Learning with progressives- digital drawing with the IPAD.

I am trying to get better with my comic art so I am working on progressive to identify my weak points in tackling a character design- from draft to finished stage. In a normal comic scenario I would only have to take the character or scene to clean draft stage. I believe I am a better penciler than I could be as a s an inker of colorist, but for my own creations I need to progress with all tasks until I have the finances and infrastructure  to create a team  of targeted professionals to get a professional product to the peoples.

So case 1 this progressive was done with Sketchbook app for the I-Pad Pro with I-pencil.  The first image is a pen sketch.  This is where I am work strongest, with loose lines to define the form and minimal shading.  I am okay with this image, because I don’t have any expectations except to define a form and hopefully feel through an expression. The female’s facial features however were too harsh for the female I wished to portray.  I worked on the line drawing in the software to soften these features.  I also attempted to better simplify the clothing drapery. I think I succeeded on the face and have more work to do on the clothing; however, I apparently made her body profile more angular rather than the initial natural curves of the drawing. I noted too late that you need to plan out the digital inks before you commit if you wish to copy over an expressive drafting line. This is why a professional inker comes into play over good pencils. I thinks I flatten this art out too much at this stage. The final color image is a way to bring back the form with rendering shapes in the color regions. I felt I semi-accomplished this with the current direct I gave myself which was minimal.  Overall it was not a failure but a moderate gain- everything is better in color!

This next progressive- case 2- I decided to work up the draft to a more constructive point before adding a digital line- so I added a couple of digital drawing states past the initial pen sketch. The first image had a contour underlay as seen in red. I kind of use this in preliminary sketches like a scribble to fudge through a find a form. I learned this refining trick  ( called abstraction) from a caricature artist Court Jones.  You can see his instruction videos onYoutube on the PROKO channel. This helped to sure up the drawing and clarify my initial weakness of making faces and features lopsided.  This beginning drawing I like best out of the three because it looks more 3d. Note to self, identify line drawings that don’t flatten the  sketch image- ie more curves rather than short choppy strokes. Now the digital ink drawing is cleaner, but I lost a lot of volume and shape cues I created in the draft image. Again I learned too late, I should have  copied out this draft image and compared it next to the  image I started coloring on.  I would have used it as a guide to render the form so I could have gotten back some of the  volume I lost….. but as I said it always looks better in color- now if I could rendered the original sketch with color, I would be in happy town!

So all in all I felt good about my attempts and now know I can and will do better next time.

I suggest everyone  try progressives to identify challenging areas in their production work.

new artwork posting

I started to get back to posting artwork- and will be get more dedicated to it in the vein of seeking art related jobs- I have noted a new desire to get paid using art instead of just posting things to stay current and ease my need to draw.  So hopefully I will also market this desire to get out there again and show others they can do it as well ---draw for a living.  So here come to posts....

 Note that all done in on the IPAD PRO-  using Sketchbook APP for many and Procreate APP for two of the bust images.   I will continue  learn, leverage, and  use these tools in production- I will seek to push digital art methods in the future and find other innovative methods that could be beneficial to comic production and related asset creation going further... Ciao

Observation of the greats- Will Eisner

I have always wondered why the Pre 1960's style of comic strips and comics seemed so alien to me. They were cartoony and silly even though many of the techniques we use in comics today were inspired by those  cartoony styles- Milt Caniff,  Will Eisner and others. what I wasn't understanding is that their style along with the more ultra real styles of Hal Foster, and Burne Hogarth which we more attribute to the current comic -book style were just as skilled in their draftsmanship and design style. So I took the challenge to see what was so cool about the work. I started to just trace over an image of Will Eisner character to see what it would look like and what would be the difference. I noted he had great command of thick- to thin line work on his characters, although they may look funny to me- they had character and that's the beauty of his work. Character!... so my next task was to try to interpret one of his characters poses. Once I tried to mimic his purposeful and characteristic line-work- I found out it was not hard to recreate a look that also had character.  I also noticed that his way of scrunching up the character's pose was such an exaggeration that it even pushed out more character and feeling- more than the character I created.  This was a fantastic lesson for me and I challenge others to do the same with work that seems alien to you. It may make your work that more  a character of YOU!!!

Re-inking over a classic-

 I wanted to redo the issue for cover 2 of FX Mulrooney originally penciled by myself and Inked by Patrick Hatfiield ( a fantastic designer and inker). This was a pure classic to say the least. I had scanned in the original into the computer with the original image and colored originally to much success. Along the way at some convention the original was misplaced and I wanted a digital version to finish the book with.  So when my computer crashed, I could only find a crappy scan made by bridging two 8.5- 11 prints together and could not find the original whole scan- not good- I could not find the original colored PSD either- I was stuck so I had to recreate the image digitally with corrections.  I am not a natural inker but I felt that I am a good tracer at best, digitally. So I made a point to re-create the image from crappy scans… I started to feel confident digitally inking only this year so I gave it a shot. I used an iPad Pro and the iPencil to create this image in Sketchbook app for the iPad. I took that Image in the Procreate App for the iPad Pro and  created the flats and rendering. I exported that image to my computer to use Gimp for final effects.  Please note that there is no app for Gimp or Inkscape for the iPad but the image would have had to been exported anyway to get into the printers hands. I used Inkscape for logo Images  and finished them in Gimp as well. This overall was a good assignment and a great new potential workflow for comics. My big gap is going to adequately create lettering in Inkscape and Gimp and learning how to input fonts into those programs- the other gap in comic production that I will have to explore is how to export to a multipage PDF for printing- But you get an idea on how to recreate an image digitally in the iPad and computer. 

Disclaimer- it will always be easier on production level  and more professional to use the Adobe toolsets- but if you are cheap like me there are options.

rotating logo

I am trying to show this spinning logo

okay this is a little buggy- but you get the picture- created with an svg in html

I can even type around this
object and use as a part of the
article- possibilities

space;