Issuu

#24

WINTER 2013

7.95 In The US

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS AND CARTOONING

GLEN ORBIK

DEMOS HIS NOIR PAINTING TECHNIQUE

ROBERT VALLEY

INTERVIEW WITH THE ANIMATOR OF TRON: UPRISING & “THE BEATLES: ROCK BAND”

BOB McLEOD

CRITIQUES A NEWCOMER’S WORK PLUS: MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

82658 27764 1

Contains nudity for figure drawing instruction • Mature Readers Only

DIGITAL

NS DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional EDITIO BLE A “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and IL AVA NLY animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS FOR O 5 and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic $2.9 storytelling, as well as such DRAW! #4 skills as layout, penciling, inking, Interview with ERIK LARSEN, KEVIN lettering, coloring, Photoshop techNOWLAN on drawing and inking niques, plus web guides, tips, tricks, techniques, DAVE COOPER’s coloring techniques in Photoshop, BRET and a handy reference source—this BLEVINS tutorial on Figure magazine has it all! Composition, PAUL RIVOCHE on the Design Process, reviews of NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for comics drawing papers, and more! purposes of figure drawing. (88-page magazine) $5.95 INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS. (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #8

DRAW! #9

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #5

DRAW! #6

DRAW! #7

MIKE WIERINGO interview, BENDIS and OEMING on how they create “Powers”, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw great hands”, “The illusion of depth in design” by PAUL RIVOCHE, art books reviewed by TERRY BEATTY, plus reviews of the best art supplies, and more!

Interview & demo with BILL WRAY, STEPHEN DeSTEFANO interview, BRET BLEVINS shows “How to draw the human figure in light and shadow,” Photoshop tutorial by CELIA CALLE, inking tips by MIKE MANLEY, reviews of the best art supplies, links, and more!

Interview/demo by DAN BRERETON, ZACH TRENHOLM on caricaturing, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” demo by ALBERTO RUIZ, “The Power of Sketching” by BRET BLEVINS, “Designing with light and shadow” by PAUL RIVOCHE, reviews of art supplies, links, and more!

(88-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #11

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

Interview & demo by MATT HALEY, TOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY on character design, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” by ALBERTO RUIZ, “Draping The Human Figure” by BRET BLEVINS, a new COMICS SECTION, International Spotlight on JOSÉ LOUIS AGREDA, and more!

WRITE NOW #8 crossover! MIKE MANLEY & DANNY FINGEROTH create a comic from script to print, BANCROFT & CORLEY on bringing characters to life, Adobe Illustrator with ALBERTO RUIZ, Noel Sickles’ work examined, PvP’s SCOTT KURTZ, art supply reviews, and more!

RON GARNEY interview & demo, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and others discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ on Adobe Illustrator, interview with MARK McKENNA, links, and more!

STEVE RUDE on comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On Life”, Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

KYLE BAKER on merging traditional and digital art, MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, and more! New BAKER cover!

Demo of painting methods by ALEX HORLEY, interview and demo by COLLEEN COOVER, a look behindthe-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more!

(96-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(88-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

(104-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(112-page magazine) $5.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

(96-page magazine) SOLD OUT (Digital Edition) $2.95

(88-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #14

DRAW! #15

DRAW! #16

DRAW! #17

DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

In-depth interviews and demos with DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, and more!

Covers major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with BILL REINHOLD, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, and more!

In-depth interview with HOWARD CHAYKIN, behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on HOW TO USE REFERENCE and WORKING FROM PHOTOS (by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY), and more!

Interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates his series, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

Interview & demo by R.M. GUERA, Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE demo and interview, DANNY FINGEROTH’s new feature on writer/artists with R. SIKORYAK, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and tool tech, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on penciling & more!

(84-page magazine) $6.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

DRAW! #20

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, Rough Stuff’s BOB McLEOD gives a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work, Write Now’s DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights writer/artist AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the best art supplies and tool technology, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, plus Web links, book reviews, and more!

Urban Barbarian DAN PANOSIAN talks shop about his gritty, designinspired work with editor MIKE MANLEY, DANNY FINGEROTH interviews “Billy Dogma” writer/artist DEAN HASPIEL, plus more of MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, product and art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, FRANK MILLER interview, plus MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 US • (Digital edition) $2.95

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $2.95

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WINTER 2013 VOL. 1, No. 24 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Copy-Editing • Eric Nolen-Weathington Front Cover • Glen Orbik DRAW! Winter 2013, Vol. 1, No. 24 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial address: DRAW! Magazine, c/o Michael Manley, 430 Spruce Ave., Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614. DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2013 by their respective contributors. Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing accept no responsibility for unsolicited submissions. All artwork herein is copyright the year of production, its creator (if work-for-hire, the entity which contracted said artwork); the characters featured in said artwork are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners; and said artwork or other trademarked material is printed in these pages with the consent of the copyright holder and/or for journalistic, educational, or historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied. This entire issue is ©2013 Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. ISSN 1932-6882. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

GLEN ORBIK

Mike Manley interviews the painter/teacher about the dying art of book illustration.

40 45 56 62 78

THE ORBIK WORKSHOP Glen Orbik details his step-by-step process for creating a painted book cover.

Robert Valley The animator/designer/comic artist gets his Swerve on.

rough critique Bob McLeod gives practical advice and tips on how to improve your work.

comic art bootcamp This month’s installment: The Eyes Have It

The crusty Critic

Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade. This month: Crusty tricks!

DRAW! WINTER 2013

-ING AHEAD

t seems another year has come and gone, and that means another year full of Drawing! As I write this I am already drawing the Judge Parker strips well into 2013, and it seems like I just got used to writing 2012 on them instead of 2011. Yet, I still have only half my Christmas shopping done! Luckily, as an artist, giving the gift of art makes time spent at the mall a lot less. Time runs a lot slower in comics than in real life. The concept of time itself seems to even be suspended for most comic strips and books in general. Some characters seem to never age despite there being strips or stories by the dozen dealing with the Christmas holiday, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and especially New Year’s, when you actually address the passing of one year into the next. But as we ring out the old year, I ring the bell once again. My hat’s off and a cup of holiday cheer to my regular contributors, Bret, Jamar, and Bob, as well as publisher John, and Eric, my Main Man who really helps get this mag out. These guys really help make DRAW! the best how-to magazine on comics and cartooning being published today. I’d also like to thank Glen Orbik for taking time out from his busy schedule and giving such a great interview and process coverage on how he works. It was also a blast to talk to Robert Valley, and cover his career and the amazing and exciting work he’s doing now on Tron, and on his past work on projects like Rock Band and the Gorillaz! My goal is to keep the pages of DRAW! as packed as possible with real info on how to work, as well as with a diversity of styles and approaches. Next issue, Draw! goes full-color throughout, which requires #25 to ship in July, giving us extra time to gear up to our new quarterly full-color schedule. As always, your feedback and kittens are welcome at: mike@actionplanet.com. Till next time—go draw something!

NEXT ISSUE in JULY, FULL-COLOR! DRAW! #25 (80 pages, now in its new FULL-COLOR format, $8.95 print/$3.95 digital), the professional “how-to” magazine on comics and animation, features the über-talented Lee Weeks! You know his outstanding work from Daredevil, Incredible Hulk, et al. His insight into the artform is must-read material. Also, DRAW! gets to know DC’s Turkish sensation, Yildiray Çinar! From his work on Noble Causes to the recent New 52 Fury of the Firestorms, Yildiray is making quite a name for himself. We also welcome comic book veteran inker Joe Rubinstein for a chat about his storied career, plus there’s the usual assortment of columns you know and love: “Comic Art Bootcamp” with Mike Manley and Bret Blevins, “Rough Critique” with Bob McLeod, and “The Crusty Critic” with Jamar Nicholas! Edited by Mike Manley. SUBSCRIPTION RATE: Four issues US: $30 Standard, $40 First Class, $11.80 Digital Only Outside the US: Canada: $43, Elsewhere: $54 Surface, $78 Airmail

TwoMorrows.A New Day For Comics Fans!

LEE WEEKS INTERVIEW & DEMO

DC’s Rising Star

yildiray çinar inking legend

JOE RUBINSTEIN ROUGH STUFF’S

BOB MCLEOD

CRITIQUES A NEWCOMER’S WORK

PLUS MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • See free previews and order at www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! WINTER 2013

Under the COVERS

Glen Orbik Interview conducted October 2012 by Mike Manley Transcribed by Steven Tice

DRAW! WINTER 2013

DRAW!: You’re from what I seen via Facebook, you’re mostly a night owl? GLEN ORBIK: Yeah, yeah, if I had my choice, such as it is.

Laurel Blechman] got to do a bunch of Batman covers, and DC did a line of pulp superhero annuals for the summer, and that’s kind of when we started with that.

DRAW!: And you’re also teaching now, right? GO: Yeah, usually I teach the later-in-the-day classes. One of them is in the afternoon, but most of them are evening classes.

DRAW!: Was that for the Warner Brothers store? GO: No, no, no. The one at the store was later. That was actually supposed to be a cool deal where we were going to get in with them and do a bunch of artwork, and they were going to fly us to Chicago to the WB store and do a big opening. And then the Time Warner/AOL merger happened and everything kind of stopped. Our big flight and big to-do turned into a half-hour drive south to Torrence to the last remaining WB store at the time.

DRAW!: Where are you teaching now? GO: Right now it’s basically the current version of the school that our teacher Fred Fixler started, the California Art Institute in Calabasas, which is about 20 miles west of us, and then on the weekends we go to Pasadena, which is, like, 20 miles in the other direction. Right now it’s just the two schools within that range. Last year I was flying up to San Francisco every week to try that for a while, but the traveling was too much of a pain in the ass. DRAW!: Have you ever taught at the Los Angeles Figurative Academy? GO: No. DRAW!: Okay, so you’re working at the place in Calabasas. GO: Yeah, Calabasas— Thousand Oaks, actually—is the California Art Institute. It’s the one that Fred started when he separated from the school he was teaching at in the ’80s.

DRAW!: Were you into comics as a kid? GO: Oh yeah. Would anybody else choose to go into comics? I mean, if there was not some sort of childhood fantasy in there to…. No, actually, I started collecting comics in the mid-’70s, and Laurel was collecting from the mid-’60s, so our two collections kind of butt up against each other. We went on purpose to do the comics stuff. DRAW!: Have you ever done any interiors? GO: No, I’m just too slow.

DRAW!: Would that be something you’d like to do, maybe as a long-term project? DRAW!: I seem to reGO: Yeah, I wouldn’t member Steve Rude took mind; it would be fun. It’s some classes there. just the reality of trying to Glen Orbik at work on a painting. GO: Yes. Steve likes to pay some bills and things. go anywhere in the world, though, that has Andrew Loomis’ When we were doing the painted covers about 15 years ago, name mentioned frequently. we had several different people from DC and Marvel ask us if we would do painted books, and I said, “Well, we would, DRAW!: [laughs] How long have you been doing this? but we’re really slow.” And they’re like, “Oh, it’s okay, take GO: I started taking classes in ’84 and started teaching in ’86. four years.” I can’t really afford to take four years. It doesn’t really work that way. You can’t get 400 bucks for something DRAW!: I think I became aware of your work when you you spent six months on. started doing the covers for American Century, which was done by Howard Chaykin. DRAW!: What do you spend most of your time doing? GO: Yeah, American Century. That was ’99, 2000—some- GO: Right now it’s mostly paperbacks, doing a lot more of where in there. That was after we [Glen and his partner, the detective sort of things. The Hard Case Crime covers are

DRAW! WINTER 2013

supposed to be covers that look like they were done 50 years ago and forgotten about. Basically, whenever it’s supposed to look like it was done a long time ago, they call us. DRAW!: And then you can hire models that look like Steve Holland that everybody used to hire in the old days? GO: Yeah, that would be great. We have a couple of people that we’ve used, or when we get into a pinch, we use ourselves, but, yeah, we’re usually trying to push them to look like Holland or whoever would fit the bill. Actually, when we did the American Century covers, we used the same two models. There were, like, a dozen covers, and we used the same girl for all but two of them, I think, just different wigs and things. DRAW!: Back in the Golden Age, the agencies used to do things like hire the models, or pay for the models, and do all that to help the illustrator. You have to do all that yourself now, right, wrangle all the models? GO: Yeah, those days are done. We sort of got in during the tail end of that when we started doing paperbacks in the early ’90s, and some of the companies basically would reimburse for a few of those things, but that didn’t last long. That’s ancient history. Now it’s just part of the fee, I guess. DRAW!: When you’re going to do a cover, do you have models in mind? How do you go about getting them? I suppose it’s easier in L.A. because it’s like central casting out there. You can probably get a guy that looks like a pirate, or a guy that looks like a judge, crook, etc. GO: Well, yeah, that’s the cool thing about teaching is that you’ve got quite a few models and students who could make good pirate models or cowboy models. So that’s one good thing about it. I stopped teaching for about four years, I don’t know, twelve years ago, and it was a lot easier if I kept my fingers in the pie to keep aware of who was out there. When you’ve had some models work for you in school, you get to see if they’re good at doing action poses, or heroic poses, or whatever kind of poses. Or, if they’re really stiff but they have a good face, you kind of keep it in mind where you can get away with it. DRAW!: I bought the book Rockwell behind the Camera, which was great to really see the amazing depth that he went to get his reference. GO: Yeah. DRAW!: Do you do sort of the same thing? You try to get people to ham it up or push their poses? GO: That book literally was the idea of what we were shooting for, no pun intended. But very abbreviated, not quite that elaborate, just because there isn’t that much time or money. I mean, they don’t pay you what they paid back in the glory days, when illustration was a huge moneymaker. DRAW!: What I’ve heard is that basically the rates have stayed the same for a long while, so if you got $1,500 for doing a cover in 1985, you pretty much get $1,500 for doing a cover in 2012.

Glen’s photo shoot and final cover to American Century #27. American Century ™ and © Howard Chaykin, Inc. and DC Comics.

DRAW! WINTER 2013

the

Glen Orbik Workshop

Glen Orbik has produced several covers for the Hard Case Crime line of novels—hardboiled detective stories that harken back to pulp traditions of the 1940s and ’50s when illustration still reigned supreme. Glen was kind enough to take us step by step through the creation process of one such cover—Songs of Innocence—and provide us with further insight into his work.

or this client—the Hard Case Crime book series— looking for the pretty girl in the story to feature goes without saying. Our heroine is a fairy princess for FAO Schwartz in the morning, a college student by day, and a sensual masseuse by night. We were aiming for an image that gave the feel of the book but didn’t actually need to be a scene from the story itself. Ironically, the author liked our idea well enough that he added a scene into the story which matched the one from our cover.

DRAW! WINTER 2013

STEP 1

We drew up three ideas for this assignment, little more than stick figures. My partner, Laurel, and I will sometimes shoot a few Polaroids to try out some pose possibilities. Of these three, they went with the third one, but they liked the first one well enough to consider using it for another book.

STEP 2

We shot photos of our model in the pose we had plans for. Then, since we had the model, camera, props, costumes, and lighting worked out, we asked the model to try some variations: head up, head down, arm over, etc. A good model often suggests better ideas than we do. You never know what is going to look the best, so an extra five minutes and 30 pictures is a good investment.

DRAW! WINTER 2013

STEP 7

I tape off the edges of my heavy-weight illustration board, which has been thinly gessoed first. I spray-fix the 6H pencil drawing and go to work. I do a very basic underpainting in about an hour, mostly to get rid of the white board. Then I refer to my color comp and tackle the painting by sections: the head and hair, the background, the upper half of the figure, and the rest of the figure and hand. Then I mail in the art, get paid, go buy art supplies for the next project, and repeat.

DRAW! WINTER 2013

Get

Your

Swerve

with

ROBERT VALLEY Interview conducted on October 2012 by Mike Manley Transcribed by Steven Tice DRAW!: How did you come about working on the Tron project? Robert Valley: I kind of wonder, myself. I think that a couple of different things came together. One was Alberto Mielgo and myself worked on that Beatles: Rock Band cinematic in London, and Charlie Bean, who’s directing Tron, was in London at the same time, so there’s an obvious connection between the three of us knowing each other. And the other connection I think comes through Titmouse because those guys asked me to do some designs for Motorcity a couple of years ago, and that kind of put me on the Disney radar. And so, when Charlie started to staff up on Tron, I guess my name came up again, and it just seemed to be a bunch of happy coincidences. DRAW!: And you were the main character designer, right? RV: I was, yeah. DRAW!: I know that they’re doing it in a 3-D program. It looks like they’re taking your designs and then basically

building 3-D characters and then doing some form of cel shading on them. Were there any issues with that from your side as a designer? RV: You know, we came up with some pretty specific designs, and I wanted to introduce some gradients on the characters to specifically soften some of the shadows around the eyes, or add wrinkles on some of the male characters, or create something that looked like mascara or kind of like a smoky eyes look on some of the girls. So some of that stuff is actually painted right into the 3-D model. And then the incidental shadows that you’re talking about, with the Toon Shader, that’s more on the Polygon side of things. DRAW!: So it’s a real combination of the surface texture versus the lighting? RV: Yeah, the way we sort of referred to it was that there were shadows that were baked in, and then there were shadows that were specific to the lighting of whatever scene. Those were just incidental shadows. Charlie, Alberto, Polygon, and I, we looked at some different Toon Shaders, and some of them looked too liquidy, and some of them weren’t quite right, so there was a bit of back and forth on that kind of stuff.

DRAW! WINTER 2013

DRAW!: Are these plug-ins or different programs? What’s the program that you guys are rendering everything on? RV: You mean the 3-D stuff? DRAW!: Yeah, the 3-D stuff. RV: Oh, I don’t know any of that. DRAW!: So you don’t know if they’re using Maya, or Lightwave, or whatever? RV: No, I don’t know any of that. It shows up and it’s like magic.

DRAW!: [laughs] How was that different—or was it different—than designing the Rock Band stuff, or working on the Gorillaz videos? Is there a different set of overall design criteria or problems that make things easier or more difficult for you when you are going between projects like this? RV: I think, going back to the Gorillaz stuff, the dynamic there was Jamie [Hewlett] would show up with a storyboard and the character models, the design pack, which is basically the way he wanted to draw the characters. And what they were wearing. You know, he was really specific about the kind of groovy details that the characters were wearing. And from there we would go on to a paperdrawn methodology or pipeline, and that was kind of a similar thing with the Beatles: Rock Band except, instead of getting designs and storyboards from Jamie, I was doing the designs and the storyboards. And then, again, we would go on to a traditional 2-D pipeline. The difference with the Tron stuff was because it was set in the digital world, and Charlie said, “Let’s do it all on the Cintiq. Let’s keep it all digital.” This goes back about two years, I guess. I got a Cintiq, and started drawing everything in Photoshop.

DRAW!: So this was all digital, just like the movie? There was no paper process on the Tron work? RV: There might have been really early on, when I was waiting for my Cintiq to arrive. There was about a (above) Traditional 2-D pencil design work for The Beatles: Rock Band video game. six-week wait for them to get more (below) A page from Robert Valley’s “Junk.” in stock, so in the meantime I was The Beatles ™ Apple Corps Ltd. Rock Band © Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. doing what I usually do: drawing Junk © Robert Valley. on paper, scanning it, putting it into Photoshop, cleaning it up, and then sending it to Charlie. Then I got my Cintiq, and everything went digital; I was drawing right in Photoshop, and that really lends itself to more of a… I don’t know, a slicker look, less chalky-looking than with the linework, and that was starting to integrate better with Alberto’s stuff. You know, it’s just the way it went. Now I’ve totally fallen in love with my Cintiq. DRAW!: I always like to talk to artists about that because I see people who work digitally because the demand of the job says, “We need it digitally,” but who prefer to work traditionally. There are people who like working back and forth between both—the virtual world and the meat world, as I call them. Going into your graphic novel, are you doing that traditionally, or is it a combination, or are you also doing that all digitally?

DRAW! WINTER 2013

RV: Well, I was just all in as far as the digital stuff on Tron, so I put my paper and pencils away for, like, a year-and-ahalf, and then I sort of transitioned from that kind of mindset right into my first Pear Cider book, and kept all that digital. I launched the book with an art show in France, and I didn’t have any original artwork. It was all digital, so I made prints. Afterwards, once the book was released and I started to promote it, I realized that what people really wanted was the tangible, 2-D, paper artwork. And I thought, “Wow, that makes sense. Now I get it.” So with the second book, the one that I just finished, I did all of the planning, the thumbnails, and the rough drawings on paper, and then I scanned that in and used that as the first step. Once it was all digital, then it was all Photoshop after that, but at least there’s some aspect of the pipeline that’s analog. DRAW!: So you were doing that for the people coming to the show. Do you find that doing it that way also adds something to your process as an artist?

RV: It does. I find, while I’m doing some storyboards this morning—I’m just starting a new project—that the very initial ideas, where you’re just kind of conjuring up ideas in your head, and you want to get them out real fast? For me there’s no better way to do that than with thumbnails, pens, and paper, and I just record those first nuggets of ideas as quickly as possible. It seems like trying to do that on the Cintiq, there’s a bit more of a delay time, it takes a bit longer, and it’s not quite as immediate, especially with what I’m doing right now, because those flocks of ideas are so fleeting. They just come and go so quickly that it’s a really delicate time. [laughs] DRAW!: In a way it’s sort of like when you have a dream, and when you wake up from your dream, if you don’t write it down, you start to forget it really quickly as the rest of the day creeps into your memory banks. Then, later on, you’re like, “Wow, was that in my dream, or was that part of another dream?” It sort of reinforces what I was saying to some of my students the other day; I was saying that, like you were talking about,

DRAW! WINTER 2013

constructive

ANALYSIS& CRITICISM newcomer’s work of a

BOB McLEOD

hat exactly makes a comic page professional? What separates the struggling amateur artists from the pro artists working for the big publishers? Other than their bank accounts and their egos, I mean. Is it figure drawing? Composition? Storytelling? Perspective? Technique? Well, it can be all of those things, or not really any of them in particular. It’s usually a combination of things, and they can often be relatively minor. What I try to do in this column is puzzle out what those main stumbling blocks are for an artist trying to break into comics. It almost always comes down to the fundamentals of art; those things I mentioned above. But it can also be something more elusive, such as style. Comics are fun to draw, and learning the fundamentals is hard, so many artists try to skip all that studying and rely on raw talent and an excess of busy line work to cover up their faults. This issue, we have a very nice sample page submitted for a critique by the talented Antonio Rodriguez, and he’s not one of those guys. It’s rare that I see a sample page with this much going for it. Antonio has obviously been doing his homework and is working hard. His page is extremely well composed, with good camera movement, nice backgrounds that show some understanding of perspective, clear storytelling, and even some fairly good figure drawing! He’s really choosing his shots well to tell the story in the most interesting way, and he’s expertly leading the reader’s eye from panel to panel by placing the center of attention in each panel to create a C formation on the overall page.

DRAW! WINTER 2013

FIGURE 1 FIGURE 2

His storytelling is fantastic. He opens with an establishing shot, as well he should, showing us we’re indoors, observing a couple watching the news on TV. I so often see beginners draw shots like this from behind the sofa only to see the sofa is up against the wall in the next panel, meaning we were somehow looking out from inside the wall! Antonio wisely avoids that trap by placing the sofa in the middle of the room in panel three. He’s decorated the room with pictures, a plant, a bookshelf, exposed brick, etc., not just a blank wall in an empty room, like so many beginners try to get away with. He then smartly goes from that long shot to an extreme closeup with no cluttering background, introducing the characters. Then he goes to another, even better establishing down-shot, and right back to another extreme close-up for the kiss, before ending with a medium shot to show her glowing. The elaborate backgrounds in panels one and three allow him to eliminate backgrounds in the other panels, where they would be distracting clutter. So many beginners have either too little backgrounds or too many. This is first-rate stuff in these respects, and I just don’t see that in most sample pages. Take a bow, Antonio. Well done! So Antonio’s no doubt gotta be thinking, “For cryin’ out loud, what more do I need to do to get work drawing the X-Men for Marvel?” Maybe you’re thinking that too. Well, as the old expression goes, “Close, but no cigar” (I guess they used to give you a cigar when you won at a carnival game or something). At any rate, sometimes it’s seemingly little things that can hold you back. Little things here and there that maybe by themselves seem trivial, but when they’re added together, the work becomes just subpar enough to get that dreaded rejection slip (though frankly I’ve inked many, many far worse pages than this for Marvel and DC in my career). But let’s see what can we do to help Antonio get to that next level. The big, primary problem I see here is simply the loose sketchiness of the pencils. This is like a page from the 1980s, during my heyday (yes, I’m that old). I preferred inking loose pencils like this because I could take over more and make a

bigger contribution. I was no mere tracer. But the days of loose pencils are pretty much long gone. Today, most editors want everything nailed down tightly in the pencils so that nothing can go amiss in the inks. Most pencilers just want the inker to lay down clean lines and not screw anything up. They don’t trust the inker to be able to add anything worthwhile, and may even resent it if they do. And many current inkers prefer tight pencils because they’re not pencilers themselves and don’t really have a finished rendering style of their own. They don’t have a solid knowledge of anatomy. They mainly just know how to do pretty, controlled line work. (Current inkers can send hate mail to me care of DRAW! magazine.) Inking has become such an extreme specialty that figure-drawing ability is no longer needed. “Just follow the pencils, Bub.” It used to be a fairly standard practice (particularly on rush jobs) to put an X wherever you wanted solid black, rather than taking the time to color it in with the pencil, when the inker just had to erase all that pencil after he inked it anyway. I always preferred to add my own blacks and lighting, and erasing pages by artists like Gene Colan (were there any?) was a smudgy nightmare where half the ink came up with the erased pencil lead. Today, I guess editors think X’s are being lazy, and prefer that you color in those blacks in pencil. Especially on a sample page, where you’re trying to impress the editor, why would you want to take shortcuts, anyway? Save that for when you’re getting steady work, and the editor is calling you asking where the pages are. So as good as panel one is, it’s bordering on “breakdowns” (typically pencils with no blacks or rendering added), rather than finished pencils. Another thing that sticks out to the inker in me is the competing patterns of the plant and bricks in panel one. Detail can create gray patterns, and I don’t like to put gray on gray. I mention this only so you’re aware it can be a problem. It’s a minor thing, but if I were inking this page, I’d make the plant a black silhouette. Panel two starts revealing some weaknesses. As you can see in Figure 1, the noses are consistently poorly drawn, for

DRAW! WINTER 2013

SeeinG tO by Bret Blevins and Mike Manley

elcome to another installment of Comic Book Bootcamp. This time around we are going to cover the eye, which poets have called “the window to the soul.” The human eye is the first thing we look at when looking at someone’s face, being it a drawing or in life. We “look people in the eye” and are suspicious of people who don’t look at us back in the eye. It’s the key for expressions, and emotional attitude, and acting, especially for the artist.

As a result the eye is probably the feature that is drawn more often than any other by artists from antiquity to the present because it is our window to the world, our focus or portal, the view both inward to the psyche and outward. The eye is also a feature than many artists struggle to draw—along with the human face—to get the expression and position in the head just right. One of the most common mistakes in drawing the eye stems from drawing the form of the head as an egg, which it is not.

DRAW! WINTER 2013

If we were to draw the head as an egg and then try and fit the eyes on, we would end up with a very strange and alien looking creature. The only part of the head that is “round” is the cranium. The rest of the head is comprised of a series of blocks and planes.

One of the most common mistakes artists make in drawing the eyes in the head is that they often draw the eye more as a decal on the face, rather than as an eyeball in its socket within the skull, so the eye lies flat on the surface. This affects the perspective of the face. Most of the times you will be drawing a face, you will be drawing it in perspective, and that will have a crucial effect on the scale and placement of the eyes set into the head.

(Figure A) A drawing of the human skull to show the form of the skull, the orbital fossa, the mandible, etc. (Figure B) In this simplified drawing of the skull, you can more easily see the blocks, curves, and planes of the form. (Figure C) A drawing of the human eyeball in its socket.

The form of the eye itself is always the same, with any differences being due to variations in the sex, age, and racial characteristics of the muscles, eye lids, etc. Important details to remember are: • The upper lid is thicker than the lower (see Figure 1). • The cornea is slightly raised from the surface of the eyeball in a convex spheroid shape (see Figure 1). • At the outside, the upper lid folds over the lower; at the inside, the upper and lower lids are separated by a small triangular pad of flesh (see Figure 2). The outer meeting point of the lids is higher than the inner, except in extreme old age, where gravity and a loss of elasticity can cause a dropping fold that is lower on the outside. • The lashes grow from the farthest protruding edge of the lids; they do not meet or touch the eyeball (see Figure 2). • The eyes curve back around the skull as they approach the side of the head, retreating from the front plane of the face. This allows us to see via a “sidelong” glance, looking to the side without turning the head (see Figures 3 and 4).

DRAW! WINTER 2013

Draw! #24