Jeremy Wins Life

You have remebered me twitting about Robot6′s less than glowing reviews about The Twilight Zone comic books, produced by SCAD Faculty and Alumni. Well one of my favorite writers, Tucker Stone, has a new article out comparing The Center of Cartoon Studies to the Sequential Arts department at SCAD. As a SCAD student, I just had to turn off my hulu (which was playing The Daily Show, which was currently showing Jon Stewart interview Ricky Gervais), and read on what he had to say about my program.

Take a look at the the article here.

I’ll be back later tonight to dissect his words and respond to his article.
—————-

UPDATED at 7:15PM:
There are a few points that Stone touches on that I’ve heard many times, but is still something that bears repeating. I like that he addresses how comics aren’t just superheroes. It may not be his taste, it may not be another reader’s taste, but it’s someone’s taste, and that is where comics should be going. I’d like to see some more superhero artists doing independent work, like a filmmaker making a high budget summer flick to pay for his more thoughtful and personal project. Or a director making a children’s movie to raise money to make his rated-R pictures. Just use the money made from doing mainstream stuff and give it back to the medium with projects filled with passion. We also need to invite people outside of the comics community to get involved in reading comic books. Some people don’t know that comics even exist. Comics need to stop playing to itself, stop having fanboy mentalities, teach newcomers who may be coming into comics from bad movie adaptations, instead of shunning them for tasting the poison that these studios have turned our “religion” into. We need to cross over into genres and audiences of the most unlikely to reach potential readers.

Another point that Tucker Stone makes in this article is that artists have to start somewhere. These Twilight Zone books may be flawed in many ways but they are just the beginning of what we are to see from these creators (I hope!). I’ve discussed with my peers that even after SCAD, we may not be well prepared to face the rest of the comics world. Robot6 slaughters these rising artists featured in Twilight Zone that could very well be me in another 2-3 years. Which raises a few more questions:

(more…)

With another quarter at SCAD completed, I want to post some of the work I’ve done in SEQA 122: Materials & Techniques. One thing I find when taking classes is that I crave to see projects done by past students for particular assignments. You know, just to see how it was done and to avoid some of the problems they ran into.

I’ll only be talking about projects rather than any sketchbook assignments.

Assignment 1: Crowquill (4 illustrations)
There were some simple guidelines for the first project. One still life (the sneaker), one environment (the downshot of the alley), one from a photograph (David Lo Pan). The other instruction was to draw two out of the four illustrations as a line drawing, and draw the remaining two with full value. I’m happy with my sneaker, David Lo Pan, but the environment is not what it could have been. I experimented a lot with it, but to show darkness and shadow the way I did is not the best way to do it.

Assignment 2: Aspect-to-Aspect Environment
I have been enjoying drawing environments a lot. My goals for this piece was that it could actually be a page I could use for a future comic that takes place in the desert. I did lots of research and used flickr for a lot of textures and general inspiration. Its really important to do sketchbook work just working and reworking different ways to actually record some of how environment work in a comic style. And after creating an arsenal of sketches, I just threw them into corresponding panel shapes and formed a composition onto the page. It was a really simple way to work and turned out spectacular. But I’m still not confident with drawings figures within my environments.

Assignment 3: Brush Mutants
Using brush, four illustrations were to be drawn, similar to Assignment 1. We were allowed to divide the page into fours and draw four seperate mutants with brush. Or we had the option to combine all four into a composition on a single page. I chose the latter, thinking that I could use this as a page in a narrative sometime in the future as well. It was a lot of fun coming up with monsters. Pictured is a stone-scaled worm, a tree pirate with a human peg leg, some Wolf-man, and my favorite, the Benjamin Button Baby Bats, all fighting a tough girl. Showing control of brush is very difficult to do. I try to make clean lines rather than do any feathering or dry brush work. I had some trouble creating the composition and some of the monster’s anatomy is unaccurate. It’s not a piece I’m particularly proud of, but I am glad to use brush more because it prepared me for the next assignment.

Assignment 4: Brush Pantomime
Every time I think about this piece when it’s not in front of me, I always think I had done such a lazy job on it. I think to myself that I just sped through this one and didn’t give it the care that it deserves. But whenever I see (like when we were given our pieces back after the grading period), it struck me that it was actually a beautiful page. It is one of my best pages done in brush, and I remember taking my time to handle the brush and create clean linework. It was tough, brush is a difficult medium to handle. But I was able to push through and create something worthy of being part of a bigger story.

Assignment 5: Inkwash Pantomime
Here are the two pages I completed. The first page was entirely environments. I worked differently for this by compiling sketchbook work into photoshop and collaging them into a narrative. I printed them in blue on watercolor paper, and then inked and inkwashed them traditionally. It was a different process that I might employ in the future, doing drawings on seperate sheets and then smashing them together to create one page of comics.

(more…)

My tribute to Sweetwater. I completely forgot I had this interaction with Mullins after San Diego Comic-con 2008. We had the same plane, same flight out of San Diego to Savannah. It was pretty sweet hanging out with him on a late Sunday night, exhausted but completely inspired by some of the comics stuff we saw and did that weekend. I’m going to miss that mutual energy he had.

The last class review I had done (and the only one) was my Materials and Techniques class. There were many great assignments and of all of them, my drawings of the characters from 30 Rock were my favorite. In spirit of the show’s premiere this week, Thursday Oct. 15th, I want to share the designs I did for the first time here.

Project: Animated TV Show

This is my favorite assignment. We had to pretend our favorite television show never existed as a live-action show and we were to pitch it as an animated show. The character designs were to reflect the personalities from their live-action counterparts. Some people chose obvious shows like Seinfeld and The Office. The show I chose to redesign was 30 Rock.

In my assignments I try to choose subjects that aren’t done too often. 30Rock is pretty new and it doesn’t have the popularity of some other shows out there, but the characters are diverse enough to make completely different designs for each. My best characters from this line-up is Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin). The interesting thing is that my Tracy design came to me in the first drawing I ever did of him. I was dead-on, and needed only a bit of simplifying, but it captured his likeness right away. Jack, on the other hand, took my 50 drawings to perfect. It seems so simple in the final drawing, but I had to look at Alec Baldwin’s face from many of his recent films and publicity stills. He was tough to capture, but because I explored him so deeply, he turned out to be one of the best designs I’ve done.

I took Visual Storytelling 1 in the summer quarter of 2009. I wanted to review the class and my work, just like i did for my Materials and Techniques class, but never got around to typing one up. I thought I would strategically release around class sign-ups, banking that my professor ould be teaching the class again in Fall 09, but it turns out he didn’t teach it, nor will he be teaching it for some time. My class may be the last Vis 1 class taught by Tom Lyle, but the other professors aren’t inferior. Ofcourse, I offer this “class review” not only to review how the class went, but how my work progressed from it. I also like to talk about the kinds of assignments that are offered and what you should prepare for before taking the class, because sometimes I like to look around deviantart or Google for the pages of students past, just to guage an idea of how they approached a project.

Keep in mind that the process that Tom works in is not how everyone works, but he expects you to work his way. For a versatile artist, that isn’t a problem. I had a little difficulty here and there working from thumbnails, then creating tight roughs on an 8.5×11, and then printing them out on a 11×17 sheet and re-tracing/going in tighter with my pencils. It’s a long process that made my work stiffer, but for some it makes finished pencilled pages more “designed”. I lost energy in places, but I think it helped to slow me down and plan things out before straight jumping onto a blank page.

Project 1: Chickasaw Adventures #7

Tom Lyle did a comic called “Chickasaw Adventures” and proposes his students suffer what he went through. The script is not at all worthy of being transformed into a comic, and a lot is left up to the artist. As the very first assignment, it sets the tone of the entire class, and once you get through it, the other assignments aren’t quite as difficult. When I finished this project, I had thought I had done well, but I was torn to shreds (as was everyone). I didn’t think I would get any better than these pages (true!) and that this would be the culmination of my learning at SCAD. Ofcourse, I’d be proven wrong.

(more…)