Fantastic Four ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Modern Masters Volume Thirty:
Paolo Rivera
edited and designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Paolo Rivera front cover designed by April Rivera interviews conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington and transcribed by Jon Knutson and Eric Nolen-Weathington
TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, NC 27614 www.twomorrows.com First Printing • January 2015 • Printed in the USA Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-060-1
Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork are ™ and © Paolo Rivera unless otherwise noted. Absorbing Man, Avengers, Black Widow, Bucky, Captain America, Chameleon, Colossus, Coyote, Daredevil, Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, Electro, Falcon, Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider, Green Goblin, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hobgoblin, Hulk, Iron Man, Kingpin, Klaw, Kraven the Hunter, Lizard, Magneto, Mary Jane Watson, Miracleman, Mole Man, Mysterio, Nick Fury, Peter Parker, Punisher, Red Skull, Rhino, Sandman, Scorpion, Spider-Man, The Spot, Thor, Venom, Vulture, White Queen, Wolverine, X-Men, Young Allies © Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman © DC Comics / Blackout © Dark Horse Comics, Inc. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles © Viacom International, Inc. and Viacom Overseas Holdings C.V. The Tick © Ben Edlund / Walking Dead © Robert Kirkman, LLC / Hellboy © Mike Mignola Five Ghosts © Frank Barbiere and Chris Mooneyham / Madman © Michael Allred / God Hates Astronauts © Ryan Browne Panthro © Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc. and Ted Wolf. / Voltron © World Events Productions Mickey Mouse © Disney Enterprises, Inc. / Green Hornet © The Green Hornet, Inc. Alien © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. / Army of Darkness © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc.
Dedication To Jamie Dallessandro, one of the good guys who left too soon.
Acknowledgements Paolo Rivera, for his time, his thoughtfulness, and his great record-keeping. April Rivera, for her interest and for looking out for Paolo.
Special Thanks R. Kikuo Johnson, Jon Knutson, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, and John and Pam Morrow
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Modern Masters Volume 30:
PAOLO RIVERA
Table of Contents Introduction by R. Kikuo Johnson ........................................................................ 4 Part One: Stuck in a Corner, Surrounded by Art .................................................... 6 Part Two: Breaking in While Breaking Out ......................................................... 11 Part Three: Back to the Drawing Board .............................................................. 28 Part Four: The Book on Everyone’s Radar ............................................................ 43 Part Five: Storytelling and the Creative Process ................................................... 64 Art Gallery .......................................................................................................... 77
Part 1:
Stuck in a Corner Surrounded by Art
MODERN MASTERS: You were born in Florida. What year was that? PAOLO RIVERA: 1981.
had done, and my dad’s dad told him to get a job with the government like he had done. They were both artistically inclined, but never really got full support.
MM: Most of your fans know a little about your father now, but what did your parents do for a living when you were growing up? PAOLO: In ’82 my parents opened a framing shop/art supply store. My mom basically ran it. It was just me and my mom, and I was stuck in a corner all day, every day, with unlimited art supplies and the means to stay quiet. [Eric laughs] I had a lot of time on my hands, so I just kept drawing. My mom did professional framing, and even though it was my dad’s business, she ran it, and he would travel the country doing caricatures wherever he could— malls and whatnot. I think it was mostly caricatures at that time, but the reason they settled in Daytona Beach was that my dad would do airbrush T-shirts, and back in the ’80s, Daytona was a spring break Mecca.
MM: Did either of them have any formal training? PAOLO: Not really, no. They met in a drawing class in Orlando, so they took at least one class, but no real formal training. My mom does have a degree in textiles, but my dad is pretty much self-taught. His dad was, for a time, a butcher, so my dad literally drew on butcher’s paper. [laughter] MM: They didn’t get the full support of their parents, but I assume they gave you that support. PAOLO: Oh yeah, definitely. They always made it very apparent that I had to support myself, but at the same time, they weren’t going to tell me not to do it. MM: And in the environment in which you were raised, you could see that artwork was something that you could do for a living. PAOLO: Yeah, at the very least it was an option. Whereas with my parents… all my mom’s sisters are nurses for the most part, and she’s the oldest of eleven. That’s saying something. MM: Was being an artist something you aspired to from an early age, or did you go through different phases of wanting to do something else? PAOLO: It was definitely something I always wanted to do. I started drawing basically as soon as I was in the corner of the store. I don’t think it really felt like a real option until high school when I saw that I could go to an art school, and that art schools had scholarships and I would maybe be able to get one. Our teacher in high school passed away a couple of years ago, but she was very good at getting me on the right track for going to art school. You know, there are a lot of kids in art class, but only a handful of us were considering that as a real option.
MM: So you grew up surrounded by art. Did you ever go with your dad on any of his work trips, or were you stuck at the store? PAOLO: No, not really. It was pretty much just me and my mom. I think he would be out for months at a time. He didn’t really come back full-time until I was in grade school—kindergarten or first grade. He came back and started working at the mall in Daytona doing airbrush T-shirts. My mom ran the store from 1982 to 2000. MM: Was she artistic as well? PAOLO: Yeah, and that’s the thing with my parents. Neither one of them got the support they would have preferred from their parents. My mom’s mom told her to become a nurse like she
MM: Being in the art store, you must have been surrounded by instructional 6
books. Were you interested in those, or did you just experiment? PAOLO: Yeah, definitely. Because of where I grew up, I was heavily influenced by airbrush. Much to my mom’s chagrin, I would copy my dad’s Spring Break design, so it would be the Tazmanian Devil holding a can of Budweiser in one hand and a bikini top in the other hand saying, “Spring Break ’87.” [laughter] It wasn’t something my mom liked very much, but it was what I wanted to draw. They were a good couple to play off of each other, because my dad was always doing that kind of stuff. He eventually made the switch from airbrush T-shirts to doing custom motorcycles and cars, but it’s all kind of the same stuff. My mom was much more graphically oriented, much more into textiles and pattern and composition. Looking back on it now, I think it was very tough for her to work in that store and be surrounded by people who, to give you one example, would come in to show her artwork they did that was obviously copied from an issue of Playboy, and it wasn’t particularly welldrawn either. She always had very, very high standards, which were above most of the stuff she saw, which in Daytona was airbrush art—which was almost exclusively copied from photos and popular culture—and tattoo art. She came from a more cultured background. MM: Did you see much fine art growing up? Were you interested in that as well? PAOLO: Yeah, definitely. Even though my dad did airbrushing to make a living, he always wanted to be a fine artist, I think. He bought a printing press at one point and would do his own fine etching, but it’s pretty tough to make a living doing that. But the store was a gallery of sorts. We had Van Goghs on the wall; we had a Rembrandt etching. These were all prints and posters, of course, but some of the classics. MM: Did either of your parents ever talk about those paintings with you on an analytical level? PAOLO: If they did, I don’t really remember. If I ever got any kind of specific instruction, it was probably more from my dad— how to draw an ellipse on a car, and that kind of thing.
[laughs] In high school, my mom was very upset with my color ability. I did a mural right after my freshman year for my biology teacher. She taught marine biology, so I did a big mural in her classroom. And my mom was appalled at the color, [laughter] so she sat me down and made me do a bunch of color exercises in paint. I was pretty decent at drawing, but painting was something I didn’t really do. I give her crap about it now, but I’m glad she did it. MM: Did your dad draw for pleasure, or was it all work for him? PAOLO: It was pretty much all work. I did come across a sketchbook he had, but I think that was from when he was younger. He was working so many hours during the day, I don’t think he wanted to draw very much when he got home. He did the airbrush Tshirts until ’94 when somebody saw him in the mall and asked him, “Do you want to do that but make more money?” That was Chris Cruz Artistry in DeLand, Florida, and he’s pretty much been working there ever since. MM: Was there any kind of art community built up around the art store? Were there regulars you could talk to and get input from? PAOLO: Not really. What happened with the store mirrored what happened in Daytona. All of those airbrush artists eventually had to find other work, so they started travelling to other places. They’d have us send them supplies, and eventually the store morphed into a straight-up mail order airbrush supply 7
Previous Page: A 1995 drawing of Venom from Paolo’s early teens copied from a Tom Lyle figure from the “Maximum Carnage” crossover. Above: Another “Maximum Carnage” Venom drawing from around the same time period, this one copied from a Ron Lim panel. Venom © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Below: The inks for a 2007 print of the anime classic Voltron. Next Page: A panel from “Masks” for Marvel Double-Shot #2. Voltron © World Events Productions. Dr. Doom © Marvel Characters, Inc.
for every single class. Classes are three times a week, but each class is eight hours a day, so you get to know everybody pretty well. Some of them might go into Apparel, some into Painting, Architecture… any number of things, and it’s really nice to have that diversity. MM: Going from high school, how big of a jump was it going to RISD? PAOLO: For me it was pretty glorious. [laughter] I couldn’t wait to leave home. And not only that, but to draw full-time. I was pretty academically focused in high school, because I knew that was my ticket. And that was a good move, because that’s what helped me get the scholarship to RISD. So it was really nice to be able to focus on what I truly wanted to do.
Freshman year you have five classes: Drawing, 2-D Design, and 3-D Design, along with English and Art History. It’s not school in the traditional sense. A friend of mine who went to a “real” school asked me, “So what do you do? What kind of math are you taking?” [laughter] “Well… we don’t have that.” There was just a nice variety of things. Like, in 3-D Design it was more about mechanical engineering and sculpture and making things that actually worked. We had to make a chair out of cardboard, and then I made a table out of cardboard just for fun, and I used that table all throughout college. [laughter] A $7 piece of cardboard—a 4' x 8' sheet I folded into a sturdy little shelf. Even though I don’t build things much anymore, I still use those principles. MM: Being around people who were going into so many different areas, did you waver in what you wanted to do at all? PAOLO: Well, I did enjoy the 3-D design aspect of it, and the only other choice I seriously considered was Industrial Design. My mom definitely wanted me to try that, because she saw that I enjoyed it, and you can actually get a job doing that. [laughter] My dad convinced me to go the other route. He basically told me industrial design was something I could pick up on my own. I know there are industrial designers out there going, “What? That’s not true!” but in terms of man hours needed to master those skills, illustration takes a lot longer. So he said, “You can spend the next three years learning illustration—and it will actually take you ten years—or you can take industrial design and pick up illustration skills here and there.” At the same time, I met Jim Krueger of Earth X fame at Mega Con in Orlando when I was still in high school. I kept in contact with him, and I actually did some pin-ups for him after my freshman year at RISD. After that, he hired me to do some more pin-ups for him, so I had technically already gotten some professional work, and it was Jim who introduced me to Marvel at the end of my junior year. That’s when I started working regularly. I tried to get in pretty early on because I saw a path for myself, so I figured Illustration could possibly work.
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Part 2:
Breaking in, While Breaking Out
MM: You had David Mazzucchelli as one of your teachers, right? PAOLO: Yes, I had him at the beginning of my senior year. He was a major influence, because prior to that I had really only focused on drawing. He was the first to make me understand what storytelling was. One of my best friends and eventual roommates, R. Kikuo Johnson, was a huge influence on me as well. He could draw, but he was also making his own stories starting all the way back to our freshman year. He knew what he wanted to do and what he needed to learn, while I was more focused on rendering. He was in the same class with Mazzucchelli that I was, and we still keep in contact.
PAOLO: He would give me very objective advice. There was one panel at the end where a woman was about to jump off a cliff. It was a fully painted close-up, and I had taken shots of a model that I was basically just copying. He took a look at the panel and said, “This is a nice painting of a woman, but we need to see that she’s on the edge of a cliff,” so I had to zoom way out and show this small figure at the top of a very tall cliff. Without that, I don’t think you would understand that she was about to jump. It was little things like that. I was decent enough at painting, but I wasn’t thinking the panels through at the level I should have been. MM: While you were working on that story, you were just learning the process for how to produce a comic. What was your process like at that point? I assume Marvel asked to see pencils before you started painting. PAOLO: Yeah. My editor at the time, Tom Brevoort, helped me out quite a bit. In June 2002 I did my first Marvel cover, which was Iron Man #63. Right after that is when they offered me my first story. I started on it the summer of 2002, and that fall is when I got into Mazzucchelli’s class. But I used basically the same process I do now. I did little thumbnail layouts, and at the time I was taking model reference for everything. I took those photos and painted in my parents’ garage on big 20" x 30" canvas in oil. It was roughly the same process I do now. I would submit it to my editor, and they would provide me with some notes, but I always had a general sense of storytelling just from reading comics and watching movies.
MM: So you never did sequential art on your own, even back in high school? PAOLO: Not really. I always drew that kind of stuff, and I read comics, and I always saw comics as the only option for me as to what I wanted to do. My dad always told me, “You don’t want to do animation, because you’ll just end up being a tweener [Ed. Note: An inbetweener draws the movements in between the key frames].” [laughs] It’s funny because now I know people who tween. At the time it paid really well, but there was a lot more glory in comics, and I liked being more of an author as opposed to being part of the production line. MM: What did you take out of Mazzucchelli’s class? PAOLO: That was the first time I had to break stuff down and tell a story. And it was funny, because I was technically already working for Marvel. My first Marvel gig was an eleven-page short story written by Christopher Priest for Marvel Double-Shot—a Dr. Doom story. I was actually doing that while I was in Mazzucchelli’s class. He knew this, and he did the same thing when he was at RISD, so he let me go easy on some of the class assignments and focus on that story. He knew I was doing that, and he knew he could help.
MM: Did you have any interaction with Christopher Priest, or did they just hand you the script? PAOLO: There was very, very limited interaction. We did a couple of back-and-forth emails, but pretty much everything I needed was in the script. Almost everything I’ve gotten from Marvel has been full script. The only time I’ve done anything Marvel-style was a couple of pages of Daredevil.
MM: Were you showing him your layouts and asking him what you could do to improve them? 11
Part 3:
Back to the Drawing Board MM: Did you spend time practicing your inking before you started on the job, or did you just kind of jump into it? PAOLO: I did a couple of character studies just to get the feel of it, but mostly I just jumped right in. I think for that particular one, I didn’t even do layouts. Usually I do a 4" x 6" pencil sketch and submit that to the editor, get the approval, and then start on pencils. I did that for the first four pages, and then, I think to speed things up, I just started drawing straight on the final board, and I’d show them a rough at some point in the process.
MM: Next up was Amazing Spider-Man #577. You actually did the interior story and the cover for that. PAOLO: Yes, that was 2008, and it was the first book where I did pencils and inks. MM: Why did you decide to do pencil and ink rather than painting. Was that something the editor suggested, or something you wanted to try? Or was it more financially based, so you could do more work? PAOLO: It was a little bit of all that. I’d just finished Mythos, which took way, way too long, and so we were all interested in getting me to be faster, which of course translates to me making more money, so that helped too. The other thing that helped was I had done a commission for my art dealer. It was a Wolverine and Colossus “fastball special” piece for a book he was putting together of his artists, and when I showed it to my editor, he was like, “Why didn’t you just do this for us?” That’s when they decided to put me on Spidey.
MM: Were you making your pencils tighter for your inking than for your painting? PAOLO: It’s about the same, I think. I don’t know. MM: Were you doing much of the drawing in the inking stage? PAOLO: Not at the time. I was doing a lot of the texturing in the inking stage. Once I got the basic forms down, then I would kind of go “off-script,” so to speak, and kind of add things here and there. All the major points were locked down.
MM: Had you been doing much pencil and ink drawing, say, in sketchbooks or something, while you were doing all the painting for Marvel? PAOLO: I’d done a little bit here and there. In 2004 I did an Army of Darkness cover that was pen and ink, but it took me a really long time to do it. Beyond that, I think everything else I’d done for Marvel was painted.
MM: Did you just start working from panel one on through, or did you jump around at all? PAOLO: I pretty much drew from the beginning to the end. You can start jumping around, and the pages you don’t want to do never get done. [laughter] It never fails. With any script there’s always going to be some pages that are necessary, but aren’t necessarily as cool as a big splash page. The only time I would jump around was when I was painting in oils, and I had to, because I would get to one point on one, and have to let it dry, so I would move to the next one and come back to it later. MM: What about the comfort factor? Were you thinking in color still, and tones? Did your painting experience inform your inking at all? PAOLO: It did. I had to kind of make a transition where I realized that I couldn’t think in values. I actually think it helped me a lot, because it made me create stronger compositions. When you’re painting, you can almost make anything work, because you can fudge it. 28
There’s an anecdote from the Howard Pyle School of Art told by N.C. Wyeth, where they used to sit around and draw each other the worst possible composition they could think of, and then they would hand it off to the next person, and they would take it and, using just the value, try and improve it. So there’s a lot you can do with lighting, because you can use it as a spotlight to accentuate things or downplay things. There’s just a lot more give and take. With black-&-white, it’s either a good composition or it’s not. MM: You stuck with a pretty clean style. Do you think that carried over because you were used to drawing for painting? There’s some rendering, of course, but there’s not a lot of intricate crosshatching or things like that. PAOLO: I don’t know. I just do what I like. I was looking at a lot of Milton Caniff for inking. Really, I think that’s where I get my inking style. I don’t draw like him, but I ink like him. I just draw my regular way of drawing something, whatever the figure is, and then I’ll just put his inking on top of it, and that’s kind of what my style is.
PAOLO: I was pretty happy with it. I remember at the beginning, my style did sort of change. I’m definitely less “noodly” than I used to be. On that issue, I would draw every hair on the Punisher’s face, and I still kind of do that. I still love giving him that eight o’clock shadow, but not as much as I used to. I used to really get in there and draw each and every line, and I would actually take this one brush that I have that was super old, and I never took care of it—and I specifically didn’t take care of it so it would age, and the fibers would split out so you’d get with one stroke, four
Previous Page: The “fastball special” piece that won Paolo a job on Spider-Man.
MM: Were you inking mostly with a brush, or did you use pen at all? PAOLO: Always the brush, yeah. I’m just more comfortable with a brush. I use a big fat one, #6, which is bigger than what most people like, but for me, I find it easier because it has more variation in line width, and just texture overall.
Left and Above: Preliminary sketches as Paolo warmed up for Amazing Spider-Man #577 featuring the Punisher. Paolo made the interesting decision to go more cartoony and organic with the Punisher’s skull emblem.
MM: What about the smaller detail work, like the Spider-Man webbing and that kind of thing? Were you using a smaller brush or a pen for that? PAOLO: I still used the big brush. Occasionally I’d use a small one if I had to do a whole lot of it, but the nice thing about a big brush, it has what’s called a “cat tongue” shape to it, so it’s big and fat when it gets close to the barrel, but as it gets closer to the tip, it kind of thins out, so it’s almost like having a very, very fine brush with a very big brush behind it. The big brush can hold all the extra ink, but the fine brush is what gives all the detail.
Colossus, Punisher, Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.
MM: What did you think when you were done with the job? Was it like, “Oh, I’ve still got a learning process to go through?” or were you fairly happy with it? 29
Below: An exclusive propoganda-styled variant cover for Captain America #1 (2012) for Hastings. Inks by Paolo’s dad, Joe Rivera, though all but the border inks were knocked out in the coloring. Next Page: Paolo’s first depiction of Daredevil’s radar sense in action from Daredevil #1. Inks by Joe Rivera. Captain America, Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc.
MM: Were you able to stylize it some? PAOLO: I always plan on that, and it just ends up being my style of painting. [laughter] I start by looking at the painting, and trying to copy it. If I was actually talking strictly the painting technique, I could, but it’s tough to run the McGinnis filter through a different photo to my brain. MM: The one you did for The First Avenger was more photorealistic than most of your work tends to be, I think. PAOLO: It is. It’s different from what I usually do, but it’s still me. The same thing with what this one was. There are some portraits I did better than others. Part of it is, McGinnis is really good at painting opaquely, and I can do it, but on a much more limited scale. I’m
still mostly transparent. I’m building things up slowly, and with a few flecks of paint at the end. I get the sense that he goes right in there, and it looks amazing. MM: How does the approval process for those posters work? Who has final say on what you do? PAOLO: Yeah, this last one, I was working with a different producer. The Captain America one and the Iron Man 3 poster were both through one producer, and the Cap 2 was a different producer. It’s kind of the same people. They all know each other, but Marvel Studios is split up. Those guys are working on several things at once. It always goes to him, and they get final approval from the producer. Once he says okay, we’re good to go. MM: Is the initial process any different working with them than working with the comics end? PAOLO: Yeah, with this last Cap 2 painting, we were in the sketch stage for a very long time. I would say I did at least a dozen very different takes on what the final poster would be, whereas with Marvel, a couple of weeks ago I got an email from them saying, “Hey, can you get this done on Monday?” And I said, “Yeah, I think so. How’s this sketch?” And they said, “Beautiful!” and I did it. It’s a very quick turnaround on those jobs compared to working with the studios. Also, when I’m doing work for the studios, it’s kind of like a pet project to them. It’s just a present that goes to the cast and crew. It’s not something they need. I’m sure if I was working for the actual production, I would be under the gun. MM: Well, they still have a cut-off date, they just have more room to work with. PAOLO: Yeah. Cap 2 doesn’t come out until April, but I think they already sent the posters out, because principal photography is done.
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Part 4:
The Book on Everyone’s Radar
MM: Daredevil was your first regular monthly ongoing. How did you get that assignment, and were you kind of nervous about keeping a monthly schedule? Was it pitched to you as being alternating arcs with another artist? How was that all settled? PAOLO: Well, Steve Wacker, the editor, pitched it pretty well. He knew basically what my speed was, which was slow, and he pitched it to me as alternating arcs with Marcos Martin. I think Marcos visited around that time, so we got to meet briefly in New York. Steve really organized the whole thing. He put us together and figured it all out, and we agreed, and that was that. I’d done four [consecutive] issues of Amazing Spider-Man, and he said it wouldn’t be any more insane than that. The thought was that since I wouldn’t be coloring, and I wouldn’t be inking, I could hit the schedule a little more easily.
interesting things with the sound effects. But I don’t think he actually used the radar sense. MM: No, he didn’t. A lot of artists have done different things with the radar sense. Were those things in the back of your mind, “I don’t want to look like anybody else,” or was it all based off of Mark’s idea of that 3-D look? PAOLO: Really it was just based off Mark’s description. It just seemed like the best solution. Later on, I found an issue of Daredevil where Gene Colan had done something very similar, but for completely different reasons. Daredevil had gotten two seconds behind reality, and saw a ghosted image of himself, so the technique was nothing new, it was just how I used it was something new. MM: Did you have much of a head start before the series was launched to get going on it? PAOLO: I can’t remember exactly how far, but Steve knows what he’s dealing with when he deals with me. I had plenty of lead time. If I remember correctly, Mark Waid gave me the first ten pages of the second half, just to give me something to get started on.
MM: In that meeting with Marcos and Mark, did you work up how you wanted the visual effects to work, like the radar sense? Did you work together to come up with that approach? PAOLO: Mark basically asked for it in the script. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew how he wanted it to feel, which was three-dimensional but not visual. At one point he said, “Maybe it could be painted,” but I really didn’t want to mess with that. It just seemed like the cross-contoured drawing style was the best solution. I think just because I went first, I was the one who had to come up with it, and so we just went from there. Actually, Marcos had the backup story in that first issue. He did some
MM: Did you do a lot of preliminary drawings and design work before getting started on it, or did you have time? PAOLO: I did about one page of it; it wasn’t very much. I wasn’t going to do anything much different with Daredevil’s look. I thought it was good the way it was. The main thing I’d do was change the cane. During the little research I did online, I came across
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Part 5:
Storytelling and the Creative Process
MM: Do you try to get up early, or are you more of a late night guy? How do you schedule your work? PAOLO: I’m naturally more of a night owl, but ever since I started living with my wife—I think 2011 is when we moved in together—I’ve tried to stay on her schedule, and she has a normal work day. So, at this point, I get up around 7:30, but my mind isn’t ready to do anything until about 8:00. So, I just try and eat, and lately I’ve been studying Spanish, because I want to know it. [laughs] I did it for every year of school ever, almost, and I don’t know it, so
I’m kind of disappointed in myself. [laughter] Today I did it for about 45 minutes in the morning. From there I work until about noon, doing whatever it is I need to do. Today I spent an hour just packing up and shipping things. I need to work on that. Work until noon, have lunch... it usually takes me about an hour to actually get back to work, then I’ll work until, basically, my wife gets home. And I have like a third work shift after dinner until I go to bed. It can be anything from just answering emails, to blogging, to something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Lately, it’s been writing, to try and write my own story. It’s kind of an eight-hour work day, plus something extra tacked on the end. MM: During that extra time, do you try to say, “I’m doing things other than drawing during this period,” to give yourself a breather? PAOLO: It really depends on what’s pressing at the moment. Right before I went to Amsterdam, I was trying desperately to finish that Young Ones poster, and I was painting nonstop for a week. I haven’t calculated how many hours it took me yet, but there was a week where I was just solid painting, every waking hour. That’s why I don’t paint any more, it just takes so much freaking time. I’ll have one idea, and I’ll be like, “Oh, I’ll turn that into something,” then you just get tired of that idea. It’s kind of not worth the time you put into it, I guess. MM: But it sounds like you do a pretty good job of keeping track of how long you’ve put into a job. PAOLO: Oh, yeah, definitely. I’m about to do a blog post about it. I use iCal, the standard calendar that comes on a Mac, and I link it to Google Calendars. Aside from putting it in the cloud and making it accessible from any device, it allows me to use this other website that will actually tally the hours for each job. So, I use my iCal not so much as an appointment book, but more as a log. And a to-do list—it’s like a cross between the two. I put in a block of time, and I’ll put what the project is, and the aspect, whether it’s layout, pencils, sketching, or painting, or coloring, and I’ll label each one. Once a month, I go to this website and 64
they’ll tally it all up for me. So I have good records on everything going back to, oh, maybe 2007? Maybe before. Almost down to the hour, after a certain point. MM: Is there a point where you say, “I’ve put way too many hours into this. I’ve got to find a way to finish it off now?” PAOLO: Not specifically, but I must get that feeling at some point. It always happens when I’m painting. I’ll get to the point where it doesn’t need more work, and, “You need to start on the next thing. There’s a deadline coming.” With the Young Ones poster, it started to look done pretty quickly, but I just pored over the portraits, just hours and hours, making the most minute changes to everybody’s face, eyes, mouth, nostrils, whatever, and who knows if it made it any better. [laughs] After a certain point, you can’t see it, so that is one reason I try to break up projects. I try to work on several things at once, because when I do get tired of one thing, I can switch to the other, but you don’t always have that luxury. MM: I should’ve asked this before, but for the poster you’re doing, what size are you working at? PAOLO: 16" x 24". I actually would’ve preferred to work larger, but 16" x 24" is the biggest I can do and still get it scanned in two pieces. Bigger than that, it’s just hard to manage. I’ve got space for 16" x 24" pieces. Right now, I’ve got two Captain America posters, and then this Young Ones poster, and they don’t take up too much space. I’m not willing to part with them unless it’s for tons and tons of money, and nobody’s offered. [laughter] So I’ll just keep them. I’m pretty excited about the Captain America 2 poster, because they wanted something like a ’70s political thriller, and I did a bunch of sketches, a lot of them I liked, but in the end, what they went for was kind of the joke one, which was a 1975 Bond poster by McGinnis. It’s not figure for figure, but there are a lot of elements in it, like the border, and the lettering, and the tiny figures that are just crazy ’70s colors. It’s not all-out ’70s, but it’s pretty ’70s. It was just a lot of fun, and I got to paint it at 16" x 24", which is just nice to work a little bit bigger. MM: What about your workspace? Do you have a separate painting area from your drawing area, or is it all more or less together?
PAOLO: It’s all together now. We moved to San Francisco last summer, and now I have a dedicated studio. We have a two-bedroom, and I take up the other bedroom. It looks kind of like crap now, but it’s on its way to being my ideal workstation. I just got two Craftsmen tool chests, and they’re the best. I don’t really roll them much, but I could if I wanted, and one’s got a middle chest on top of it, and they all have what are essentially big flat files, but for half the price. If you look up flat files, they always gouge you, but if you put a Craftsmen logo on it and call it something else, it’s the same product at way less money. They’re big and metal and red, and I just love them. [laughter] Actually, I’ve got two of them. One is the painting workstation. I have a big two-and-a-half gallon container of distilled water which I use as a faucet whenever I need brush water or palette water. The other tool chest has all of my packing and shipping supplies and printing supplies. 65
Previous Page: Pencils for the cover of Mythos: Captain America. Above: Painted head sketches for Mythos: Hulk. Paolo painted the book in gray tones, which he then scanned and colored in Photoshop, so he included his “palette”—a gray tone chart—at the bottom of the page. Captain America, Hulk, and all related characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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