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;