that certain erasers were using themselves up far more quickly for the same amount of erasing. The MOO, in particular, crated a hilariously long and thick snake of eraser waste, enough that an earthworm might have tried to mate with it were it any larger. The Tombo won again, with the MOO second in creating less dust, but the Faber-Castell coming in second in not using itself up too quickly. They all erased adequately, and I'd recommend any of them.

Links time!

Sarah Glidden has been regiggering her watercolor process for her comics. Here she is experimenting with different techniques:

She finally settled on one, and the results are beautiful to behold.

Becky Cloonan step-by-step process art? Hell yes please.

Evidently the best perspective book for cartoonists ever made has a sequel now:

Extreme Perspective! For Artists: Learn the Secrets of Curvilinear, Cylindrical, Fisheye, Isometric, and Other Amazing Systems that Will Make Your Drawings Pop Off the Page (Book & DVD)

In this sequel to the classic bestseller Perspective! For the Comic Book Artist, David Chelsea takes perspective to a whole other level—by exploring the most dramatic viewpoints employed by today’s artists. Many of these techniques have been carefully guarded secrets for centuries. But David, and his hollow-headed friend, Mugg, make them accessible to a new generation of artists, cartoonists, illustrators, and animators. In Extreme Perspective! For Artists, you’ll learn how to

• Render complicated multi-sided objects in perfect perspective
• Create accurate shadows and reflections from your own imagination
• Master the most difficult kinds of curvilinear perspective systems
• Draw eye-popping images in fisheye perspective
• Use your computer to create elaborate scenes quicker and more easily
• … And much, much more!

Also included is a comprehensive library of perspective grids on DVD, suitable for printing or using with Photoshop and other applications.

All that for $13.35? WHY DO I NOT HAVE IT IN MY HANDS RIGHT NOW? WHY DON'T YOU?!

2011-01-23T09:14:00.006-05:00

This week on Comic Tools: Reader Question

Hey Matt,

I've recently read the Scott Pilgrim comics and become interested in drawing comics. I've always been a hopeless drawer though so i got a book to teach me some basics and it's really helping so far, but it doesn't teach anything about comics. I found your blog very useful but its hard to find somewhere to begin. Are there any books out there you'd recommend to teach basic comic drawing?

Josh.

Short answer:

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud's Making Comics
Jessica Abel and Matt Madden's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures
David Chelsea's Perspective! For Comic Book Artists

Read those and do all the assignments suggested in them, and you'll have just saved yourself 4 years of college. I wish I were more than a hair away from kidding.

Long answer:

To get good at comics you'll have to read a lot of comics, and learn to steal. I don't mean imitate- that's like stealing someone's jewelry by hoisting their house into the back of your pickup and driving off. It doesn't work and you look like a moron doing it. You must learn to steal- and I use that word deliberately- the very best parts of what works about your favorite artists, and throw away the rest. You must learn to avoid taking on the bad habits of artists you like, the way you might avoid contracting AIDS. It's so easy, SO easy, to look at a great artist, imitate (meaning copy totally) their art, including it's weak parts, and then defend those weaknesses for decades as the inspiration you got from a great artist, instead of a cheap, hacky trick that both you and the artist you got it from should be shamed of. Jack Kirby was insanely inventive and kinetic and used blacks like no human being before or since, but he basically drew humans with 2 not very good faces and just slightly more expressions. Dave Sim has an incredible work ethic and is a proficient inker and letterer, but his people are ugly, stiff, and insensitive. Moebius and Frank Quitely are some of the best draughtsmen on the planet, but they draw distracting and freakish baby faces on everyone and sometimes their art can be lifelessly static.

Everyone's style is a combination of all the things they're best at, and attempts to either avoid or cover the evidence of everything they suck at. Mike Mignola once confessed to a class I was in that he doesn't draw cars because he hates drawing them and uses lots of shadows because he sucks at perspective. You'll eventually form your style by lazily covering up all the things you suck at; don't add to that all the things your favorite artists suck at.

This counts ten thousand times more if your art is Manga influenced. Every single one of my manga influenced artist friends will back me on this: if you take your cues by imitating your favorite manga, you will spend years of your commercially crippled career painfully stripping your art of the shortcuts that, by sheer necessity of how fast those artists must produce, makes up 1/2 to fully 9/10ths of the art of any given page of manga.

If you ever find yourself thinking "Oh, finally, this art looks like something I can actually draw!", put the book down and never look at it again. If bikes are hard for you, fill a sketchbook with people on every kind of bike you can find reference for. If hands are really tricky for you, never, ever draw a panel without showing both hands of every person in the panel. If shoes are tricky for you, don't do another damned thing until you can draw everything from sneakers to dress shoes convincingly. Learn to draw brick walls that don't look like cinderblock walls. Read a lot of good comics, look at a lot of good art, read a lot of good books, and learn to steal the very best from all of them. And don't imitate.

And now, some links for this week!

Andrew Loomis made the best art instruction books for illustrators and cartoonists ever made, and you can download them in their entirety, for free, online!

For young or beginning artists who want a warm, earnest, supportive place to get input on their work, there's few places better than the Flight Forums. Professionals from the books and others who just hang out are always watching to give advice to all those who seek it.

Why has Alec Longstreth given up on rapidographs and pigma pens? Find out!

Listen to Dean Haspiel.

Remember how I was talking about absorbing the worst shortcuts from people's work? Here's a great example. Ha, "Dreamworks brow."

Next week, another eraser showdown!

2011-01-16T21:10:00.006-05:00

The biggest event in Comic Tools likely to happen this year or any other happened last Sunday, with Jim Woodring exhibiting his enormous pen, it's dripping tip gleaming in the light, to over 100 assembled men, women, and children. Woodring found the 25 pound black wooden shaft awkward and difficult to maneuver, and eventually resorted to just working with the tip, which produced much happier results.

Okay, enough dick innuendo. (Heh, in YOU end-o.) Seriously though, you have no idea how much I wanted to photoshop truck balls onto this thing. Or make a super-nerdy comics in-joke by having the tip going through a slice of pizza.

Dick jokes aside, I really, really love that this thing exists. It's actually really fascinating to me that his learning to use this thing wasn't all that different than the process I go through picking up any ordinary pen.

He had two nibs made, a steel prototype, and then a brass-plated, hand-engraved model, seen here:

Beautiful, right? But it turned out that that nib was actually a bit too stiff, and the steel nib was more flexible, so Jim put the better looking nib away in favor of the more practical prototype:

(The brass nib in the bucket of shame. click on this image for Glenn Fleichmann's great flickr set of this event.)

This happens to me all the time, when one nib will just be too damned stiff, and I have to chuck it and move on to another one in the box.

Here you can see Jim making the first lines with the stiffer brass nib, and all the dripping and control problems he was having:

Jim Woodring - Nibbus Maximus from Gavin Lees on Vimeo.

At first he was cautiously getting a feel for what marks it could and could not make, and the frist drawing was pretty shabby looking, which always happens to me while learning a new tool.

But amazingly, not too far into the demonstration, Woodring's inking with the pen from Land of the Giants was virtually indistinguishable from his regular inking. Here he is inking a drawing with the Nibbus Maximus:

And at the end of this video you can see him inking with his regular pen:

The man clearly has a feel for the nib as a broad concept, and when you change the parameters, like size, ink thickness, and flexibility, he just has to take awhile to readjust his technique before he's mastered it as he would any other nib. It's way, way more interesting to watch than I thought it would be, and watching him have to struggle to adapt to the tool gave me insights into how any artist adapts to nib pens.

Many have pointed out that new Seattle transplant Scott Kurtz was at the event (as seen in the below photo), and I thought I'd take this opportunity to say what spectacular resources the podcast Webcomics Weekly (which he co-hosts) and accompanying book How to Make Webcomics (which he co-wrote) are. My good friend Erika Moen helped make herself a successful independent artist and businesswoman based on concepts she learned from these resources, and anyone who has a webcomic, are is looking to start a webcomic, would do well to buy the book and start listening to the podcast from episode 1.

Two additional things Woodring posted on his blo g that I thought were cool, a guide to how nibs were made in the old days:

(Click to see larger.)

And this drawing of a frog being hit by lightning:

(Click to see larger.)

I notice that Wooding is wearing the exact same shirt and suit that he was wearing when I met him at an art opening, and I wonder if he's like me, with only one nice outfit that he just uses over and over at any vaguely fancy event.

In unrelated news, Dark Horse posted this really fantastic back and forth illustrated dialogue between editor Scott Allie and artist Guy Davis on the latest BPRD cover. It's a perfect example of an editor doing their job right, taking an okay idea and molding it into a great one, making the artist look good, and strengthening the narrative impact of the imagery.

Below, a special treat for you: A progression from Guy's thumbnails, to his pencils, to his inks from one of my favorite pages in that issue. Click to see it in all it's glory:

See you next week!

2011-01-08T13:07:00.002-05:00

This week on Comic Tools: Take care of your wrist!

Robin Bougie is one of the nicest men I have ever met in comics. Much like the also famously sweet Scott McCloud, he's spends most of his time as a creator helping other creators, publishing their work, using his own prominence to bring good work to light, and talking openly about his experiences as a creator. For years now he's had problems with his drawing hand, as has his wife Rebecca. This is the second time he's posted this video of injury-preventing hand stretches:

When he first posted it I was drawing a lot of comics myself, and getting terrible wrist pain. These stretches helped me a lot. From his post:

Do these stretches before you start, and once an hour, every hour, while drawing. Please don't fuck your shit up like we did. If you're a writer and typing a lot, it couldn't hurt you to do the same.

Think of yourself like an athlete, and for them stretching before they take part in their sport is absolutely VITAL in order to prevent injury. We, as artists, absolutely have to start thinking this way as well -- especially if we're in our thirties or older when our bodies aren't willing to put up with the crap we put them through.

I'm having a lot more trouble staying pain free because I started doing these stretches stuff AFTER I strained my arm, and I know now that it's much better to be preventative and begin doing them before you do permanent damage. LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE!

More information about RSI here:
http://www.bupa.co.uk/health-information/directory/r/repetitive-strain-syndrome-rsi

Your wrist is no less a comic tool than your pen, unless you intend to learn to draw somehow without it. Take care of it. Don't hold El Corazon over crocodile-filled water with your wrist.

By the way, unless you have a really high tolerance for fucked-up, disturbing sexual imagery, do NOT click to see the other entries in his journal. Don't say you weren't warned.

Oh, and I really liked this comment to the youtube video:

"This has helped me quite a bit. For those that loose faith in humanity...visit Youtube every now and again. The fact that people take time out of their lives to help people like this is a testament to humanity"

I actually mainly watch youtube videos by people who have taken time and effort to teach others, but it's still odd to me to see someone associate youtube with MORE faith in humanity. Probably because any video, of any thing, will eventually get a comment calling the poster a fag or questioning their skills. This comment made me think that maybe I should focus more on the fact that I've gotten an amazingly thorough education on a few subjects on Youtube, and less on guys in their parent's basement looking for things to call faggy while their tiny penises heal from over masturbating.

Also, in perhaps the biggest Comic Tool news of all time, Jim Woodring will be demonstrating his enormous, 7 foot nib pen. Here's video of the nib:

He's using it in public for the very first time today, and I'll post video of that when it becomes available. I have no idea how the hell this thing is supposed to work, but you can bet I'm drooling to find out and see what he can do with it.

See you all next week!

2011-01-02T21:43:00.004-05:00

Reader Question:

Hi,
I'm following your comics tools blog lately and I want to know if there is a post on Paper/Bristol Board.
I want to buy bristol board at Blue Line Pro but I'm not sure if I should take 2ply or 3ply. It's a 10$ difference. I'm from germany and we don't distinguish by ply we only do by weight.

Could you give me advice?

Thank you so far

Jannick

Bristol is a fast-dying form of commercial grade paper that is still used by many cartoonists and illustrators, although not nearly as much as it used to be, the result of which has been a steep and ever worsening decline in variety and quality, as it's no longer profitable for mills to manufacture for anything less than astronomical prices.

Bristol is made by laminating thin sheets together with glue, creating thicker sheets, as opposed to producing a thicker sheet from the get-go. This is what the ply of bristol refers to; 1 ply is a single sheet thickness, 2 ply is two sheets glued together, and so on.

I see no particular reason to get more than 2 ply bristol. Because of the gluing process, thicker bristol isn't less prone to buckling than thicker bristol, unlike with other kinds of paper, although is is more resistant to denting. Which would matter if you were using your art as a car door. In my experience all it does is add weight to your portfolio.

2011-01-02T17:48:00.003-05:00

This week on Comic Tools: Preparation Links

Sarah Glidden shows us how she made her wonderful watercolor comic pages. Of particular interest to me was her use of a glaze of color under SOME, but not ALL parts of the images. I've seen cartoonists like Lucy Knisley use washes of color, usually yellow, over the whole image, but the way Sarah uses it is interesting, because she uses it to compartmentalize different parts of the ground from each other.

On this example page, she uses a yellow wash to separate the foreground from the midground and background, and blue to make a background sink deeper into shadow. You can't always see these glazes of undercolor in the final panels, yet this subtle technique makes her painted panels organized and easier to read.

Friend of Comic Tools, Jason Little, wrote this fantastic post about his artwork and writing process leading up to his fantastic latest book from Dark Horse, Motel Art Improvement Service. There's so much to love about this post, like his accounting about how the story started as a misguided diatribe about the health insurance industry, or how he originally wanted to serialize the story in a series of regular comic books. He was talked out of both ideas, and the result is better for it. It's the comics equivalent of a wife saying to her husband, "You're not going out looking like THAT, are you?!"

I must say though, I love this panel from when he was contemplating doing the book in only two colors of ink to save printing costs. It shows what a master of print Jason is, that if you don't have an eye that looks for such things, you don't immediately notice this panel has only two colors. It looks so lush.

Aaron Renier talks about his process writing and drawing Walker Bean in this Newsarama interview. I have seen art from this book, and it makes me shake with jealousy just thinking about it, it's so good.

Friend of Comic Tools Chris Schweizer posts artwork frequently to his blog, and it reveals that he one one of the ballsiest inkers and loosest pencillers I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, his pencils are often less resolved that a game of connect the dots. I don't know how he does it. Here, he posts one of his most detailed penciled panels (still absurdly under rendered), and here he shows off some gorgeous setting sketches for a story. The amazing thing is, that panel isn't even his finished inks- for his comics,he renders what look like finished inks in marker, then scans them in, prints them in blue, and inks in brush over that. But I've seen him ink drawings straight from pencils that loose that looked no less finished, to my eye. Insane.

Here we have a great example of everything I stand against in art teaching, in this excerpt from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way:

See how easy it is? Just draw a stick figure, then add cylinders, then fill it in with years of painstaking anatomical study and direct life drawing knowledge, not to mention expert knowledge of lighting, drapery, and character design. Jesus Christ, why don't they just show you a white sheet of paper and say "Just add characters here with a pencil! Pause the tape while you practice doing that."

My thanks to my good friend Emily Felger for sending me a new keyboard.

2010-12-19T22:41:00.009-05:00

This week on Comic Tools: Eraser Shields

In the course of penciling comics, sometimes you end up with little distracting lines that you want to get rid of, but they're so close to lines you want to keep that erasing one might accidentally erase the other. It's a common problem when drawing fiddly, intricate things like faces, or as I've chosen for this example, skulls.

My usual solution to this problem is to form a point on my kneaded rubber eraser and use it to erase only the lines I want gone. If you do this, make sure your point isn't long and floppy like this, or you won't be able to press on it hard enough to erase.

Make the angle of the tip as obtuse as you can, and the tip will hold up to much harder erasing before losing its shape.

However some artists, like my girlfriend, press their pencil into the paper like a marine trying to stab through body armor, and kneaded rubber erasers aren't enough. Here's her eraser, worn to a blunted nubble:

How is she to erase single lines with this, without erasing everything around them? That is where eraser shields come in. An eraser shield is just a paper-thin piece of steel slightly larger than a credit card, with holes of various shapes and sizes cut in it. You cunningly select and position the holes to mask off the lines you want gone, like so,

And then erase them.

You have to be careful about checking your placement, though,

lest you remove lines you in fact want to keep:

They really ought to make these in clear flexible plastic for better positioning. It wouldn't be too difficult to make one out of acetate, though. Any material that was thin and stiff enough would work.

Anyway, here's the cleaned pencils,

And heres the skull all inked up:

Sorry I haven't been getting to comments yet, my keyboard is broken and my spacebar has been dead all week. I've been inserting every space by copying and pasting, writing this. I have a friend with a new one, though, so hopefully that'll be sorted out soon.

See you next week!

2010-12-12T14:29:00.003-05:00

Eraser shields: Not for dueling pencil knights.

(Also, not actually the subject of this post.)

I'm ready to start posting every week again. I know, it's been awhile. A lot's happened. I moved in with my girlfriend. I got a full-time job in New York Central Art Supply's paper department. I was removed from the book I've worked on, or worked to be able to work on, for the last four and a half years. I did a shitload of anatomy research, the results of which you'll be seeing in the future on this blog. I started a new project with a friend of mine, which I'll be discussing much more freely than my previous project as I work on it.

I'll talk about my removal from the book I was working on in more detail another time. All I'll say for now is that it wasn't acrimonious, but it was very sad and disappointing for all parties. Basically, I hadn't turned in any work in a long time, and because of my new job, no work was forthcoming any time soon. First Second said they needed the book done by such-and-such time, I said I could not do it by then, and so they were forced to let me go. I think it's important for people to share their failures as well as successes, particularly ones that are learning experiences, so believe me, I WILL go into more detail about this later. But at the moment the circumstances of my being let go aren't totally over with, or even solidified in terms of what will happen legally, and it's still pretty goddamned painful to talk about, so you'll excuse me if I refuse to answer any questions on the subject for now.

But it, in combination with a major move, is the main reason I've been offline so long, and not really been in the spirit of blogging about comics.

Anyhow, I'll be resuming tools posts next week with a post about the eraser shield. And I'll be catching up responding to a backlog of reader comments during the week.

2010-06-07T08:08:00.002-04:00

Still alive, healthy, have job, no longer in imminent danger of homelessness.

Still getting my shit together, another good month till I start the blog back up, I think. I actually want to be ready to do it every week, on time when I start again.

Thanks to all those who expressed concern.

-Matt

2010-03-31T19:17:00.002-04:00

MONSTER WINSOR AND NEWTON BRUSH SALE RIGHT NOW!!!! HOLY CRAP!!!! ENDS APRIL 2ND!

http://www.aswexpress.com/discount-art-supplies/online/703/art-supplies/6

2010-02-22T15:43:00.002-05:00

I really wish it wasn't TMI to describe some of the medical issues I've had this week, because it's been dazzling to see one minor malady lead into another and destroy my productive time so spectacularly.

I've been real behind all winter, as I'm sure you all have noticed. It's not because I'm running out of material either, it's because I used up a lot of my easy quick posts, and most of what I have left on my list are posts that are extremely involved to write, take a lot of research, involve coordinating a lot of interviews, or all 3 at once, in some cases. I see most of you regular readers subscribe or follow with a blog reader, and that's good, because it would drive a person mad to check here all the time.

I think what's realistically gonna happen is probably for another month or two posts will trickle in like they have been, and then there'll be a real busy season for posts this spring and summer, and then after that I WILL have run out of material and things will slow up again. If anyone sends me links or reviews of their own, I will as always link to them.

Right, so I'm off to go sort out my work for this week. If all goes well, I'll see you this coming Saturday!

-Matt

2010-02-03T13:05:00.006-05:00

So reader Beau won the contest, which I was hoping would be a time killer to fill a week I knew I'd miss, but then I went and missed another week. Beau, please email me at contact(at)matthew-bernier.com to claim your price, this beautiful archival-quality poster-sized print of my postcard design for Patton Oswalt, printed on Arches hot-press watercolor paper and signed by me.
I'm assuming there probably isn't a great deal of demand for them since beau was really the only person who felt like making two lists to get one, but if anyone else wants such a poster, they can write me at the same address. They are $25 plus shipping.

A few folks asked how I was doing- I've recovered from my terrible viral resurgence, and I'm back on my feet. Thanks to everyone who asked.

I have entries coming finally (I spent the last week sending out interview questions to various people I'd been procrastinating about writing), but for this week I have a bunch of neat links:

Remember Sean Murphy, the dude I presented at SCAD with? The harsh Onion's comics reviewer liked the first entry of his new comic with Grant Morrison, Joe the Barbarian, and having seen it in stores, I have to say I do, too! Sean's a crazy-talented inker.

The great Jillian Tamaki, talking about aping artistic styles.

Mark Siegel of First Second books isn't just a great editor, he's a great cartoonist! And he's putting his new book out as a webcomic! It's called Sailor Twain and you should read it.

James Gurney talks about the antiquated but still extremely useful comics tool, the proportion wheel.

SCAD student and friend of Comic Tools Blog Falynn draws fucking amazing apocalypse trucks.

And Hope Larson is doing a cool educational experiment:

"If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that I'm working on a short comic and posting the process art on Flickr. When it's complete I'll compile the whole thing–script, thumbnails, roughs, inks–into a short comic for print and web. The idea isn't to make a comics how-to, but to show how much work goes into something as basic as a 10-page short story.

It's nerve-wracking to show work to the world when it's vulnerable and new, but that's the whole point. Once I make it through the roughs I'll enlist someone to play editor, make his/her notes public, and address those notes in the final art."

2010-01-24T21:18:00.004-05:00

Contest!

I'm suffering my annual resurgence of a mono-like virus I picked up a few years back, and don't have it in me to put a post together, but I didn't want to just call in sick, so I'm holding a fun little contest.

You may remember my post about lettering, where I showed many of the most common mistakes I see in amateur lettering, and gave a general philosophy about how artists can approach this intimidating subject.

This last week it was announced that the Twilight graphic novel was going to print, and that they'd be making 350,000 copies for their initial print run, an insane number for a comic. As it turns out, Stephenie Meyer cares even less about how her books are adapted into comic form than she does about how they're adapted into film, or for that matter the quality of her writing. Stephenie could certainly pay for quality, if she wanted, but instead chose first-time comic book artist Young Kim (who, it's reported rather vaguely, has a "fine arts" background) for the job. Kim's too-shitty-to-be-called-generic, obviously hastily produced hackwork is hysterical, confusing, and infuriating. It's hard to see how such a terrible artist was chosen to helm a GN with one of the largest print runs I've ever heard of. Maybe Meyer saw in Kim a kindred spirit with absolutely no pride in her work? Meyer has stated that she was involved in every page of the book, and feels very happy with it. But the artwork actually wasn't what caught my eye first. The lettering in this book is literally- and I use that word mindfully- literally the worst published lettering I have ever seen. If I'd known lettering could look this bad, I'd have requested that Meyer actually piss in my face instead.

Here's where we get to the contest. In my post I covered nine distinct types of mistake one can make in lettering. I counted eight major types of mistake in this lettering, and four of them were ones I didn't think of when making my post. Here is a single page from the new book:

The first person who can tell me what those types of mistake were, and which ones I did not cover in my post, will win a signed print of my poster for Patton Oswalt:

Leave your answers in the comments. I'll let you know when I have a winner.

Have a good week everyone!

2010-01-17T03:04:00.000-05:00

This week: SCAD Atlanta students will destroy us all.

I assume most of you will recognize this episode of the Simpsons:

Basically, SCAD Atlanta is a training ground/hardened military facility for a sixties-era mad terrorist, probably Chris Schweizer.

How else do you explain the decor of the place, space-industrial in gaudy colors and exposed metal (And I'm pretty sure this is a transporter facility)?

The place has custom-designed recycling bins that match the building! This is the oppressive conformity indicative of a cruel dictator who cannot stand opposition even in his garbage disposal.

Look at this cafeteria, large enough to feed a small army, with the SCAD logo covering an entire wall, chanting a visual reminder of loyalty unto death.

Look at this relaxation area, straight out of a James bond film:

These pod chairs are robotically enhanced:

You enter one,

Pull the sensory isolation shield around you,

and then invert yourself, immersing yourself into a technological relaxation bubble no doubt filled with ultrasonic subliminal brainwashing messages. Mere students don't require devices like this to relax- only agents of horror, soldiers that have done things which stretch even morally bleached minds to their breaking point, require such mechanically-assisted relaxation to find peace.

There is a small "theater" which is clearly a single-stage to orbit escape pod for the facility's higher ranking officials, should something go awry:

Surrounded by smaller single-man escape pods:

Make no mistake, SCAD Atlanta students will destroy us all.

(SCAD Atlanta's building was originally a huge federal building, following which it was rennovated to the tune of $40 million by a dot-com that promptly went bankrupt upon completion, and now SCAD has a long term lease and the benefit of facilities that were supposed to be for the man-children of a failed Google. I say Man-children because I have never seen a building LESS decorated by women in my entire life. I've been to strip clubs with a more feminine touch.)

Actually, SCAD Atlanta students ARE coming to destroy us all, with their art.

Way back in October I was invited to be one of SCAD Atlanta's two guest speakers, along with Sean Murphy. We both gave a talk about our careers, two lessons with students, and did portfolio reviews. Tim O'She a did a fan-fucking-tastic job covering it all, in an article that manages to quote myself and several others at length while never taking any of us out of context or ruining a nuanced idea. In fact, as Sean pointed out, Tim made us all seem smarter than we are, if anything.

Tim's article covers pretty much everything about what happened except stuff that was in my internal monologue. The two main themes in my head were

a: I absolutely do not deserve to be a co-equal guest artist discussing my "career" alongside a veteran artist who's been at this more than 3 times as long as I have,

b: I was so, SO glad that the lessons, which were basically "The best of Comic Tools, LIVE!" worked out.

I actually learned several new things from the students during my tools lesson, which I'll be passing along soon (I'm still gathering materials for that), and the students really responded well to the anatomy lesson. It was a lot like this blog, actually: I was mostly teaching stuff, but then they had info I didn't know, and now we'll all be able to have this information.

Regarding a: seriously, this was awkward for me. It's really stretching it to say I've had a "career" in comics at all, frankly. Sean's been a published, deadline-meeting workhorse for like 7 years now. I'm not even through my first book, and I'm WAYYYY over deadline with that. I tried to deal with my inadequacy by taking it-head on, and being as honest as possible. I ended up being a good counterpoint to Sean, as an Indie artist who has made some serious mistakes early on, but with the perspective of an indy artist, which is that I can just move on, keep working, and my peers and even my editors will help steer me back on course. This was in sharp contrast to Sean's sector of the industry, which is much more cut throat. Some of my smaller screw ups could, if made by Sean, have cost him his career in the industry forever, no joke. I don't think I deserved to be speaking next to him, but the two of us did serve to emphasize what a varied industry comics can be, and that was good for the students.

Here's Sean and me speaking:

Here's Sean doing his inking tutorial, which I sadly had to miss:

And here's me doing portfolio reviews:

Jesus, the portfolio reviews.

Everyone drawing below the industry top 5%: watch the fuck out. SCAD Atlanta is not like it's retarded cousin SCAD Savannah. As iron sharpens iron, so these artists sharpen each other. This is a school that turns down applicants. This is a school that gives failing grades to unpublishable- emphasis on PUBLISHABLE- work. This is a school that listens to it's teachers, fosters a culture of greatness, and turns out the best students I have ever seen. Several students I met were currently working on books for ONI while still in school. Others had gigs lined up, or were in the process of it. I saw exactly 2 students who weren't ready to work at a totally pro level right then.

Most of them were better than me.

That's not to say there wasn't any one of them I couldn't give a good critique to- everybody has weaknesses. But basically everyone was working close to or at a level indistinguishable from the top 30% of actual pro work. It was a huge change from SVA's huge percentage of mediocrity and borderline-retarded losers being strung along with passing grades for their tuition money. Much is demanded of SCAD students, and as people always do, the students rise to high expectations, enforced with stern grading.

SCAD Atlanta is retarded, RETARDED expensive, but if you can afford it, they are a genuinely great school, with a director and teachers who really have a vision and set of ethics for the place. It was an honor to have been chosen to speak at such a place.

(I'd like to give a special shout-out to Falynn, who toured me around the campus so I could take photos without getting lost and accidentally stumbling into the school's fusion reactor. Here is her livejournal, where you can see her lovely watercolors.)

If SCAD Atlanta ever invites you as a guest, accept. I was fed like Caligula every single day. I'm serious- one night my dinner tab was eighty something, and they didn't flinch. I was put up in a great hotel room. I wanted for nothing, and felt very obligated to give them my all in my presentations. HOSPITALITY, spelled in capital letters, is the legal middle name of everyone there.

I got in a little tourism while I was in Atlanta, which, for the record, is the least pleasant city I have ever been in. New Yorkers, if you want to know what Atlanta is like, imagine if every street in Manhattan were I-95. Now imagine the entire city is like the east side from 23rd to 50th street, but with 5 out of every 6 businesses removed from the street and replaced with parking or windowless concrete walls. Now imagine it's a zombie apocalypse, and you can cover the whole distance from 23rd to 50th and encounter only 4 people. Basically, imagine white plains at night, as an entire city.

BUT, their aquarium has whale sharks, and that redeems their entire shitty awful nightmare city:

I also went to the Coke museum, which is sort of sad but also sort of cool. They have a room where you can drink Coca Cola products from all over the world, and these were my favorites:

Notably absent was Mexican Coke, which I'm sure they didn't include because if they did nobody would drink the shitty American Coke.

SCAD did me one last great favor, by flying me out to Austin, where I was able to help my girlfriend move out of her apartment and to New York city. That was one of the most important weeks of my life, and it gains importance the farther I go into this relationship. I'll always be grateful to them for making that possible for me. My special thanks go out to Shawn Crystal and Chris Schweizer, who made this happen and treated me so very, very well. Blessings be upon you and your families.

I don't know what next week's lesson will be yet! We shall see...

2010-01-11T00:20:00.007-05:00

This week: Brush discussion, and turning Patton into the Moon.

First off, for all those concerned, my fingers have healed creepily well, to the point where I have fingerprints back except on a very tiny bit on my thumb, and they're growing in there too. If you want to see what they looked like after one week, click here. Do NOT click if you're squeamish at all. My thumb, which got the deepest cut, is still a tad tender, but they're both up and running with honest-to-God skin. The skin was really dry until the last few days, because my new sebaceous glands hadn't grown in yet. Now I can sweat and produce oil, so it doesn't look like I have crazy localized eczema.

So, there was a lot of conversation about last week's topic and my retraction of my endorsement of Rosemary and co's brushes, and I'd like to discuss and clarify a few things about that, while also rolling in a couple items that Chris Schweise r gave me to review when I was at SCAD Atlanta.

In the comments Kiel provided a link to a fantastic primer/comparison on five different name brand brushes on artist Mike Crowell's site. Mike has, without reservation, the worst artist web page I have ever seen in my life, which is saying a lot, which makes it all the more bizarre that this amazing tutorial is just sitting there amongst the 4 other pages of his site, which include a home page consisting almost solely of a terrible photo of him, an art page with 2 pages of art, a page with nothing but am email address, and a links page. His brush lesson is as good as the rest of the site is bafflingly poor, and I learned some new things from it. It also serves as a great primer for the point I want to make, which is about consistency and/versus quality.

Mike's brush page confirms yet again what I and many others have always said- they don't do it often, but when they do, Windsor and Newton makes the best brushes in the world. But if you just broke/lost/ruined your brush and you need one NOW for a project, you can't afford to go to 3 different stores and try every brush looking for one that works, and possibly not even find one. (This has happened to me- twice.) Everyone I know who doesn't use Windsor and Newton either never used a great one and abandoned them early, or used them for years until the quality control dropped so low they got frustrated and jumped ship. But the fact is, there are people out there still using 20 year old W&N brushes. I've used my #3 like I hated it for 6 years now and it's still as good as new. Windsor and Newton , a GOOD Windor and Newton, is a mythical beast, the brush that all other brushes aspire to be. As a brand, they suck and are FLAKY inconsistent.

Raphael is the brand most people jump ship to, and with good reason. You still need to test them, but their QC is much better than W&N. You can actually find a working Raphael brush in one store stocked with them almost every time. If you ordered five I'd give you great odds more than one would work. And their best brushes are just a hair under a good W&N, which is like being a shade slower than the Millennium Falcon but not breaking down nearly as much.

The reason I was so excited about Rosemary was not that they were amazing quality brushes- they're not. They are perfectly effective, however. A good Rosemary brush is like what I'd picture a solid military issue brush to be like- it lacks finesse, but it's solidly built and in skilled hands will get the job done. Rosemary brushes won't hold as much ink and have less spring than better brushes, but because every single one I and everyone else ordered was a perfect example, I recommended them because she was the most consistent. Rosemary brushes were, I thought, the first brushes I'd ever seen where you could order ONE brush and get a working brush every time, guaranteed.

But now I semi-frequently have reports sent to me of people ordering brushes from her that are a little off. Now, sure, she has a policy that she'll replace anything you're not satisfied with, but the point was, she was a slightly lower quality but still good brush that I was recommending because of their insane consistency. So if she lacks the consistency, and she doesn't have any edge on quality, why the hell not just tell you to rummage through the art store for Raphaels?

So it is on that basis that I retract my endorsement. I say put your effort and money into a higher quality brush. You really do get what you pay for with brushes.

Mike's brush page has a section towards the bottom about identifying quality brushes that's more specific and informative than anything I've ever posted, so you should read that, maybe even print it out and take it with you when shopping. He inspects every bristle, and if you've ever used a brush you know that's not fanatical- one splayed hair will ruin a brush. It's like a grain of sand in a Swiss army knife.

According to Mike Raphael and Scharff brushes are essentially identical in constriction and quality control, so if you need to dash out to buy one they'd both be good choices. I have never heard of ANYONE being disappointed with either. However, because mora brands means more likely hood you'll be able to find a brush if you need to find one fast, allow me to toss in a brand that's only become recently available in America, but which seems to be in growing demand amongst the students at SCAD's Atlanta campus: the Escoda, made in Tajmir, Spain.

Here you can see the #2 Tajmir on top, over my trusty #3 W&N, and my #2 Rosemary. Click to see the image larger.
I wish I had a #2 Windsor to show you how the belly's compare better, but you can see that the Escoda has a better belly than the Rosemary, though not as much as the W&N.
A simple line test showed that indeed, the Escoda holds far more ink than the Rosemary. I wish I could compare it to other brands, but I don't have any. It feels to me slightly wispier but just as springy as the Raphaels I've tried. It's a good brush and several SCAD Atlanta students and faculty seem to just love them. Chris claims the quality control is very good on them. Look for them if you're ever out brush hunting. If nothing else, it's another good option that increases your chances of coming back home with a tool you can draw with. While I was there Chris also gave me a bottle of a new Japanese ink I'd never seen nor heard of that's carried in a local art supply store that caters to the cartooning students. It's called Holbein ink. According to their company profile they started in 1900 a a Japanese company producing "European" artist materials (They do not elaborate), which presumably explains why they chose a German name. Like everything I've ever bought from Japan, the ink bottle comes in nifty, crazy sturdy plastic packaging that you don't have to destroy to open.

Here you can see the Holbein logo in a calligraphic font, with an Iron cross over it, because I guess that's what the Japanese thought people would think was German at the time.
As usual, I LOVE Japanese infographics.
The ink is one of the best I've ever tried, continuing Japan's total dominance in modern ink making. It's matte and deeply black, sort of like Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Hi Carb ink. I like this ink a little better. If you can get ahold of it, definitely try it. My understanding is that it comes in two thicknesses, this one, and another that is very thick and actually needs dilution before use.

Changing subjects, remember how I said you'd crap yourselves when you saw what was delaying me? It was Two large poster projects, one of which I can't show you just yet, but the other of which is finished, and I'll share it's making with you below.

First off, some of you may recall a ways back last year when Patton Oswalt had me do this poster for a show of his:

Well, he liked that one so much had asked me to design the postcard for another show.

I needed a fairly simple design that would read easily at a small size, and something that would force people to look at it, which as every artist knows means face, eyes, hands, boobs or any nudity. Patton has a fantastically expresive and distinctive face (He's one of the comedians who I think almost all of his fans know what he looks like), so I decided to go with his face. Plus, I already knew how to draw him, so that would save time.

You can now follow along with my process by matching the numbered paragraphs to their matching numbered picture:

1: This was my first doodle of what would turn out to e the final composition, although I did more than 30 other drawings to make sure, as is usual with me on illustrations. Illustrations aren't as intuitive for me as comics, and require a lot of planning. I throw away a lot of work doing illustrations. Obviously, the concept is to have his head be the moon from "La Voyage Dans La Lune." The twist is that the rocket in his eye is actually the LCross rocket stage that was launched at the moon to look for water. It took me 3 hours to find 6 good, accurate images of this goddamned thing:
The probe is the gold thing on the top.

2: This was a computer sketch I did to establish the basic lettering shapes in the title, which was to be hand-lettered, and of the overall image. I like using digital when I have to do a lot of drafts to figure out black balance but not necessarily a lot of redrawing.
3: I penciled his face and then found myself stuck for about 2 days as to how the hell to make him look like his head was the moon without making him look like he had a terrible skin condition. Nothing was working. I got really frustrated with the delay when Patton wrote me asking if it was done so he could post it for New Years and I had to tell him no.

4: Finally, I figured it out and successfully tested it it on the computer: instead of making his head the moon, I'd do what the original filmmakers had done- apply the moon like a mast around his head, with his head sliiiiiightly pushing out from the moon, so you can still barely still see his original jaw line, but then stretching his hairline and ears out to the edges of the moon. It worked perfectly- still recognizably Patton, but looking like the moon from the film.

5: Next came the pencils, for the drawing, border, and hand lettering.

6: Then came the inked lettering, which you see me holding here for scale:

Hand lettering is generally drawn large when a very smooth finished product is needed; reduction eliminates any mistakes. I also added in the rest of the lettering, a tedious process, because I wasn't using a computer font, but rather an old font that I'd scanned in and modified slightly. I had to place each and every letter by hand.

My girlfriend swooped in and gave me some help with this- she is absolutely excellent at spacing type, and her adjustments made all the difference in the world.

I emailed Patton about whether his current hairstyle matched the one I used in this drawing, but he never wrote back. As it turned out I didn't need him for that one, because that very night he was on the Tonight show, and I was able to see his hair there and adjust my drawing accordingly. (I ended up making is a mishmosh of about 4 similar hairstyles like his current one, figuring it would be more recognizable to average them.)

I had an incredibly odd moment inking the drawing. I was getting fristrated drawing the Lcross booster and I decided to move in to his face for a bit to relax (I like to eat my veggies before my meat, so to speak), and as soon as I started inking his eyebrows Patton called in live to the Best Show on WFMU, which I was listening to, so suddenly I was getting Patton through the eyes and in the ears at the same time. My night suddenly became a Russian Nesting doll of Patton. I tried emailing him to see if I could get him to talk about how I was listening to him and drawing him at the same time while he was still on the air, but he didn't get it till after. It was worth a shot.

It had been awhile since I inked anything, and in my rustiness I over-inked the left side of Patton's face, requiring me to lightbox that side and re-ink it, as you can see here: 7: I drew the border with a thick bamboo skewer and then inverted the image in photoshop.

8: And voila, the finished product, which you can see better below: (Click to enlarge)
I'm pretty damned proud of it. It's by far my best lettering job, and I love the composition.

I look forward to when I can show you the other poster I've been working on. It's still in development right now.

Finally, I thought you all might like this funny shot of me looking out of the eye window in my camera mask, which allows me to look at things for real and not just through the camera's rear screen. Next week: My visit to SCAD

2010-01-03T23:14:00.002-05:00

You're all totally gonna crap yourselves when you see what's been holding me up this week. (not counting quality Holiday time with the Girlfriend.)

2009-12-16T01:05:00.004-05:00

My friend and colleague Liz Baillie does a fantastic, weekly updating webcomic called Freewheel. It's about a girl who strikes out on her own as a modern hobo on an important mission. I've read more of the comic than Liz has posted, and I can tell you that as good as it is now, it gets better.

A page from Freewheel:

For those of you who don't like reading comics online, Liz is raising the cash to print Freewheel, and she's put together a hobo-themed fundraiser with various levels of giving, with names like "can opener," "matches," and the best and highest level, "mayor of Hobotown". Each level comes with it's own special benefits, just like a PBS fundraiser.

Won't you head on over and make her hobo dreams come true?

2009-12-13T22:02:00.010-05:00

This week: THE UNIVERSE AVENGES ITSELF ON ME FOR MY LACK OF ENTRIES.

Hi folks,

Loads of content not generated by me this week, which is awesome, since typing is slightly awkward since I lopped the tips of my thumb and index finger off my left (thankfully non-dominant) hand. First time in what's been probably over 11 years straight of multiple-times daily knife use that I've cut myself with a knife I was using. And though there were extenuating circumstances, the fact is that knives are like wild animals- if one bites you, it's your fault. Ironically, it actually happened maybe two minutes tops after I was telling my girlfriend about the silly things I'd seen people do in knife safety training classes.

Anyway, getting on with it:

Here's a video of Erika Moen, Dylan Meconis, and Bill Mudron talking about the art and life issues of being a cartoonist. It is thick with insight and blue humor, my favorite combination. The title of the video will give you a pretty good idea if their humor is for you.

Here's a fantastic essay by Evan Dorkin about the issue of health insurance, specifically as it relates to cartoonists, and even more specifically as it relates to cartoonists living in NYC. Bonus for you NYC people: It lists specific resources that his wife spent a lot of time tracking down, and gives tips on how to best go about contacting them. Bonus bonus: It includes a link to a video interview by Time with my friend Julia Wertz.

Finally, I'll conclude with some real tool talk:

Comic Tools reader Reynold Kissling purchased some Rosemary brushes recently (remember my article about them?) and compared them to his trusty Winsor and Newton, and I'm sad to say that they really came out lacking. Perhaps as she's had to fill more orders her quality control has gone down, but in any event the reason I recommended them was that you could order them sight unseen and TRUST that they'd be great. It seems that this is no longer the case, and I therefore no longer recommend getting them, if buying them is going to be the same crapshoot every other brand is. Better to go to the store and actually try your brushes out. I have reformatted the impeccably thorough, well photographed, and rather Comic Tools-esque report he gave on his livejournal and pasted it below. His website is here. His book "Kingwood Himself" can be read in its entirety over at Top Shelf's webcomics page, Top Shelf 2.0, and he will be selling his new book "Pale Blue Dot" at the Stumptown Comics Fest next year. I thank him for bringing this issue to the attention of Comic Tools readers.

Rosemary & Co. Brushes Review
I've been inking predominantly with brushes now for several years, and have become....somewhat discretionary in my tastes (some would say obsessive). My number one tool, my excalibur if you will, has always been the Winsor & Newton Series 7 Kolinsky brush, size #2. Simply put, the brush is perfect. It has a huge variety of line weights, has excellent snap, and holds a preposterous amount of ink for its size. They say the tool doesn't make the man, but when it comes to inking, you NEED a tool that will give you complete control over your linemaking, and the Winsor & Newton #2 does the job. So what's the problem? Well, as I'm sure most of you know, Winsor & Newton's brushes have become steadily less reliable over the last few years. A W&N brush is expensive, and if the bristles are even just a little bit out of alignment, then the whole brush is worthless and you've just wasted your hard-earned money. Three out of the last four W&N brushes I bought have been duds (and I do the water-test at the store before I buy them). I'm sick of throwing away my money for worthless brushes, and for the past few months I've been searching for a comparable alternative. Enter Rosemary & Company. I heard about them from the blog Comic Tools (run by a guy even more obsessively anal than me), and after reading rave review after rave review, I took the plunge and ordered a Series 33 #2 and #0. Suffice to say, my expectations were high. They arrived yesterday, and I've had a good chance to test them out.

I decided to compare them side by side with my Winsor & Newton:

The first thing I noticed was that the Rosemary #2 is much thinner than the W&N #2. More on that later. Then I decided to compare the brushes dry, to see how the bristles fan out when not held together by moisture:

This was the first sign of trouble. With a brand new brush, you expect the bristles to fan out pretty evenly. Here you can see that on the Rosemary brushes several bristles are sticking out haphazardly, pointing in every direction. Here is a closeup of each brush's bristles, starting with the W&N #2:

At this point, I want to mention that my Winsor & Newton brush is over a year old. I've beat that thing to hell, leaving dried ink in the ferrule and dragging it across harsh paper, and yet its bristles are still more uniform than the brand new Rosemary brushes. You can plainly see that many of the bristles in the Rosemary brushes are not aligned. So how were they to ink with? Well, mostly it was frustrating. The #2 couldn't get a fine point, it didn't snap very well, and it did not retain very much ink. This is where its size comes in. As I mentioned earlier, the belly of the Rosemary #2 brush is much thinner than the belly of the W&N. The belly of a brush holds ink and helps provide the snap that is so crucial to making crisp lines. Even more frustrating was despite the fact that the Rosemary brush was thinner, it could not make thin lines like the W&N can. I found that I had to resort to using the #0 to make the same lines my W&N can easily handle by itself. Also, the brushes just felt weak. I had to apply more downward force to get variety out of the lines, and in those instances the entire brush bent with the curve all the way down to the ferrule, instead of just the tip. And lastly, the Rosemary brushes lost their point extremely easily. If they got the least bit dry or if I tried to take too sharp a corner, the tip would split and fork off, breaking the single line into two. Here's a portion of the panel I inked with the Rosemary brushes:

I know it doesn't look like I was experiencing the disaster I just described, but you can rest assured that I was fighting with these brushes the whole way. Last and probably least, the handle of the Rosemary brushes felt inferior to the W&N brush. I took a photo as evidence:

Take a look at the light reflecting off of the handles of each brush. On the left, the reflection coming of the W&N is smooth and regular all the way to the edges. Immediately to the right, the reflection is bumpy and irregular, especially near the edges. These reflections highlight the irregularity of either the wood of the handles or the paint applied to them. This is certainly nitpicking, but it does make a difference. I'd like to think that I am a scientific man, and that you wouldn't be satisfied with me simply describing the problems I had with these brushes, so I thought I would prove them empirically through a series of inking tests:

The first test consisted of me dipping the brushes fully (not to the ferrule of course) and then drawing a straight line continuously until they ran out of ink. As you can see, the W&N ran roughshod over the Rosemary #2, and the #0 could barely hang in there for three lines.

In this test, I simply followed a tight curve in a single stroke with each brush. Now this test probably reveals my weaknesses with inking more than anything else, but you can see that each brush did about the same. I would like to note, however, that the #0 forked out at the end of the line.

This last test is the most revealing. Here, I started a line with each brush at a certain thickness, then tested the limit for how thick and thin a line each could produce. As you can see, the W&N has an extreme capacity for variety of line weight, going from phat with a "ph" to supermodel-thin with no trouble and with me in complete control throughout. The Rosemary #2, however, can't even come close to reaching the same level of thickness, and you can see that the line already starts to break up before I even finish the first fat part. As you can see, I was able to get the Rosemary #2 down to the same thinness as the W&N, but not without losing the line entirely. I obviously am not in control of the brush at this point. The Rosemary #0 obviously can't keep up, and the brush is almost totally dry before I can even get to the second thickness test. The Winsor & Newton runs laps around the Rosemary brushes in this last round. So there you have it. The brand-spanking new Rosemary brushes, which came on the heels of rave reviews and high expectations, couldn't even stand up to an abused ink-clogged year-old Winsor & Newton brush. But really, there are no winners here. As long as Winsor & Newton brushes are going to be so inconsistent, we are going to be left with worthless brushes and empty wallets. The search for a better brush goes on...

2009-12-06T22:37:00.002-05:00

Gah!

I'm sorry guys, I'm not actually all that sick, but I'm finding it really difficult standing at my computer and trying to write. I can talk alright, but I can't seem to string more than a few sentences together without getting all foggy.

I've gotten several questions since I announced I was coming back online, though, so let me address those really quick:

Regarding the scanning tutorials, I'm actually gonna pause those a bit to conduct some further research and do some interviewing. I met this fellow named Nolan Woodward at SCAD Atlanta, and he's a true expert on all this sort of stuff. Everyone has different ways of scanning and processing files, and many of them work, but I'm convinced that his information is the very best and the most technically correct available. So, before I start the tutorials, I want to try all of his methods myself, really learn them so I can convey them to you as clearly as possible. Scanning is a super important issue, because what most cartoonists actually make for a living ISN'T drawings, it's digital files of scanned artwork. Which is WHY lesson one was get an external hard drive. And believe me, no matter what else I write, the day will come when THAT piece of advice turns out to be the best thing I ever told you.

I have the next entry partway constructed in the pipeline, waiting for me to get well, and if I'm up to it tonight I'll post some of the links I've been collecting in the off time for you to chew on till I'm well.

Again, I'm sorry for the delay. If it makes you feel any better this cold ain't too convenient for me either.

And finally, thanks to all of you who sent me very warm whoops of joy that I was back online.

2009-12-06T01:57:00.001-05:00

Finally back up and running. As Reader Brad pointed out, I said on the second that I'd start posting on the third, and today is actually the sixth. The reason is I started to get sick in the middle of an illustration project, and had to turn my energies to that instead. Yesterday my girlfriend came over and made me soup and took care of me, and as much as I love you all and this blog, I actually LOVE her, so she trumps Comic Tools any night. (Thank goodness, too, because I needed the rest.)

So, the post or two will get you caught up on what I've been up to in my absence.

Tomorrow- Part 1: SCAD Atlanta students will destroy us all.

2009-12-02T23:39:00.001-05:00

I'll start in tomorrow, folks, I've just blasted my mind out drawing a bunch of little bikes for an illustration job, and I have yet more to do tonight. I'll share the results when I can.

2009-11-30T10:48:00.001-05:00

Coming back online this week. Each day I'll post a little about what I've been up to, culminating in a return to regular posting this weekend.

2009-10-13T15:51:00.003-04:00

Hi there Comic Tools readers,

my apologies for not posting this week. I'm spending the time I'd usually use making an entry to get my lesson and materials arranged for my speaking event at the Savannah College of Art and Design Atlanta campus (click poster to make it bigger):

The 23rd will just be an introductory day to talk about myself and my (embarrassingly short) career. The 24th will be a workshop on habits and basic tool use, and the 25th will be a workshop on anatomy and perspective for the cartoonist. Plan accordingly.

You can find out about my fellow speaker, who unlike myself has an actual career, here at his website.

2009-10-04T03:58:00.003-04:00

Scanning Series Part 1: Get an external hard drive.

No, really, if you don't have one, go get one right now. Don't even think of reading next week's entry or any of the rest in the series until you've gotten one.

You'll thank me later, believe me. I have friends who got their external hard drive days before a catastrophic computer failure that would have lost years of work they would have had no way of getting back. I also have friends who lost months of work forever because they didn't have one, or didn't use it.

If you can afford it, buy 2, or use a web-based service on top of the external. External hard drives corrupt and fail too. If you don't have a way to protect your files, you have no business scanning them.

Go. I'd better not see you back here until you have one.

Oh, and check out this nifty little suitcase I bought on the street to hold my originals while traveling! Isn't it just darling? I have some travel announcements forthcoming about my speaking at SCAD's Atlanta campus in late October. My first Comic Tools speaking gig! Woo!

2009-09-28T00:44:00.001-04:00

Some dickweed from this inkjet refill company spammed the comments. Take note and take your business elsewhere.

2009-09-27T22:32:00.009-04:00

This week: Replacing a crappy panel

Sometimes you just don't hit it out of the park. Sometimes, you lose your balance swinging your bat into thin air and fall over.

When you realize you've just inked a crappy comic panel, and it's not just a matter of a few corrections, it's that the whole thing needs to go, and you can't sacrifice any of the work around it by starting a new page, you have several options, depending on what tools you have at your disposal, and preferences you may have about your original art.

Example crappy comic panel:

If you had a computer, you could just re-draw the panel by hand, scan it in, and change it out, or even re-draw it digitally if you liked. If you didn't, you could just paste a piece of illustration board over it and draw on that. Both work great and are super-easy. But let's say you're very anal about your originals, or you want the original art to look pristine because you're going to sell it, or give it to someone as a present. Although I'm slowly moving out of it, it used to be very important to me that my art look in person exactly like it does in reproduction. I still find it unsatisfying not to, a little bit. So I developed this technique, which as far as I know I invented, for replacing a panel in such a way that's so seamless you can't tell a repair has been made in the page from the front, even looking closely.

I should mention, this technique doesn't really work if your panel borders aren't straight.

So, first, you take a thin pointy thing, like a really thin pin, or in this case, an antique drafting compass point:
You poke a hole at exactly the inside of the termination of the border lines:Then tape a piece of illustration board (the exact same as you're using) over the offending panel, making sure it's a little larger than the panel you want to replace:

If you turn it over you can see the holes in the back of the original:
Now you should be looking at a setup like in Fig.1. (click to enlarge, I'll explain the rest of the Figures below.)

Fig. 2: Then, cut from hole to hole, being very careful to line up your cut EXACTLY with the holes and being very careful with the corners, as demonstrated in the Cutting Technique post last week. The tip of your cutting tool should start and end in the pinholes.

Fig. 3: flip everything over and carefully extract the newly cut replacement square, being very careful of it's delicate edges. Now clear out the old panel, and lower the new panel into place.

Fig 4: You should have a nice, tight fit, because the way we stacked the paper means that the widest paper left by the wedge of the blade as it came through is now the front of our replacement sheet, and the widest part of the original sheet left by the blade's edge is also facing up. If you look at Fig. 2 again, you'll see that those two edges are almost perfectly even. In fact, the'll often meet with just a little puckering, due to the tightness of the fit. If you do this right you can hold the joined edges up to a bright lamp and not see any light through the cut.

Fig. 5: Finally, you tape the back seam or as I prefer, seal it with a sheet of thin cotton marker paper backed with archival adhesive film. Then buff the edge with a bone folder to flatten any puckering, making the cut edge look like an uninterrupted sheet of paper, and forming a smooth surface you can actually ink over. That's right, you can INK OVER the cut and it won't bleed into it, it's so tight. It feels exactly like drawing on a new sheet of paper, which no correction fluid or patch could ever do.

If you're totally accurate, the seam will lie on the panel border inside edge, and you'll never be able to find it without a microscope:

I actually messed up a border, however, which is good, because you can see what it looks like on open paper:
I marked up the edges of the new panel with HARD pen strokes, to show how it won't bleed, even in the exposed part of the join:

It feels like drawing on a brand new sheet of paper. Unless someone looks at the back, they'll never know the difference.

The back, taped:

(Not my preferred method, but it works. Just make sure what you use is archival.)

Here's the excised panel sitting next to it's replacement:
Next week, I kick off a multi-part series about scanning technique. This and my anatomy tutorial are gonna be the big ones of this whole endeavor.

2009-09-20T14:56:00.003-04:00

Linky links:

Guy Davis pencils are always good. The coolest part is he hasn't inked these yet. But he'll post them when he does. And so will I. Nick Bertozzi was made to be a teacher, and you can tell because when he's interviewed, just talking how he normally talks he's teaching left and right. Go read this thing.

Jillian Tamaki process shots. This woman throws out more good ideas in a week than I have in a year.

Evidently it's kind of a thing now for people to build their own Cintiq-style monitor tablet. No, really. Links:

Here

Here

And a video of such a creature in action:

I know, right?

2009-09-20T11:30:00.012-04:00

This week : Cutting Technique

My High school, Hebron academy, located in rural Maine, was and is the only private school with a dedicated Outdoor education program. I spent seven seasons in the program. The first month was always the same, an intensive month of wilderness first aid training. Once we knew how to handle any emergency that might happen, we headed out to the outdoor workshop area to start learning our tools, and the first thing we learned was knife safety. Everything in knife safety is all about leaning how to use your knife in a way that will prevent harm to you and others. Rules about always cutting away from yourself, how to grip a knife and how to walk with it are designed so that if you slip, fall, or make some other mistake the knife's working end won't wind up in your fingers or torso.

When I went to college my friend Jordan, an accomplished graphic designer, taught me everything I know about cutting art materials. Cutting for art creates a whole new set of demands- not only must you not cut yourself, you mustn't damage what you're working on, either. Mistakes of less than the width of a pencil line can totally ruin some projects. Mistakes can be expensive, depending on the material you're cutting. If you make a mistake while trimming a book, you've ruined a copy of that book. Jordan taught me how to cut absolutely straight lines with a minimum of accidents, and it's one of the hand skills that's served me best throughout the years after.

The modern cartoonist has all sorts of things they might need to cut. You may cut down your own paper, and you need to be able to measure accurate right angles off the edges and run it through a printer without jamming. You might be fixing a badly drawn panel by cutting it out and replacing it with new paper. (I'll teach you that next week.) You might have to face-trim a stack of books by hand for a convention. You might need to trim matte board for a gallery show, or you might be making a sketchbook for yourself. Good cutting technique is essential to all of these tasks.

I'll start off by pointing out the most common mistake: lining up the cut by lining the ruler edge up over the line, and then lining up the cutting tool tip with the edge of the ruler:

This a recipe for an inaccurate cut. The actual tip of your cutting tool isn't exactly aligned with the side of the cutting tool, so to get the tip to line up with the ruler edge you have to angle the cutting tool at the grind angle of the cutting edge, like you see above. Even if you manage to somehow keep the blade in that position for an entire cut, you'll be creating torsion forces on the blade and on the paper, causing ragged edges, increased edge dulling and blade breakage, and increasing the likelyhood you'll catch on a slightly denser patch of paper and whong off in a bad direction because of all the force you're applying dragging a crooked blade through the material.

But chances are you won't keep that angle consistent. You'll feel all the stress you're causing and change your angle as you go. You may even follow the ruler edge but angle out the other way, like so:
What you need to do instead is place the side of your cutting tool flush against the side of the ruler, and see how far the tip is from the side, and then put the ruler that far away from your lines. That way, the tip will fall exactly on the line with the side of your tool butting against the ruler as a guide, and the cutting edge looking straight back at the line it's about to cut like a laser beam. (By the way, this is exactly the technique you should use for making accurate pencil lines- not lining the tip up with the edge, but instead moving the ruler so that the sides touch the ruler and the tip touches the line. Ever draw a pencil line with a ruler it found out it wasn't straight? You didn't do this.)
It's important to stay vertical, in case you have to stop the cut for some reason and resume it again. If yyou change angles at all, this will happen:

The change in angle means you'll start cutting a totally different path, possibly cutting off too much or too little material. Check to make sure you're keeping the blade square with the ruler on every axis, and your cuts will be consistent every single time. No more going back for a second pass and peeling off a thin curl of paper because it wasn't quite lined up with the last cut.

If you click on the photo below to enlarge it, you'll see the terrible gap left by a cut whwre the blade changed angles as it went. You can't measure off of it, and you can't use it for construction, because it won't marry with another edge. If you cut too much off this edge instead of too little you'd have to throw it away or toss it in the scrap pile, at your cost.

Contrast it to the edge cut the right way, which fits pretty snugly. (There are a very few small gaps, because I was wearing my face rig and it was distracting my cutting.) By the way, I really prefer the NT cutter I reviewed for making straight cuts. The wider blade makes it easier to follow the ruler, and the ergonomics of the handle better accommodate long, straight cuts.

Here you can see it leaves an edge so gapless it looks like I put the paper under the ruler instead of next to it:If you draw a line you want to cut with a pencil you can't just keep the ruler in the same spot and make the cut. Why? Because the distance between the sides and tip of your pencil is probably pretty different that that of your cutting tool. You can see how far off it is for me:

You need to do the alignment first for your pencil, and then again for your cutting tool. Here we are all readjusted nice and flush:
Now let's talk about cutting a corner. Sometimes you can keep cutting past the corner because you're going to throw away the excess anyway- but sometimes you need that corner to stop neatly right at the exact point where the lines meet.

In that case, you need to make 2 cuts starting in that point and cutting away. CAREFULLY start by putting the tip exactly on the point and cutting yourself a short slice, making sure you never cut past the point. Once you have a nice, safe cut back from the delicate point, you can proceed as usual. on that side. Then do the same for the other side.
While doing this part of the demo I actually made a mistake and didn't tip-check the line like I should have trusting my eyeballing, and look how far off I was.:
I made the rest of the cut correctly to show how bad a mistake this was. If this was a project meant for display it would have been ruined because of my carelessness. Always, ALWAYS check to make sure the tip of your tool is on the line, at both ends of the line. Actually touch the tool down and check. If you think that little extra time is frustrating, try ruining a tedious project and having to start all over.
Ergonomics is an important consideration in making accurate cuts, especially long ones. You should never cut directly in front of you, because as you draw your hand back your wrist will be put into a terrible position:
What you want is for your wrist to be able to stay in the same position through the entire cut. You can cut down on the side of your cutting hand, like so:
Or you can cut at an angle, pulling down towards the side of your cutting hand, like so:
Either one will allow you to move comfortably. If your light is blocked by your hands in either of these positions, move the light if you can.

Now let's talk about cutting stacks of paper, like when performing a face trim on a minicomic. Never is is as important as with this task that you maintain the same square angle with the blade, as you will be making many cuts, all of which need to be the same.

The temptation when cutting a stack of sheets (or thick material like foamcore) is to get through it as fast as possible with hard, deep cuts. In knife training you learn that the more force you apply, the more risk of accidental damage to yourself, and with art cutting more force means more chance of accidental damage to what you're working on. (and yourself.) What you want to do is make your cuts with fairly low pressure, and work on keeping them as straight and accurate as you can. Imagine a laser slowly eating through the hull of a very thick spaceship, making one pass, then another, then another, forming a clean edge.

Inaccurate cuts will lead to curved, frayed edges like this:

Here's a copy of my comic Out Of Water, face trimmed properly. See how all the pages are straight and flush? (For those of you wondering what face trimming is: When you fold a stack of paper into a book, the center sheets bulge out and make it very hard to flip through, plus it looks ratty. Face trimming is cutting off that excess.)
The final consideration when cutting is what side to place the ruler on. Usually you have a side with stuff you want to keep and stuff you're trimming off.
Knife safety assumes that accidents will happen, and they do, even to very experienced people. Knife safety therefore works to minimize the damage of an accident. You can use your ruler to minimize the chance of damage to the stuff you want when you cut by physically protecting it should the ruler veer off for any reason. Always place your ruler over the stuff you want to keep, like so: This will prevent this from happening:

Now, sometimes you want the stuff on both sides of a cut, and in that case you'd just better follow all my other advice really carefully and hope for the best.

Next week, I'll demonstrate a technique I invented for replacing panels that's so seamless it's almost impossible for someone to tell where the original was cut, unless they know what to look for.

2009-09-15T10:48:00.003-04:00

Hello Comic Tools readers,

Whooo boy. I figured an entry about cutting technique would be a layup, and I did NOT allow myself enough time last week to properly think the lesson through and plan out the visuals. I've got all the photography done, but I am just crashing right now, so I'm gonna hop up early tomorrow after I night's sleep and pop it out.

That'll learn me, it's always these seemingly simple subjects that are always the hardest to explain. Never underestimate your opponent, even if it's a lesson in hand skills.

2009-09-15T10:04:00.002-04:00

SOPHOMORE SVA STUDENTS TAKE NOTE:

From Jillian Tamaki's blog:

In other news, I've picked up a class at SVA this semester, pinch hitting for an instructor on mat leave (congrats, Lauren!). Sophomore Drawing for Cartoonists. There is still room in the class if you are interested. You will have to contact the dept directly.

I know a fair number of SVA students read this blog. So let me tell you this- my choice of sophomore year drawing teacher ended up being the most important choice of my college career. I went with Scott Harrison, known as "the guy who actually fails people." (SVA is known for letting crap students coast as long as they pay tuition) Scott held our work up to professional level critique, and it was almost half a year before any of the students who could stand to stick with it made a piece that was totally acceptable to him. In that half a year my work, and the work of all my classmates who hung in there, made a quantum leap as he encouraged our good tendencies and smashed our bad habits to dust. By holding us to pro standards, our work became pro level, and every single person who hung in with his class got work after graduation.

Jillian is not only a true pro, a deadline hero and a brilliant cartoonist, she's fantastic at explaining process and critiquing what works and what doesn't, as anyone who follows this blog knows from all the times I've linked to her posts. If you possibly can, take her class. It's an opportunity of a lifetime.

2009-09-04T16:36:00.001-04:00

This week: The best cutter in the world

I'm kind of an asshole, by natural tendency. I like to be right too much, and my brain will still instantly start debating anything anyone says to it. "The sky is blue." "Hrmm, I dunno, that looks like more of a Robin's egg than a pure spectrum blue." Over time I have gotten better at keeping these thoughts on the non-fucking annoying side of my mouth. Being into things like comics and outdoor gear and knives has actually done a lot to mitigate some of my worst tendencies, because when it comes to things like brands of ink, tent designs, and blade shapes, it's all about individual preference. It's very rare in my fields of interest that you can say "this is the best there is, and everything else is crap." Usually the closest you can come is saying that for a specific application, and given certain preferences, a certain thing would be the most likely favored. You certainly wouldn't want a wharncliffe style blade for a task better suited to a clip point, but which exact clip point you might want is as personal as your fingerprints. As I've matured, I've been able to take these principles from my own interests and apply them to things like music and film tastes (infamous sticking points for nerds where we lose all sense of humor about what we're talking about and become really repulsive), and it's made me, incrementally, a better person to be around.

Certainty usually only comes when something is clearly inferior for anyone's uses- pink erasers, leaky tents and knives whose locking mechanisms break and close on your fingers, say. It's rare that you can ever say "this is the best of this thing, everything else is inferior, tastes and preference be damned."

Well, the asshole in me is filled with glee to be able to tell you all that this cutter is the best you can buy- better than any other brand, better than any other design by the same company, with absolutely no contest. Thanks to a friend of mine I was able to obtain one at half price, and it arrived today. Here it is, new in it's package:

Here's a closeup of the label: It's made by the Japanese, who have evidently taken their level of craft making Samurai swords and applied it to making box cutters.

My pure joy with this thing starts at the box. The instructions are clear and the graphics are not only clear, but well laid-out and very attractively designed:

And like all Japanese packaging I've ever encountered, it's a jealousy-inducing combination of incredibly tough and easy to open. The plastic bubble holding this thing in is one of the most solid plastics I've ever encountered in this role, but they don't glue it to the cardboard, making it impossible to open. Instead, they have one staple at the bottom, and once you break that you simply slide the totally intact information card (which is important because it's so useful and informative) up and out of the plastic. You could slide it down and re-staple it and it could be as solid as when you bought it.

Here it is out of the box. The central shaft is heavy gauge stainless steel. The grey painted metal surrounding it and making up the handle? CAST ALUMINUM. Except for the two heavy-duty red plastic parts you see this whole thing is made of solid metal. The clever ribbing helps you maintain a comfortable grip AND keeps it feeling light despite the tough construction. From above you an see how thick and hand-filling that handle is. From here you can also see one of the knife's best features, which is the forward-mounted locking screw.
What's the big deal with that? Well, first of all, having a locking screw at all is very important if you're going to use the blade for cutting anything that may bind around the blade and pull it backwards of forwards, like very heavy cardboard, thick foam core, matte board, wood, etc. Pretty much everyone puts the locking screw here on the side:
Oh, great, so the mechanism responsible for holding my blade steady so I don't slip and find out what my finger bones look like is right where I'm holding the fucking knife, so I'll be sure to rub back and forth on it while I make aggressive cuts. What a great way to ensure that it has a greater chance of failing at the times my risk of serious injury is highest!

On top of that, this makes the knife a two-handed knife, because you can't really lock the blade with the same hand you're holding it with, at least not without awkwardly and dangerously shifting your grip.

Now look at the NT cutter when you're holding it:
That locking screw is RIGHT IN FRONT of where your thumb will naturally rest when cutting. All you have to do is reach half an inch forward and you can lock or unlock your blade TIGHTLY. When that screw is tightened that blade may as well be welded in. The screw has great, sharp metal texturing so you can get really good purchase on it and tighten that screw with little effort and no slipping. AND they even had the foresight to engrave (!) an arrow turning in the direction it locks, with the word lock in the center.

In this photo from the front you can see that the cast aluminum runs not only outside but inside the knife as well. This thing is basically a piece of metal- you'd need the Mythbusters to damage it in any way.

The blades are snap-off, but they're probably NOT what you're used to in snap off blades. The Osaka-based company that makes the cutter whose side-mounted locking wheel I just trashed, makes great blades, as does every Japanese utility blade manufacturer I'm aware of. As far as I can tell they're all based in Osaka, too. From my knife interests I know that Japanese steel is of especially high quality and sought out around the world, but only recently did I become aware that even in the world of snap off knives for utility blades, the different companies are in a pitched arms race, all producing roughly identical blades of incredible quality, all of which seem like Elf steel when compared to the crap X-acto uses. You almost jump in the air when you cut something with one of these for the first time.

I used to think a new X-acto blade was the sharpest anything could get, until I learned how to sharpen my own knives. Nowdays my pocket knife is sharper than a new X-acto blade. The Japanese blades are sharper than anything I could possibly produce by hand. You have to push and X-acto blade to make it cut. These Japanese blades are like a gopher straining on a leash- you merely touch the surface of something- paper, cardboard, anything- and they seem to want to burrow in, as if they were pulling themselves forward.

Now, you're thinking, great, they're sharp, but aren't snap off blades weak? Usually, yes. But with these Japanese snap-offs aren't designed to be broken by hand. You need pliers, or the conveniently included blade snapper:
I broke one off once accidentally, while batoning wood, which means I push-cut and then twisted the blade hard. Aside from that, these aren't going to break until you decide to break them. And then they break cleanly- I've used snap-off blades that left ragged edges before.

The blade changing system is extremely easy to use. You push the red button one way and then you pull the blade magazine out. The blades are held securely in place and won't spill out at you. You can load 6 blades at once. The knife comes pre-loaded with 2 blades.
As good as they are, I don't even recommend these blades, because they make something even BETTER:
Here's a description of what you're looking at: "UltraMax® ultra-sharp premium heavy-duty snap-off black blades, exclusively designed for maximum cutting performance, are ideal for applications where superior sharpness is required. These blades made from high quality carbon tool steel are developed using a special double honing process for extreme sharpness and are 25% sharper than our Heavy-Duty LB blades. "

I have used these before and I can vouch for these being almost science-fiction sharp. These blades do not just adequately cut things like PVC pipe, leather, heavy rubber, and hard wood- they seem to want to burrow through to the other side of these materials on contact. And their edge lasts really, really long. Once you stuff these blades into an NT cutter (I recommend these instead of NT's blades because they're significantly easier to find in the U.S. and basically identical) you basically have a short lightsaber in your hand.

While photographing for this review I had the idea to compare the NT cutter to an X-acto knife, thinking that I'd demonstrate that no tool is totally perfect, and that the NT's durability and versatility in being able to cut everything from drywall to paper meant some sacrifice in dexterity. What I ended up proving was that X-acto blades suck a lot worse than I ever imagined.

I started off with a task I was sure the NT wouldn't perform nearly as well as the X-acto, tight, curved cutting. I drew some tight, hard-to-follow curves, like this:

And then I followed them with both blades. I noticed that precision-gripping the NT was actually very easy, much moreso than I'd have thought: And the results surprised me.

The X-acto did take the tight curves slightly more smoothly. In a super-tight turn the NT cutter will bend the paper slightly, unless you pick up the blade partway through. (I did these cuts without picking up the blade.) However, the NT praxtically burrowed through my paper into the self-healing board below, and with no pressure it cut all the way through. My X-acto cuts, while very slightly smoother, did not make it through everywhere, and I'd have had to make about five small additional re-cuts to free the flap, as you can see below:

Then I decided to try my most common X-acto task, cutting a bunch of pages flush.

It took me 20 cuts to make it through these pages, and even using a metal ruler as a guide the X-acto's tendency to divert and flex left a very slight curve in the cut. (I'll grant that I wasn't using my best cutting technique, though . I'll post a tutorial on cutting technique next week. ) Whenever I use an X-acto hard like this, my hand always hurts in these places:

Not only did the NT cutter do the job in 11 cuts instead of 20, it's cuts were cleaner, and the NT is so comfortable to hold I didn't feel like I'd cut through a thick stack of paper at all. And the NT edge was straight.
Next I moved to thin foam core. The X-acto (brand new blade) pushed into and bent the foam core card board fa r more than the sharper NT:
And for all that damage, it didn't even cut all the way through on the first pass. (The NT cut is a bit ragged because I did it too hard and too quickly- again, video on good cutting next week. )
My next material was the plastic bubble the knife came in. I made two attempts but could not make the X-acto fully penetrate the plastic, let alone cut forward. I actually pushed harder than was safe- if it had slipped I could have been badly injured. The NT cutter shot through the plastic like a tuna through water.
If you look at the blades in profile, the NT and the X-acto have the same steel thickness, it's just that the X-acto are an inferior steel. (I should note at this point that I'm using special X-life heavy duty X-acto blades, not just regular X-acto blades. Even their "premium" steel sucks.) I break the tip off my X-acto blades within the first five cuts, no matter how lightly I'm cutting. Like I said before, I've only broken a Japanese snap-off blade batoning in wood, which is really something I should have been doing with a chisel. As a neat little bonus I thought I'd try the same tests with my trusty pocket knife:
I maintain a good edge on all my blades, and my pocket knife in particular, since it's main uses are cutting paper, and doing occasional minor surgery on myself or others, such as removing a splinter or callus. On a good day I can do better than the Razor blades you'd buy in a drug store. (Although the Japanese make shaving razors that I couldn't hope to match.)

My knife went through the foam core as well as the NT, just with a little more resistance due to the MUCH thicker blade.

Same deal with the plastic, puncturing it was a little harder with my thicker knife, but once it was in it sailed right through the hard plastic.
Having a good cutter with replaceable blades in indispensable to the artist. Cartoonists are always cutting tough, fiberous materials such as stacks of paper, thick watercolor sheets, minicomics, cardboard boxes, matte board, foam core, and so on. I've had my hand crippled for a full day after trimming minicomics by hand, and that would not have happened if I'd had this tool.

The NT cutter cannot be bought online- at least not by a regular person. But stores can order them. (Edit: Comic Tools Reader Sam found a place! http://www.carpediemstore.com/listCategoriesAndProducts.asp?idCategory=2228 )This is it's entry on the NT website: http://www.ntcutter.co.jp/L-2000RA.htm
It's not a cheap tool, running in the 30 dollar range- but there's nothing quite like it, and this thing is built like a horse shoe. You'll be figuring out which kid to give it to on your death bed. Alhough there are some tasks which an X-acto would be better suited to (By the way, Olfa, the company that makes the high-strenth blades I reccomend for the NT cutter, makes X-acto style blades in much better steel.), the fact that the NT cutter performs those same tasks adequately, while performing many tasks better, and several tasks that the X-acto cannot perform at all, means that the NT barely represents any compromise of function in favor of versatility. If you only have one cutting tool, this should be it.

Next week, proper cutting technique.

2009-08-31T00:45:00.012-04:00

This week: Finally, the printer!

Sorry about the corroded silvering in the hall mirror, it's the only one big enough for me to have taken a photo of me and the title card.

So, before I get to the week's topic, here's a photo of my stack of thank-you cards (before addressing.) Every single person who gave anything will be getting a personal note and a piece of Comic Tools original art.

I sent these out a couple days ago, so if you don't get it in a couple weeks, maybe longer for the folks in Germany, Britain, Canada and Israel, let me know.

So this week I'm going to talk about two different but similar processes Jason Little and I are using to generate our original art, using a large format printer to take our small layouts and transfer them to our illustration board in pure cyan, so they act like rough blue pencils for our final art.

Why go to the expense and trouble? In my case it has to do with my working with a writer and an editor. Normally my thumbnails are inch and a half high scribbles, totally incomprehensible to someone who isn't me. For example:
Obviously this isn't very helpful to an editor and writer who might like to actually see how I'm adapting the story into comics form.

My problem is, there's really not much at all in between this stage of drawing and a fairly finished drawing, for me. It's the same for my finished art, you see scribbles and marks and suddenly they're a mostly-formed drawing, without a lot of in between.

So, I started thumbnailing tight enough to be readable, and I realized "shit, these are basically rough pencils, and I'm gonna have to do almost 400 of these and then re-draw ALL of this AGIAN?!" Just thinking about it was deeply depressing, and made my thumbnailing work a miserable chore. I didn't want to put any effort into a whole body of art just to throw it away. I told my friend Hilary about my problems. At the time she was interning with Jason Little, and she suggested that a solution might be something like his method. She told me how he drew his layouts small but readable, scanned them in, cleaned them up and arranged them with word balloons and panels and everything in illustrator, and then printed them out in Cyan, so he could keep right on evolving those layouts into finished art. No wasted work. I decided there was no other way to go about it, that was my ticket.

Of course that meant getting access to a printer that could accomodate illustration boards, and you all know how that went.

A couple months ago I went to Jason Little's home and interviewed him about his process, both for myself and for Comic Tools. I'm going to take you through his process first, and then mine, so you can compare and contrast them, and see how each process meets our different needs.

Jason's process

First, here's a sample of what Jason's layouts look like. These are for his Shutterbug Bee comic Motel Art Improvement Service, which you can read part of here. Ye gods do I love Jason Little's comics. Jason's layouts are a great deal more readable than mine, I notice.

Jason then takes these layouts and converts the lines to pure cyan, and then drops the file into illustrator, where he begins positioning balloons and panels.

Here you can see the finished page, with the cyan lines turned lighter, all the panels and balloons arranged, and ready for printing. Unlike myself, Jason does not hand draw his balloons or his panel borders for Bee. Instead he actually prints them out in black in the same printout where he prints the cyan layouts. His printer is good enough quality that the lines will scan just fine later.
This is what his book looks like all spread out in illustrator:As you'll see, Jason prints his layouts out much darker than me, which has to do both with that we'll both use different tools for our finished pencils, but also in how we like to build up a drawing. You can see how he prints the borders and balloons onto the illustration board.

Now, at this point I expected Jason to just hold up his finished page based on this printout and then that'd be the end of the entry and we'd call it a day. But then Jason asked me if I'd like him to draw and ink on it a little. I was totally flabbergasted by this generosity, and I sure as hell didn't say no. Here he is starting off with a blue pencil:The blue pencil makes a slightly darker line than the cyan printout, so it's easy for Jason to refine the drawing. This is one place where Jason and I differ big time- I am NOT one of those artists who can draw a bunch of lines and then pick one. I always pick wrong when I try it, every single time. I draw a line, and if it doesn't work, I erase it. If I need to re-draw something, I erase and do again. My mind can't handle the clutter. You'll notice Jason wears a cotton glove to avoid smudging his oils onto the paper, and to avoid smudging the pencils as well.
At this point he started inking. You can see the sharper, darker pencil lines.
And here is Jason with the finished page from the comic:
Matt's process

So, these are my layouts:

These are done at exactly print size, though in order to fit them onto a sheet of US letter size paper the margins aren't accurate, which I'll correct later. The lettering is arranged into balloons on the computer first and then printed out. My balloons are the start of every step in making a comic page for me- the first thing I thumbnail, the first thing I draw, the first thing I pencil, the first thing I ink. Printing them out and cutting them out gives me the advantage of being able to move them around and make minute corrections to placement without having to re-draw them, and allows me to use these thumbnails as tight layouts for my final art, because I know everything is the size it's going to be in print.

I have a VERY carefully measured corner of tape on my scanner glass that I dock the top right corner of every page to- this ensures that they scan the same every single time, and that the files can be easily handled in batches with automation.
I put down a sheet of bristol in back of copy paper when I scan it,
Because as you can see below, the inside of my scanner cover is black, and it darkens the image if you allow the scanner light to shine up through thin copy paper into the black. Bristol is basically opaque to a scanner so I never layer when scanning it, just copy paper. Here in my scanner settings you can see that I've chosen to define the scanner boundary in pixels. Those numbers correspond to the first scan of my thumbnails that I did, and because I like to be able to handle every single file in the exact same way, I make all my thumbnail scans an identical number of pixels, rather than hand selecting the bounding box each time. Consistency is awesome when working with computers. Computers don't really do happy accidents.
All my scanned thumbs go into a folder called Rawthumbs300. This indicates that these are raw files to be kept unmodified in this folder, so that they'll always be around to be turned into a veriety of products, such as web-viewable thumbnails for my editor, or blueline files for my printer. The 300 indicates the DPI I scan them at. I don't use the First Second naming convention I use on all the other files, to emphasize that these are separate raw product not to be touched. Book 1 and book 2 of my project have separate rawthumbs300 files.

Here's what they look like when they come into photoshop as raw files:
And here's what they look like after they pass through a batch action I made just for turning them into blue lines:
No, they're not blue lines YET, but it's very important that they go through a very specific set of levels and curves adjustments to come out exactly how I like them when I turn them blue. Now I take these files and put them into a template file for my blue lines, that I've set up so it prints within a milimeter's tolerance of the measurements for my final art:
I drag the bottom left forner to align with the guides, and then I run another batch operation on the files. This operation is very complex, and in fact I learned that you could do a lot of things I had no idea you could do in a photoshop action when setting this up. The action resizes the layer, selects the right page only, drags it over and nudges it into perfect alignment with the margins,(which in this template are the accurate print margins for the book blown up to fit on my illustration board) deselects it, then goes through all the channels and changes all the linework into all cyan, then deletes everything from every channel except cyan, creating a fill channel. Then it makes opacity and fill adjustments to get it to the darkness I want. Finally, it saves the file as a ziptif, then selects the next file and does all the same to it, in batches of five, which I then check by eye and make any final adjustments as necessary, which they almost never are. Here's how they look after that: And here's the actions I have set up. You can see I have them set to run by key command, so I don't need to find the action in the list and click on it every time:

Not it's time to print. See that big clot of pages below my printer? Those are the hand-cut illustration boards for my entire first book.
Two important things about my print settings for this. One, I turn color correction off. If you try to print pure cyan with color correction on, the computer will try to make it more visually pleasing with some magenta dots here and there that you won't see until they make a mess of your scans.

Next, I want to use as little ink as possible, and since no one will see this stage of the art I set the print quality to fast. In order to do this I have to lie and say I'm using plain paper, but the bristol causes no damage to the printer. I'll also note, though it's not shown, that I have a special paper size selection custom made for these pages, the result being the prints land exactly where I want them on the page every single time.
Here's my blank illustration board (except for page numbers written on it in pencil below where the pages will be) in the printer's dedicated large media path, which is FLAT. No bending!

And here's the result:

Why so light? Because I'm using graphite. I t took me five tries to get just the right balance where the lines weren't so light I lost detail and couldn't see anything, and not so dark that a pencil line made with no pressure at all wouldn't be darker than them. (otherwise I'd end up pressing wayyyyy too hard to make a finished drawing, in my attempts to make the art darker than the layout lines.) Here's some pencil lines made with no pressure, just lead on paper:And without having to apply pressure to the eraser, they go away:

Just how it should be, enough to act as a firm guide but not get in my way.

And that is what I'm using the printer for! I'll show you samples of art as I make it.

Next week: Best cutter in the world

2009-08-22T23:07:00.002-04:00

This Week: Eraser Rub Off

Howdy Comic Tools readers! Before I get to today's entry, I thought I'd show you the result of all your generosity, my new large format printer, paid for entirely by donations for all of you!

Check this sweet purring cadillac of a printer out:

It's a Canon PIXMA Pro9000 Mark II. Normally it'd sell for $500 new, but I got this one on Ebay for $319 with shipping. It came brand new in box. It is, by far, the most advanced piece of technology I've ever handled. Printers sure have come a long way since I last checked. Before getting this printer, I thought Epsons were about as good as you could get in printers, and man have I re-thought that. Epsons are the Geos to this thing's Mercedes.

Every door opens slowly on it's own after a gentle press, no forcing anything open or clattering, almost-fitting joints. The print head is easily accessed and replaced, should there ever be need of it, with a simple lever. It has 8 individual dye-based ink cartridges:

All of which light up when inserted to indicate their circuitry is functioning:It has a dedicated paper path for large format and thick media, and here you can see my first print going through it!:

I still need o work on sizing to get the dimensions right on the page, but here's some pencil and ink doodling I did to give you an idea of where I'm headed with this process:
Canon ink is lightfast and archival, and the printer uses the least ink per page out of any brand of inkjet. I could not be happier with this thing.

Seriously folks, I was in one of those "I'm totally screwed and there's nothing I can do" tight spots in life, and you totally yanked my ass out. Everyone who gave will be getting a personal response in the mail and a bit of original art used in the making of a Comic Tools entry.

In the meantime, thank you, thank you everybody.

Now, moving on to this week's topic.

Awhile back my friend Joe was lamenting that he was on his last Sakura Eraser:

I'd never heard of the thing. Like many art students I'd been introduced to the Staedtler eraser for all my hard rubber eraser needs and I'd never tried anything else. (for those of you who don't know what a hard rubber eraser is and why it's different, basically there's only 2 kinds of erasers that are worth having around for erasing pencils for scanning. One is a gum rubber eraser, which if you're not a hard-presser and you use robust paper is all you'll need most of the time. The other is the rubber eraser, which you use to really work the pencil out of pencil lines that you drew too hard. Joe draws pretty hard most of the time, and as a result uses a rubber eraser almost exclusively to scrub his art down after inking.)

One day Joe lamented to me that he was about to use up his last Sakura, and he couldn't seem to find any more of them. I asked him to show one to me to compare it to a Staedtler, and the difference was that of night and day. Not only did the Sakura erase better, it created far less of the crumbly "dust" rubber erasers are infamous for, and it damaged the paper less too. I'd say the difference between the Sakura and the Staedtler was as large as the difference between a Staedtler and a pink pencil eraser like you might have used in school before you knew better.

I was saddened by the news that here was this amazing tool that vastly improved on a product I use all the time, that I had never heard of, and evidently it could not be found anymore. "This sounds like a job for Comic Tools blog.", I sid, and I wrote an email to the manufacturer asking about the eraser. a few days later I received this curt reply:

"SJ100 was discontinued and are no longer available. They are working on
a replacement product that is not available yet."

A few weeks later Joe called me into his room to show me some new Japanese erasers he'd bought at Books Kinokuniya, which is the cheapest place in NYC to buy Japanese art supplies. He'd bought two erasers, a Tombo Mono and a Foam eraser. He showed me both, and the differences between them, and I decided then that a good comic tools entry would be to look at all the Japanese erasers you can buy now in the wake of the Sakura's disappearence, and see how they compare. I threw in the Staedtler for good measure. I should say that Joe says the Sakura was better than all of these, and he hopes very much whatever new product they're developing will show up soon. If anybody has a Sakura I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

To prepare for the test I made samples of lettering and art that were drawn far too hard onto the paper, so that no normal gum rubber could erase them. These lines would need a hard rubber eraser to come out. I've adjusted these scans to match the darkness in real life: (to see all of these larger, click on them.)
Next, I inked the drawings and lettering:Next, I did a careful erasing of each, not stopping until I had gotten all the pencil totally gone. If you click to see the image below larger, you'll really see some differences in the scan. The Staedtler could not get all the pencil out, at all. It was too hard to press into the lines, and not sticky enough to grab the pencil lead. This test of the Foam seemed to confirm what Joe had said, which is that the Foam is TOO sticky- it sticks to the ink and starts pulling it from the paper when you use it roughly. You can see that the lettering has been compromised. I also rubbed off a LOT of eraser doing the job. The Tombo Mono, Joe's favorite in his own tests, looks great here, and worked nearly 3 times as fast as any of the others while leaving no ink damage. The pencil was gone out of the deepest gouges in a few passes. The Non-Dust Tombo didn't fare too badly either, although I rubbed off a lot more of the eraser doing the same job as the regular Tombo, which means I'd have to buy more of them.

After the erasing I took photos of the resulting dust. Here's the crumbly Staedtler and it's infamously infuriating messy dust, running like a crap waterfall down my table and off camera onto my lap:

Here's the foam eraser's rather large load of somewhat more manageable "dust,", actually more like rolled melted rubber, which is what it is:Here's the scant and manageable dust left by the Tombo Mono:
And here's the notably long strands of rubber left by the Non-Dust:

For the next step, I scrubbed the middle of the drawing and lettering with all my body weight, ravaging the paper. If I'd been using regular bristol instead of the robust stuff I use I'd have ground the surface into flannel. I also added a lighter stroke of ink underneath and scrubbed it mercilessly too. Doing this, the Staedtler FINALLY did it's job and erased the pencil liall the way, but now my lettering was so rubbed off it didn't scan right anymore. Compare it to the untouched lettering above. That would have been ANY fine line in it's path. The foam did an even worse number on my ink, peeling ink from the lettering AND the drawing. FAR too sticky to be used safely with an ink drawing. The lettering in particular is now ruined. The Tombo did the best, with virtually no degredation and the least loss of material to the eraser. The Non-Dust did second best, although the lettering lightened a little and I lost a lot of eraser material.

Just like in Joe's experience, the Tombo Mono is the clear winner. I'll let you all know if a new Sakura becomes available, and of course I'll test that too.

Next week: So what am I going to do with this printer, anyway?

2009-08-19T22:03:00.002-04:00

You can stop now!

I mean, you know, if you still WANTED to donate that would be totally awesome and all, I'm certainly not taking those buttons down, but I have all I need for the printer and I've just ordered it.

I'll be writing a better note of thanks later this week and I'll be sending several of you extra special thank yous for your holy-shit generosity, but I wanted you all to know that I'm no longer in desperate straits in this matter, you have come to my rescue and covered my ass, and your charity should now be focused elsewhere.

What kind of printer is it, you ask? You'll find out when I do my post about printing blueline layouts.

2009-08-16T05:23:00.004-04:00

Getting there!

Hey everybody, since Wednesday when I asked you all for help getting a printer after an expensive month long fiasco that I didn't even describe half of, Comic Tools readers have donated 100 dollars and forty three cents, which is a hair short of halfway to a brand new large format printer which will allow me not only to start finished art for my First Second book, but also to finish an amazing Comic Tools entry where, in researching the method I'm using to produce the art for my book, I visited Jason Little in his home, where he taught me how to do it, demonstrated by printing out a page of his own layouts, and then he actually penciled and inked part of a panel right then and there, with me photographing the whole thing.

I also have entries coming up such as an insanely in-depth review of different inks, how to choose perspectives in comic panels, and a HUGE multi part tutorial about scanning that will rival my anatomy tutorial.

I don't need any money to produce any of this content (this isn't PBS, you're not gonna have to deal with annual fund drives), but I do really honest to god need this new printer to do my job, and I've already spent more money on this misguided adventure than I can afford. In the last several days many of you have donated, some of you generously enough I may have to take a bullet for you or something. For those of you who haven't yet, if each of you donated five dollars it would put me into the clear and leave a little extra for ink. But any amount at all would still be closer, and deeply appreciated. This is a piece of professional equipment that I really need, and if you've enjoyed this blog and the content I've provided, maybe it's worth enough to you to help me out. You'd really be pulling me out of a ditch. To all of you who've already helped, holy moly smokes thank you thank you thank you. (To those of you who gave big, and who will give big- you have special packages coming to you in the near future. )

2009-08-15T21:32:00.004-04:00

This week: Balloon Shape.

This entry isn't about what you probably think it's going to be about. I suspect you think I'm either going to talk about the various shapes of balloons you can use in your comics, (round, cloud, square, unfurling scroll, etc.) or about how to compose your balloons within your comic panels.

Neither of those would be worth discussing on Comic Tools, not because they're not important, but because they're both extremely broad subjects of discussion which are very, very well discussed in many books and websites already. The reason I let myself get away with tutorials on comic tools is that I only talk about things I call "mental tools," little tips and tricks that you can keep in your mental toolbox and use to make your art easier and better. Subjects of broad aesthetic discussion are for the artist in you- Comic Tools blog is for the craftsman in you.

This week I want to bring something clearly into everyone's mental focus that they may or may not think of, but which very few people think of enough, if at all: The shape of the outline of the balloon is as important as the shape formed by the negative space inside the balloon, and the shape of the negative space inside the balloon is as important as the shape of the words inside the balloon. The words, the negative space, and the balloon's outline all have to combine into a single, pleasing form.

Many cartoonists, and most beginning cartoonists, look at text as something they have to either put over or cram into their art. This is because most young cartoonists "just want to draw," and don't want to have to deal with it. By the time anyone has gotten to a point of being even a little professional they've at least caved in to the idea that they actually have to leave room for balloons or their work will look like shit and be totally unreadable. Most even go to the effort to compose their pages by using the balloons as a visual element to lead the eye through the page, recognizing them as a part of the image and not just something they have to make room for.

But many professionals, even many good ones, stop there. They'll compose the balloons on the page, but they don't think about composing the balloon itself. And thus their balloons keep making their art look worse, and thus they keep hating text.

An average of 30% of your comic page might well be word balloon by area- it's worth taking the time not to make a third of your page look like garbage.

The problem with text, from a drawing perspective, is you can only do so much to change it, especially if you're working off a script you can't re-write. Those words are going to be that size and that spacing. You can't draw the word from a different angle, or from above, or in perspective to make it thinner. It's frustrating, how unmoldable they are, how undeterrably horizontal. All you can really do is stack them into a shape that's easy to draw a balloon around.

Most young cartoonists don't even TRY. I'm sure every one of you has seen a comic with one or more of these mistakes:
The problem on the top left is different from all the others in that it's a mistake made by cartoonists who are just starting to try to address the relationship of their text to the balloon but don't quite have the hang of it. I did it for awhile and so did many of my classmates at SVA. It happens when you keep drawing your balloons around your words and leaving huge amounts of space around them here but almost crashing the edge against a letter somewhere else. The teacher or a fellow student will say "You need to be leaving more equal space around your words, imagine there's a forcefield around the letters you can't cross." But then you take them too literally and you draw these spandex-fit balloons that really are like drawing a forcefield around the text.

If you're still doing that? It's time to graduate. although it IS important you have space around your words, it's not important that the space around them be equal. It's important that the space around them, and the words themselves, form a pleasing shape.

Let's take a phrase and I'll show you what I mean.

Below I've misspelled "I am a very hot Paleontologist, yes." seven times, in different arrangements. I've eliminated some, approved of others, and I'm iffy on one. Have a look at them and then I'll explain why.

Alright, now below are those same arrangements, but with the shape of the letters emphasized:

1 is just a boring shape, and being rectangular it's hard to form a pleasing oval around. But it used space pretty efficiently, so I marked it as lukewarm, a shape I might use is I had to but one I'd avoid when composing my page.

2 and 3 are pointy, nasty shapes that waste previous room on my page with empty and not very artful lumps of negative space. I can do better, and I can think of no reason why I'd use them.

4 and 5 are both more efficient at using their space and form stable shapes that are easy to draw a balloon around. I like to plan versions that will float as well as versions that I can bodge against the panel border if I need to, so I have options when I got to compose the panel.

6 is another inefficent waste of space.

7 is not only a better shape, but it's more compact, despite being an extra line. Should I choose to put this balloon in a corner this will take up the least of my drawing and do so very attractively.

When composing a page I figure out the best balloon shapes for the text first, and I compose only with the ones that pass. This way I know for sure that the text will look great later- I've already eliminated all the bad options!

Doing this not only makes the page look better, it makes the page read better. Text that gets forgotten till later usually gets crammed in, and cramped text actually has quite a detrimental effect on a reader. Read these two balloons with identical text, and pay attention to your eye strain, and even your level of stress, as you read one, and then the other:

If you're running a balloon up against the side of a page you also have to decide whether you're going to have the letters run flush against the border or be centered in the balloon. You have to draw the balloon differently for both. Also, you either have to have the balloon up against the border or totally away from it, having them tough forms and unattractive and awkward to draw around tangent:

When everything is working well, the reader should notice as little as possible that they're even reading. It's for this reason that I'm also typically of the opinion that text should be kept absolutely as simple and innocuous as possible. The goal is to be not noticed, so as not to pull the reader out of the story.
Using very regular, innocuous text also make composing much easier. However, as anyone who's read my comics knows, I DO think there's times where it's appropriate to draw attention to the text for effect:

I think a lot of folks associate bad lettering with digital, or computer lettering, either as seen in crappy mainstream comics or in englich Manga translations where the letterer is rarely an artist, such as these examples:
They're hilariously bad, to be sure. But let's not forget that plenty of great artists who did all their lettering by hand have made the same mistakes. Bill Watterson constantly ran out of room and had to bodge the rest of a long word in by drawing all the letters small, and Winsor McCay, one of the greatest cartoonists of all time, may well have been the worst letterer of all time. (Which is odd, since his title lettering was breathtaking. I think it's because he thought of the titles as drawing and his balloons as text.)

I think it's just easier to see mistakes in digital lettering, and that mistakes look worse in digital lettering, because everything is so regular and clean. Doing things by hand gives you a little leeway.

Two of my favorite letterers who use digital are Steven Griffin and Bryan Lee O'Malley.

Just look at the letter shapes in this spread from Hawaiian Dick, which Steve colors and letters:

They're immaculate. They sit there like perfect jewels. I envy the shit out of this guy. You can't see it here, but his colors make me foam at the mouth with jealous rage too.

I've always loved Bryan's combo if hand drawn balloons and computer text (some of the most tasteful computer text I've ever seen), but what's really unique and interesting about his lettering is how most of the time he composes his balloons so they only have one or two worse across running down his distinctive tall balloons in a punchy column.

Sometimes he'll let them get wider and grow into fat circles, but unlike just about every letterer I've ever seen, O'Malley defaults to the vertical, rather than the horizontal. The result is that instead of reading a block of text, I meander through the character's words as they speak. It makes for a unique reading experience.

Next week: The marvelous erasers of Japan

2009-08-12T15:12:00.008-04:00

Shaking my coffee cup at you

Hello Comic Tools readers,

I have a major tool problem right now, and I could really use your help, and by help I mean cash.

For the project I'm working on for First Second, two epic books, I need a large format printer to print my layouts in pure cyan onto my illustration board, so I can finish pencil over it and then drop out the blue later. It's a process that I learned from Jason Little, and I recently documented how he does it in his home in Brooklyn for an upcoming comic tools entry. I'm waiting to do that entry so I can contrast some interesting differences in how he does it versus how I'll be doing it. And there we come to the problem.

Months ago my wonderful girlfriend sent me her large format printer to use. When I went to use it, it turned out to be totally messed up from travel and disuse. So I bought a used one from an architect in Carol gardens for fifty dollars- it has a serious issue with it's print head that will cost me upward of 100 dollars and a trip to Jersey to fix. So I got another for 70 dollars, but it's in need of a similarly expensive cleaning, also involving a trip to Jersey as well, adding even more money.

It's not worth my time to fix these, and doing some looking around there are two new printers that will serve my need that cost in between 250 and 350 dollars. The lower end of that is what fixing these old craigslist printers would cost me, and I'd have a new machine.

I don't have the money for either option, an this is an essential piece of equipment for my project. (not to mention the entry.)

I have deliberately taken no steps to monetize this blog, because I feel that this information should be free and spreadable as possible. I will never, ever charge anything for the information on this blog. But I know many of you appreciate it enough that you would pay for it, and I'd like to ask you, if I've helped you or your art in some way, to help me in purchasing this extremely important piece of expensive professional equipment. Maybe there's a five dollar cup of coffee, or hell, maybe even a ten dollar comic you can go without. Maybe you can spare a dollar. I'm in a serious bind here and I'd be one step away from blood-indebted to anyone who'd help me out here.

If you'd like to help, please click on donate, think of my puppy dog eyes welling with tears, and give what you can. I'll make a post to stop you should some miracle occur and I get enough actually cover the cost of the printer.

(Edit: actually, I did the math, and if everyone who follows me on Blogger gave five bucks that would totally cover it.)

(Edit 2: donation button fixed.)

2009-08-08T22:38:00.004-04:00

Hello Comic Tools readers!

In my absence I've also left a lot of comments unresponded to, so the the bottom of this post I'm going to respond to all the comments that weren't just "Good job, love the blog!" I'm going to respond to those kinds of comments right now- Thank you, each and every one of you!

I've been away so before I get back to tutorials I'd like to play a little catch-up, as there's been a ton of great stuff accumulating in my links folder over these weeks. I won't even be posting all of it today- I'll be spreading some throughout the week as well.

To start with, this will teach me to sit on a link for too long. The whole main subject of this week's post was going to be all these great cartoonist videos that had been posted, and all of them have since become unavailable online. To start with, you may remember all the videos I linked to in which P. Craig Russell would take one of his comic pages and discuss the composition and storytelling in great depth. Comic Tools reader Chester Kent informed me that those videos had been taken down, but then re-posted , evidently because the website hosting them (and also responsible for producing them) changed it's name from "Lurid TV" to "Wayne Alan Harold Presents. " Chester helpfully provided me with the link, and I tucked it away to post to Comic Tools later.

Well, as it turns out those videos are no longer available online except as a DVD containing all of them, and, if I read the description correctly, other material as well. Here's the cover:

And the description: NIGHT MUSIC: THE ART OF P. CRAIG RUSSELL takes you into this artist’s professional and personal life for an in‐depth look at both his career and his storytelling techniques. You’ll also go behind‐the‐scenes to see Russell hard at work on his comics adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN: THE DREAM HUNTERS.

I'm sad to see they're no longer available free, but they were certainly some of the best educational content I ever linked to. A commenter to Lucy Knisley's LJ recently asked, regarding Lucy mentioning one of her Center for Cartoon Studies teachers,

"What were you taught? To think in a story arc, to use different inking tools, to vary perspective, to compose in spaces of different sizes? What about cartooning can be turned into a syllabus and assessed in a portfolio evaluation, a graded essay, a set of multiple-choice questions? I hope that you will share an anecdote from cartooning school, one that says -- I was stuck HERE, and then with THIS comment, I was suddenly THERE. With, of course, pictures."

Having gone to school for comics myself and having gotten some use out of it myself, I'd answer with a story of a teacher saying something a lot like the kinds of things P.Craig Russell says every three seconds in these videos. These videos are like a superconcentrated comics course, so the current asking price of 20 bucks does not strike me as high at all. How much did YOU pay for college courses that didn't teach you nearly as much? The answer for me is honestly probably thousands. So, maybe you should get the DVD.

In that same week those videos were (temporarily) re-posted Sam Hiti posted a FANTASTIC video of him inking a free-handed sketch in brush, but it was promotion for his new books- all of which come with an original sketch by Sam inside- and he has since taken it town. I'm actually going to write him and ask super nicely if he would please re-post the video, because I think the fastest way to learn inking is to watch it actually being done, and I think Sam is one of the best inkers out there. (I should mention that Comic Tools reader Looka clued me in to the video even existing.)

But these weeks were not all lost educational opportunity! Quite the contrary!

Matthew Reidsma wrote a fantastic post on why large, vertical, easy-to-read-from-a-distance signs are important for conventions, especially non comics conventions. What makes this piece particularly great is almost less the lesson and more why Matt learned the lesson in the first place. Matt found himself growing dissatisfied with comics conventions because in going to them he only reachs out to people who are already comics fans. So he started attending zine fairs, craft fairs, and other art fairs, and in doing so he found what he was looking for. Reidsma:

"...it's the market I always SAY I am looking for. Comic conventions are full of people who already love comics. You just need to convince them to like yours. Art markets have a wide array of people who may have never read a comic in their lives (except perhas Garfield or Dilbert). Those are the people I want to meet. Because if I can convince those people that comics are worth reading, that's better than selling 5000 comics at SPX or MoCCA. On the business side, one crafter asked me at a show in Indianapolis last month, "Why go to a show where ALL of your competition is in the same room with you?"

One of Reidsma's convention signs:

Jillian Tamaki and Yuko Shimizu BOTH posted more fantastic process images from their professional illustration gigs. I will never get tired of either of them. Their names link to their posts rather than just their sites.

Below, Yuko changes eye color: Comic Tools reader/ deputized Comic Tools contributor Rivkah has posted the second part of her educational series about print. The small image below links to her post, which in turn links to an image that you can click on to get even larger versions of the panels. She has learned her lesson about working for small computer screens and has resolved to work smaller in future installments. Part one can be seen here. (readers who peruse her blog may note that she also did some ink reviews awhile back- they didn't go unnoticed, but I have an idea for a larger post about ink that they'll be a part of.)
Oh, and this isn't educational, but I'm just saying: My classmate and friend Nicolas Cinquegrani has a new book out. You should buy it. Here's an interview with the writer, Neil Kleid.

Here's where you buy it.
And now, reader comments:

In response to my post "I love my new ink bottle,"

Anton Edmin wrote "Older bottles of Sheaffer 'Skrip' fountain pen ink have a clever little built in inkwell near the lip. These can be bought for next to nix.",

and Westival wrote "I just bought an old glass inkwell on ebay in attempts to solve this problem (among others). I personally only want a small amount of ink out at a given time, as I have already felt the burn of spilling a full bottle of ink onto the carpet. I'll let y'all know how it goes when I receive it."

When I have excess cash lying around I might well check those out. In the meantime I have, as I said in the post, and ink bottle that I love. How are you loving yours, Kiel?

In regard to my post "Don't buy one of these things,"

Steampunkpainter wrote "Thanks, I've been following ever since this was an interview blog, and props to you especially because I was thinking of buying one of those "stay wet" paint palletes, as I work in acrylic gouache and it is a BITCH to keep workable. Now, I needn't worry."

I actually kept that container with the paint in it. There's a tiny bit of mold near the lid but the paint and paper are both still usable, weeks later.

Joey wrote "Good call on the homemade stay-wet tray. I never had any problems with the tray I used in college, but cannot remember the maker. Anyhow.
As I read this I kept coming across the word guache in your post. What you are referring to is gouache.
guache = lacking social experience or grace.

Actually, we're both wrong. Gauche = lacking social experience or grace, Gouache is the paint, and Guache isn't anything. I have corrected the misspellings, thank you for pointing them out! (Blogger spell check recognizes none of them, by the way.)

In response to my post "Tiny little metal ball,"

JoBi wrote "I'm doing an experiment. Bought two pens. I emptied one cartridge and filled it with plain Talens india ink. Did it more than six months ago (I don use it every day) and still no clogs, no problems."

I shall have to try this!

Thanks to all of you! I'll see you next week with a lesson on word Balloons!

2009-08-08T12:14:00.003-04:00

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear last time.

In my post on February the 5th of this year titled "That's gonna stop right now" I thought I made it very clear than if you were a company and you wanted to use my blog as an advertising platform you are to contact me directly and ask, rather than spamming my comments posing as a legitimate reader.

I believe I also made it clear that anyone who did spam my blog would see this blog used as a platform to damage them and their enterprise.

The FREE COMICS, MANGA, ANIME ARTWORKS DOWNLOAD blog just fucked up big time.

Not only did they have someone pose as a commenter on my blog, their site has several comics made by personal friends of mine who frankly don't get rich from making their comics, and this site is giving away their copyrighted work for free. Some of these books are self published, so they can't exactly say they're sticking it to the big guys, or that they're only hurting big companies. This site also has a great many comics from Dark Horse that I know they didn't get permission to give away, and I love Dark Horse as a company and have many friends with them.

If that commenter is reading this- you used the name OneShare- I passed along this blog to one of my editor friends at Dark Horse to have her pass it along to their legal department- maybe they'll find it worth their while to slap you with a cease and desist order, you fucking douche nozzle.

I'm a professional fucking cartoonist, asshole- what the FUCK did you THINK I was going to do when you strolled into my blog advertising the fact that you were giving away other cartoonist's work without their permisson? Choke on shit and die like a pig in hell. You'd better hope I'm too busy to remember to contact Marvel, Image, Fantagraphics, DC and many others while I'm at it. You stole from Jason Shiga, motherfucker- for that alone I'd gladly snip off your toes and fingers with a cigar cutter.

I hope I've made my stance on this issue very clear, yes? Anyone else wanna spam me?

There will be a regular comic tools post later today and regular weekly posting will resume thereafter.

2009-07-12T00:38:00.005-04:00

Don't buy one of these things

I normally try to keep this blog focused on ink, paper, and digital from time to time, but enough cartoonists use gouache and watercolor often enough for this to be a good topic.

The contraption above is one of the pieces of equipment I've owned over the years where the relationship started as a dazzling, starry-eyed honeymoon, but ended in tears and bitterness. If you don't recognize it, it is a Masterson Sta-Wet Palette, and if you have ever worked with tube watercolor or gouache and had your perfectly mixed color dry onto the palette, never to be quite the same again after re-hydration, you are probably already ordering one online after reading the name.

Don't enter your credit card quite yet.

First of all, let me say for the record that this product does exactly what it says it will. It will keep guache and watercolor and acrylic wet, even in the thinnest of layers, for days to weeks. It's a sealing plastic box that comes in various sizes. Inside is a sponge pad and a sheet of acrylic coated paper that you use as a disposable palette surface. You soak the sponge and get the paper wet, put the paper on the sponge, blot off the excess water and you put your paint on that. Close the box when you're done, come back to still wet paint. I'm not panning their product because it doesn't work.

I'm panning it because they charge $obscenity.bullshit for it. The small palette costs ten bucks and the large one costs 15. The flimsy paper, which paint will often leak through and stain the sponge, costs 4-7 bucks for refills of 30. The sponges, which have to be replaced occasionally due to paint leaking through the paper, and which are prone to mold (evidently they have no antimicrobial treatment like many kitchen sponges do) are 7-10 bucks for three. It all works but it's all shitty and cheap, and you can do better for less money, and NOT have a mono-tasker tool taking up space in your studio to boot.

All you need is:

A piece of cheap-as-you-can-find tupperware like Gladware, or whatever off brand gladware is, or a deli takeout containter, or anything that seals up watertight that's large enough to fit your paint mixing area into. (either use a large one or a bunch of small ones.)
A piece of cotton fiber paper. Most watercolor papers and decent stationary paper are cotton. If you're an artist you probably have scraps of this lying all around. Those scraps can be put to good use as stay-wet palettes, and then you can doodle on them when you dry them out.
A sponge or sponges.
Water.

Here's what you do:

Below you can see I had a soaked sponge in my plastic tub. I chose a small one so the photos would come out better. The sponge is really wet, I did not wring it out.
Next I took a piece of light weight watercolor paper and soaked it till it was floppy, then blotted it so it wasn't slick with water on the surface.
On top of the sponge it went.

Then I took some red gouache, because I figured it would photograph well. Left on it's lonesome this guache dries despair-inducingly fast.

I spread it around to show that even the thinnest skim will stay moist and workable.

Then I sealed it,

And out it in my closet:

That was Thursday night. Tonight I opened it, and voila- as you can see it is quite moist, yet it has not bled or been dilluted. It is exactly as I left it:

With some scrap paper and your tupperware you can have your own stay-wet palettes for cheap, and you can use them for food when you're done. Why buy one?

By the way, I want to say an odd sort of thank you to all my readers. It's common on the internet for people to develop a strong sense of entitlement to content they like, to the extent that people will harass bloggers and movie makers and comic artists about not updating their totally free whatever that they earn no money from and don't even get ad revenue from. As you've all undoubtedly noticed my updates have been less frequent lately, which is because I've been trying to get past a stage in my book for First Second and it is just a freaking slog, and, well...no one's given me shit about it. Not one single person. No one's even asked me the uncomfortable to answer question of what's been wrong, why am I not updating as often. I've gotten some very kind comments about people's appreciation for the blog, and that's been it.

So, thank you all, for not being self-entitled pricks and being really kind to me. I'm really pleased to see that's the kind of classy audience I attract. I'll tell you all this, the best of the blog is not behind me. Two of my biggest tutorials are still in the pipeline, as well as several requested topics, and I am always finding new stuff. I'm having a hard time finding time lately, and when that's over, I'll post weekly or maybe even more once again.

Thank you all again.

-Matt

2009-07-06T16:02:00.002-04:00

So I have totally loved Jillian Tamaki's stuff since I first found a copy of the single issue of Skim in Giant Robot in like, 2005 or something, and the finished book totally lived up to the hype. And Matt's already posted to her before, but since then she's put up one of her handouts on keeping a sketchbook from her class at Parsons. There's also one on idea generation, both of them good reads.

Also, Eddie Campbell has been posting about his upcoming Alec book on his blog, which have always been my favorite of his comics. But I've had this link saved for two years now, the first of seven posts about paper he uses, though the others are image specific, and at times things that materialized somewhere in his studio that seemed to fit the purpose.

Part 2,, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6,Part 7

2009-06-21T03:02:00.003-04:00

Rivkah Print Lesson 01:

Comic Tools Reader , cartoonist extraordinaire, and fellow online tutorialist Rivkah is starting a series of comics teaching about print. I know my pre-press pretty well, and I pride myself on sending files to my publishers that get compliments (scanning is an upcoming multi-part Comic Tools lesson, in fact), but I don't really have much knowledge of print. Rivkah ran a publishing company and knows this stuff inside and out, so I'll be posting her lessons here as they come out. I've already learned stuff I didn't know just in this introductory comic. These will get pretty intense, so strap in.

(click to see full-size version)

2009-06-21T01:39:00.005-04:00

This week: I love my new ink bottle

No, Comic Tools isn't dormant again, and the posting schedule isn't changing, I just had lots going on and took an unannounced 2 week vacation.

During the first week Ma Fille visited me from out of state and while she was here, she bought me this lovely sumi ink bottle at Kinokuniya. Here's a good shot of the label, which is entirely in Japanese:

I didn't want the bottle for the ink, which I transferred into a bottle of totally useless and crappy fountain pen ink I've had lying around since I lived in Maine, but rather for the bottle itself. As anybody who's inked much knows, bottles are a royal pain in the ass.

Most ink bottles come thin necked and wide-bodied like this:

The result is you can only comfortably get your nib or brush in so far before you start accidentally getting ink from the edge on the tool and your fingers if you're not careful, and it can be very hard to see where the ink level is to avoid over dipping the brush.

This is actually a much fatter bottle than the ink I currently use. I don't have any fresh bottles of what I use now lying around, but here's their dropper caps, which will show you just how much smaller the bottles for my current ink are. I can barely fit my nib holder through the top of the bottle.
I tried solving the problem by using old film strip canisters as ink containers. It sort of worked- as you can see you can really reach the nib in their easy with no mess on yourself because of how wide and shallow they are:

But unlike a good ink bottle they didn't seal watertight and any little jostle would fuse the lid to the canister with solid ink:
Even worse they, allowed evaporation over time. Here's about four bucks worth of ink reduced to an eighth of an inch veneer that will never come off or be fully reconstituted the way it was ever again:
Which is why I got so excited about this sumi ink bottle. First of all, it's huge, which means you can put a lot of ink in. It's got a stable, wide bottom. It's got a wide mouth, and it even has a nifty brush holder groove:
See?
That groove looks more for show than action but I tell you, it's very stable. It actually works. And the best part? It has a cap that seals air and water tight:
Never ever ever take the styrofoam out of a bottle like that by the way, or you'll take away it's ability to seal.

This is the bottle open. Two things to notice here: see how they made the neck ridge low and prominent so you could wipe the excess of the brush without gunking up the top edge? And notice how even the thin film of ink on top of that ridge, away from all the other ink, is WET? That's how little moisture this bottle lets out- no dry ink forms inside.
I am so psyched to have this thing.

Also, Timothy Dempsey asked me to link him here, so here I am, doing that. Here is his blog where he posts things that he did. Perhaps you might like to have a look.

2009-05-30T20:00:00.000-04:00

People who aren't me show you how they watercolor!

I have to attend a funeral this weekend, so this entry is made up a couple real gems that I've been saving for a rainy day.

There are a few illustrators whose blogs I'd follow just for their so-good-I-sometimes-want-to-cut-my-drawing-hand-off-and-mail-it-to-them-as-tribute art, but I have a special place in my heart for the illustrators that take the time to talk about their experience making art. Jillian Tamaki doesn't write very much on her blog, but when she does she often has something useful to say about what it takes to be an illustrator.

Recently illustrator Quentin Blake got a website, and I heard about it on Jillian's blog. You all know Quentin's work, even if, like I didn't, you don't recognize his name immediately. His wiggly line is what you picture when you imagine a Roald Dahl book. He illustrated Matilda, B.F.G., Willy Wonka, and literally hundreds of other children's books.

And on Quentin's site is a very well-produced TEN MINUTE video of Quentin walking you through his well-honed working process from beginning to end. Look at this still image! This is what I wish Comic Tools COULD be, video-documenting masters using their tools and explaining their process:

It Looks like one of my process photos, right?!

Just for posting this link to alert us of it's existence we all owe Jillian a kidney. But she went further than that, and she talked about some of Quentin's work habits and what makes them as effective as they are, and how they apply to everyone who makes art professionally:

A few things I thought were really interesting about the video:

1. While inking the final image on the light-table (with what looks like an upside down nib?), he is NOT tracing. He is redrawing using the underlying image as a rough guide. Nathan Fox spoke a bit about this when he visited my class a few weeks ago, as he inked over a very loose drawing. I think it's really important you CONCENTRATE when you're drawing and stay very cognizant about what you are doing. You should never be on "autopilot" when you are drawing.

2. Please observe that he will often do a piece several times. I do this too. If something isn't working, sometimes the best thing to do is to throw it away and start over. This is particularly important if "freshness" and "simplicity" is a vital aspect of your work. In many ways, "simple" is the hardest thing to do because you have nowhere to hide.

3. I have noticed that many students do not like doing sketches. Quentin Blake's work looks so free and loose, but please note the amount of planning and roughs behind his pictures. The fact is that illustrators are collaborators and sketches are the way we communicate with designers, art directors, editors, or whoever we're working with. Part of your process development should be finding a way to fulfill this step while still keeping things interesting and fresh for the final stage.

And if that wasn't enough talent on video for you, here's Lucy Knisely doing a portrait of the cast of "The Nanny,", from beginning to end, in real time, explaining as she goes. It's around three hours of a great cartoonist doing her thing.

2009-05-24T02:15:00.007-04:00

This week: Neck Muscles (and also hand resources)

It's not hard to see why the neck freaks so many people out. You look at it with the skin on and it's hard to see what's going on. Then you look at an anatomy diagram and you see what looks like dozens of tiny muscles in layers crisscrossing every which way, and you like eating the end of a shotgun.

The problem with looking at an anatomy text to see what's going on with the neck is that anatomy texts are there to each you anatomy, but they aren't prioritized for the artist, who more than likely just wants to know what muscle they're looking at, or trying to get those slanty lines in the neck right.

To actually draw a neck, any neck, you only need to know five muscles.

You heard me. Five. (Technically nine, but the first four are symmetrical, and if you can draw them on one side you can draw them on the other, just like if you can draw a left arm you can draw a right arm.)

If you're drawing more than five visible neck muscles, you're not drawing a human being. Seriously. ("But Matt, what about when I flex my neck and make all those muscles pop out? There's more than five of those!" No there actually aren't, but I'll explain later why it looks like there is.)

Five muscles. Here we go:

First, here's our plain skeleton. You'll note he has ears, and dots behind his ears (not on the jawbone, but in this drawing the jawbone covers up where they'd actually be.) Those are there to show where some of the muscles insert.
That tube in back of the muscles in the picture below is your windpipe. The cartilage of the trachea is larger and sticks out more in men than in women, although there are freakish examples like Ann Coulter. (No matter what I say, I cannot convince my mother that she actually is, and has always been, a biological woman.)

First two muscles: Sternohyoid comes up from the sternum and inserts in front of the trachea. Omohyoid comes from the bend 2/3rds out on the collar bone, attaches to the top rib, and then comes up and attaches in front of the trachea. These muscles are often mostly invisible, but they become prominent in very skinny people or in times of stress, anger, and fear.
3rd and 4th muscles: you all recognise trapezius, right? Trapezius covers up a looooooooooot of muscles underneath it, making them pretty much invisible and making this lesson much shorter. Also, see how there's not really anything in front of either side of it? That gap that's left is actually a prominent feature of the neck and shoulder area, and you can actually see it in all the photos below that accompany the illustrations. The muscle that has two forks coming up from the sternumm and collar bone and reaching up behind the ear is sternocleidomastoid (say that 3 times fast), the most prominent and most often mis-drawn muscle when people draw necks. A lot of folks draw a slanty line in the neck not knowing where it comes from or where it's going to.
Here's a good picture of the sternocleidomastoids from the side:

Here's what they all look like layered together.
In this fetching photo of my friend Hilary Florido, you can see all of these muscles clearly. Look closely and you can actually see where her omohyoid muscle bends into her top rib: Looks like Trixie from Speed Racer, doesn't she?

The fifth and last muscles you need to know to draw the neck is platysma, a thin muscle that makes up the front of your neck. It's the muscle that sticks out and makes all those strainy lines when you try to make your "neck muscles" pop out. What looks like a lot of muscles is actually just the fibers of this one muscle.

Try not to overuse this one superhero artists, okay? Pay attention and you'll notice that even if you're straining or yelling you don't flex this muscle very often at all. Only in certain kinds of grimaces and yells.
Here's someone flexing their platysma: Also for the superhero folk, note that platysma lays on either side of the trachia but not actually over it, and that it DOES NOT CIRCLE ALL THE WAY AROUND THE NECK, no matter what Rob Liefeld says. See how it only goes back so far? Yeah, keep that in mind, will you, superhero artists drawing necks?

You'd think that the neck muscles would stick out more in musclebound folk, but the opposite is actually the case: skinny people tend to have strand-like, very clear neck muscles whereas bulk tens to obscure them, as in this example: Looks like he's hiding a pineapple in there, doesn't he?

Okay, now, in the comments section a reader was begging me for a hand tutorial.

But there's no point in me doing one, because MAD cartoonist Tom Richmond already did a tutorial on hands that's better than the one I might have done by like a million billion times.

Tom has several other really intensive tutorials on his site, which can all be found at this link: http://www.tomrichmond.com/blog/tag/tutorial/ I'm gonna make that link a part of this blog's sidebar, too, it's such a great resource.

This is the last of my entries on anatomy for cartoonists, and I leave you with some hands drawn by Farel Darymple, who draws some of my favorite hands of anybody, ever: (click on them to read the comic they're from)

Next week: I'll actually be away at a funeral, but I have something up my sleeve that I've been saving for a rainy day.

2009-05-21T13:13:00.002-04:00

Matt Madden and Jessica Abel's pre-MOCCA comic making class

From Matt's blog:

"Starting the day after Memorial Day, Jessica and I are offering an intensive 2-week class at SVA, the goal of which is to learn how to make comics by writing, drawing, and printing a minicomic in time for the MoCCA Art Festival the weekend of June 6-7. We'll teach in the mornings and afternoons will alternate between open studio time and visits from a group of stellar guest cartoonists: David Mazzucchelli, Becky Cloonan, Tom Hart, Gary Panter, and Kim Deitch! Each will have a three hour session that will be a combination workshop/craft talk/crit.

The roster's filling up fast so sign up sooner rather than later. Info below, registration info here.

Summer Intensive Comics Workshop
CIC-3012-A
Mon.–Fri., May 26–June 5
(begins Tuesday, May 26)
Instructional Hours: Mon.—Fri., 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Studio Hours: Mon.–Fri., 5:00 pm–10:00 pm;
Sat., May 30, 9:00 am–10:00 pm
9 sessions; 6 CEUs; $950

Comics, graphic novels, manga: it seems everyone wants to be a cartoonist these days. Yet comics is a complex medium that requires a grasp of drawing and storytelling as well as an understanding of the various tools and technology to prepare artwork for print. A great way to learn how to make comics is to jump in and make a short, printed comic in only two weeks. This intensive comics workshop is geared toward those intrepid students ready to make the plunge. In daily sessions, we will guide students through the process of making a comic, by presenting activities and short assignments on the basics of cartooning and storytelling as well as advanced topics like inking and reproduction. In addition, several afternoons will feature lectures and critiques with visiting professional cartoonists. The workshop will also include participation in the annual art festival of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) held June 6–7; students will have the opportunity to sell and trade their comics at the premier gathering of independent comic artists and small publishers, literally the day after their comics are finished."