I am graduating soon! I created these postcards to send out to my family. I also sent out copies of “Luke Holds Off”, too, which I hope were well-received. In other news, the impromptu gallery show went well! A lot of friends and comedians came out to show their support. For such a last-minute show, it was a huge success. Everyone drank my beer.

This year, I took both.

NOTE: I enjoy writing these reviews of classes and the assignments given. Some of these posts become very long and strenuous, so I identified that problem by breaking up longer sections into separate posts. In this blog entry that you are reading right now, I display the final image (or images) of the comic along with a general look at the assignment goals, and what I did to meet them. Separate posts provide more in-depth looks at certain aspects that go into the creation of the comic or illustration. They show sketches, original pencil work, and I talk about where the ideas came from and the troubles I faced while making the final piece.

Project 1 – Not a Box

Booster Puzzle

I hit the ground running on the first project. Our first assignment wanted us to create a comic that didn’t conform to traditional panel shapes. We were not allowed to use squares or rectangles.

The first idea was more puzzle-like. The narrative was more linear, and I planned to create a puzzle that had to be put together entirely to be read. It would have a beginning, middle, and an end. The story would start off with a character that answered the door in every panel, revealing more about a painting that he was showing off at a party. Once the puzzle was complete, it could be flipped over to reveal the painting the main character was speaking of in its entirety. But with some suggestions from the class and little bit more guidance from the professor, the idea evolved into something better.

The concept was similar, but instead of answering the door in every shot, the main character spoke to his guests at an already happenin’ party. The puzzle would fit together to create one entire image, and the puzzle pieces could become a stand-alone conversation between the main character and a guest.

I wanted to create an all-ages friendly piece just like Where’s Waldo. At first, the story took place at a party that starred twenty year-olds, but I couldn’t have drugs and alcohol. They were replaced with pieces of gum and carrot-flavored soda! The character Booster walks around the party and mingles with guests, and hidden within his conversations are references to the past and the future. Things are seemingly happening all at once in one image, but there is also a contradiction in the storytelling that they are happening after one another in an interconnected narrative. I was working with simultaneity without even knowing it, something we would explore in project 2.

Note: If you are interested in reading a more in-depth look at the process of the “Booster Puzzle”, including my reflection on the piece, please click here.

Project 2 – Simultaneity

The idea that two events are happening at once is not a new idea to comics. I’m going to be honest; I wanted to draw a girl several times over. I wanted to draw a figure in a trendy outfit and explore the different angles and poses her body would take over the course of the drawing.  I found a common thread that weaved through the stories of Lichtenstein’s paintings and went to work crafting my own.

Project 3 – Continuous Scene

The problem I faced with this piece was that I felt that this project I had already done before. Booster’s Party became a continuous scene organically, and The Flichtenstein Gallery was logical to make into a continuous scene. My goal was to do something new with the “continuousness”.

I focused on a story and a character. Another beautiful woman would dominate the page, but this time it’d be a woman we’d gradually not like. The story begins with photographs of a girl whose relationship with the narrator is obvious a romantic one. But as the photos will tell us, we learn that their relationship goes sour. I wanted to create a sense of noir storytelling with a hint of 100 Bullets crime and grit. It turned into another interesting concept that needs more exploring.

With only a few days to do this project, our class agreed that finished pencils was what could be accomplished realistically, so I present to you the final penciled work on Project 3.

Project 4 – Parody

The parody is an art I’ve always been interested in, and with the Internet age, the art has grown even more! We live in an age of irony, where nostalgia and callbacks are the fun of living in the now. We all are fans of something, followers of something, NERDS of something, and creating jokes that only those in the know will get is what makes us feel part of a group.

I think collectively, the class had a hard time choosing whether to parody and make fun of a known property, pay homage to it, or even make a pastiche of it. I personally had trouble in finding something that parodied something new.

Now let me ask, have you ever done a Mad Fold-in? Comic enthusiasts and people with a very American childhood growing up will remember that Mad Magazine had a creative activity on the back covers of every issue. The ingenious idea to tell a joke with one image and provide a punch line by folding it and creating a new one was the creation of Al Jaffee. Jaffee has been with Mad Magazine for over 40 years, has made over 500 hundred Mad Fold-ins, and to this day continues making them well into his sixties years of age.

Spoiler Alert! By clicking this link, you will be taken to a page where you can see the fold and ultimately the punch line replicated here, online.

Or you can download the PDF version of my Mad Fold-in, and perform the fold yourself, and enjoy!

Project 5 – Mini-Comic

There was only one other person taking both Mini-comics and Alternative comics simultaneously this quarter, like me. Matt Burbridge and I had been making minis all quarter, separate from these assignments, and now it was time to make another. Most of my comics so far had been illustrations and I was craving to do a narrative. It had to be something simple, maybe a series of illustrations that ultimately told a story in the end. I began to tell the story of a young man who was running into past lovers, all of whom were at the same party as him.

Click here to read the entire comic, “Guilty Party”.

Project 6 – “Off the Wall”

The final was a lot more open than all the others. It could be almost anything.

The catch was that it couldn’t be just another comic on paper. It had to have real-world applications. While we were advised not to do graffiti, our minds were headed that way.

Idea generation was difficult because I wasn’t sure what message I wanted to make. With the quarter coming to a close, I felt burnt out, and ready to call it in. I looked back at my quarter and felt proud of the work I’ve done, and reminded myself that every project isn’t a hit. I decided to just go with my first instinct and make it the best I can.

I settled with an idea I’ve struggled with expressing for years. When I was younger I went through a phase of manga and shounen, like most American boys these days. As I grew up and manga gained popularity, I noticed American comics trying to get on the bandwagon. It bothered me! It was a marketing stunt. It was a trick. I was being marketed to, and even at that age, I was smart enough to know that I was being taken advantage of.

Under the same umbrella is the idea of variant covers. Variant covers are a mainstream comics practice that sells the same comic, but with a limited run of covers drawn by a different artists (most commonly, a celebrity comics artist). The idea is that people will buy the original version of the comic, and then later the same comic again, only with a different “special edition collector’s” cover. And of course, that bothers a LOT of people.

My idea explores two ideas. Readers might be interested if Spider-man was “manga-ized”, but would readers of Japanese manga buy a book that was “Westernized”? I created a cover for Bleach, drawn in the style of classic Jack Kirby, who is basically the father of the American comic book art style.

I placed the covers around actual Bleach graphic novels in bookstores, but it’s a mystery what happened to them.

———

This was the most liberating class I’ve ever had, period. It was a class that I felt paralleled what I wanted to do with comics. Alternative Comics is a class for those who want to learn how to change the medium. You will learn the history of cartoonists who rebelled against the mainstream and created a culture of comics that not only spoke to a generation at the time, but changed the way people view comics and graphic novels today.

Visual Storytelling 1 gives you the basic rules you need, while Alternative Comics will help you break them. With Visual Storytelling 2 next quarter, I’m sure that my experience with both traditional and alternative methods under my belt, I’ll be creating another set of artwork that pushes my skills as a creative artist.

If you are interested in being creative and leaving the comics medium more enriched with possibilities, Alternative Comics will cultivate that side of you.

At some point early in an artist’s career, creating a resume is going to come up. And just like having a website, creating a resume is always better to do earlier than later. I’ve been trying to create the best document that shows my accomplishments, and every year I find myself tweaking. If you want to avoid some of the pitfalls I ran into, here is the evolution of my resume from 2008 to today.

1. List All Your Credentials

I began at JobCentral, SCAD’s online career resource, to create my first resume. It outlines the basics and advises you what to include. Start off by listing your accomplishments, jobs you’ve had, awards you’ve won. Based on your major you can even include your participation in a gallery, where your work has been published, etc. Don’t be afraid if your accomplishments stretch back to high school; use it anyways.

My first shot at making a resume

2. Make it Look Professional

I had my resume for a year before I gave it a second look. I had all my credentials on a piece of paper, so I now had to work on presentation. I gave my resume a face lift. I looked for the best ways to design a winning resume, and I fought whether to include drawings in it. I decided for a traditional professional look, and copied a free template from a design blog called LifeClever. The blogger was very kind to post a basic professional template, but it being free did not detract from its value. Take a look for yourself, and you’ll probably like the results.

The LifeClever approach

3. Design with Personality

Evidently, you can skip part 2 and go straight into designing your resume. The reason I held off was because I hadn’t thought of a brand, and I didn’t want to send mixed messages between my resume and my website. But another year passed, and it was time to update the ol’ resume. This time I went into Photoshop to combine design elements with the text. Resume v2.0 was too stiff, and though it outlined my work clearly and in an organized way, i didn’t say anything about me. With version 3, I stuck to the simple approach, without adding drawings, but using typography to speak for my personality.

Version 3.0, utilizing photoshop

This is only a couple of months news, and still needs tweaking. But a resume should always be changing, always be worked on, adding and subtracting elements as you see fit. Career Fair (or SCAD-Con, now) is coming to Savannah, and I hope this will come in handy when you find the time to polish up your business documents. Happy job-hunting!

Below I have posted many of the original pages of artwork and comics I made for classes, comedy shows, and other projects. Some of them have been posted earlier this month, but most will be coming soon! Add me to your RSS feed to get updated when some of these pages hit the web, and when you can actually READ my comics. Thanks for watching me, and in the coming weeks I promise to show you some of the coolest things I’ve made this quarter.

PS. I also tabled at SCAD’s Mini Comics Expo, and wrote about it on the SEQALab website. Head on over there to see some of the pictures I took!

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a photo of myself or my own table. It was the first time I was ever selling my comics, and I can’t believe I forgot to snag a photo! But here’s a photo I took of my mock table set-up (I was preparing the night before, because I was really nervous.)

Project 1: Savannah Building

I was very pleased that my first assignment came out this way. We went on a field trip and took plenty of pictures, so I had lots of reference under my arsenal. I gave a lot of attention the pipes in the foreground and the blinds, and the rest was just fillin in the page. I had a vision of the kind of character I wanted to draw. I had a Mediterranean guy in my head with a huge nose with a similar look to how French artist Rudolph Guenoden draws himself in comics. It came out exactly how it was in my head (which is pretty rare for me). I even drew him in the exact angle I wanted.

Savannah seems to come up in almost every SEQA class at least once, so drawing from life wasn’t too hard. After a while, you just start drawing the town from your head because you know it so well. You don’t just realize what landmarks or recurring images are in the town, you know the feeling too, and are able to incorporate the emotion of the town into the drawing as well.

Project 2: Character’s Room

We drew a stereotype out of a hat. I got beauty queen. For the first day I was stressing out what a beauty queen would have in her room that wouldn’t just label her as “teenage girl”. I did some creative things with this by including mannequins with all her sashes on them and a sewing corner where she can alter dresses herself. It’s more of a working beauty queen who doesn’t have everything just handed to her because she’s beautiful. But maybe that’s why she sort of looks like a man? Because she doesn’t just win competitions on her looks alone, she works hard at doing what she does.

And there I go! Telling myself stories to get into this character’s head and find out what would be in her room. A lot of my classmates found themselves doing the same, enveloping themselves in their characters lives and adding details that could only be found by digging deep into a personality. It’s an exercise in being creative and not just relying on what’s on the surface of a stereotype/occupation to find what else you can throw in their personal living space.

Project 3: Crowded City

For this piece we had to include a busy metropolitan city rife with men in matching suits, a Paris Hilton-type girl, a cub scout assisting the elderly cross the street, and a man in a banana suit handing out fliers. For most, at least one of those are far away tucked in the background as the others take up a majority of the foreground. When I finished this piece, I didn’t think it would end up being one of my favorites. I was sure that every other student would clog up their illustration with a ton more pedestrians than asked for, so I ended up as one of the few doing it. It turned into more of a Where’s Waldo piece than I had expected, and I love it! I didn’t use to draw so much details in backgrounds and this turned out to be a nice breakthrough piece.

—————

After the first three projects, we finally got into comics.

Project 4: River Street & the Strange Shop

It was a nice change of pace to get back to comics, but I did enjoy the illustrations, though. This assignment focused on environments, but we critiques still brought up effective storytelling techniques. We were given a premise that a man and woman (older, not college-aged) were walking on riverstreet under an umbrella in the rain. Then one of them drags the other into a shop, and the shop and its “strange” contents were left to the artist. I went with a basic thrift/antique shop that I wish I did more on-site research for. It looks just like a place with junk in it, and not so much an antique store.

The way I made it strange was putting a large creature in it named Rob. It was kind of a hit with my classmates as to where he came from, who he was, and how such a monstrous anything could navigate in a small space with so many breakables.

I liked a lot of the shot calls I made, but panels 1 and 2 were strongly suggested to be switched. Other than those, it read and flowed pretty well.

Project 5: Fort Pulaski

At this point I start feeling fatigued. Drawing is hard work! Especially when drawing environments of real places. We took a field trip to Fort Pulaski, an old Civil War era military shelter. The place was aged with dilapidated bricks and cannons that no longer could fire. I didn’t get a lot of sketchbook work done, but I took plenty of photos and left with a pretty good arsenal. I remember the day being beautiful, and I just reveled in the warmth and amazing scenery.

There were a limited amount of angles one could choose to tell a story of an elderly couple walking out of the fort and crossing the drawbridge. And like Project 4, our story could end with whatever we felt like. I have no explanation for my meditating guru that rises out of the water. I just wanted to draw a guy with a big head.

Project 6: Car

Our next assignment revolved around cars. Prof. G-sleeve is a huge car nerd. He works on them, reads about them, and as a man who hails from the great state of Texas, drives a gigantic one. I’ve forgotten if this assignment was to draw cars from life or imagined. But one thing is for sure, this was my worst piece of the quarter. For some reason I drew in a simplistic style that I usually reserve for character design for animation. Its got a lot more dead line weights than I have been doing this quarter.

To me, it’s just another assignment. It’s the next two that I really got into.

Project 7: The Party

In this project, a man is toasting colleagues in a fancy dining room setting. Then the man hears the telephone ring and exits to answer it. A nerdy character is on the other line and gives him bad news. The man hangs up, pulls out a gun, reenters the dining room, and shoots all the guests. Then the man jumps out of the window and lands in a car with a sexy gal driving, gives her a wink and drives off.

(NOTE: Page 3 is not yet uploaded!)

That’s the sequence of events. We were allowed to change the gender of characters (A woman does all of those things, and jumps into the car with a man driving). So with that, I decided to do some interesting things with my page layouts. At this point during the quarter we had just wrapped up Comics Art Forum and I was on a high from Brandon Graham’s workshop, where the artist spoke on the things in comics that keeps him excited. He showed us comics that had interesting or innovative storytelling devices, panels that were cropped a certain way or gutters that still had images in them. All of these different page layouts added to the story, enhanced storytelling, or were just fun to look at and/or draw.

Page 1 and page 2 are symmetrically laid out, with the last panel of page 1 matching the size and shape of panel 6 of page 2 (something I stole from Alan Moore’s Watchmen). The dining room scene is matched entirely, and the camera angle is the same. The others correspond just by shape and size. I also did a pan on page 2 which worked out well with the sequence of events given. She’s on the phone, hangs it up, then reaches for a gun, all while the camera moves down her body.

Page 3 was fun to do because I adopt a technique from the Kuberts in the first issues of Ultimate Fantastic Four. Black bars similar to a widescreen film are placed on the sides to create a “cinematic” look. I created same-sized panels leading the eye down mimicking the falling of main character as she leaps down herself. In an assignment where every other student’s project could potentially look the same, I tried my best not to wind up doing the same old same old the professor has seen before.

Project 8: Bowling & World War II

Right off the bat, this was my favorite project of the class. The results stunned even me, but its because I put the most work into these four pages than any one page of this class. It was tons of reference-shooting, plenty of research building. It is the perfect culmination of everything we learned in class, realized in a final project.

We were required to follow a script where two old men are at a bowling alley, having a drink at the bar. One is checking out a group of girls/ladies bowling while the other begins to recall a story. The story flashes back to German ME-16 planes attacking B-26 airplanes. A man in the American B-26s is firing on the enemy and look down to the cockpit. Again, we were free to fill in the blank of the story here, as long as we ended the story back at the bowling alley bar where the man is giving a confused look to the storyteller.

We took a field trip to the Mighty 8th Air Force base and there were tons of airplanes to take in. We took advantage of models, costume and gear, and got a feel for what it would be like to be flying a plane and gunning Nazis in a air simulator! I really wanted to tell a more heartening story than a “gag” comic where a funny thing happens during this supposedly serious story. I was interested in drawing a pin-up girl that saved a falling airman, and the challenge I found myself in was how I would design the pages in a way that would allow a reader to believe that this painted design could come to life. It lead to a beautiful payoff where she catches him, a finally, my favorite panel, where she pulls him in and embraces him. It was fun to do!

————
This is a required class for a degree in Sequential Art. I’ve learned a lot about creating believable environments and making the world a character itself. I just hope I don’t fall off the wagon and completely leave characters in The Matrix.

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.

Project 2: Gotham by Gaslamp

I absolutely loved this project. Everyone did. We drew Batman. For homework! This project takes a page from Mike Mignola’s “Gotham by Gaslight” book he did for DC. The story takes place in retelling of Batman in the same time period of Jack the Ripper (who is the villain). I did some sketches of a redesigned Batman, a design of Jack the Ripper, as well as a generic woman/beggar/prositute. There are some great shots in these pages, and lots of black placements. We also inked it (above are just the pencils), but this reads well in pencils as well.

Project 3: Batman & Robin Inks

We inked Tom Lyle’s artwork of Batman and Robin. I never really liked their facial structures, but it was just fun to place down inks. A lot of different styles come from the other students and there are portions of the image you wouldn’t have thought to ink a certain way. The materials that you HAVE to use are brush and crowquill, even on the straight lines of the buildings, but once you get the hang of it, it actually isn’t as daunting.

Project 4: Bartman!

This project was the least interesting. We took a script from Bartman comics and did three pages of it. We were allowed to redesign Bart Simpson and Millhouse, so I decided to draw them as two black kids. There were a few environments that I got excited about drawing. There’s just so many different things to take into account for the storytelling, and this project really emphasized reading the script and making sure the design of the page could tell the story effectively and include everything that the writer wants to incorporate. You have to take care of every character, prop, signage mentioned, while keeping the flow of the page reading well. Because it’s an All-ages comic, there’s plenty of side things happening to keep the younger audience interested in and/or laughing at every panel.

Project 5: The Mark Kneece Script

What is unfortunate about taking Vis 1 in the summer is that you don’t get a chance to work with students of Mark Kneece’s scripting class. This assignment is a collaboration between a scripting class and the Vis 1 class that corresponds to the same time slot. Vis 1 students take two pages from a script that Mark Kneece’s students are writing. The script is a historical fiction piece, so lots of reference is left up to the artist to make the writing come alive. Summer class students didn’t get to work with a scripting student. We had to use our own scripts from when we had the class in previous years/quarters. (Note: When I took the scripting class, every script that I had adapted were either unfinished, or there weren’t enough students to pair up, so my script didn;t get drawn. As fate would have it, I didn’t get to work with a writer this time either. I completely looked forward to these match-ups, but because they didn’t happen, I tend to do more creator-owned work. It’s just because I didn’t get to experience such cool collaborations as others did. I wish I did, though! Maybe I’d be more interested in the art of “creative teams” if I did.)

I wrote a script about Jack Benny of the old radio days. His writers are trying to write a punchline to the end of sketch. The sketch has a robber holding up a gun to Jack and says “Your money or your life.” The writers aren’t sure what the punchline should be, and when they pitch the sketch to Jack without having one, one writer nudges the other saying “Well, say SOMETHING to Jack.” As to which the other responds, “I’m thinking it over!” Ofcourse, then that is the punchline to the whole show, and Jack ends up using that line, which garners tons and tons of laughs. It’s a famous sketch of the show, and I really wanted to find a cool way to write that into a script.

Project 6: “Open the door and…?”

Lately, the final is my favorite work of the class. It’s certainly true with this project. The premise is that we hear a sound, wake up in the middle of the night, check our phone, then hear another noise, swing open the door and ______. So to fill in that blank, I had the idea that a planet would crash onto ours. A strange science-fiction premise, but one that had a lot of my peers intrigued as well! Most of the time monsters are behind the curtain, or a character with a gun, zombies, etc. Usually stories are self-contained within the four pages, but I have the problem of making these pages an inciting incident of a larger story.

I worked differently than usual. Some pages are made from smaller sketches on seperate pieces of paper, combined them in Photoshop and THEN printed them out on a larger page. In the end, some of the pages are a little bit more energetic and the storytelling is designed a little bit more preemptively. A problem that resulted is that there isn’t as much consistency in my body proportions and facial structure. It came out to be a dark piece, with lots of blacks, which is very effective as a framing device, and I enjoyed the hell out of the end product.

——-

Class critiques are very detail-centric. Making sure everything in your comic including: anatomical proportions, historical accuracies, perspective, etc.  I had Tom Lyle teach me in a Drawing for Sequential class. I had an understanding of his expectations, which really helped when taking this class. In that class, Tom was really good about having his students focus on drawing anatomy correctly (or correctly based on the ideal human figure), but he always emphasized drawing more anatomy of the gender a student had more difficulty with. Most of the time, guys find it harder to draw women, and girls find it harder to draw men.

My one big complaint of this class was that was de-emphasized. All the projects deal with men. There’s only a slight chance that the Mark Kneece Script will have women in it (if you or someone else’s writes one containing them) or the final (if you ARE a woman, then you draw yourself.) I would suggest replacing the Bartman comic with one with female characters, just because that comic seems to be the most expendable.

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.

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.

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.

The second page was interesting for me. I wanted to be able to continue the story but change gears to the indoors. It was interesting to create this environment from my head because the previous page is all direct observation. Though the two pages aren’t uniform styles, they do have enough cohesiveness to read.

Assignment 6: Using two techniques in a narrative inspired by lyrics or poetry
For the final, we had to use two of the learned techniques as well as incorporate hand lettering. Here are three pages using the song lyrics from Gym Class Heroes’ “Make Out Club”. I worked on large 18×24 bristol which allowed my brushstrokes to be larger and more free. It was an all-out experiment, scanning in different elements like the watercolor background and white and black paint splatters and using photoshop to create a collage image. It looked nothing like how I imagined it initially, but I would like to believe I achieved my goal of illustrating the presence of music.

Thanks for reading! I hope this helps anyone taking the Materials & Techniques class in the future. Please comment so I can hear some of your thoughts!

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:

Do I want to put my work out there early, even when it is not ready? I want to make a name for myself, establish my spot in the comics industry, make some money, have a book under my belt, have a book to call mine.

Or should I wait, when my craft is perfected? I want to make my name with strong art behind it, give readers a truly evocative experience devoid of flaws and distractions, make money that I truly deserve and secure future projects by impressing people.

Are comic fans forgiving to artists? Are comic artists supposed to have a set style that they are known by? If an artist’s improvements are acceptable, is the occasional failure acceptable, too? Not everything an artist does is a masterpiece. Each comic book should be a stepping stone into the next, but we’re going to slip up somewhere in between. Will readers completely drop a favorite if that artist stumbles along the way? Does the public want an artist who is flawless versus a newcomer who is still learning? College artists are all at different points in their own art after graduating. I hope by then I will be ready to take on the public.