Lettering in Practice

All the little x's mean that area is to be inked in swaths of black. Some of the panels just have lines running through them that stands for much the same, but those are recent additions once I thought it over.

It was a pain, in all honesty. Doesn't help that I don't own a t-square, a drawing board that can stay still, nor a lettering guide of any decent quality (it's a little slip of plastic covered with tape and full of holes my friend and I made based on what Todd Klein suggests for Alvin Lettering Guide users on his website). It doesn't help that my pen (a Rotring Art Pen (F)) kept railroading more than putting ink on the page. Eugh. There was probably some leftover oils and debris in the thing from the manufacturing process that I never cleaned out yet. It works fine now after a good cleaning. My main gripe with the pen is that it makes a very thick line, the "F" of this pen is more like a 0.6-0.8 on the standard fineliner. I should find way to get the pen to achieve a thinner line. I should see if the fountain pen stations in National Bookstore do basic nib grinding...

By the time I've posted this, most of these have already been inked or partially inked. It'll be the first time I'll ink comic pages with a brush rather than just my usual practice in inking and other things. I also did a few things with the lettering. I slanted the boxes, somewhat. Made the actual letters more cramped and dirty than I usually do in my practice sessions.

Composition practice

It seems I've forgotten to erase the pencils... Oh well.

It's supposed to be a- hmm.... I don't know actually... Oh well. I drew it, that's what's important, and here we are looking at it.

I had just watched Barry Lyndon, directed by the amazing Stanley Kubrik, before sketching this (do you see it in the setting, with all the hay, masonry, and cross-shaped windows where Barry and Lord Bullingdon had their duel). As I was mulling over what to take from the scene as I remembered it, Isildur and Narsil from Lord of the Rings popped in my head. Ah, there it was. That shall be my center of attention, I decided on a whim. Obviously, I didn't plan it out too well.

A large, brick building with a high, vaulted ceiling and windows. No floors or levels. Piles of hay all around and somewhere around the bottom center there's a sword sticking out of the floor. My main design elements- err... my props? Is that what they're called? I have no idea. I don't know these technical terms. I just read some books and drew for awhile. All I knew was, I wanted to pull the reader's attention towards the sword. To do that, I had to employ a few little tricks.  Or attempt to use them...

There was perspective, there was the line. This is not referring to line art, but to how the parts of the drawing all come together to try and draw your attention from one part to another with visual interest and other little details. Also, contrast.

While I used a lot of black in my older, much more embarrassing, drawings I feel I'm a lot closer now to the spirit of Mike Mignola's (one of my idols) artwork than the visual aping in the linework and basic shapes. I would have to thank Scott Allie for that and his comments on Mike's style which helped me realize one of the things that just makes Mike's artwork work. When the foreground is black, or mostly black, keep the background light. When the background is black, keep the foreground light. There's also a whole heap of crap regarding color and Mike's artwork but that's a whole other topic. A prime example of how to color Mike right is not getting too dark with the coloring (which is funny when you look at the heaps of black he just dunks on every page). Dave Stewart and James Sinclair did this amazingly well throughout Hellboy's run. To see Mike colored less successfully, look to Bram Stoker's Dracula, a pencil job by Mike in his pre-Hellboy days, with Topps comics. Notice how dark and incoherent it sometimes is due to the dark colors and all the black?

Sorry about that, I just get passionate with regards to Mike and the majesty of his work. I just love them to all hell.

Anyway, hopefully I did something right and made the blade and the area around it standout. I could have also used some white ink to add more "bricks". Maybe a skillful cropping could improve it. Maybe I should have stuck with the perspective and brought the eye level down a good deal more, gave less space to the whole pile of nothing around the windows and did more. Ach well... better luck next time.

Things I'm working on

Hello, lost soul. If you expected any sort of salvation or salve that might cure your cancer in this little segment of the internet I'm calling my own, you are sadly mistaken. You've stumbled on the blog of an aspiring comic book artist and draftsman hopeful who doesn't do much else other than the usual crap. Y'know, stuff. Watching stuff, listening to stuff, reading stuff, going out with some friends stuff, buying stuff, getting tired of university and cursing at some teachers stuff, fixing stuff up, doing stuff, getting too critical over my stuff leading to mild depression stuff, looking for stuff to do. Y'know, stuff.

In this blog you'll see the various concoctions I'm mostly working on, mostly penciling, inking and lettering some comic pages, some scripts for comics I'll eventually draw, others are researching for scripts that I'll eventually draw. See a pattern here?

I do draw other things, of course. Mostly life studies in order to better learn the anatomy and form of the human body or master studies of the works of some of the greats who have interested me in some way. As a result you should expect a lot of brush-and-ink/pen-and-ink since I waste a lot of my time on comic books and have since become very familiar with the various artists working in the medium. I might do some watercolor stuff or some inkwash, who knows? Just expect lots of black ink and paper. You have been warned. Let's get on to the more interesting things.

The following pages are for an online anthology called Premier Comics. The latest issue they've published has some of my work, work I'm not too proud of since I did that a year or so ago and I've changed my approach and how I draw since then. At least some of my work is out there. Download it here: http://premiercomics.com/archives/1414

I drew these on some of Canson's student's watercolor paper, 200GSM.
Sorry I didn't scan these, they're rough sketches so there isn't a lot of detail on them anyway. There isn't much to miss.

You can see a fuck-up I did there in the third page. I made a few corrections in white ink but since I plan to inkwash these things, thus adding a color that isn't some form of black or white. I can't just turn up the brightness and contrast to hide little things like that. So I had to cut it out and replace the panel. 

 

The script was made by another (more) talented individual (with a lot more balls than I) whom I know of as Daze, which is obviously his online pseudonym. The pages will probably be lettered by myself, just like in Soul Food.

The process of turning the script into text wasn't too bad, seeing as it was complete by the time I got my hands on it. Unlike a few other scripts I've played around with before, this was the simplest since I wanted to adhere to the script completely, no changes. I didn't feel like doing something else with it, like what I did with that third page in Soul Food. The main thing that was off from the script, in Fair Winds, was my idea to make the bleed black and expand the borders of the final panel beyond the normal set within the issue itself.

I should be working on this again in a few days, I just need to loosen up my drawing muscles. I haven't drawn in some time since the final weeks of classes were getting in the way, but it's done already so there's no excuse. I can't wait to work on these again.


So this sums up my first official blog post with actual content. Woo. We just hit a milestone.

Hello

I should start posting soon, for now I must deal with my academic requirements.