the (comics) industry

Penciller/Inker relationships
Is he a tracer, a finisher - art partner, continuity cop, embellisher? The analogy of an inker as a drummer in a band doesn’t even really fit because American comics is done in so much of an assembly-line style that they really have no say until everything else is done - almost more like the mixer or sound engineer, if we were to use the band analogy (and if so then what is the colorist or even letterer for that matter. I’ve seen pencilers leave all the black placement and shadows to the inkers, correct anatomy and perspective, finish out buildings add background and even draw in full figures like the famous jim lee and scott williams page shown here. is it their job to point out all they do to the penciler, in hopes that things will change and they wont have to do as much next time or is it too much for any one person in the process to try and tell the others how to do their job.
Does a bad penciller/inker reflect on the other’s skillset and talent in the finished work if it looks bad - or can artists only tell the difference. Are we cutthroat enough to only do “our job” or is it the nature of a team effort that each person down the line must pick up the slack the others have left? I suppose this is the job of the editor to make sure that everyone is doing their job to their full extent - or that there is an understanding between the various creative teams - supposing that every team is different. But its hard to say anything as a statement - that isn’t a question for clarification - without stepping on the other’s toes. Is it the inker’s job to silently make the penciller look as good as possible and change things or is his job only controlling the look of the lines and not their placement (the pencilelr’s job)? There are even inkers that take over the art, that you see the inker more than the penciller like Bill S. or Joe Kubert.


writer/artist relationships - and their effect on the reader
I’ve also been talking to my friend about the difference between “rockstar artists” that grab you from a distance because of their own intrinsic power from their style (jim lee, kelley jones etc) - and “story artists” who really go unnoticed until you read the work, and find it served the storytelling the best and played second fiddle or even in tandem with the writer rather than over his head (steve dillon, john cassaday, etc). There are some that are both or have become that.
For a long time, I guess growing up in the 90’s - the age of rock star artists - I began buying and reading comics purely visually, and it wasn’t until recently that I would buy a book because of the writer, disliking the art at first because it didn’t “grab” me and then find the artists to be a perfect fit - and I couldn’t imagine it any other way.
How does this affect marketing that is either based on a name by name basis, or splash page art? Of course there have been artists in this transition that I used to like visually but can’t stand to read, or found confusing. I’ve known writers who hate artists who render or take time for themselves such as drawing full splash pages etc, that the reader slows down to look at - because it messes with their pacing. Then there have been artists that even play with that idea, and actually simplify during action sequences so you read faster- you have less to look at, like Mignolla.
I might never pick up a book if I don’t respond well to the marketing or I have to go through the work to read synopsizes or listen/read peer reviews. Neither of which are bad, and are probably by far more accurate than splash-page art, but it is almost totally the opposite in terms of how we process that type of marketing and the types of people that respond to it - or would go through the work, its not as immediate as it used to be.
Then there is also the difference between cover artists and interior artists like Brian Stillfreeze, and Dave Dorman who could sell sand to Egyptians, or bottle water to Americans - lol. I suppose in certain instances they have become recognized and gone on to an easier and higher paying career where they are a house-hold name in the comics world but by and large it is a totally difference industry from a buyers perspective and no one really told anyone else to change the way you look for new books. You just kind of get jaded after spending a couple hundred on beautiful cover art that delivers nothing inside - not saying that Dorman or Stillfreeze have done that , just that they easily could.
Many have even said that this is the age of “rock-star artists,” who people will sit through bad art they don’t like just to read a good story. I suppose it is such a subjective subject that a perfect match and balance will only be found in the eye of the beholder, and is still changing. But its interesting for a guy who fell out of reading for a few years to come back and see it almost flip flopped of where it was 20, 15 or even 10 years ago. Ideally we are looking to take in all aspects equally well, but it rarely happens as such.

Many of these conversations/arguments were inspired/introduced to me, by things I heard inker John Holdridge, and writer Mike Baron say years ago at a class they taught, rather dualistically - for these very reasons, in Denver’s RMCAD about 10 years ago, now. But they are things I am only now beginning to experience and question for myself.

ok inks

put up a bunch of new inks on da, this one didnt quite make the grade - i loved the figured but the back ground was so rough i just didnt make it through. anyway - pencils by rick leonardi, idk what book.

Batman Scarecrow inks by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Hellboy inks and zip by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

X-men: academy x inks by ~xaqBazit on deviantART
my finals will be up next week, im doing two uninked and one unpublished cover my Marko Djurdjevic and a buch o stuff form lyle's class.
also some of my art was featured on the "art and fist" they have a blog and it could make it into their anthology. check it out here and here.

Carter Ink

Tattoo Shop Wall Illustrations by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Here's some pictures of what turned out to be "wall illustrations" after I had planned to do a single mural for them. It worked out better this way though, I hope I can get some better pictures soon. I used pencil to draw them out and about 6 black sharpies to finish all 3 (they are just not made for an unsmooth wall) and two white paint sharpies, both water and old based though neither work for whiting out comics AT ALL! They work great for doing highlights on wall illustrations. I didn't get paid but rather exchanged the work for 1/2 off on the tattoos that I'll be getting soon. They all took me about an hour each to finish.

I based the top figure off a sketch I had in an old sketchbook, ghost rider and an old character design from middle school. I drew him on a separate day and decided against going back in with white sharpie even though he was designed to be lit from his mouth.

The middle figure is based a few different characters and illustrations from princess mononoke and some artwork by Marko Djurdjevic, a comic artist, specifically a drawing he did for an RPG and his design for the demons in Thor.

The last figure is based on a couple different mcfarlane action figures (series 22 skullsplitter, series 21 Raven and series 25 hellspawn) Alex Ross' Green Lantern design for Kingdom Come and a poster I have for Olivier Coipel's run on Thor.

I briefly talked tattoos with the guys at the shop and they asked if I had considered interning to become a tattoo artist. It wasn't an invitation (I don't think) but it was an interesting talk. I wouldn't feel at all like my education at SCAD went towards something other than comics, it already has. But as a profession I have considered, very seriously, becoming a tattoo artist. I feel like I will have so much to offer the comic industry in the next few years and yet I feel the same about the tattoo industry. They seemed to have plenty of free time, but they just opened, so I would have time to work on a graphic novel but I wouldn't be able to do a monthly book anymore. For me to get into it though I would have to wait till my fiance got done doing her pastry externship and we would have to save up some cash considering I wouldn't get paid for it for at least 6 months to apprentice - if i could find a place that was looking to apprentice someone. And I know with tattooing that my drawing skills are only half the work, but I feel like they are a sold half, as humbly as I can feel that. It would be a more solid paycheck once I got going but I've been told my skills lay in storytelling and while that would come in handy in tattooing it's more focusing on a single image, like illustration and I feel like my speed advantage would be lost. I may get lazier and rely on reference more as many tattoo artists do and would probably draw less. So much of school has been getting me to draw a bunch and draw accurately, and that I would lose some of those skills the less I drew and that scares me. But it may be a easier more secure lifestyle and in no way less rewarding, and I would still have the option of graphic novel. I don't know, we'll see but its interesting and intriguing to think about.

"A page a Day"

Jack Kirby is estimated to have drawn somewhere between 24-25,000 - yes you read that right, twenty-five-thousand pages, not to mention creating and sometimes writing the stories for hundreds of characters over his career. I'm not sure if this credit is finished pages or including breakdowns which he did for almost every comic artist during his time at marvel, because of his explosive in-your-face storytelling.

The saying is that you have to be good enough to finish one page a day to be a professional comic book artist. And logically that makes sense, 22pg comic and with a one-month deadline and 28 days in the month, minus weekends and give a little leeway for big pages or laziness is about right. And when you start out in comics you start working and say "hey, I can do that. It's not impossible" That is when you are in highschool or College and if your not in class then you just have a bunch of time to kill and if you can avoid watching reruns on tv or playing video games then you're doing pretty well. have most of your free time. But if your anything like me you have a job, you have bills, you have homework, class, a girlfriend, friends and you have to take care of stuff like hygiene, food, dishes, laundry etc. And after you leave college you will also have loans hanging over your head for the next 20-30 years, if your lucky. Which means you will probably be working a part if not full-time job for at least your first few years into your professional comics career. Add on top of this if you have kids in the near future, get sick often, blah blah blah. So you can see how quickly you need to become faster than a page a day to make a deadline for a monthly book.
Tom's been talking about how volume counts, and it makes sense - (the more you draw, the easier it is next time and the quicker you find and correct your weaknesses). He's mentioned some people work too fast and others too slow. And his take is that while your in school, you should not be playing to your strengths but facing your weaknesses and getting help on them. If all you wanted from college was an expensive pat on the back then ignore me. But its just been something we've been talking about a lot recently.
For me specifically I have to work fast because i already have to have a job and I have no doubt that if i could dedicate more time to it i would probably be where i want to be by now. But with everything i already have and how many outside projects i have going all i can do is focus on quantity and facing those problems I haven't concurred or "creatively avoided" as i like to say. It's no wonder the running motto in comics is "when in doubt black it out" and artists like Todd McFarlane are famous for doing things like inserting random smoke or FX to hide a difficult or ugly portion of a drawing, and he is not the worst example by far just one of the more famous, *cough* Rob Lifield *cough* .
Manga is this side of the coin and it shows that to a large and growing amount of readers that "volume counts." Backgrounds are close-to-none and speedlines, caricaturized easy to read and repeated expressions, similar compositions and cool looking angles and fx take the place of intentional thought-out and time-consuming aspects. Even inventions like Zip-a-tone were invented, and artists usually who wrote/lettered/drew and inked their own books (as opposed to assembly-line American style) took on unnamed assistants who's strengths were their weaknesses - all to save time and so they can stretch a story on to take up most of their lives to complete and end having worked on multiple phone-book sized works. Osama Tezuka, you could call him the manga/anime Jack Kirby, and as his bio on this website describes he is "Dubbed "The Human Dream Factory" by manga authority Frederick Schodt, Tezuka produced an estimated 150,000 pages of comic book art, 21 animated series, and 500 individual manga and animation stories."
So I'm not saying one is better than the other or that the artists like Bernie Wrightson who take years to complete select master-works at a speed slower than painting are any more/less talented than people like Kirby or Tezuka I'm mearly stating that as I get close to graduating it becomes clear how different people in this industry across the world have used their time in it and what they seemed to have valued based on their accomplishments.

*On another note, (the reason I wrote this) I drew and inked my super-hero page for Faber Castell Yesterday and colored it today and realized though I had a while to think/thumbnail the page actually drawing and inking it only took about 8/9 hrs (but it was pretty much straight-through next to dinner) and only about 4/5 hours to color, today, (try making a brown with only red, yellow and blue). But I love the page and am really really proud of it, as it seems I am more and more with every project. I'm sad that they want the originals but I have scans and will post them after I'm allowed to in a few months. I got to use my old character from way back that I've now dubbed "THE OSPREY" (which is a bad-ass plane/helicopter by the way -> google it.) You can see my old maquette and turnaround designs for him in my first post for Vitamin Z, here. But it was my first paid gig for a sequential art page! Though I cant say it was published per say, but it was the only time my hand has hurt from working on a page and it was probably all the small lines and me bearing down for control and strait lines with the tech-pens.

And finally now I go on to design and paint a mural for Carter Ink here in Georgia, design my next tattoo and try and get aired and finish all 11 episodes of my "Terra Novus" Radio Drama, though its future as was planned seems uncertain, but I'm exploring alternative routes to get it out there.

coppying, tracing, reference and plagurism

now unlike most artists ill tell you i started learning how to draw by tracing. my mom bought me a small 8x10 light table and i was also lucky enough to have a small projector. some times i did copy line for line, like if i wanted a poster of a certain shot. it gets your hand used to the proportions that other artists are using especially id you sketch on top of another artists work.

then i moved on to compiling shots and mixing tracing to make a story, this, however is where i started to really learn, because you have to break down the figure and start to make it look like your own and make the clothes/costume/hair etc. fit the form. i used to feel so bad about it, because i wasn't confident enough to draw each panel and i couldn't stand the idea of drawing inside a certain sized box - which why tight roughs have been cool because i will draw it, and resize or move certain elements around to make it fit as a whole. Ive also seen artists draw all their stuff in a sketch book and then resize and trace each element onto the final, like Adam Hughes normally works. if you can keep the energy of your original drawings this is good because you will have the confidence you need to draw it yourself, by whatever means you need as long as you can accomplish that it doesn't matter what you do.

drawing from comics has always been a mixed thing, some say do it, others say you'll pick up bad habits or wont know what your describing. and id agree, but i did. i think its especially important when picking up rendering and textural techniques. Ive also been looking at a lot of inking recently.

then the next step would be trying to draw and original picture and use techniques you found when looking at someone else's work, and trying to apply the same ideas but make them work. then you'll relay start understanding what they were trying to do and where to use them. or i used to like to trace a figure and try to change the light source, or if he is cropped trace what you have and finish the rest of the body.

you can also trace photographs, or draw on top of them, or with comic book sand follow background and objects lines back to a vanishing point and find the horizon line, we did this for school at scad, and then even try to "hang the figures" on that line. <-its a techniques for figures in perspective, if you dont know what it means look it up.

THESE ARE ALL THINGS TO PRACTICE AND LEARN FROM - NOT FOR YOUR ACTUAL PAGES.
Reference for your pages should be like i said for textures and rendering, but applied to your drawing (ie: a different angle, different environment etc)don't find a character that fits the perspective of a separate background and then trace them together. though that could be helpful, don't use it for your finished pages, maybe just for practice. i think i did all these tings when i didn't have any friends who knew how to draw and i was kind of making habits and building techniques, but i didn't know what they meant.

look at a lot of stuff as well, i used to subscribe to wizard magazine as a kid and go through the 10 cent bins in my comic shop, though it was the early/mid 90's, now its the dollar bins, to get a ton of material from a lot of different artists and compare and see what they are doing well that is the same, you'll start to learn the conventions of comic books, layouts, storytelling, composition, and you'll see who is taking risks, who's playing it safe, who is not doing so well, and what is too much.


now recently when doing the tight roughs i did alot of sketches for the splash page where Karen makes her dressed up, flirty, sexy entrance to entice the doctor into leaving her husband alone. but when i went to go do it, it fell flat. its like i was trying for a stereotype and it didnt work, like the witter of aliens said he first wrote a comedy but it wasn't funny, so he turned to horror. but i stuck it out, and liek i said earlier, started referencing and comparing artists who drew great looking females and then applied those same techniques in my work, once they had become normal, and in my head. i used the reference for my sketchbook but just the memory for drawing it, that is important. there was a certain pose i was looking for and i looked at tons of models, my girlfriend even posed, but it just wasn't clicking. i changed a few things and bam, there it was. a few weeks later i was looking through an issue of danger girl and saw a pose almost exactly like mine, in fact i had toyed with the idea of giving her a fur coat just like the image i was thinking, though it wasn't next to me and i hadn't seen it for some years, i was unconsciously referencing that image. this seems to happen alot when i come up with story ideas, something will happen too easy then ill realize it is because it is just like something i liked and forgot about. so here is the image and here is my image.



Danger Girl Natalia by ~Blasterkid on deviantART

they are strikingly similar and i scared myself. however i felt like the way i had worked and the differences in the images, (campbell's is way better and sexier than mine) allowed me to stick with it. but i promised myself not to look at that image too closely when i did my final, and i wont, ill draw from my drawing. i was actually more trying to reference teh whole idea of the scene from the old Romita sr./stan lee, spider-man issue/scene where he finally meets MJ.

however the other day i was searching deviantart and found an image that was ridiculously close to another student's of mine. i found his myspace and found his drawing and compared it, he had traced it, he had zoomed up a bit and changed the costumes (a bit), but the whole thing was WAY too close to even be a drawing based of a drawing. However, I am friends with this student, I will not disclose his ID or what image he referenced. i thought of that, of turning him in to SCAD, i felt it was my duty and i was so conflicted/mad at the same time. and yet if i said anything i knew things would be weird, and he might get in trouble. he's been through a lot these last few quarters and just like anybody in that situation he probably cut a few too many corners and was on a tight deadline, but in the real world he is going to get sued and fired. i just wanted to look out for him but i cant find myself to tell him in a way that will seem like i am trying to help and not trying to turn on him. i didn't even want to know if the same technique applied to the rest of his work and stopped looking right there, i figured ignorance was bliss.

anyways to sum up, a few of the big "no-no's" in comic books can be alot of help IN YOUR SKETCHBOOK, you can learn alot about how comics work and artists you like IN YOUR SKETCHBOOK, but when it comes to drawing your final pages make sure those times you look at other artists stay IN YOUR SKETCHBOOK!

some links you may find interesting related to this topic are as follows, particularly with Greg land and Adam Hughes (AH!).

http://www.youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=113493&page=2
http://kungfurodeo.com/2008/03/31/david-mack-is-the-new-greg-land-is-the-new-rob-liefeld/
http://drawn.ca/2007/04/04/stuart-immonens-bag-of-tricks/