Artblock

I just haven't been able to do much drawing beyond the usual daily grinding (thirty minutes or so of figure drawing basically), not much to share there either seeing as I've transitioned to using a whiteboard and a market to draw with than say using paper like how I've traditionally drawn. Drawing on paper is handy since I can go over the drawings later and play around with those with some inking or drawing clothes over them, crap like that. Maybe I need some paper again...  I haven't seen much joy in the entire enterprise of art itself recently.  It's probably an outgrowth of my personal issues lately. Oh well.

Issues with Painting

I liked this painting I did a lot. I'd like it even more if a little hadn't accident occurred: some ink spilled on the right cheek of the girl. To compensate for the damage, I made the skin redder with a thicker application of PY43 and PR122, Winsor-Newton and White Nights watercolors and as much lifting as I could manage. I did need to overwork the paper in the process but that doesn't matter. Sad, but that's how it is. I still managed to salvage most of it, so that's a relief. I did at least two other watercolors prior to this before I finished with this one. I dare say I'm almost proud of it. I only used three brushes (technically four) on this, a 1/2 inch oval, a 1/4 inch oval, and a Kuretake waterbrush body with the bristles of a Pentel waterbrush. Jean Haines is right, you only need so many brushes for a painting. The ovals did the heavy lifting, the waterbrush did mostly lifting and adding small additions of color when and where needed. I should do this more often.

Forrestry and Inking

I had some fun inking some stills of tropical Southeast Asian forests. I really enjoyed it and I want to get better at it. I did most of them with my brushes

The first saw some experimentation on my part on smudging my inks. The result is kind of shit but I'm learning and I have some things to study too so it isn't so bad. I'm proudest of the second to the last pic, it's easily the most interesting and unique one of them all. I'd like to do more of those. I need to be more naturally abstract with the other patterns and textures, chunky forms of mostly symmetrical shapes aren't going to help my desire to show the inconsistencies and beautiful chaos of nature and its totality.

There's this too. It's just more fun with the marker and I absolutely love it. I'm trying to me looser with my inks now and not being so anal about super precision, as long as it's relatively thin and I can do the abstract lines and forms easy with the fatter brushes and the marker,  I'm freakin happy.

Dart With Destiny, Status: Completed

I can't show it in its entirety sadly, such are agreements with my partner and the site we're posting it to, but I can show parts of it.

Page Four

Page 10

Page Five

Here's a few of the pages in random order and a bit of commentary.

Page Four:
Probably my favorite page of them all because it's the most quality of them all at least in my view. Other than the Fabbrician and the wonky perspective I can't see how I can do much else to bolster this page.

Page Ten:
Panels three and four disappoint me. The pencils were nearly identical other than the head turn that the man takes when he faced Glen aka Mr. Stubbles. I thought "hey, seeing as he turns his head his clothes have to follow suit!" So I made some adjustments in the inking, and then came the realization that it won't work and how that spoiled my confidence in my inking and made me fuck the placement of the fine liner I was inking with.... it was just TRAGIC. Now it's very different and it spoiled what I was going for. Oh well...

Page Five:
Panel six (the last one, the inset panels within and between panels I count as full panels in their own right here) was cut out and replaced. Seems pretty seamless here.

I'm an Idiot and I Forgot to Upload. Better Late than Never?

Ah... Mignola. How I love thee. A friend was borrowing my Hellboy Library Editions as he visited my place, one and three specifically since they're the only ones I own, he wanted to do some studies of his art and I've been more than supportive of his forays into the fields of art. I became a bit jealous and decided to join him. Flipping to a random page on the third Hellboy Library Edition, the random flip brought me to his The Island series that Mignola had drawn and I decided to emulate the figure of the Priest as well as I can.  Like with most of Mignola's work from this late 90s and early 2000s era of his comic book illustrations, the Priest in The Island had struck itself deep in my mind's eye as a major foundation in my visual library.  I still maintain this to be my personal favorite era of Mignola's art but his 80s work is a very good contender as well.

I also wanted to play around with some cartooning and expressions. I dusted off one of my favorite abstractions from life, my rendition of the rat. You can call it a mouse, I've also heard it called a puppy. It doesn't matter. It's kinda cute and it's rodent-ish. It's good enough for me. Finding fun ways to play around with balancing and making an appealing little abstract figure are fun too. I need to do this more.

Some recent figure drawing exercises I've done. I like these a lot lately.

The Importance of Planning

How some artists like Jack Kirby are able to just draw full pages without much thought and get what they want out of them is beyond me. To be able to put pencil to paper and just let your arm and the graphite do its magic takes a certain skill or imagination not with me. Borrowing Kelley Jones' term for someone who has had an extreme influence on one's art, I am much like my "art father" Mike Mignola. I cannot just have my way with the page, I need to plan carefully only to destroy some pages after much thought as they do not satisfy a certain level of quality that I expect of myself. An extreme form of this problem is what had happened to Mike Mignola as he was writing and drawing what I believe was Hellboy: The Island. It may very well be the reason too as to why the artist changed from Mike to Duncan Fregredo from The Wild Hunt onwards up until The Fury, only coming back to the drawing board as the writer-artist for Hellboy in Hell. In any case, I'm in my own mini-The Island phase right now. I want to draw but I can't get myself to like my own craft nor my compositions. Oh well... Some mild bitching from me is the most one would be getting from for now. Till next week.

These are the abandoned The Island pages, carefully penciled and inked but still abandoned. Just like the two pages I've done so far!

This page is particularly powerful in my memories. Fifth panel, left-most face. That face is seared into my memory, likely forever.

The art from this point onwards is from the Mike Mignola-Duncan Fregredo era of the Hellboy comics. These are all from The Wild Hunt.

I Remembered that I'm a Slow Writer

I always underestimate how slow I am as a writer. Oh well, that "short" brush essay
 won't be coming any time soon, assuming you count a six-pager and counting on TNR font 12 as short. As I won't come out with that any time soon, I'll just go back to posting some sketches for now and talking about my stupid reading in the arts.

In the past month or two, I've felt as though I've stagnated and the fluidity and weight and motion that I've come to develop has ended. My figures felt stiffer and it was depressing. I blame myself for having seen that one Danny Galieote video on the asymmetry of the body and how it balances itself out in the contrasting curve as you will see below. Strangely enough, seeing the asymmetric curves again in the work of Michael Hampton's Figure Drawing: Design and Invention made it clock in my head and add something to my work that Danny Galieote took away. I like having more life and energy in my drawings again. He also broke my mental prison of trying to stay in proportion while making thirty-second sketches. As long as you capture the emotion and comprehensibility of the pose, it's good.

Some sketches I'm really proud of post-Hamptonian revitalization.

Drawn on my small whiteboard.

Another angle.

Hampton just pushed my head back into another direction, a good one. I really appreciate it. I'm more confident and happy with my work now.

The next few drawings will be assorted in subject and who was with me when I made them, the first being a riff with my friend. I'll post more of those drawings with him in the coming weeks. He came over and we had fun with all my paper and markers. I introduced him to the asymmetric curves and he's just so happy with his art now. Good for him. He's learning!

New Frontiers

I've decided. I'm going to be posting essays on this blog and making a video essay version to upload to youtube. I just need to find a way to decently record the video segments... I'll find a way. I already have a topic outline of the essay. I might have it by next week but the video part might be awhile from now. Such is life....

New horizons!

Sketches of My Studies and a Refinement of My Style

I believe that my style has evolved once more. I have no idea how to describe it but it seems to have become more unified and "internally consistent" in its form.

It's different somehow, but it's for the better. It is here that you can also see some sketches of mine where I was consciously and forcing myself to draw in a more Mignola-esque style. The reference is in Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm, bottom left panel. That's one of the particular images from Mike Mignola's canon of art that has always struck me and has burned itself in the depths of my imagination. I should probably make a series on that one day, "Artwork That Has Struck Me". That would be a good idea.

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Here are some other sketches where I actively emulate Mignola, but no as hard as with the last sketch, and play around with some mild cartooning.

Lazy Week, Lazy Doodling

Sorry I didn't make the post yesterday, I was doing something. I'm back again for whoever finds this interesting, the scant one or two people out there, assuming there are even that many. No, I'm not bitter or anything, this stuff takes time to build up and I'm not surprised or angry no one is noticing me or anything. This is more of a personal exercise for me anyway, see how long I can sustain this kind of a project. Doing okay so far. I want to sustain this.

Oh yes, my secret Public Domain novel adaptation project is going well too. I had just recently finished writing it in its rough "script" form, if you can call it a script, and the thumbnails are not too far off themselves, those too are rough. I can start refining them further, soon enough. It's standing at twenty-eight pages so far. I wonder how long I need to finish drawing all of it.

Anyway, have some drawings.

There was another but it was stubborn and wouldn't upload for some weird reason. I wanted to talk about that one a lot too. Sad.

More lettering practice. I think I"m getting better at this.

Reaching into my Inner Mignola-clone and Other Things

I got my order for an Ames Lettering Guide, it's from Alvin (the brand and not some person named Alvin). I've been wanting this for awhile now, now that I do have it I absolutely love it.

I dove in and set it to the often quoted 3 1/2 setting from Todd Klein's blog, letterer extraordinaire, and I got somewhat confused.... Do you see what I see?

The paper, as you can see, is standard US Letter size. The setting Todd Klein uses is quite small, very much proportional to the general measurement of the very same lettering on reproduced art, that is the final product that you see in floppies, in trade paperbacks, in omnibuses, and other sorts of comics. Thus, the setting that Todd Klein says that you should use matches the size for the art once scaled down since the reproduced art is half the size or less of that which you see in what is offered to the usual comic book reading public, those who buy original art aside. Once scaled up to the usual size that the original art has, that is around 10X15", 11X17, or A3, to be proportional the lettering setting should also be scaled up to at least the 7 setting. Reproduced art is just half of that or less than that. Anyway, with this realization which might not even be true at all and I'm just going off on some weird logic, I set my own Lettering Guide to 8 and played around with 6 and went off with that. here's how it went. (I remember seeing some letterers working on reproduced art and Klein working on overlays over the original art, so I don't really know. It might just be something particular to the letterer and there isn't a set standard.)

Most of these are with the 3 1/2 setting.

Also, here's some doodles.

These were in the last couple days.

Some sketches.

Me calling on my inner Mike Mignola.