Blue Moon Blog

About half (and in the past, sometimes more) of what I do is storyboard work for television commercials. Storyboard frames are quickly executed drawings to communicate a concept, and help test and plan television, movie or animated projects.

I’ve been doing storyboards for over a decade, and find it helps me as a cartoonist, requiring me to think and work fast, and keep loose. For years, I’d color them with marker over inked drawings I’d copied on marker paper, achieving a more cartoony and clean look, but which also created an extra step and took time.

The last five years, I’ve skipped the inking step altogether. With these two examples above, I colored with marker over printed pencils on marker paper. I beef up some lines and spot black areas with a thick marker, and rough up and add texture with a black colored pencil. Some storyboard artists do more polished and finished frames that look nearly like finished illustration. I prefer a looser, rougher look and feel, and so work with Art Directors with a similar sensibility.

The last few months, I’ve been coloring my penciled storyboard drawings on the computer with the Cintiq, and will share a frame or two of those tomorrow.

Taking a break from production on my children’s book in progress, Night of the Bedbugs, I’m still doing my Bedbugs characters, but instead for an idea for a project that’s now crystalized as a Bedbugs ABC book. For the Minnesota Spring comic show this Sunday, I’m hoping to have a mini-comic or two available. These little chapbooks serve as prototypes or first editions of the work-to-be, perhaps eventually a Bedbugs board book. Anyway, we’ll see how the week goes….

I colored these few to preview here. Of the three above, which mood is closest to yours today?

“With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a god-like hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win. He represents American power — and he has the profile of an eagle.” - Movie critic Pauline Kael, 1968

That’s part of what made him such an icon. His look and aura made him appear larger than life. How many others could fill those shoes, all those great icons he portrayed? But he was a very good and solid actor, too. Had to be, to pull off those big roles. And he did well more subtle roles, just watch his performance in the western, Will Penny, if you don’t believe me.

I saw on a blog last week after Heston died:

When I read “remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo,” I wondered, by whom? I’m pretty old but I’ve never seen those movies. I was alive when they came out, but too young to go to movies like that, and they weren’t the kind of movies I was ever interested in over the decades I’ve spent catching up on old movies…I think most people younger than 60 remember him chiefly for “Planet of the Apes.”

Ask the man on the street to imitate Charlton Heston and I bet he’d say “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!

Well, certainly he is also remembered for Apes, but he was already quite well known by then, having won an Oscar for Ben Hur a decade earlier. I’m fifteen years younger than this blogger and grew up watching those movies when they ran on TV at least annually. My parents saw all those movies on the big screen when they were first released, and passed on to the next generation an appreciation for Heston and his peers, and for those movies from an earlier period. By the time Apes showed up, I was already a fan. It was one of the first movies I saw on the big screen (I was six), which only paved the way for me to love Chuck (please don’t call him Charlie).

A word on the art above: I initially struggled with a few pencils, overworking them and not quite grasping his likeness. Frustrated, I jumped in to ink. The brush saved me. I inked boldly and quickly and achieved the look I was after, finding more of the likeness along the way. The scanned inks were than colored in Photoshop, and I played with “chalk” brushes for the background, but am not sure if I overdid it. What do you think?

This has turned out to be a long post, so you’re probably wondering when I will make an end?

When I am finished.

I’ve done plenty of comics the last decade, just not any that have appeared in a comic book. After having drawn hundreds and hundreds of pages within the comics industry, all the comics I’ve drawn since have shown up beyond its borders. That’s about to change, as I’ve signed up to do a short story that will appear in the pages of Proof. I’ve not yet received the script from my pal, Alex Grecian, but the story sounds like it will be a blast to draw.

Alex has divulged to me I’ll get to draw even more crazy creatures from the book, and one that will be making his debut in the story I’ll be drawing. In preparation, I doodled a couple pages of character studies of Elvis Chesnut and the Dover Demon, two of Proof’s best buddies, and a couple of my favorites from the series.

Here’s a sneak peek, although Elvis will look different; he’s had a haircut since I did these studies, some in pencil, some in ink.

In creating the cover for the Superman vs. Hollywood book (about which I’ve written here before), I was asked to do three initial layouts, then two more additional compositions. In all, we needed to suggest Superman without outright showing him. Each rejected layout shown here has its own strengths:

• the first shows a full figure, and has a pop art feel, what with the sound effects

• #2 was a later exploration, and an obvious approach, suggesting the iconic action of the reveal of the logo and costume behind the street clothes; this idea has been used on other covers for pre-existing Superman-related books

• The third has more action, but was a bit too literal with Supes punching out a Hollywood agent; not an easy read

• The last is my favorite, with Supes in the foreground and largely in silhouette, striking a confrontational before a movie theater marquee, on which would be displayed the book title

I can see why the final cover art was chosen, as it retains the confrontational elements, while adding more action lacking in others. It was a fun project, all in all, and its always a kick to see the final art in print.

When doing layouts for recent caricature, I began with a quick sketch on screen with the Cintiq. Though I was pleased with the likeness, I realized the ratio between the elements was off. I needed to push the envelope and exaggerate the relative proportions.

His head needed to be larger, not only for easier identification, but also to fill space. I also enlarged the clapboard, so the title for this by-line illustration could be as large as possible for readability, and popped it out beyond the border, to add depth and attract attention. This was all a snap to do digitally in Photoshop, enlarging only the head, then reducing in size the director’s chair on which he sits. I tightened the drawing throughout, drawing anew only the arms, which had to be exaggerated to make it all work.

Lastly, I needed to fill space in the lower right, so added a shark swim toy for fun, alluding (in something of a stretch) to the shark in Jaws, as this weekly feature in a local New Jersey newspaper focuses on Summer DVD recommendations. To me, Jaws, more than any other says “summer movie.”

To view the final color art, visit our Blue Moon Gallery.

This is the initial sketch I did when preparing the post on Lyle Lovett earlier this week. I was working from a variety of photos, but got carried away taking liberties and lost the likeness. Adding too many wrinkles and some sharp edges in the wrong places, I ended up with an amalgamation of Lovett and a beardless Abe Lincoln, or a suggestion of Steinbeck’s Tom Joad. Not a bad drawing, just not Lyle.

I’ve been having trouble sleeping the last few days, which opened the door to another cold which has settled in my chest. Fun! This exquisite feeling reminded of these two pieces I did long ago, back when I had even more trouble with sleep. I was experimenting again with the Hunt crow quill a lot back then, and with weird textures. For both of these pieces I dipped my digits in ink for fingerprint effects I thought helped get the point across, either for a wrinkles on a weary and weathered face, or twinkly spots before tired eyes.

When doing layouts for a comic book page, the artist considers a variety of options quickly. Working with the script to tell the story as best as possible, one breaks down the page in a series of panels. Each of those panels has its own composition, but must also work within the overall page composition. Each panel is presented from various points of view, which correspond to and support all the other panels. And through it all, the artist must make sure the information and story is communicated clearly and doesn’t lose the reader.

The challenge is to make the art and layout fun and interesting, while still following sound and solid storytelling and layout principles. For example, here’s a page from Dreams Of Looking Up, an historical and educational comic book I drew for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.

In this page, we see an old woman looking at photos and a painting of an eagle, recalling her youth. The page begins in the past, the young woman holding her baby, looking up at an eagle taking off from its nest on a high peak. I decided a long, vertical panel would best depict this, also establishing a connection (both physical and emotional) between the young woman and her surroundings. This long vertical panel on the left is balanced by a column of panels on the right. The trick is to make sure the reader doesn’t just skip to the last panel.

In that regard, I have a few things going for me here. In America, folks are trained from early on to read from top-to-bottom, left-to-right, so it’s ingrained and natural. In that first panel, though the vertical shape pulls the eye down to the woman and the baby, even for a split second, the reader’s eye is pulled back up (rather than to the right) to see the eagle, and follows its flight path to the first caption, which is bridged between frames one and two, linking us to the row of panels on the right. Now, it’s possible the reader will be drawn to the eagle, then to the caption, or directly to the caption (as indicated by the diagrammatic dotted red line above), but people take in images rapidly, and you’d be hard pressed to convince me a reader wouldn’t see the entire first panel, even if only for an instant, before their eyes dart back to the top. Once there, readers will follow smoothly south, reading words and pictures ’til rejoining the present day conversation between her grandchildren.

This is just one page out of twenty-four in this particular comic book story, each presenting its own layout and storytelling challenges. A lot of thought goes into each panel, each page, each story at this stage, before the real drawing begins.

This page, and more pages from this book and its companion volume can be viewed in our Major Works section. Or order your own copies at the official Mille Lacs Band web site.

We’ve completed the latest installment of Tzivos Hashem Kids comics, which I wrote about last month. I’ll blog a link when we’ve posted the finished pages after it’s printed, but here’s a little preview of one panel where our hero, Joey is searching for an important book in his grandparent’s attic.

While laying out the pages, in this panel I just quickly added boxes and brick-a-brack to frame Joey with the book, and to establish an attic environment with the limited space I had. In the foreground I indicated an old lantern sitting on a box. By the pencil stage, it struck me to change that object to an old tray my grandmother had left me when she died. It means nothing to anyone else, but it’s a plus whenever an artist can connect to material with references to personal emotional or nostalgic touchstones; it can bring the work further alive. At the very least it makes it more fun to draw and look at later.

It doesn’t end up being much in the final art, and will be partially covered by a word balloon, but I know it’s there. I was pleased when Mary said, “Hey, I know what that is!” as she started coloring the pages. There aren’t many more on the planet who would recognize this obscure little object.

I’m not sure why this is the single trinket Grammy chose to leave me in her will. Maybe when I was a kid it caught my eye sitting on her dresser, and I commented on it to her? It’s not much to look at, as it’s dirty and beat up, crinkly in the center and off-kilter. But it means a lot to me because she chose it for me. Over more than thirty years now, I’ve used it to hold pins and buttons other such stuff, usually on my dresser or nightstand. Every time I see it, I think of her. I just moved it to the studio, where it holds and displays marbles, as I’ve been collecting them since the summer.

I don’t know if you’d call it a tray, or a dish, or a dish-tray. Laura thinks it looks like a hat.

Here’s to the little knick-knack my Grammy wanted me to have, in all its glory, awesome power and might!