Blue Moon Blog

I’ve been making good progress when time allows the last few weeks on a seven-page story to appear in the Image comic, Proof. Here’s the first panel of the story, featuring an old man and his monkey, in glorious color:

For the past several years, I’ve been coloring most of my illustrations and comics in Adobe Illustrator, but on this story I’m trying a different look and method using Photoshop. Still employing a simple, mostly flat-color look, I’m also using a chalk Photoshop brush for backgrounds to add texture and depth, separating the characters from their environment a bit, similar to the approach used in much animation.

This is the last preview of any art for the story that I’ll post before it appears, which may be sooner than later since I may finish it earlier than I expected. I’ll keep you posted here.

I always wait several months to upgrade on software to allow plenty of time for everyone to work out the bugs. But after having waited about nine months to take the leap to Apple’s Leopard OS, I was eager to make the move. Before doing so, I’ve learned by being burned it’s best to check that other software or hardware companies support their prodcuts in a timely fashion for a new OS. I ran into trouble with my Microtek scanner last time I tried this when upgrading to Tiger. It took Microtek 18-24 months to make available a driver that would work with OSX 10.4. Yikes! Unfortunately, I discovered this fact after the upgrade, and was forced for a year or two to keep my ScanMaker 9800XL hooked up to my old computer in another room. What a pain!  Not efficient and a waste of time. This kind of problem has driven other artists to give up on Microtek completely.

Well, they’re more on the ball this time, as the driver was made available about eight months after Apple released Leopard. That’s not super-fast, but an improvement, and if you’re going to wait some months for the new OS, it’s probably worth it; at least, it is for me.  The Scanmaker 9800XL is a large scanner that accommodates the large comic book art I do (no more splitting apart pages with multiple scans and piecing them back together digitally), and is less expensive (now about $900.00; I paid $1100.00 five years back) than other comparable scanners (at least 2-3 times the price). It does a nice job on scans, saves tons of time given its image space. As long as they continue to improve on support, I’m going to stick with Microtek, and can recommend it.

After a couple really busy months with my regular jobs, I’m happy to have the chance to get back at work on a couple more personal projects, including a short back-up story to appear in the Image comic book, Proof. I’ve written here before about the early stages of the creative process, but here’s the first glimpse of a finished color panel.

I’m reminded just how much work comics can be, and while untold hours are spent fashioning what readers will absorb in seconds, there’s nothing else I enjoy doing more. In this story, I get to draw a bunch of weird creatures, a couple of whom remind me a small bit of my earliest comic book work on the creator owned and self published Trollords (with Scott Beaderstadt). In a handful of months, you’ll see what I mean.

We’ve completed another few installments of the comics stories we do for a Jewish kids magazine, a series which we’ve heard recently will continue for the foreseeable future, which is good news. Each story centers on certain Jewish holidays and the culture. One story focuses on the Four Sons of the Passover, which gave us a chance to go all super-heroic, thanks to the fun script by writer/editor Ella Broh. And another story features the star, Joey traveling the world for Shavuot to ask folks of other creeds and countries about the Torah.

It’s funny, as I work on these comics, what gets me most jazzed is not always the large splash panels and big action, but the smalls ways in which I can employ storytelling strategies that work only in comics. For this quick series of three panels (above) a tiny superhero transports Joey from a magical time-travel land back to his grandparents’ attic. Their return trip need to be treated differently than their way there, and while using as little space as possible. In a long horizontal strip and three tiny frames, I got Joey back where he belonged with simple, iconic images.

It’s also a treat to do these kids comics in the simple, bold fashion I prefer, rather than in a style that’s over-rendered in ink or color. To compliment the line art and for a look easy-on-the-eye, Mary and I stick with essentially flat color in this case. For other comics stories, I may use another look and approach entirely.

To read these latest editions, visit our Major Works section, open the Blue Moon Viewer, and click forward to “The Awesome Foursome!” Of course, you’re welcome to read the earlier stories, if you haven’t seen them before. Enjoy!

Work on my children’s book, Night of the Bedbugs has kicked into high gear recently, and I’m glad to be able to devote some time to it for a change. It feels great to check off more and more pages as finished. I’m still planning for the book to be a deluxe multi-media package, and began writing today another tune for the CD that will be included with the hardcover book. Below is another snippet of preview art.

I posted previously a couple sick & tired drawings, from quite a bit back, while I was experimenting more with the Hunt crow quill and various textures. Here are a few more I drew a few years later to expand the collection for a mini-comic I sold at comic shows. These guys are beaten down by life, and can’t seem to escape even in their dreams. I used no thumbprints on these, but rather messed with textures achieved with grease pencil, dry brush,  sponge, and toothbrush spatter.

Following those storyboard pencils I posted yesterday, here are some color frames recently finished. As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I keep them looser by coloring over scanned pencils, then coloring digitally on-screen with my trusty Cintiq. The rough color effects are achieved simply with a “chalk” brush in Photoshop, at various degrees of opacity.

People with products.  Go figure, I enjoy drawing them, after all these years.

From a recent storyboard job, these are a couple of my favorites.  Every so often, the client just wants penciled frames, and I need to do them even quicker than usual, down and dirty.

Penciled frames like these don’t take too long, maybe 10-30 minutes each, depending on the content and level of detail. Once I have a shot roughed in, I sometimes take reference photos to get a quick idea of a particular gesture, and other times I jump right in and draw without a guide or net. The best boards, I think keep things loose, while still readable and “all there.” For this job, I did over thirty frames in just over a day.

Between other jobs, I’ve been working on roughs and layouts for that back-up story for the Proof comic book I mentioned here a bit back. For “thinking work” like this, I like to get out of the studio sometimes, and kick back a bit, more comfy-style. That was easier to do this week since it’s finally warming up here in Minnesota, so I was able to get some sun or at least fresh air as I sketched away while sitting on the deck or patio.

Lately, for my comics work, I’ve been doing breakdowns for each page right on the printed script in red pen. No one else (not even the writer, I’d guess) can tell what the heck’s going on in these tiny page roughs, maybe 3″ tall. If I wait too long before going to the next step, even I can’t decipher some of the strange scribblings!

The next step is to do a larger layout. These I do at print size, so I can get a more clear idea of the actual size and proportions of things as it will appear to readers. I’m showing here just a few panels from this page, so as not to give away too much or ruin the story for those who’ll read it later when it sees print.

I like to draw these layouts quickly in marker to figure composition, character expressions and gestures. For me, word balloon placement is integral to the page and panel design, so I draw those in at this stage, rather than later, to allow enough room for both word and pictures, that they support each other and work together seamlessly. Boy, there’s just nothing I like doing more than this. Comics!

I hear more and more comics artists are printing their layouts in non-repro blue on larger sheets or bristol, and that’s what I’m planning to finally try for this story. I’m getting awful tired of transferring pencils to board on my light table. It seems like an extra step to me more than ever, and I’d rather streamline the process. We’ll see how it goes….

Being a creative person, one might think my Right Brain would be in charge. Not always so. I’ve also got a logical streak, so sometimes my Left Brain is in command and dictates. My pal, Mitch has coined a term to describe the condition: Corpus Callosum Dominant.

The corpus callosum is that thing in our little mammal brains which connects the left and right hemispheres, a bunch of white matter that handles much of the correspondence between the two. I’m not sure if too much communication is ever a bad thing, but the good ol’ CC can sometimes cause me some real headaches, blessing me with perhaps an enlarged or overactive conduit. Depending on the personal situation, I’m not always sure which half will take the lead. At times of indecision or agitation, I wish one of the sides would just take over, making it easier on me. It can get a little goofy in here, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone to get a glimpse inside my sometimes confused mind!

Of course, being Corpus Callosum Dominant can have its advantages for work, coming in handy for running a business, or when assessing, planning and executing creative projects, especially those large or complex. The left brain kicks in overdrive when: taking direction, asking specific questions about details of a job; figuring measurements and specs; or doing multi-panel and multi-page breakdowns. With those last two items, we start to enter areas where both sides work together, not entirely analytical nor creative, but rather a synergy of the two. That’s when it’s best, when there’s a balance and one gets in a groove to solve creative problems and challenges.

Sometimes it’s tough to sustain that balance during the creative process. For me, the danger comes in over-thinking a piece, where the art can become stiff and I can wring all the life out of it. I can run into this while songwriting, as well, find myslef trying to shoehorn a melody around a buttoned-down song idea, or well-thought-out lyrics. Sure, sometimes it takes extra work to fashion something worthwhile, but work it too hard and you can kill it. And while it’s nice — essential, actually — to go totally Right Brain and play around without thought about a finished product or piece, in the end an artist still needs a more reasonable voice to find structure in a work or make the call that a piece is indeed finished.

I’m sure I’m not alone. All of us dance back and forth between logic and emotion every day, every second. And maybe my case isn’t all that extreme, really. But sometimes it sure feels like it! What a relief and pleasure it is when things are clicking on all cylinders, to tap into a small portion of the power of that incredible lump in our skulls.