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THIS BOOK CONTAINS NUDITY FOR THE PURPOSE OF FIGURE DRAWING AND ART INSTRUCTION, AND IS INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS.

9 781893 905917

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

$29.95 in the US

ISBN 978-1-893905-91-7

TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

52995

BEST OF

VOLUME THREE

MIKE MANLEY, EDITOR

ISBN-13: 978-1-893905-91-7 ISBN-10: 1-893905-91-8

The Best Of DRAW! Volume Three

The Best of DRAW!, Volume Three compiles material from the sold-out issues #5, #6 and #7 of DRAW!, the professional “How-To” magazine on comics and cartooning, with previously uncollected material from issues #3 and #4! Featured here are tutorials by, and interviews with, the top artists in the comics industry: MIKE WIERINGO (penciling), BRET BLEVINS (drawing hands, sketching, and using shadow and light), DAN BRERETON (painting and illustration), CELIA CALLE and ALBERTO RUIZ (digital illustration), BILL WRAY (cartooning and painting), PAUL RIVOCHE (drawing and design), ZACH TRENHOLM (caricature), STEPHEN DESTEFANO (comics and animation), and more! Each artist presents their work step-by-step, so you can see it progress to finished form, learning valuable tips and tricks along the way. See how the pros do it, and learn from the best, as editor MIKE MANLEY assembles this wealth of information for both beginning and experienced artists!

THE

ART © 2008 DAN BRERETON.

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ALL CHARACTERS TM & © 2008 THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS.

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STEP-BY-STEP LESSONS & INTERVIEWS BY TOP PROS IN COMICS, CARTOONING, & ANIMATION!

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At

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TwoMorrows.Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. (& LEGO! ) TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

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THE

BEST OF

VOLUME THREE

STEP-BY-STEP LESSONS & INTERVIEWS BY TOP PROS IN COMICS, CARTOONING, & ANIMATION!

THIS BOOK CONTAINS NUDITY FOR THE PURPOSE OF FIGURE DRAWING AND ART INSTRUCTION, AND IS INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS.

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

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THE BEST OF DRAW! VO L U M E O N E Edited by Mike Manley Designed by Mike Manley and Eric Nolen-Weathington Front cover illustration by Dan Brereton Back cover illustration by Celia Calle Proofreading by Eric Nolen-Weathington and John Morrow

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • April 2008 • Printed in Canada ISBN: 978-1-893905-91-7 Trademarks & Copyrights All contributions herein are copyright 2008 by their respective contributors. All artwork herein is copyright the year of production, its creator (if work-for-hire, the entity which contracted said artwork); the characters featured in said artwork are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners; and said artwork or other trademarked material is printed in these pages with the consent of the copyright holder and/or for journalistic, educational and historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied. Aqualad, Aquaman, Batgirl, Batman, Birds of Prey, Bizarro, Catwoman, Fiddler, Fight for Tomorrow, Joker, Justice League, Legion of Super-heroes, Live Wire, Lobo, Lois Lane, ’Mazing Man, Mera, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Spyder, Starman, Superman, Vigilante are TM and ©2008 DC Comics • Tom Strong TM and ©2008 America’s Best Comics LLC. • Blade, Devil Dinosaur, Dr. Octopus, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Human Torch, Invisible Woman, Kitty Pryde, MechaniX, Thing, Mr. Fantastic, Modulus, Moonboy, New Mutants, Sleepwalker, Spider-Man, Spirits of Vengeance, Storm, Wolverine TM and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Archie and all related characters TM and ©2008 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. • Powers TM and ©2008 Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Oeming • Mister X is TM and ©2008 Vortex Comics.• Tarzan is TM and ©2008 ERB, Inc. • Tellos TM and ©2008 Todd Dezago and Mike Wieringo • Static Shock! TM and ©2008 Milestone Media, Inc. • Hellboy Jr. TM and ©2008 Mike Mignola • Big Blown Baby TM and ©2008 Bill Wray • Jingle Belle TM and ©2008 Paul Dini • Dollz TM and ©2008 Randy Green • Monroe © 2008 E.C. Publications Inc. • Dexter’s Lab, Samurai Jack, Zesty Relish TM and ©2008 Cartoon Network • Dennis the Menace, Popeye TM and ©2008 King Features Syndicate • Elvira® TM and ©2008 Queen “B” productions • Ren & Stimpy, Wild Thornberrys TM and ©2008 Viacom International Inc. • The Crow TM and ©2008 Fallen Bird Productions Inc. • Nightbreed TM and ©2008 Clive Barker. This entire book is ©2008 Action Planet Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders.

Acknowledgements I want to thank Brian Michael Bendis, Bret Blevins, Dan Brereton, Ken Bruzenak, Celia Calle, Stephen DeStefano, Mike Oeming, Peter Pantazis, Paul Rivoche, Alberto Ruiz, Zach Trenholm, Mike Wieringo and Bill Wray for taking their time and sharing with us their knowledge and love of comics, and to thank my family, friends as well as the many, many regular readers of DRAW! who have given me nothing but universally positive feedback on DRAW! since day one.

If you enjoyed the Best of DRAW!, remember:

M AG A Z I N E

…is available at finer comics shops and bookstores, and by subscription (print or digital) from:

www.twomorrows.com

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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY MIKE MANLEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 FROM DRAW! #5 PENCILING AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE WIERINGO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 DRAWING AND DESIGN DREAMING DESIGN: THE DEPTH ILLUSION, BY PAUL RIVOCHE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 POWERS: STEP BY STEP FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT WITH THE POWERS TEAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 PENCILING DRAWING HANDS, BY BRET BLEVINS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55

DRAWING AND DESIGN DREAMING DESIGN: OBSERVATION AND MEMORY, BY PAUL RIVOCHE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .68 FROM DRAW! #6 CARTOONING AN INTERVIEW AND PAINTING DEMO WITH BILL WRAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79 DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION AN INTERVIEW AND DEMO WITH CELIA CALLE . . . . . . . . . . . .102 INKING TIPS, TOOLS, AND TECHNIQUE WITH MIKE MANLEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116 COMICS AND ANIMATION AN INTERVIEW AND DEMO WITH STEPHEN DESTEFANO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .124 FIGURE DRAWING THE FIGURE IN LIGHT AND SHADOW, BY BRET BLEVINS . . . . . . . . . . .149

DRAWING AND DESIGN DREAMING DESIGN: THE DESIGN PROCESS, BY PAUL RIVOCHE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161 FROM DRAW! #7 PENCILING THE POWER OF SKETCHING, BY BRET BLEVINS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .175 CARICATURE AN INTERVIEW AND DEMO WITH ZACH TRENHOLM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .196 DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION INKING AND COLORING IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR, BY ALBERTO RUIZ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .212 ILLUSTRATION AN INTERVIEW AND DEMO WITH DAN BRERETON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .218 DRAWING AND DESIGN LIGHT AND SHADOW, BY PAUL RIVOCHE . . . . . . . . . . . . . .246

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INTRODUCTION elcome to the third Best of Draw! collection featuring the best of the “how-to” material culled from the pages of DRAW! Magazine. This being our third volume, or our third time around, gives credence to the fact that not only is the work of the artists featured in this volume some of the “best of the best” working in their respective disciplines in the field of cartooning, comics and animation; but that this material is timeless. There is no time limit or shelf-life on the principles of drawing and storytelling found in the demonstrations and the work of the artists featured in this volume. Many things come and go like fashion in the world of art—commercially and in the fine art field as well. But real drawing skill and knowledge is not changeable like the lapels of a jacket or the hemline of a dress, or even the ever-changing software and technology we all interface with and use every day.

W

Figurative interpretation by Bret Blevins

The artist, the Cartoonist—yes I said “Cartoonist” with a capital “C”—who has a long and successful career has a sound grounding in the principles exposed by the many artists featured here.

We all use the same materials, the same basic handful of pens and pencils, markers, and computers, and yet we all employ them, and the knowledge we gain through practice and study, in a unique and interesting way as we project the impulse of

creativity through our artistic memory banks and the unique prism of our personality, down our arm to our hand, and finally onto the screen, canvas or page. Jack Kirby, certainly the most important cartoonist of the past 60 years as far as adventure and superhero comics goes, had a saying that, “One man can be a school for another.” In this volume, then, you have many, many schools to attend, study and learn from. I’d like to thank each and everyone of them who made this book possible, and to especially thank Dan Brereton for the new amazing cover, my best friend and fellow keeper of the flame Bret Blevins, and to my backbone and never failing friend and publisher John Morrow.

I’d also like to dedicate this book to the memory of my great friend Mike Wieringo, one of the best artists to grace us with his charm, humanity and talent on and off the comic page—a stellar human being and booster of almost everyone he ever met—who was taken away from us too young.

Now go Draw! something,

Mike Manley, editor

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MIKE WIERINGO

THE FANTASTIC PENCILS OF

MIKE WIERINGO

THE FANTASTIC FOUR ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

For over a decade Mike Wieringo’s animated and appealing artwork has graced some of the biggest icons in comics. From his break-out run on The Flash to his amazing work on Spider-Man to his creator-owned work on Tellos, to his current run on the first family of comics, The Fantastic Four.

DRAW! editor Mike Manley conducted this interview over the internet and by phone with the easy-going, busy artist from his Artamus Studio in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

WIERINGO: This is a panel from FF #61 where Ben is on the track of someone who played a practical joke on him. It was fun to show the public’s reaction to this lumbering monster running down the street. I tried to give the guy in the foreground a Sam Jackson-kind-of look.

DRAW!: Let’s begin with a brief bio. Give me the specifics.

Where were you born? Did anyone introduce you into comics?

WIERINGO: Well, I was born in Vicenza, Italy in 1963. My father was in the Army when I was born and that’s where he and my mother were stationed.We left not long after I was born, and we moved all over the place for years. We lived in New York state for a while, Virginia, over to Germany for three years and then back to Virginia in the U.S. in 1974. I’ve been in the U.S. ever since. My dad was actually the one who introduced me to comic books. He would buy comics from the base PX (Post Exchange) when we were living in Germany and he’d let me read them. They were mostly DC comics like Superman and Batman, but he would occasionally buy the odd Marvel like X-Men or Spider-Man. But overwhelmingly, they were the DC books.

DRAW!: Why was that? Did you find DC just more appealing for some reason? DC’s were certainly more accessible in other mediums like TV and cartoons.

WIERINGO: Well, these were the books being bought by my father in Germany that I’m talking about. This was when I was between 8 and 10 years old. I didn’t start buying my own comics until I was 11 years old and back in the O.S. I wasn’t allowed to go to the PX myself because there was a lot of drug dealing and violence going on, on base (if you can believe that... but it happened). But I remember my dad telling me about the comics he bought when he was a kid—things like Airboy, The Heap (a predecessor to Swamp Thing), Blackhawk as well as Superman and Batman. I read what he bought, but when I got to buy my own books, I was into the Marvel stuff.

DRAW!: So you were you into comics and cartoons as a kid?

WIERINGO: Yeah—I really took to comic books immediately.

The first time my dad brought some home, I was hooked. It’s always been that way. I can very easily get drawn into the “reality” of whichever comic book I’m reading/looking at. The comic book medium has always affected me in that way. I can open a comic book and get sucked in from the first couple of pages— THE BEST OF DRAW! 5

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MIKE WIERINGO

even in the bad ones. It’s like my brain is tuned into the language of comics, so it’s very easy to get immersed in whichever book I’m looking at, and it’s been like that for me since childhood.

I’ve always enjoyed cartoons and movies as well, but nothing connects with me as much as comic books.

DRAW!: When did you get started in the business?

WIERINGO: I got started in late 1991 drawing a Doc Savage mini-series for a small publisher called Millennium Publications.

I was working on samples at the time and had a pretty friendly relationship with the artists of Gaijin Studios (guys like Cully Hamner, Brian Stelfreeze, Karl Story, Adam Hughes and others) and they hooked me up with the publisher at Millennium. It was quite a learning experience, I’ll tell ya. The difference between working on samples and trying to get them “perfect,” and working on pages on deadline was a real eye-opener, no doubt.

WIERINGO: All of that, yeah. But mainly it was, and remains to this day—drawing what someone else has written, as opposed to drawing my own stories. I guess the thing I had the most trouble dealing with is the fact that I had been drawing my own stories for many years before actually starting to work as a freelancer for anyone. From around age 11 or 12 I had been creating my own little comics of varying length with stories either about my favorite existing characters from Marvel and DC or from my own knock-off characters. Every kid that likes to draw comics had their own versions of their favorite existing super-hero (I would assume; every kid I knew that drew did), and so I had years of my own storytelling and pacing habits in place. Not all of them were good, mind you, but it was very hard to go from creating and drawing my own stories to trying to get inside a writer’s mind to try to convey what they’re looking for in a story. It has also been a challenge from day one to draw things that I’m not used to drawing or really don’t have a lot of interest in drawing. One of the big problems I have with some of the writers I’ve worked with is their penchant for writing long scenes that take place with a couple of characters sitting and talking at a desk or in a small room or what have you, that will go on for 5, 6 or 7 pages at times. It’s difficult to maintain enthusiasm for something like that when you have to draw it. It’s great for television, but not so hot for comics. I think some of these guys would love to be writing for episodic television instead of comics, because that’s how their scripts read at times.

6 THE BEST OF DRAW!

THE FANTASTIC FOUR ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

DRAW!: What was the hardest part of this for you? The working when you don’t want to, or get tired, or drawing things you don’t find interesting?

DRAW!: What or who were you studying at this time artistically? Who were you learning from?

WIERINGO: Well, I was a huge Brian Stelfreeze nut, to be honest. Up to the point that I discovered his work when visiting a Heroes Convention in Charlotte, NC. I had been into the old fan favorites like John Byrne and George Pérez, but when I saw Brian’s work, it was so unique and from such a different point of view, it just blew me away. My mistake was in trying to really emulate his work at the time. I’ve discovered over the years that personally, for me, trying to draw “like” someone else is a very frustrating and ultimately fruitless endeavor. When I was younger and just getting started doing samples and getting little nibbles from publishers, I was like a magpie and was trying to incorporate stuff from every new artist I was exposed to that enthused me and it was getting me nowhere but confused and lost. It wasn’t until I let my own natural tendencies take over that I started to feel more comfortable and started to make headway.

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MIKE WIERINGO

THE FANTASTIC FOUR ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

cies, which are much softer, rounder and bouncier lines, so it looked really weird, stiff and clunky. As far as studying art and artists outside of comics, I was exposed to a lot of work while in college that was eye-opening and really expanded my worldview of drawing and painting. But my personal goal was always to work in comics, so I kind of put those elements aside when I first graduated and spent most of my time taking in more comic book related influences. It’s not been until the last several years that I’ve begun to look outside the comic book world again for inspiration.

Speaking of the animation and illustration stuff we were talking about earlier. Over that past several years, I’ve been buying as many of the “Art of...” Disney books that they publish after each animated film comes out. I’ve also been buying things like the Society of Illustrators award books and books like Spectrum. As far as feeling as though I had to conform to a house style, I don’t think I ever felt that early on. I guess as the comic book business has imploded over the years, and especially the “mainstream super-hero” aspect of it, I’ve felt some pressure to conform my work to what’s “expected” in the long-underwear books. A lot of that is probably self-imposed pressure. It comes from reading too many critical posts on internet message boards, and that’s something that I need to stop doing. I really need to learn to just draw for myself and enjoy what I’m doing for myself instead of worrying about what others think of my work or would like me to do with my stuff. I think that if I make myself happy with my own stuff, it’ll show in the work and thus people viewing it will enjoy it as well.

DRAW!: You mentioned when we talked earlier that you got started later. You went to college later. Were you taking art classes? Did this add any seriousness to your approach to breaking in, to your work ethic?

(ABOVE) WIERINGO: This is the layout and pencils for a page from FF #60. I love the humor Mark Waid writes into his scripts. This was a funny scene.

LEFT: This is a sketch for an illustration an acquaintance who owns a plane asked me to do for the side of his plane—kind of like a WWII “Good Girl” illustration. He wanted her topless and I didn’t want to do it, so it didn’t go anywhere. It was fun, though.

DRAW!: How far along in your career would you say that was?

Were you doing any study of artists and art outside of comics at the same time? Did you feel you had to conform to a “house style” at all?

WIERINGO: Well, this was fairly early on. It was after I had graduated from college (in 1991)—but before I started getting work from the “majors.” On the Doc Savage mini-series the Gaijin guys lined up for me, I was trying to do a Brian Stelfreeze riff, but it was so difficult for me to even “try” to emulate his work. At the time, I didn’t really much understand his working methods and his own influences, so it was pretty much alien to me. I was just trying to emulate the surface stylistics without really understanding the mechanics of what he was doing—so it was kind of clashing with my own natural tenden-

WIERINGO: Well, my parents couldn’t really afford to send me to college right out of high school, so I went to work in the grocery business. For a while, I kind of lost interest in drawing since I couldn’t go to art school like I wanted right out of high school, but after a couple of years of working my ass off, I realized I could get stuck in the cycle of working and buying stuff and I didn’t want to get stuck in the small-town community my folks lived near, so I set my sights on saving my own money toward going to college. Drawing comics had always been my ultimate goal from childhood, so I was pretty driven after a while to get to art school and get some drawing classes to help my meager abilities at around 20. I think that working for six years before college (I started at VCU in Richmond, VA at 24 years old and graduated at 27) helped me to build a real work ethic and drive to reach my goals. I really hated working in the grocery biz, so I was very set on reaching for the “brass ring,” so to speak.

DRAW!: So do you feel that since you had “real world” working experiences before getting into the comic biz, it helped you be more “professional” in certain respects. More responsible? Things like answer your phone? I know that sounds funny, but a lot of artists get bad reps for just not answering their phones.

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MIKE WIERINGO

WIERINGO: It’s a combination of the “real world” working experience and the fact that I come from a very economically lower-class background. My folks live in a very rural area and my father’s income was never very high. We had everything we needed, don’t get me wrong, but we weren’t what you could call middle-class by any stretch. So growing up never having much money, it has made me very fearful of returning to that state of existence. They say that most folks are only a few paychecks away from being broke, and I’m no exception to that. I had a few “fat” years at the tail end of the comics boom when there was a lot of merchandising art money to be made from Marvel and DC’s creative services departments, doing stuff like Chef Boyardee can art and Cookie Crisp Spider-Man animated style trading cards made me a lot of money for a couple of years, but that all dried up fast. So it’s tough to keep head-above-water these days. It keeps me working.

DRAW!: Could you pull any experience from that time and use it in your work for characters and situations etc.?

WIERINGO: I could, I suppose, but it wouldn’t make for very exciting comics (talking about my time working in the grocery business). It would make for the sort of depressing Joe Matt kind of auto-bio comic that was big a few years back, but I kind of doubt that people would enjoy reading about someone who absolutely hated his job in the produce department of Food World and would wish that he’d get hit by a car and killed every morning on the way to work, which is how I felt most of the time. It’s just too depressing. I guess if I could work in some humor it would make for a good sort of sit-com comic, but I’m not sure I’m into that kind of thing right now.

DRAW!: I think it could be really funny, strong material.

Sounds like you have a real passion there even talking about it.

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Do you follow the indy side of the biz? Do you have any desire to do small press or mini comics?

WIERINGO: Well, I have a strong negative passion about the whole situation. I suppose I could create a comic that would be funny by creating humorous situations and characters within the framework of the grocery business, but in reality, the job was just incredibly monotonous and thankless and that’s why I hated it so much. I buy many, many more small press and independent comics than I do anything else these days. Superhero comics just don’t interest me much anymore.

I’ll buy certain super-hero books if it’s being drawn by an artist whose work I really enjoy, but as far as the cape stuff is concerned, I think there’s not much new under the sun story- wise, so they don’t do much for me. I’ve really gotta think that the real, long-term life of comic books is in alternative work. So I always keep an eye out for fun and interesting stuff being done in indy and small press areas. I would love to do work in the small press area myself. It would be a real blast to just let go and create any kind of story I wanted to and not have to worry about trying to “market” something to the majority of the audience reading comics these days in an THE INVISIBLE WOMAN effort to really generate big ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. profits.

DRAW!: You’ve had the chance to work on some of the biggest icons in the comics biz. When you start working on a character like Spidey or like Superman, do you take time before you actually start working to try and “work out” your ideal or your “take” on the character?

WIERINGO: I feel very, very fortunate to have had the opportunities I’ve been given. Working on characters like Spidey and Superman, real icons of the comic book world, is the kind of

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PENCILING thing I never thought I’d get the chance to do starting out in the business, so when those opportunities came, it was incredibly intimidating. I always try to take a significant amount of time to work out my “take” on the characters I’m working with, trying to get a handle on how I’m going to draw a specific character.

The big problem I have with that is that no matter how much I try to work out a method of depicting a character, over the period of several issues, the way I draw a character will change anyway. My work tends to morph over a period of many issues of whichever title I happen to be drawing. It’s not really a conscious thing, it just happens every time I draw a new character or title. The way I drew, say, Spider-Man looked completely different from my first issue to my last, and I was on that book (Sensational Spider-Man) for some 18 issues.

It’s not something that I hate in my stuff, it just happens.

DRAW!: I think that happens with everyone. If you look at any character, he evolves over the course of time. The Thing or Bugs Bunny are good examples here. Do you find that the character becomes more and more like a real person, a real fleshed-out person in your mind, or artist’s eye?

MIKE WIERINGO

DRAW!: Does that make it easier to draw or make the character act on paper?

WIERINGO: Absolutely. When I’m really connected with a character, it’s very easy to draw them, even in situations that are new, that I’ve never had to tackle before. And if something is very difficult, or is a real challenge and becomes frustrating for me, I can get through that because I enjoy the character so much. If I encounter something like that with a character I don’t like to draw, it makes the road-block that much more difficult and frustrating. It makes me want to quit rather than conquer the problem.

DRAW!: Do you feel sometimes like you have to restrain yourself stylistically? That comic book fans today seem to not want a cartoony or broad approach to these characters. Do you feel you must conform in some sense?

WIERINGO: Yeah, definitely. I don’t know why it is, but it seems that comic book fans, especially fans of super-hero comics, have this need to see their characters depicted in a “realistic” or gritty, dark and “serious” style and that kind of thing has never really WIERINGO: It appealed to me. does if I’m really My own work into the character would be a lot and the writer more cartoony if I I’m working felt free to let loose with. For and draw things the way instance, on I see them in my head. My Sensational Spiderstuff is open and cartoony anyTHE THING ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL Man, I really enjoyed working way, but the kind of thing I enjoy CHARACTERS, INC. with Todd Dezago (the writer) and we had doing and seeing is a lot more extreme many of the same sensibilities as far as how we like to tell a in that direction than in the “realistic” story and what we want to do, so I really came to enjoy and vein. But to keep a toe-hold in the “mainstream” of popular connect with Ben Reilly (yeah, the clone) and later, Peter comic book culture, to be able to make a good living drawing Parker. The Spider-Man stuff was a blast to draw, but I also comics, I feel like I have to conform to a great degree to what very much got into the personal life aspects of the characters fans expect. as well. What you could call the more soap-operatic aspects.

The characters did seem more real to me—more like they were DRAW!: So you feel restrained in some sense. That fans may tangible. I don’t get that feeling with characters or stories or react in a negative way to you really cutting loose? Like they writers I’m not really into. would drop the book?

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WIERINGO: That’s a big fear with me, yeah. I’ve seen so many artists fall by the wayside for one reason or another, and I’d hate to join those ranks. I don’t know, sometimes I think it’s more selfimposed than anything else. It’s just a deep-seeded fear of rejection, I suppose. That and going broke. But there’s a part of me, a voice in the back of my head that says, “Don’t do anything that might ‘rock the boat’ and make people turn away from your work.” Even though it’s probably the most frustrating thing for me to deal with out of everything one deals with in being a comic book artist.

Above the deadlines, the stories, the editors, the lack of time for a personal life, it’s the frustration of not feeling comfortable enough to just let loose and get as free with my drawing as I’d like.

DRAW!: So how does one “self edit’ here? Do you rough out things, then decide you’ve gone too far, and then pull back? I find this rather distressing, but I can sympathize with you here, as I think many artists feel they can’t cut loose, and pull back on mainstream work. They feel that the mass audience can’t follow along. Yet our market is pretty much a niche market now, so you’d think fans would be so familiar with the characters and material. Enough to stretch a bit. Maybe even be tired of the status quo?

WIERINGO: Well, it’s the oddity of what I see as the majority of the fan mentality. Most of the folks reading comics these days are our age or a bit younger. I’m not sure what the demographics are exactly, but I’d put it between 17 and 40-something for the most part. And mostly male. And the largest part of this group still reads super-hero comics, but to keep from feeling too squeamish about that, they seem to gravitate toward stories that are more “adult” in nature and illustrated in a style that is more “realistic” in its representation. I look at the popularity of guys like Alex Ross, Jae Lee, Brian Hitch, Greg Horn, J.G. Jones and a whole host of artists that either rely on photo reference (some are a slave to it) or try to draw in a kind of pseudo-photorealistic style and it just seems to dominate the market to me. Most of what DC puts out is done in that style. The kind of 5th-generation Adam Hughes clone. That doesn’t interest me. I take heart when I see guys like Darwyn Cooke, J. Bone, Jim Mahfood, Scott Morse, 10 THE BEST OF DRAW!

Mike Oeming, Jason Pearson, and others getting wider recognition for doing more open, more expressive work, but I’d love to see even more of it become the norm.

DRAW!: There are artists like Bill Sienkiewicz who have a career based on going “over the edge.”

WIERINGO: Yep, and that’s great. But I’d like to see it happen more regularly. I look at the huge diversity of styles and stories that are popular in Europe and I wonder why there can’t be more of that kind of mentality here in the States. It’s the old saying, diversity is a “good” thing, but that doesn’t fly in American comic books, for the most part.

DRAW!: Do you feel the mainstream books are not a place for such experimentation? That it’s a place for status quo work. Or is it just that on big icon books you tend to hold back? I just find this whole selfediting very troubling, and sort of sad. I want to see the crazy Mike Wieringo!

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WIERINGO: These are the pencils for the cover to Fantastic Four #60 (my first issue).

Since it was the first issue for the new creative team, the editors had me go though tons of sketches for this.

They wanted something that would highlight the whole team without being “narrative”— so after many tries, we came up with this montage-style piece.

LEFT: One of the many roughs Mike did for the cover.

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MIKE WIERINGO I’ve also seen that happen with folks who just went their own way and the readers gravitated toward that as well. Folks like Mike Mignola, Jeff Smith, Terry Moore and others are shining examples of this. People who want to do comics their own way and the enjoyment they have really shows. So I don’t want to come off and be completely negative here. I’m hoping, really hoping, that one day, I’ll break my own constrictions and do the kind of work I want to and folks will like it. I’m always hopeful.

DOLLZ ™ AND ©2008 RANDY GREEN

DRAW!: Well how then do you keep your artistic fires pumped.

Keep the batteries charged up while doing a monthly book?

(ABOVE) WIERINGO: This is the sketch for a cover I did for Randy Green’s Dollz comic that he published through Image Comics. This was a real blast to do—it has lots of cute girls in wild costumes and a wonderful cartoon bunny. I thought this was a wonderful comic—but alas, it was shortlived.

WIERINGO: In my mind, it’s mainly more on the big icon books that I get that feeling—but oddly enough (I should say luckily enough) I’ve really only worked on those kinds of books.

I’ve gone from Flash to Rogue to Robin to Spider-Man to Superman to Fantastic Four (with just a tad of creator-owned stuff thrown in). And all those characters have fan followings that have certain expectations that I feel awareness of. There is also a part of me that believes, however, that if you’re doing work you enjoy, it will show in the end product and that the viewer/reader will tap into that joy and come along for the ride.

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WIERINGO: Well, if I can get into a groove, it’s pretty easy to stay charged up, really. I’m the kind of person that needs to draw every day and keep a regular routine going to keep the momentum of drawing a monthly book going.

It’s very frustrating that real life tends to get in the way so often.

There’s always something coming up that stymies the flow when I get in it. Like the ice storm that just happened here, I lost an entire week of work because of not having power for that long. Now it’s going to take me days to get a rhythm going that will allow me to produce pages in a timely manner.

That’s really why I can’t do a book month-in and month-out. I can really only generate about eight or nine issues a month just because I have to deal with things around my house, my cat, my car or whatever. I’m pretty isolated here without any support structure to help me with those things, so it’s too easy to fall out of the groove.

DRAW!: Was there a difference between working Marvel “plot method” or DC full-script method that you preferred?

WIERINGO: Absolutely. I so much more enjoy working from plot method than full script. Plots allow me to pace the action and storytelling the way I’d like to see it as opposed to the way the writer sees it. To my mind, that is the collaborative method, not so much conforming to the writer’s vision of how the comic should be paced. As long as the intent and focus of the story is maintained, I prefer to be left to my own devices as far as pacing is concerned. I feel really constrained working with a full script.

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PETER PARKER, SPIDER-MAN ™ & ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

ULTIMATE POSSIBILITIES?

Working full script just makes me feel like a “hired pencil” that’s basically interchangeable with any other artist. That doesn’t give me the feeling of teamwork or collaboration. It just make me feel like a cog.

DRAW!: So you feel less mentally involved then? Like the corners are already defined by the script?

WIERINGO: Yeah, that’s it. Even though I know it would be a lot more work for me, I would prefer to be given the loosest plot possible. That way, I feel as though in at least the visual sense, the pacing and visual storytelling, I’m able to create the world from my own imagination. This is difficult when the plot is too loose and the artist is made to feel as though they’re really writing it (which is how I imagine the way Stan Lee and Jack Kirby worked together) but I almost feel as though the pain of that kind of frustration is more agreeable than that of the frustration of feeling boxed into the writer’s vision. It just doesn’t feel as collaborative to work from full script. But I’ve started to grow used to it somewhat, so it’s not so much of a problem as it was coming off of doing Tellos with Todd. That was so fluid and give-and-take that going to a concrete, full script, fully dialogued story was a real culture shock.

DRAW!: Do you still attempt to re-pace things even with a full script? Make one panel two, move dialogue, restructure the narrative in some way to make the storytelling clearer, or more dramatic?

WIERINGO: This was an interesting assignment from Marvel that never happened (for me, at least...). They asked me to create a series of sketches featuring a young Peter Parker getting into his costume in an alley as the beginning of an idea they had to create a comic that would re-introduce and revitalize the Spider-Man mythos. It’s what ended up being Ultimate SpiderMan, as it turns out.

WIERINGO: Occasionally, yes. Sometimes I’ll split a panel into two if I think that it makes for a better “moment,” to give a beat for emotional emphasis or to stress a characters reaction to something. Or, if the writer has written something for one panel that I think needs to be broken into two or more panels to make the storytelling more clear. I will never do anything that hampers storytelling, I can tell you that. My sensibilities run more toward a feeling of animation, so if anything, I’d tend to stretch things out and add extra beats for effect, not to subtract.

DRAW!: Is it the opposite feeling when working on your creator-owned projects like Tellos?

WIERINGO: Oh, yes. I feel so much more free and liberated when working on creator-owned stuff. I feel it allows me much more freedom to stretch my legs as far as pacing, layout and the way I depict the characters and action. This sort of ties into the question about cartooniness as well. When I’m working on my own creations, I figure if someone is buying it for me and my work, I’m going to give them and show them what’s in my head and in my heart as far as how I like to draw. That’s why I’m so sad that the present market is so weak that it really can’t sustain creator-owned THE BEST OF DRAW! 13

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WIERINGO: This is another example of having to work out the different elements of the page separately. With the crazy demands of the large panel, I couldn’t make it all work smoothly on one layout page, so I had to work it out separately.

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WIERINGO: This is another page from FF #60. It’s one of the most intense, chaotic things I’ve ever had to do. The idea is that these scientists have inadvertently release an “anti-gravity liquid” that’s causing a mess. I had to draw scientists, equipment, and the FF themselves flying around. Mark Waid’s always giving me challenging stuff to draw.

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books with personal visions. At least not in a way that creates financial security. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of wonderful comics being done that are unique and personal to be sure, but they don’t do great numbers.

DRAW!: Do you use any sort of reference for your work at all? Does the computer come into play at all?

DRAW!: Are you planning to better learn the computer side of things like drawing with a tablet, etc. Do you follow that edge of the field at all? I notice the Fantastic Four covers are digitally painted. Do you collaborate in any way or have input here? Do color guides, etc.?

WIERINGO: I do have plans to learn the computer side of artwork. I’m very interested in coloring my own work—at least on 16 THE BEST OF DRAW!

THE FANTASTIC FOUR ™ & ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

WIERINGO: I use reference for things like locations or vehicles—or for the kind of clothes and hairstyles folks are wearing. I use the computer to search the web for reference I need, but I’m not very proficient in using Photoshop for stuff, so it’s more of a search tool than anything right now.

(ABOVE) WIERINGO: A penciled page from FF #63 and a sketch for one of the panels. Sometimes when a layout isn’t coming as easily as it should, I have to layout some of the panels separately. In this case, I had to do so for every panel on this page.

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(ABOVE) WIERINGO: Layout and pencils for a page from FF #60.

Notice the first panel—initially, I didn’t like the original sketch, so I reworked it. In hindsight, I like the original best.

covers. I’m determined to learn coloring in Photoshop. I’m just the kind of person who has to be shown how to do something many times before I can pick it up. I’m slow that way. I want to do sketching and coloring artwork and the like. I have a full set up with a Mac G4 computer, a 12" x 17" flatbed scanner, printer and the whole works—it’s just a matter of finding the time to expand my knowledge. As far as the FF covers go, Richard Isanove does a great job and doesn’t need any input from me.

DRAW!: What’s your typical work day like?

WIERINGO: I usually get up at about 6:00 a.m. and get ready for work. I have breakfast and get dressed and get to the studio around 8:00 a.m. I start work on a layout and hopefully get it done by lunch. I have lunch at 12:00 noon and then start transferring the layout

onto artboard using my light table—and the goal is to finish the page by 5:00 p.m. Then I get to the gym to work out and get home by 7:30 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. I eat dinner and hit the bed by about 10:00 p.m. Then I get up the next day and start all over again.

DRAW!: I understand you share a studio. Who are your compadres? Does this atmosphere help with the work?

WIERINGO: Yep, I share a studio with Richard Case. At one point, there were 8 or 9 artists in the studio. That was the reason I moved to North Carolina in the first place was for the large community of comic book artists sharing this studio. I wanted to be a part of the creative juices that were flowing here. I’ve been a part of this studio for going on 10 years now, but now everyone has moved on to greener pastures but Rich and me. So I’m planning to move to Richmond, Virginia sometime in 2003. My family lives there and I want to get back to VCU to take some more art classes to refresh my skills. I’m starting to feel a little stale—and I never want to stop learning and improving.

DRAW!: So you feel that returning to school, doing figure drawing etc., is very important? Do you draw from life much?

WIERINGO: I feel that figure drawing is very important.

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their work, I always tell them to draw from life as much as possible. I was fortunate to get four good years of life model drawing in college with a fantastic teacher named Donald Early who taught me so much more in those four years than I could have ever learned on my own. But I haven’t had the benefit of doing much life drawing since I graduated, and I just think my work could benefit even more from getting back into it. At least on a semi-regular basis.

DRAW!: Do you study at all now? Do you feed your muse?

WIERINGO: Only by looking at artists whose work I really enjoy for inspiration.

I always keep lots of fun books around to get my juices flowing when I’m feeling the need to kickstart my drawing on a day when I’m feeling at a low ebb creatively.

DRAW!: How do you interact with the other artists in the studio? Do you show each other work, help out on deadlines, etc.?

WIERINGO: Well, there’s only two of us in the studio now. Richard Case (artist on Hunter, Age of Magic—and of Doom Patrol fame) and me. We’re 18 THE BEST OF DRAW!

(ABOVE) WIERINGO: Another example of working out elements of the page separately. I went through several versions of a sad Franklin as his mother chastises him on the way out the window.

(RIGHT) WIERINGO: I started to work out the layout for the FF heading toward Modulus from the groundlevel, but I rethought it and decided to make it a downshot to add some variety from the slight up-shot of the first panel.

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good friends and we get along really well in the studio. We look over each other’s shoulders all the time to see what the other is doing. It’s still a good atmosphere, but not as thrilling as it was when there were about eight guys here.

DRAW!: Did you find that environment helped you grow or learn at all?

WIERINGO: Oh, most definitely. Especially at the height of our membership. I was exposed to different styles and methods of working and I was always able to go to someone when I was feeling stumped creatively and get advice or help with something that was giving me trouble.

I can still do that with Rich, but I miss having a wider variety of opinions available.

DRAW!: Do you keep a schedule to have a certain amount of pages done per day?

WIERINGO: I keep on a very regular schedule. I think that working for years before college gave me a good work ethic. However, I’m not the fastest artist in the world, so I shoot for about five pages a week output—but more often than not, it ends up being four pages per week. Real life seems to get in the way too, too often. I’ll have to mow the lawn, take my cat to the vet (she’s really old), take my car to the shop, run errands—whatever it is. And I don’t really have any support structure here, so I have to handle it all by myself. That can get in the way of productivity very often.

DRAW!: Do you keep a sketchbook?

WIERINGO: I sketch a lot, but not in a real traditional sketchbook. I enjoy drawing on 81⁄2" x 11" copy paper. I really enjoy the way if feels to draw on that paper with blue pencil. It makes me feel like an animator. So I just have stacks of sketches on separate sheets of paper.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR ™ & ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

DRAW!: Do you find that a sketchbook is intimidating in some way? That loose sheets of paper have no formality about them?

WIERINGO: There is that—but it’s mainly a comfort thing as well. I just really like the texture of copy paper and it’s something I’ve been drawing on since I was really young. I used to draw all my own comics as a kid on copy paper. My folks would always keep me in copy paper. They were very encouraging when it came to me drawing—so whenever I’d get low on copy paper, they’d get me more.

I’ve never found a sketchbook that has the exact feel of good copy paper. There’s also the fact that I don’t like drawing in a sketchbook because the book is too high and it doesn’t feel comfortable on my wrist when it’s resting on the edge of the book. I like working on something very flat without having my forearm bent down even slightly, which is what happens when I work in a book. I know it probably sounds strange, but that’s just the way I feel.

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WIERINGO: Another page from FF #63. Reed’s headed into the “Modulus Realm” to try to stop his rampage. I really enjoy the character play between Reed and Sue.

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WIERINGO: I just use a full piece of copy paper—and I rule off about 3⁄4 of an inch down the right side and draw on the rest. I usually draw all the way to the edges of the paper, so there’s no exterior ruled lines that serve as a border. If I have a grid or border on the outside, I just feel constrained. It’s just another quirk I have right now. I have in the past used layout templates of various sizes and I’ve changed the way I work over the years. I used to draw my layouts about trading card size, four to an 81⁄2" x 11" piece of copy paper. And the layouts used to be much, more loose and I did more finishing when I was tracing the layout onto the art board on the light box. But as the years have gone by, my layouts have gotten bigger, until they take up the majority of the piece of copy paper. Now I enlarge it 125% and it’s usually the right size for transfer to the art board. ©2008 MIKE WIERINGO.

DRAW!: Do you prefer the rough or smooth surface paper?

WIERINGO: This is just a sketch I did in ink for a Flash Gordon-type character. I like playing around with different genres when I’m just sketching.

BELOW: A self-portrait/caricature I did for a Gorilla Comics press release.

DRAW!: Do you sketch for fun, to learn, or both? Does any of this sketching or ideas work its way into your commercial work?

WIERINGO: Mostly for fun. When I sketch, I tend to draw in the way I wish I could draw all the time, even in my freelance work. I guess sketching for me allows me to stretch and explore my more open, cartoony side. I tend to draw characters that I have floating around in my head and I work out ideas for characters and stories that I’ve been thinking about.

WIERINGO: The Smoother the better!!! I very much prefer smooth art board, my favorite is actually a plate finish. The best paper I’ve ever encountered is Image Comics’ board that they provide to people publishing books with them. It’s a little thicker than Marvel and DC paper (so it’s a tad harder to see through on the light box), but it’s really incredibly smooth and I’ve always enjoyed drawing on slick paper. Most of the Marvel and DC stuff has too much tooth for my liking.

DRAW!: It seems like you like a fairly hard lead; is this because you want that very clean look to your pencils? Sort of an animated clean-up line? Your work is so nice and clean you could just shoot from your pencils and fill the blacks in in Photoshop.

DRAW!: What do you do when you hit a snag or have that day when the work isn’t coming easily?

WIERINGO: I scream and cry. Barring that, if I can keep my cool, I’ll take a walk or look at artists whose work I really like to get inspiration or just start sketching whatever makes me feel good to get into a groove and hopefully get the creative juices flowing.

ART TOOLS and THE PROCESS:

WIERINGO: I do my layouts on 81⁄2" x 11" simple copy paper with blue Sanford Col-erase pencils. I’ll tighten them up with .05 2H graphite in a click-feed lead holder/pencil. Then I blow them up on the copy machine and transfer them to the bristol art board Marvel provides on my light box. I use 4H or 5H drafting leads in a Berol lead holder for that.

DRAW!: Are your layouts pre-gridded? Do you copy off a grid that you can use to preset enlargements on the copy machine?

©2008 MIKE WIERINGO.

DRAW!: What are the tools of your trade? Pencils, markers, paper, etc. Make and type, be as specific as possible.

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MIKE WIERINGO use Pigma markers. I used to ink my own stuff with a brush when I was younger and just working on samples, but my hand is a little too shaky for smooth brush work. I do use a brush to thicken up lines in certain areas when I’m inking, and for filling in large black areas, but mostly I use markers because they’re more comfortable and give me more control and a feeling of drawing. I have some pen nibs that I’m going to try using some day when I get the opportunity to ink something else.

DRAW!: Is there a reason you don’t ink more of your own work?

THE FANTASTIC FOUR ™ & ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

WIERINGO: It’s mostly a lack of confidence in my own abilities. And mostly in inking small things on the page. I ink most of my own covers—mainly when doing personal work—because the images tend to be big and easier to ink. But when it comes to inking small details on a page, I tend to freeze up and get shaky with the ink pen. I know that it’s just a matter of inking enough to get comfortable with it, but I’ve been in situations where I’m just penciling—and on a monthly title—for so long, that I rarely have the time to practice.

DRAW!: White rubber or kneaded erasers?

WIERINGO: Yeah, it’s to keep a clean and clear line. I try to make my work as tight and clear as possible so that whoever’s inking me never needs to guess at what I’m doing. It’s also a way of controlling as much as possible the end-look of the artwork. Eventually, I’d like to get into inking my own stuff—but right now I don’t feel confident enough to jump into it. So by keeping my pencils really tight, it’ll hopefully look consistent from job to job. That way, the biggest difference the inker can make is in their line quality, not in what they have to interpret.

DRAW!: What about inking? Are you old school, pens and brush, or do you use markers?

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WIERINGO: White rubber. I have some large Magic Rub erasers for big areas, and various thinner click-erasers for smaller, more delicate areas.

DRAW!: Are you influenced by manga or anime at all, or animation in general?

WIERINGO: I would say I’m somewhat influenced by Japanese animation and comics—mostly the comics—but I’m not nearly as much into that kind of thing as I used to be years ago. I really enjoy the style and slowing down and stretching out of the storytelling that manga achieves. It’s a great way to tell a story about people without worrying about cluttering up the pages with tons of background de-tails. It tends to speed up the reading process—but that’s their charm. In more recent years, however, I’ve really gotten into Disney animation as well as various

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THE FANTASTIC FOUR ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

movies that have come out like The Iron Giant and The Road to El Dorado. Whether the stories are great or not, the really strong design elements of a lot of American animated movies these days really jazzes me. The Iron Giant was a real revelation of just how cool an animated movie can be and the character design was just incredible. But even movies that really slipped below the radar of most folks, or even engendered some scorn like The Emperor’s New Groove, Atlantis, and Lilo and Stitch have a great fascination for me as far as the actual art of the animation. But it really started with movies like Hercules and The Hunchback of Notre Dame for me.

It just seemed like Disney was incorporating new influences for their animation and it really resonated with me. When I talk about stretching my work and experimenting with the way I draw, that’s the kind of think I’m talking about. Trying to explore more open, expressive, animated-looking work. In fact, I did a fill-in issue of Meridian for CrossGen right on the heels of Tellos, which I had done in a very animated style, and the general consensus on the Meridian message boards was that it looked way to much like a Disney movie. They didn’t mean it as such, but I took satisfaction in that.

DRAW!: So you feel more freedom to stylistically experiment on some of these, for lack of a better term, “iconic” books?

WIERINGO: Another layout and finished pencils from FF #63. I didn’t like the original sketch for panel 3, so I reworked it. Also notice—sometimes when I’m transferring the layout to the artboard, I’ll tweak things here and there, such as the machinery in the big panel 3. The diagnostic equipment behind Reed and Sue and the tank Ben’s in have been tweaked just a bit..

WIERINGO: No, less. Like I said, I think fans of the major “icon” characters have definite expectations of what those characters should look like, and I don’t feel as though my work fits those expectations most of the time.

DRAW!: Switching up a bit here, how much time did you spend doing design work for something like Tellos? I mean it’s a whole world you are creating from scratch as opposed to doing riffs of already established “universes” like Marvel’s or DC’s. How did you go about fleshing Tellos out?

WIERINGO: I spent a long time fleshing out the Tellos characters and settings. Longer than I’ve spent on anything else I’ve ever done. Todd Dezago and I had a definite idea of THE BEST OF DRAW! 23

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the whole of the story, which characters were going to be involved, what they were going to be doing and where they were going to be going. And with the project not really being “on schedule” to begin publication as is often the case at Marvel or DC, I was able to take the time to really develop the looks for the characters and settings for Tellos. Even though the characters ended up looking a bit different by the end of the series than they did at the beginning, but that was more a stylistic thing rather than design driven. But I’d say I spent a good two months or more working on the designs for the Tellos comic book.

DRAW!: Do you have any advice to artists just getting into the comics business or who are thinking about it?

WIERINGO: I think that the best advice I could give to an aspiring artist who wants to draw comics is to be true to him/ herself, and don’t expect to get rich. As far as staying true to one’s self—I mean don’t try to conform to what others want from you. An artist will have the most fun and satisfying experience doing the kind of comics they want to do instead of doing the kind of comics others want them to do. That’s just a view I have from personal experience. I’m really grateful about the success I’ve had in the comic book biz, but sometimes I wish it had gone in another direction. I remember that my brother and I were starting to work on a personal project together while we were both living at home with our folks 10-12 years ago (maybe a little more), and I was really antsy to move out on my own, so I backed out of the project with my brother and concentrated on working on samples to get freelance work. There are times when I think I would have been much more creatively satisfied and fulfilled if I had concentrated on producing personal stuff 24 THE BEST OF DRAW!

©2008 MIKE WIERINGO.

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MIKE WIERINGO

As far as animation, I’ve been watching Kim Possible. I was watching Invader Zim before they canceled it, damn Nickelodeon.

I also like the Proud Family for it’s character design. I also think Jackie Chan Adventures is a hoot. As far as movies, as I said, I’ve been to see every traditionally animated Disney movie since The Lion King, Hercules, and Hunchback. I’m planning on catching Treasure Planet even though I know it’s bombing at the box office. It just looks really cool.

DRAW!: I see here that you are not having your penciled pages of the Fantastic Four inked in the traditional way. How did this come about? Was this your decision?

WIERINGO: This is something that the editors on Fantastic Four told me would be happening from the very beginning. It certainly wasn’t my decision, I think it came from the top. I think it’s something that Marvel is doing with several books whenever possible as a cost cutting measure. It’s sort of an extension or variation on the process of having pencils colored without inking.

DRAW!: What does this entail on your end to facilitate this?

You do the scanning and send the pages along to the inker? Can you describe your process?

rather than work-for-hire comics. A whole lot poorer financially, but more satisfied, I think. And in the current market climate, it’s going to be very difficult to make a good living from work-for-hire unless you’re an already established artist. Whenever the market is depressed as it is now, it becomes much more of a closed shop as far as getting a foot in the door at Marvel or DC. But then, this sort of ties into the first part of this question. If you can’t get work from the “biggies,” don’t worry about it and just do your own comics. That’ll get you noticed just as quickly.

WIERINGO: Well, the idea was for that to happen, yeah. The ultimate goal was for me to scan my own pencils in and upload the scan files to Marvel’s FTP site. Karl Kesel (the inker) would then take those files from the FTP site and print them out in non-photo blue on his printer and ink those. The problem with that process is three-fold for me. One, the Marvel tech guy gave me the passcode to their FTP site, but he never told me how to actually navigate my way to the site.

And two, Karl doesn’t like the quality of my scans. I did a test

DRAW!: What are you watching and reading today in comics and animation etc.?

WIERINGO: Let’s see, in comics, I regularly buy Jeff Smith’s Bone, Mike Kunkel’s Herobear and the Kid, anything by Dave Cooper, Love and Rockets, which is being published again, thank goodness, anything by Dupuy and Berberian (if it’s not translated, I just look at the pictures), anything by Jason Pearson, Carlos Meglia, J. Bone, Darwyn Cooke, Art Adams, Jeff Matsuda, and a bunch of others. Notice the cartoony trend in the artists?

(ABOVE LEFT) WIERINGO: This was a sketch for a Serra (from Tellos) lithograph for anotheruniverse.com that never happened.

LEFT: Sketches of lions. I love animals and have always played with the idea of doing a “Savannah Drama” that would feature talking African wildlife.

RIGHT: A sketch of Koj from Tellos.

TELLOS ™ AND ©2008 TODD DEZAGO AND MIKE WIERINGO.

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(ABOVE) WIERINGO: Koj fighting some Shadow jumpers from Tellos. I created tons of developmental sketches for the comic.

LEFT: A preliminary sketch of the FF to get a feel for the characters before starting on the comic.

RIGHT: A sketch of Hauser—a villain from the Tellos comic.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR ™ & ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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compensate me for anything in this. But I already had my computer setup with the big scanner and everything before they started doing this anyway.

DRAW!: Does this effect the way you work, or pencil at all now that the work is not being inked on the board?

TELLOS ™ AND ©2008 TODD DEZAGO AND MIKE WIERINGO.

WIERINGO: No, not really. I still pencil the same way. I suppose that Karl’s scanner is sensitive enough to pick up all the more delicate or subtle line work that may be in certain parts of the page, so I still pencil the same way.

and scan-ned one page and sent the file to him via e-mail. He was afraid that a lot of the fine detail was getting lost in my scanning process. So he prefers to scan them himself. Three, I’m only on a dial-up internet connection, so sending huge files for inking would take so long as not to be cost effective. And I can’t afford a DSL line or Cable Modem at this point. I’ve got too many other expenses. So as it turns out, I’ve just been sending the pencils to Marvel and they’ve been FedEx-ing them to Karl. So there’s really no shipping savings with us on FF. But Karl prefers this method, so Marvel’s still going through with it.

I think Karl likes the idea of keeping all his inks.

DRAW!: Do you prefer the old way, where you ink on the pencils?

WIERINGO: Oh, I’m pretty old-school as far as comic book original art is concerned, so I definitely prefer the old way. It’s the same way I felt when everyone went to computer lettering and it was done via file transfer and not done on the page.

Without the actual lettering on the page, it just doesn’t feel like a real piece of original comic book art. And without the inks as well, it just looks strange and naked to me. But it doesn’t seem to bother most folks who buy original art. In fact, a lot of them like the novelty of it.

©2008 MIKE WIERINGO.

DRAW!: Does Marvel compensate you for this?

WIERINGO: Well, since the process isn’t really working the way they’d like it to, no. But even if it did work for us, they wouldn’t

TELLOS ™ AND ©2008 TODD DEZAGO AND MIKE WIERINGO.

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On the next four pages is a fine selection of solid, charming and sexy sketches and drawing from Mike’s own sketchbook, all on 81⁄2" x 11" bond typing paper. Many were drawn in blue Color Erase pencil.

TELLOS ™ AND ©2008 TODD DEZAGO AND MIKE WIERINGO.

On this page are development drawings from Wieringo’s sketchbook for a Tellos back-up story that ran in the back of Section Zero, part of the Gorilla Comics line published by Image. Wieringo says he’ll sometimes do several sketches to help develop a character even if it’s not a major one.

NEXT PAGE: The drawings on the next page are development ideas for an abandoned project, a sketch of Serra from Tellos, and a few random girls.

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©2008 MIKE WIERINGO.

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Another development drawing from Wieringo’s sketchbook for Tellos.

TELLOS ™ AND ©2008 TODD DEZAGO AND MIKE WIERINGO.

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SPIDER-MAN, DR. OCTOPUS ™ & ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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DREAMING DESIGN THE DEPTH ILLUSION

This article is meant to investigate how to create, and ways of strengthening, the “Depth Illusion”—the illusion of threedimensional space created on two-dimensional paper. The focus will not primarily be on typical perspective rules and techniques such as vanishing points, horizon lines and so on. Those are very important, and should be studied, but they are not the main concern here. Instead I want to concentrate on other factors affecting whether or not an image has a sense of depth.

Sometimes, despite employing perspective convergence, studiously making all your lines obediently converge to a vanishing point on a carefully placed horizon line and dutifully following all the “rules,” there’s still no “illusion of depth”!

Let’s see if we can discover the other factors which either add to or take away from the creation of a sense of depth in a drawing...

THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL LANGUAGE The first thing to clearly realize when investigating the “Depth Illusion” is that there really is such a thing as a “twodimensional language,” with its own, and sometimes complicated and peculiar, set of rules, and its own psychology. In 32 THE BEST OF DRAW!

the eagerness to create a successful image, and to contemplate mentally all the fascinating nuances of figure gestures, vehicles, backgrounds, and so on, it is easy to forget that, in the end, all of these three-dimensional dreams end up flat: as flat lines and shapes on a flat, two-dimensional piece of paper. That piece of paper is like a “bottleneck,” a gateway, which the artist must contend with in the process of transmitting his images from himself to the viewer. A picture starts as a visualization of three-dimensional form in an artist’s mind, and ends, if the image communicates successfully, as another three-dimensional image in the viewer’s brain. But in between lies the transmission device: the decidedly twodimensional flat piece of paper. It takes a while to realize this piece of paper has entirely its own language, with its own grammar and syntax, and that what we see in our threedimensional vision must be translated into a two-dimensional language of overlapping, spacings, scale, and many other factors. Since doing a drawing is all about making choices, we must realize that some choices more clearly communicate three-dimensional form, while others obscure and camouflage it. The artist who draws has a chance to edit, to stage

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accommodating perceived forms to the limitations of drawing.

In the quest to describe form and space, the cartoonist must distill things down and eliminate accidental effects and placements—anything that does not communicate clearly. True cartooning is an art of intentional arrangement, using the twodimensional language.

LANGUAGE So what is meant by “a two-dimensional language?” What is it exactly? Its components, its vocabulary, are lines and shapes—really all the various marks we draw on flat paper. We can call it a “language” because all the sorts of marks we can make, and all the various ways they can be arranged, will all communicate different things. Some will have more clarity, and some much less. The goal is to discover the order, the reason, behind what we do—then our expression will be more clear, more powerful, more intentional and less accidental. We strive to communicate form—which is three-dimensional—using a solely two-dimensional communication device, the flat surface of the paper. In the end that’s all the artist has: flat lines and shapes shuffled around on the flat two-dimensional surface of the paper—only two dimensions, height and width. Out of the realities and difficulties which arise from accommodating this simple reality arises “the two-dimensional language.”

In many styles of drawing found in animation and comics we strive to suggest three-dimensional form and space. Those are the sort of drawings which this article concerns itself with. In other, purposely “flat” styles of work, and purely decorative drawings without any focal point or points, the goal is not to create “depth,” in which case some of these remarks may not apply. Furthermore, most of my comments here have to do with line drawing—plain lines without blacks or tones or color, the raw foundations of the structure of an image. There are many worthwhile things which could be added about the uses of blacks and tones to create depth, but for purposes of space I will have to leave those comments for another time.

ABOVE: If I was to do this sketchbook drawing over, I think I’d position the elephant’s trunk a little more to the right, so it would line up a bit less with the edge of the stall behind it. Composing a drawing is a constant juggling act, a series of compromises between different necessities. The subject has its needs, which can’t be forgotten, but neither can these sorts of staging problems be neglected either. Sometimes different demands compete with each other, which is why it’s a juggling act.

his lines, shapes, and forms, choosing the ones which will best explain what he is visualizing to the viewer. Because that is exactly what the two-dimensional language involves: a lot of explaining and translating. We explain three-dimensional forms to the viewer using two-dimensional shapes and one-dimensional lines and points; or you could say we translate three dimensions into two. It’s not enough to just “trace” or “copy” reality literally, or the exact shapes from a photo, to achieve depth; one soon discovers that something is lacking if that approach is employed. What is lacking is the editing process, the process of

DEPTH BY DIMINUTION First, consider “depth.” To the human eye, things appear to diminish in size the further away they are, which is one cue of many which help us decide the distance of an object, at least in the case of objects whose scale we know beforehand. Notice that proportions—i.e., ratios such as the ratio of the width to the height of an object—do not change as things diminish, as long as they are seen flat-on to the viewer/picture plane. When things tilt, and the object is no longer parallel to the picture plane, then foreshortening occurs—the apparent narrowing of an object.

SENSING FORM AND SPACE In a picture, the scene portrayed can range from being fairly shallow to deep space—infinity. People can’t “see” depth directly, because obviously empty air can’t be seen. That may sound silly, but it’s the first step to realizing that to “see” depth, people must rely on cues from objects—visible forms. To judge the intangible, i.e., invisible space, people are used to seeing and focusing on tangible objects. We use the placement, relative sizes, angles, and so on, of visible things around us, to make spatial judgments. In short, visible objects are used as “markers.” So in a composition, if you want to achieve a sense of depth, you must THE BEST OF DRAW! 33

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MISTER X ™ AND ©2008 VORTEX COMICS.

SPACING The sort of spacing used in a drawing greatly affects whether or not it creates a feeling of depth. Evenly sized divisions and spacings of lines, shapes, and forms usually suggest flat planes, not ones receding in space. If there is too much equality across the picture surface, whether it is the too-even spacing of smaller individual lines or breakups, or the too-even spacing of various larger picture elements, the eye associates this regular division with a flat surface. So it is good to get in the habit of using perspective spacings, as suggested by the diagram, even if you are not drawing the receding boards of a fence or similar subject.

You can use perspective spacing, for example, in the positioning of figures in a crowd, clouds in the sky, and so on—the applications are endless.

ABOVE: In this image of Mister X tracking down a wounded robot, I was careful in my choice of where to place the horizon line, setting it at about the level of Mister X’s gun, and on the same level as the robot’s severed arm. This purposely focussed attention on the gun and the robot’s damage, and also split the difference between looking up at the robot and down at the rubble on the ground plane. Looking up at the robot made him look large and dramatic; and looking down allowed me to add to the depth effect by keeping the receding layers of rubble visible. Too low a vantage point would have meant that only the first row of rubble blocks would have been visible, which would have had more of a “cutout” effect because none of the tops of the blocks would have been visible. I was also careful to overlap the rubble blocks and other picture elements clearly, aiming to stage the shapes for clarity. To add to the depth effect, I included two levels of windows: the nearer ones outside the broken wall, and much more distant ones in the city.

This gave the picture more “depth of field.”

clearly mark and illuminate the progression of space into the distance for the viewer, using various signposts. It isn’t enough to simply slap down a few converging perspective lines and think that is enough. In viewing daily reality in front of us, our two eyes give us stereoscopic vision. We judge depth by comparing the small differences between the views from each of our eyes. The comparison of these two views helps us overcome any confusion which might come from odd overlappings or placements of the things we see—we simply move our heads and get more information about the three-dimensional forms in front of us, by gaining a new view. But in regarding a flat, still drawing, no such advantage is available to us. No amount of moving our head will help us to “read” and decipher a two-dimensional drawing. The artist must make up for this lack by employing the two-dimensional language, by artfully and intentionally arranging his work to compensate. Everything about the three-dimensional forms and spaces of his scene must be explained by the artist with one view, with flat shapes and lines. If you have properly drawn forms, clearly placed in space, “depth” will follow naturally. Problems often come when everything is habitually drawn too flat, in simplistic cutout shapes, and when everything “sticks” to each other and to the picture plane. Many times this happens when there is no evident foreground, middleground, and background, or when those elements are present but are obscured by each other, or tangled into each other.

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USING ALL THREE PLANES AND AXES For depth and compositional interest it’s helpful to have forms moving in all three axes rather than only one or two. This creates a three-dimensional feel by marking out each axis for the viewer. It’s very important to convey information about all three planes of the form you are depicting—you must explain the subject’s length, width, and height. If you draw in in a style that solely consists of a staggered series of flat cutouts, in may seem to be “three dimensional,” but isn’t really. That’s fine if done intentionally, as a design style, to achieve a certain look, but not so effective if it’s done by accident while trying for a “depth” style of drawing. If you do it by accident, if you oscillate back and forth between flat drawing mannerisms and threeBELOW: By sketching real objects around you, from different angles, develop your “perspective sense”—the sense of how much foreshortening is appropriate to a given angle, what sort of spacing is correct for the perspective you have chosen. After a while it becomes second nature—you get more of a sense of what works and what doesn’t. The best way to develop this sense accurately is to observe from life.

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easily crop out one or two planes (like the ground plane or a wall plane) depending on how you position your frame. It’s all too easy to lose depth information this way, especially in close-up views.

SEAM LINES Another way to give the viewer’s eye clues about depth is to add what I call “seam” lines, where possible and believable. These can be anything from a literal seam line, to exploiting anything in your subject which plausibly gives you a line or lines curving or wrapping across the form. This helps “explain” it to the viewer, just as a cross-section would if the object was sliced open at that spot.

dimensional ones, the overall effect will be intermittent and will probably be visually boring. You might have a subject that absolutely requires using only one axis, or two, but even then there are usually opportunities to inject some contrast by adding one or two small forms in an opposing plane. A greater feeling of depth can also be obtained by adding little rims and thicknesses where possible and appropriate, to give visual relief and contrast to otherwise flat surfaces.

CROPPING It’s important also to watch cropping—the way you choose to frame your scene. Cropping can make or break depth: you can

WRAPPING This is pretty much the same thing as “seam” lines, except using three-dimensional forms instead of flat surface lines.

Showing forms wrapping around another, and partially disappearing if possible, often generates a strong depth sensation.

Cues like this give depth hints to the eye.

SPATIAL HONESTY Place things honestly in space. How do you do this?

1) Create a perspective viewpoint for your scene, decided by you from the beginning. Choose a horizon line and vanishing point(s), and stick to them!

2) Draw transparently—construct your three-dimensional forms and intersections fully. Run trace lines and center lines to check that forms are lining up properly.

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PAUL RIVOCHE objects commonly familiar to people have relatively fixed, predictable sizes or a narrow range of possible sizes—things like people, cars, windows, and so on, with people being the paramount one. We start with whatever familiar scale-reference objects we can spot, and then make decisions about nearby objects by comparing them to our “yardstick” reference objects.

In this connection, it’s important to study the sizes and proportions of various common objects. This knowledge will come in very handy in scaling illustrations clearly.

How does this all matter to the cartoonist? Because it suggests how to go about setting up a picture with a successful depth impression: start by deciding the scale, which actually goes hand in hand with deciding on a horizon line and viewpoint for your picture. It’s not enough to simply choose a horizon line and stop there; you must also set the scale of the objects displayed in your image, by deciding where you are going to set the height of the horizon line, and where the contact points are—where the subjects contact the ground plane. A simple way to do this is to get in the habit of creating a scale comparison lineup for characters or elements that must be drawn repeatedly. Drawing a lineup means forcing yourself to deal with and decide their comparative sizes, and of course also helps keep your different drawings of the same item consistent. Another helpful habit is that of jotting scale figures into your rough drawings as you work on them, even if it is a drawing which has no characters. You simply erase the scale-figure after it has done its work of reminding

3) Establish a scale for your scene and its components, and follow that scale (see below). If you strive for “spatial honesty” you will avoid creating strange impossibilities of form.

PERSPECTIVE, SCALING, AND PROPORTION To create an impression of depth, a sense of scale must be established, otherwise everything floats around vaguely, neither large nor small. To understand this it’s worth first considering how people judge the scale of things they see. Since objects appear smaller and smaller as they get further away from us, how then are we able to determine what their true size is? Well, we do it by comparison. We start with clues given to us by known objects, and compare the size of those known quantities against the unknown ones. In this way we can decide the size of less familiar things we see. As we go through this “sizing-up” process, we depend on the fact that some 36 THE BEST OF DRAW!

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MISTER X ©2008 VORTEX COMICS.

you to size things carefully and consistently, especially as they recede into the distance. Another point to note here is that, as long as they are seen flat-on (i.e., parallel to the picture plane) then the ratio of the width to the height of an object doesn’t change no matter how far away it moves. Its apparent thickness, as measured on the flat paper surface, may change due to the effect of foreshortening (when it is turned on an angle to the viewer), but the ratio of width to height does not if it is seen flat-on, and so can be a useful tool for scaling without needing to do a lot of complicated perspective line work.

This fact about the width/height ratio is also crucial to a method of creating perspective simply by proper scale and placement of objects.

This method is often called “hanging figures on a horizon,” although that name can be a little misleading because it applies to a lot more than just figures. It can be used for properly sizing and placing any object(s) in perspective, provided they are all standing on a common plane, without any ruling of lines.

OVERLAPPING Overlapping tells us what is in front of what. In the two-dimensional flat world of the paper’s surface, we judge “what is in front of what” by examining the way things overlap, just as we do in the real world. In a conversation, whoever is interrupted is pushed to the back, and the one doing the interrupting comes to the foreground. Likewise with drawings: interrupted (i.e., overlapped) shapes recede—the eye interprets them as “behind”—and the ones doing the interrupting come to the front. For the purposes of picture-making, besides showing depth, overlapping also affects composition. One way is that the shape that is being overlapped has a “bite” taken out of it, while the foreground one is unaffected.

Principles of overlapping apply from the macro to the micro: i.e., they apply not only to the largest elements of your composition (how the big shapes of your image overlap each other), but also to the different parts of any given element, the details of those parts, and so on down the line. Once acquired, the habit of overlapping for clarity, of staging shapes so that they can be clearly understood, is a habit that can be applied across the entire range of your picture.

LEFT: In this rough for a possible Mister X cover, I set the horizon line at approximately shoulder height. This can be seen by comparing the foreground Mister X to the distant suggested figures: the horizon line crosses them both at a common level, at the shoulder. The scale of the grid windows, and of the individual windows at the right behind Mister X’s head, are made to seem very large by the simple method of adding those distant figures.

Because they are a known quantity to the viewer, they act as as scale, a yardstick, making the windows seem immense.

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PAUL RIVOCHE if something is confusing. So just as on a stage, the more objects there are filling up the foreground, or the bigger the foreground objects are, the less room (i.e., negative space) is left in between to show the more distant layers of objects. So you must juggle things as you overlap them, to keep all clear to the viewer. It’s a good idea to construct your composition’s layers from foreground to background, and as you go back, you have to ration things out so you are left with enough negative space to clearly show the more distant layers. The more of the flat picture surface you use up on the foreground layers, the less is left to devote to the more distant ones.

THE ARRANGEMENT OF MASSES AND PROPORTIONS The sizing and positioning of compositional masses help create “The Depth Illusion” without using perspective lines at all. You could also call it “the staging of shapes.” The reason for the word “staging” is that it’s like a presentation, on a stage. You try for an arrangement that best explains the form you have in mind to the audience. The actual, literal subject matter can only be taken in if the presentation is first made clearly, using the two-dimensional language.

But be sure to stage your overlaps very carefully, because they are crucial. Too many, or poorly positioned overlaps can kill the Depth Illusion. You can easily “lose” lines or shapes as they pass behind another element. It is generally not a good practice to stop a form so that its termination ends up hidden as it passes behind a foreground element, when you’ve staged it in such a way that the viewer is led to expect that it will come out the other side. The eye expects it finish, and if it doesn’t, it leaves the viewer in a kind of visual suspense—you are hiding something from them. You can see this in figure drawings sometimes, in the situation where a limb is hidden behind the body; poor staging can make the figure look as if it is missing the limb. You can have the same sort of problem with shapes in general. There is no set “formula” for overlapping, but it is possible to arrive at some conclusions about what definitely does not work when it comes to the two-dimensional language. If you have too many shapes overlapping simultaneously in the same area, you may only create confusion for the viewer. A disconnected series of fragmented shapes will result, creating a puzzle for the viewer’s eye. A remedy for this is something you could term “Staggered Overlapping.” This is when you have several overlapping elements, and instead of overlapping them in the same spot, you stagger them—left, right, in a curve, up or down, whatever arrangement suits your composition. The point is to keep your overlap, but also preserve the clarity and the silhouette of each element. You overlap only a portion of each element and put the rest of it “in the clear” for the viewer to see. This is a necessary accommodation to the immobile two-dimensional realities of the flat paper surface. Think of your picture as the set of a stage play, and the viewer of your drawing as the audience viewing that play. We only have the height and width of the picture to work with, and the audience is fixed in place and cannot move around to see behind the foreground objects 38 THE BEST OF DRAW!

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TOM STRONG ™ AND ©2008 AMERICA’S BEST COMICS LLC.

IMPLIED LINES In a drawing you can make use of actual lines on the paper, or only “implied lines.” These are lines which are not actually drawn on to the paper but are suggested or implied by the arrangement of other lines or shapes. For example, a series of items, like dots in a row, can suggest a line by their positioning, even though they are only separate points.

The more closely the dots are spaced, the clearer the imaginary line which they form becomes. The eye always looks for connections or patterns not only in things themselves, but in the way they are placed. We constantly scan for relationships, not only between people but between inanimate objects.

So these subjective lines can be created by the arrangement of repetitive objects, or even dissimilar objects. This

ABOVE: In this panel from a Tom Strong story, I tried to achieve a sense of depth by using as many spatial cues as possible. The basic ones are the steeply converging perspective lines and the large change in scale between the foreground and background characters. Beyond that, I was careful to diminish the size of the windows in proportion to the size of the building masses, and I also tried to keep the receding forms of the buildings clear. For example, there are no important changes of form wherever the buildings passed behind Tom; the more complicated forms were saved for above and below him on the flat paper surface. That kept Tom’s silhouette from getting “tangled” as it overlapped the buildings, allowing for a clean visual separation. Generally speaking, when layers or elements overlap, if both are of the same level of complexity, it’s easier for them to get confused together—so for the sake of visual clarity, it’s best to make one of them simpler and one of them more complex.

RIGHT: This sketch had a lot of overlapped block forms. I added lots of surface detail for contrast with those forms, because by themselves they would have been too simple. Finer details give visual interest and texture to the forms. I looked for places to add forms moving along all three axes.

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tendency to seek for implied lines can be used to create depth effects, by implying converging perspective lines simply by the arrangement of shapes.

SILHOUETTING FOR DEPTH How you arrange the silhouette has a big impact on the feeling of depth. Not all silhouettes are created equal! The accompanying diagrams present a few ideas about composing silhouettes for depth: REPETITION Repeat elements can act as scale cues. The diminishing size of any standard elements whose scales are known to the viewer (i.e., windows, trees, people, vehicles, etc.) gives cues as to their distances away—it “explains” the change in space clearly. Of course, you need at least two of the same object shown, at different distances, to get a depth effect—but a minimum of three is even better. The more change in scale between the objects, the more distance is implied, and so the more depth is created. You must make sure that you keep everything consistent to each other as things recede back, though, so things do not drift out of proportion. The spacing of details can help create, or hinder, “The Depth Illusion,” without using perspective lines at all. One example is the spacing of textures on a surface which is receding into the distance. The princiRIGHT: It’s not enough to arrange the silhouettes of individual picture elements for clarity; you must also exercise great care in how they are overlapped, or else things at different depths can very easily get confused together, effectively flattening that area of the picture. Here, in the middle picture, you can see how the tangled overlapping has lost many key characteristics of the robots. They touch at so many places that the eye cannot sort them out, and has to work extra hard to even begin to realize where one ends and the next one begins.

Generally speaking, don’t overlap different elements at many points if you can get away with a few.

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ples of foreshortening apply here: a steady rate of diminution suggests a flat surface; a changing rate can suggest a curve, or suggest any sort of surface or form imaginable. So for a convincing depth effect, textures and details should follow the topography, and be handled with care. There is something of a paradox here for the artist employing only lines: because of convergence, as objects recede, they become smaller, thus making the details crowd closer together and in turn creating a denser texture or tone if rendered with line work. On the other hand, the closer a subject is to us, the more our eye is able to see all the details which are there, so there are more details which could potentially be included in a drawing. This can be a real problem when drawing in outline as cartoonists do; in either case described, if all the visible details are included, the picture can easily become cluttered and illegible because of all the line work. And the choice, the paradox, can be: do you put more detail into the foreground, or the distance, when you are doing outline-based art-

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LEFT: There are very many possible choices in staging a drawing, both for good and for bad. Drawing is about making decisions—a lot of them. So it is helpful to have a clear basis in which to make those decisions. What I am trying to get at in this diagram is to be very careful about not obscuring key parts of the composition, ones which reveal form and depth. Often such things as corners, contact points, intersections, etc. should be shown, because concealing them robs the viewer of information about where the forms turn or change.

Covering corners up can be uncomfortable, much in the same way that, in framing shots in film and comics, it is advisable not to crop characters at their joints. If you have an element in your image that adds character and charm, like the cliffside and bay in this doodle, stage them clearly and straightforwardly. If a background element passes behind your foreground level(s) completely, make sure it comes out cleanly on the other side. If you stop one element and start another one behind a foreground element, i.e., completely out of the viewers’ sight, confusion can result. If you can’t make your background element pass completely behind the foreground one, then try putting it all the way to one side or the other. No diagram can explain all this, since each drawing is a process of progressive discovery. Performing a similar experiment to this one, trying variations on one’s own composition, can be quite revealing.

are on different planes, that spot is effectively “flattened,” and the depth illusion is destroyed.

work? Which gives a greater depth effect? Obviously you cannot draw everything into a picture, every last detail—you must decide to include some things and leave others out—you must edit. But on what basis? If you put equal detail both in the foreground and the distance, you will certainly flatten out the picture. The point to be remembered is to have a basis on which to decide, and to employ it consistently. Often it is best to simplify forms as they recede in space, progressively eliminating details until you are eventually only left with basic masses and silhouettes. In this way, even in a line drawing, you can suggest “aerial perspective,” without using tonal values at all.

DEPTH-TROUBLESHOOTING CHECKLIST WHEN THINGS DON’T SEEM “RIGHT,” ONE OF THESE MAY BE THE CAUSE...

1) TANGENTS—when two or more lines intersect or “touch” at the same point, then even though the objects they belong to

2) LINEUPS—similar to tangents, when an element on one plane is lined up with or at the same height on the picture surface as another element on another plane of distance, what you could call “a visual pun” is created. The depth illusion is again hampered. The eye tends to connect lines that have a similar angle or direction, tending to the assumption that they are part of the same object or on the same plane. This fact can be useful in having rhythm lines run through your figure or composition; but it can also cause depth problems if it creeps in unwittingly.

3) CENTERING—a foreground element, not at the vanishing point, that centers in the middle of one behind it at whatever distance, especially when the two elements are the same size or mass—this creates a flat effect.

4) EQUALITIES—equal size lines/shapes/forms on foreground/ midground/background planes tend to flatten them— equal spacings and divisions between elements, within eleTHE BEST OF DRAW! 41

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TOM STRONG ™ AND ©2008 AMERICA’S BEST COMICS LLC.

DRAWING AND DESIGN

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TOP LEFT: Repeating the same thing at different sizes is an effective way to suggest depth. In this page from a Tom Strong story, the diminishing sizes of such elements as the windows and the rivets on the girders helped to create a feeling of space.

ABOVE: This layout is a good example of what happens when there is too much detail for its own sake. There are a lot of textures and markings, but they do not work together effectively to communicate form, space, and information. If you squint at the image as a whole, you can see that the spacing of detail across the picture surface is more or less flat, making a kind of even tonality which in turn flattens out any sense of depth. Individual details, such as the grass on the hill or the texture on the tree trunks, do not “turn” with the form, but instead sit flatly on it. There are no clearly distinct planes—everything is soft and flows together, making it hard to identify separate items.

The foreground grass is almost the same size and spacing as the grass in the distance, which defeats any sense of diminution. There has been no horizon line or viewpoint chosen, most clearly shown in the treatment of the road in the foreground, so it is impossible to get a sense of perspective and depth. Excessive, uncontrolled detail like this can easily kill a drawing, instead of enhancing it.

LEFT: In this sketch the problem was to maintain a sense of depth despite the fact that a lot of it was empty space. Additionally, I didn’t want to use the classic depth trick of placing something large in the very close foreground—I wanted to keep the feeling of great emptiness and space. So that left me with the devices of suggesting space by very carefully overlapping the forms, and progressively diminishing the spacing and sizes of the lines of the clouds.

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ments. Use perspective spacings for depth—repeating the same pattern/texture on different planes of distance—this has the effect of flattening, bringing everything up to the same plane.

5) UNCOMFORTABLE CROPPING AND OVERLAPPING— examine the way you have cropped your image to see if anything is visually confusing, for example if you have cropped off or overlapped part or parts of an object that are crucial to conveying its form, such as corners, or at an “uncomfortable” spot such as the joint of a figure. Each of the geometric forms which we use as “building blocks” in a picture has its own basic nature or character. Poor cropping and overlapping can obscure this character, inadvertently making a sphere read as a semicircle, or a cube read as a parallelogram, and so on.

6) TOO MANY OVERLAPS—if too many things overlap at once confusion can result. Things do not read clearly and distinctly, and layers become tangled and thus flattened—“camouflage” is the result, instead of clarity.

7) NOT ENOUGH OVERLAPS—if you have too few elements overlapping then nothing is clearly placed in space—it all “floats.” There’s no hierarchy established. It’s better to decide which elements should have prominence, and which should recede back.

8) CONTRADICTING THE PERSPECTIVE—when you have too many horizon lines, and/or too many vanishing points, all unrelated and contradicting each other, you can’t achieve a depth effect-when the perspective is too shallow, too steep—i.e., “warped” in various ways 44 THE BEST OF DRAW!

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FINAL THOUGHTS In many ways this article has also been about composition, since perspective and composition and the other aspects of artwork do not really exist separately, but are present simultaneously in a drawing. In many ways, good depth practices also make for good composition.

The more you understand what I’ve called “The Depth Illusion,” the more you investigate this fascinating two-dimensional language cartoonists employ—the more intentional your depth effects will be, the less random and accidental. You can monitor your drawings and check to see if there’s anything you missed. After all, that is what we strive for as artists: control.

Control allows us to flatten out the frustrating highs and lows of daily drawing attempts. So even if you are drawing a “flat” style of cartooning (and I hope I’ve made it clear there’s nothing “wrong” with drawing flat, as long as you do it on purpose), it helps to be aware of the boundary line between “flat” effects in drawing and choices and arrangements that create “The Depth Illusion.” The difference can sometimes be very subtle between a convincing three-dimensionality and an entirely unintentional flatness. The trick, as always, is noticing that difference.

RIGHT: This cartoon drawing by Gluyas Williams is a beautiful example of clarity in staging. Since he included a lot of figures at once, a high horizon line allowed him to get a clear view of them all, without the foreground ones blocking out the more distant layers. He used staggered overlapping to arrange the figures as they flow from the foreground into the distance. The diminishing sizes of the black and grey masses, as we go into the distance, and the way they cluster together more as they go back, all contribute to an illusion of depth.

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©THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE, INC.

DRAWING AND DESIGN

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LEFT: In this diagram I have purposely tried to include as many mistakes as possible, all in one image, to illustrate by complete exaggeration what can happen if you desire depth in your image, but ignore the two-dimensional language. Some of these may seem quite obvious, but mistakes like these are made all the time.

Generally, there are some very awkward foundation-level staging choices, such as the placement of the left-hand figure over the lower corner of the building, or the right-hand figure covering up the corner of the sidewalk.

Additionally, there is an overall lack of perspective convergence; in a view like this you would expect the lines to taper more, and that there would be more tapering of the vertical lines to help the “downshot” feeling. Lastly, judging by they way they are scaled and placed, these figures cannot be standing on the ground plane; if you extended the drawing below its bottom edge, and projected height-lines from the figures to the wall, you would find that they are giants relative to the size of the building and car. The only way they could be this size, in this image, would be if they were standing on some sort of higher platform or balcony that put them closer to the viewer; but as this has not been indicated to the viewer, the sizing simply reads as wrong.

There are several mistakes of “equalities” in the picture: the round sign at 5, which is supposed to be more distant than the figures, is roughly the same size as the figures’ heads, which flattens the depth effect. Other equalities have been marked with the letter “E” and a connecting line, and they too deaden and flatten the drawing.

I have labeled the tangents with a “T”; there are many of them, and they could easily have been avoided with some re-staging of the shapes.There are scale problems with the stairs and doorway—the stairs are too large and steep, and the doorway is too small to fit the figures. The line labeled 1 is poorly placed—it could be some kind of diagonal breakup on the wall of the building, but since it’s on the same angle as the car and street behind it, it ends up looking like a hole in the building. Similarly, the line at 2 could be a seam line on the street, but because it lines up with the edge of the sidewalk, it’s confusing. Lines 3 and 4 don’t fan upwards to create a perspective effect, and so look very awkward, and line 3 gets confused with the roof line of the car. Line 4 creates a tangent as it hits the edge of the picture and the pole simultaneously.

As I said, these mistakes may seem obvious, and therefore easily avoided, but in practice it’s a lot harder than it might seem to avoid all of them, as one grapples with the various considerations involved in making a drawing.

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HOWARD PYLE ABOVE: This image by master illustrator Howard Pyle reveals many depth cues at work simultaneously. First, Pyle makes sure to include foreground, middleground, and background elements to create a sense of space. For example, the chests, bags, and boxes in the lower left corner (1) act as a foreground spatial element—they give the eye something close to notice, from which it can flow back into the picture, and also carry the eye around the corner of the picture. Without these foreground depth elements, as can be seen by covering them up, the picture is not only lacking in depth but compositionally off-balance. The treasure containers create depth by their smaller size when compared to the second, more distant grouping of them, behind the pirate leader (2) in the center of the picture. The of course there is careful attention to diminution, such as the way the ground texture gets progressively smaller as it recedes. Another spatial device to note: the hanging lantern (3), suspended by a cable in the middle top of the image. Besides being part of the compositional structure, it helps create a feeling of depth.

It serves as a kind of “three-dimensional punctuation,” by being something which the eye can grab onto in the air, in front of what would otherwise be a large area of blank wall. Besides being “local color,” adding the lantern creates spatial interest in 46 THE BEST OF DRAW!

BELOW: Although this is an illustration in which there are no strongly converging perspective lines, illustrator Howard Pyle has nevertheless achieved a wonderful feeling of depth. The masses of the three figures diminish progressively and strongly in size as they go back in space; this immediately helps them recede. He has been very careful to work out the scale of the distant bricks in the house wall, as compared to the foreground ones; they are convincingly smaller, and both sets of bricks are still in proportion to the figures. Details like this are crucial; if any of the bricks had been the wrong scale, or had changed relative to the figures near them, the feeling of depth would have been damaged or destroyed.

Pyle has made several perspective choices to work with his compositional intent. He has set the horizon line at the foreground man’s eye level; this horizontally directs our attention there, and combined with the vertical line of the gate intersecting his head and the dark mass of foliage behind his head, we are compelled to focus on the man’s face and eyes. If Pyle had set his figures on flat ground, the further man would still be visible; but the open gate would have covered up

©1975 BANTAM BOOKS, INC.

©1975 BANTAM BOOKS, INC.

that area of the picture. The cable’s left end is clearly shown to contact the wall, and from this cue we can see that it hangs above the pirate crowd—the contact point (4) places it in space.

Pyle has also done some very interesting things in terms of the staging of his shapes. The two main figures, the pirate leader and the kneeling captive (5), are the largest figures in terms of mass, and so come forward. They are not significantly overlapped by any other figures, whereas the rest of the figures are partly covered up (the leader’s cape is only slightly overlapped at the left, placing him spatially behind the foreground element).

We can see that the pirate leader is the tallest in height, except for one pirate in the back, near the doorway—but he is far enough away that we don’t really notice. The pirate leader’s height gives him dominance. We are directed to him by the fact that the horizon line (6) is placed at his eye level; and similarly we are directed to the kneeling captive by the fact that the viewpoint (7—i.e., where we are standing to view this scene) is placed directly in front of him.

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BOUTET DE MONVEL IS ©1980 GERALD GOTTLIEB.

LEFT: A wonderful drawing from French illustrator Maurice Boutet de Monvel, from his 1896 book Joan of Arc. There are so many lessons for the modern illustrator in this and similar work from the past, where you often find a much better understanding of depth creation. This image, and the other inspiring drawings in the book, shows Monvel’s profound command of depth and perspective, from the careful silhouetting and overlapping of the foreground figures, to the way the various boats on the river have been sized and carefully “hung on the horizon line.” Careful study of this sort of image yields many lessons still useful to today’s cartoonists.

glimpsing what is going on. The gate serves as a powerful compositional device to lead the eye to the woman at the window, and also the fact that it is open and protruding into the walkway creates some three-dimensional contrast—if the gate had been flat, there would have been too many elements in the picture flat-on to the picture plane. the woman in the window. So he made the ground in the garden rise up gently, a believable arrangement because land around houses usually rises upwards towards the house for drainage; and this rise lifted the figures into view. They are still overlapped by the gate, leaving us with the sense that we are only

©2008 PAUL RIVOCHE.

PAUL RIVOCHE

Paul Rivoche is a Toronto-based freelance commercial artist and designer. Paul can be reached via e-mail at: privoche@yahoo.com LEFT: This drawing is a spontaneous sketchbook creation, done with no preparatory drawing, just a thin line marker. This approach is fun and risky—it forces the artist to grapple directly with multiple concerns, one after another, or simultaneously. Sometimes plunging in like this works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it is invariably stimulating. In this case I started with the seated rider, working from the head down. Next I added the saddle underneath, and then the alien beast.

The moment I added the creature’s feet, I was forced to decide on an exact horizon line and viewpoint for the rest of the scene. I chose the rider to be on a plateau, drawing in only the silhouette of its top plane.

Then I lightly made a horizontal tick mark where the distant horizon line would be, where the clouds recede into the distance. Having committed to a horizon line and viewpoint, I now stuck to this quite carefully and tried to make all the successive picture elements “obey” the “rules” they set down. To carefully manage the depth progression, I made sure to work from foreground to background, not jump around from one plane to another. I added the side wall of the rider’s plateau, then started on the large tower and associated buildings in the midground, working from top to bottom, trying to rhythmically lock in the shapes, and use varying forms and planes to flesh out all three axes.

After that, the snaking shape of the river established the flat plane of the ground going off into the distance.

Finishing the image was a matter of working over the whole picture surface, trying to balance the various densities created by the different clusterings and patternings of marks and elements. To get a fresh eye for balances, angles, patternings, and so on, I always look at the image in a mirror, and equally look at it (and adjust it) upside down. Turning it upside-down allows me to regard it as pure pattern and design, separate from the subject matter.

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DRAWING HANDS

T

BRET BLEVINS

DRAWING HANDS

BY BRET BLEVINS

he human hand is a miracle of function and design—an instrument of wonderful dexterity, strength and grace. Our opposable thumb is generally credited with the rise of Homo Sapiens as the dominant species of Earth—the hand’s sensitive flexibility enabled and encouraged the human mind to create technology and reshape our environment, and continues to do so. When drawing hands, you are engaged with a unique marvel of the natural world—approaching them with awe will help you understand their complexity.

Although knowledge of anatomy is crucial, the subject is too deep to cover in this article—I suggest using the material I’m presenting in conjunction with a good anatomy book designed for artists. Our focus in these pages is the capacity of the hand to express human emotion.

The face and two hands form a triad of visual expression that is capable of remarkably subtle communication—as every child quickly learns, interior thought and emotion is often revealed more clearly by these silent means than through speech.

Indeed, the amazing structures that crown our arms can literally place language in the hands of mute or deaf people who learn to talk by signing.

It’s useful to keep this image of “speaking hands” in mind when posing the hand gestures in your figure drawings—what are the hands in your image “saying”?

Always remember their importance as expressors of interior emotions, thoughts, intentions and attitudes, and compose the hands as con-

densed visual “dialogue” that punctuates the character’s body language.

Of course, in many cases the position of the hands will be determined by the need to explain a physical action—there is limited emotional nuance to be gleaned from the gripping of a hammer or the motion of unscrewing a jar lid—but even here you can find opportunities to convey character and personality if you are attentive. Watch someone eat leisurely, savoring the food, and compare their actions to someone on the run scarfing down a hurried meal—the difference in body language is startling. For a more whimsical contrast, compare the demeanor of a child eating vegetables to that of a child eating ice cream!

Beginning with a sketch done from life, I’ve made a second drawing that clarifies the forms by simplifying detail and accenting the important contours, the third drawing is a pure

“rhythm chart,” and the fourth is an arrow diagram of the big sweeping rhythms of each pose.

Train your vision to notice and “feel” this underlying movement—think of it as visual music—learn to hone in on the melody lines first, and worry about flourishes and detail later.

As I mentioned above, the rhythms of the hand echo those of the entire body—everything is a flowing connection, as these two whimsical sketches illustrate.

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RIGHT: The essential means of achieving this clear communication is, as always, an understanding of rhythm. Grasping the rhythm of the hand (which echoes the rhythms of the entire body) requires close, intuitive observation. Fortunately, the hands are almost always unclothed and exposed, so opportunity for study is everywhere—including the ends of your own arms!

A small hinged cosmetic mirror is an invaluable aid for drawing your own hands. Here are a few studies of hand rhythms.

ABOVE: Watching (and sketching) as patrons eat and drink in a cafe, musicians play instruments, carpenters work, children play with toys— examples to study are endless. Especially instructive for our purposes, though, is to watch people talking and thinking with their hands. You can often read a person’s thoughts by watching what their hands are doing. In these examples notice how the action of the hands immediately suggest an interior state of mind, and how shifting the hands changes the character’s attitudes and thoughts.

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BELOW AND RIGHT: Surprisingly, I often see figure drawings that haven’t integrated the hands with the body—take care that a character’s hands agree with the rest of his or her body. A gaunt person doesn’t usually have plump hands, and vice versa. A bricklayer’s hands don’t belong on a hairdresser, etc.

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LEFT: To strengthen the expressive clarity of a drawn hand, an awareness of our old friend silhouetting (see DRAW! #1-4) is crucial—though hands present challenges particular to their structure.

From many viewpoints the fingers inevitably overlap, forming an indistinct “clumped” silhouette—care must be taken here to prevent confusion, or simple lack of drama (visual interest). Often this requires a strong accent on the gesture’s defining fingers within the shape of the entire hand.

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A second problem specific to the hands are the loose folds of thin or padded flesh that permit the fingers and palm their extreme range of movement—when the edges of these folds are intensified by the heightened contrast inherent to line drawing, the hands can easily appear withered, gnarled, or too old for the rest of the body they belong to. Here a kind of “interior silhouetting” of the forms is needed—we’ll use the term streamlining. In essence this means accenting the edges or directional lines that most succinctly convey the rhythm of the entire gesture, and minimizing or deleting those that don’t—notice how the angles of the forms have been sharpened by slightly exaggerating the change of direction—making the shapes easier to “read.” Even where the need for clarification is slight or subtle, careful streamlining and “sharpening” can strengthen a drawing.

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ABOVE: Once these notions become a habit of mind, drawing the complexities of the human hand is much less intimidating, and after you’ve filled a few sketchbooks with accurate observation, it becomes easier to “animate” the expressive power of the hand in the realm of stylized character designs. In these examples the basic visual gestalt of the human hand has been mutated into mild or extreme variations, but they convey the intended meaning of the character’s emotion or attitude because the underlying natural rhythms and gestures “read” as the expressions of a more-or-less human consciousness.

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Following is a gallery of examples that depend heavily on careful “hand acting” and accurate knowledge of anatomy and gesture to achieve the desired effect. Study them closely and imagine how weak, unconvincing hands would sabotage the believability of the images—poorly realized hands will always

BRET BLEVINS

mar an otherwise competent figure drawing. Get to know them inside out!

See you next time!

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ALL CHARACTERS AND ARTWORK ™ AND ©2008 ARCHIE COMICS PUBLICATIONS,INC.

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In this humorous Archie comic book page, the character’s hands are conveying a great deal of important storytelling. Note the contrast between the lively gestures of the girls and the forced nonchalance of the boys—their pocketed hands communicate attitude even though we can’t see them! In the last three panels the silly villain and his sidekick do most of their acting with hand gestures. In this opening page of the story we already have a clear sense of the exaggerated slapstick comedy we can expect, largely “sold” by hand acting.

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SLEEPWALKER ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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On this page the hands are engaged in specific actions particular to the ball game—the slices of precise moments building up to the final panel required clear, realistic poses and accurate drawing. The drama is enhanced in the final shot by the contrast of the naturalistic human hand and the oddly distorted (but still recognizable in form and gesture) alien hand.

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The hands in these sections of a storyboard are stylized into the simpler forms demanded by animation, but the accurate, recognizably human gestures clearly convey the actions and attitude of the character. Because Bizarro is an awkward, misshapen Frankenstein-like caricature of the heroic Superman, these gestures are particular to his personality. Look through each frame and imagine Superman in exactly the same poses—he would appear limp-wristed, graceless and unheroic. Always know who you’re drawing and express their personality through every gesture.

BIZARRO ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS. ARTWORK ©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

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STATIC SHOCK! ™ AND ©2008 MILESTONE MEDIA, INC. AND ARTWORK ©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

In these bits of Static Shock! storyboard, note how carefully the hands echo, embellish or strengthen the emotions expressed in the character’s face and body.

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©2008 WALT DISNEY TELEVISION ANIMATION.

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©2008 WALT DISNEY TELEVISION ANIMATION.

DRAWING HANDS

LEFT AND ABOVE: Here Tarzan’s bumbling father-in-law struggles with the discomfort of expressing his romantic inclinations. The hands play a very important supplementary role to the acting conveyed by the face and head. Imagine the scene without the hands—a great deal of subtle character information would be lost. In these frames the clarity of the Professor’s body language depends almost entirely on the accents provided by the hand gestures.

RIGHT: This comic book panel is full of human emotion—conveyed largely by hands—they even allow us to infer the discomfort of the two characters whose faces are cropped.

SLEEPWALKER ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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DREAMING DESIGN: DESIGNING FOR COMICS AND ANIMATION: OBSERVATION AND MEMORY

I

recently received this e-mail question from someone who was interested in learning about background design:

“I guess what I’m asking is where do you begin?... where do you go from?... what speaks to you and says ‘put this here... put this sunken living room here in relation to this... this kind of track lighting is a good choice... etc... I’m sorry if I’m not making much sense....”

My answer went: don’t worry, you’re making sense. It can seem overwhelming at first. There are many things to consider, and it can be difficult to sort out which to tackle first. So in the interest of “beginning at the beginning,” and instead of writing a typical by-the-numbers article about design filled with strict prescriptive formulas, I thought I’d start by discussing something that underpins any creative drawing: visualization. My aim is to provoke thought about and examination into this often-overlooked area; by no means can I cover all its aspects, but I will instead try to outline a few key points. After this, in subsequent articles, I’ll get into more specifics about various aspects of the process of actually creating a design.

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In the haste to get something down on paper as proof of improvement, it’s all too easy to concentrate solely on learning more about drawing and all its various ramifications, but forget to learn more about visualizing, which comes before drawing. “Visualizing” is a very important step in the process which results in a final drawing on paper. After all, everything man-made which we see around us started as an idea or image in someone’s head; then it became a drawing of some kind, and then finally was produced in the physical world.

There is a chain of events there. But whether the final result is an object, or a drawing, everything starts in the mental world, in those “dream-images” in our mind’s eye. So it stands to reason that if we can improve our visualization, our “dream-images,” then our drawings should also improve.

Loosely speaking, you could say that there are two kinds of drawing: the first sort is when we draw something right in front of us, and attempt to represent it literally; the second type is when we “draw from our imagination,” inventing freely without a guide in front of us. These two kinds of drawing, although different, are much more closely related than it may seem at first glance, and practicing both yields

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have to simultaneously split your attention between inside and outside. It’s not easy to accurately capture that elusive image floating around in your imagination!

“Inside,” you need to form a mental image that’s as clear as possible, and also be able to visualize variations on it, to play with it until it’s as close to “right” as possible. “Outside,” you have to deal with the drawing on your paper, and all the attendant technical challenges of line, volume, pattern, perspective, and so on.

So: the better you can visualize inside, the better your outside results will be.

To visualize inside, to develop this ability, you need to observe, observe, observe. Why? The answer is crucial: because it will give you raw material for later, when you need to invent “spontaneously.” But what appears “spontaneous” may really not be as random as it seems. Those “spontaneous visualizations” are formed from memories; so the more memories you have available to you, the more raw material you have to invent with.

much greater results than choosing only one or the other. They have a lot in common: both involve a sort of “copying and comparing,” and both involve visualization and memory. When you draw a real object in front of you, you “copy” down onto the paper what you see, constantly comparing the real object and your drawing in order to get them as close as possible. And when you draw from imagination, you also “copy and compare”— except in this case you do it from a subject seen only in your “mind’s eye.” But look more closely: in both cases, you first visualize, then try to hold a clear memory of that visualization as you copy it down on the paper. Even when you draw a subject right in front of you, your visualization and memory skills are at work: for the moment that you look away from the subject and glance at your paper, you are then drawing a memory-image of the subject, not the subject itself! You are drawing your own personal form-conception of the subject (its masses, structures, details,etc.)—be it a truck, a knee, a flower, or whatever. It’s here where the link between the two kinds of drawing exists: if you use “drawing from real objects” to expose, examine, and refine your own personal form-conceptions, memorizing the realities of the forms as they truly are, those improved form-conceptions will be there later when you draw from imagination. The more accurately you learn to “see” real forms in front of you, by drawing from life, the more accurately you’ll be able to “see” those elusive forms floating through your mind’s eye.

The process of creative design really all starts with the flexibility of your imagination. You need to develop the ability to dream-in-daylight: to dream with your eyes open, while sitting at the drawing board, and then “catch” those dreams and put them on paper so others can see them. If that sounds like a strange description, perhaps it is, but it’s the best way I can describe what we do. I’m sure you know what I mean. You see something “inside” (in your mind’s eye)—and try and simultaneously trace it down “outside” (in the real world, on the paper in front of you). It’s a tricky juggling act, no doubt about it, because you

ALL CHARACTERS AND ARTWORK © 2008 DC COMICS

ABOVE: Experimentation is a lot of the fun of designing. Don’t lock yourself in too soon—feel free to play around and explore the boundaries of your design, the more extreme the better. You can never know what better idea lies just beyond the next drawing.... These were rough ideas for a bomb-carrying helicopter piloted by Batman’s nemesis, Mr. Freeze.

ABOVE: These were rough model sheets done to sort out design possibilities for a comic book project. I would do drawings like this to sort out the exact look of key elements, and also to get “warmed up.” I like to have all the information I need organized on one handy piece of paper. From Legion Worlds #3, from DC Comics.

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©2008 PAUL RIVOCHE

ABOVE: For any kind of design you do, real life can give you the “theme” or starting point—the initial bit of inspiration you need to get going. After perceiving a theme, you can play variations on it, to suit whatever design purpose you have in mind. In these roughs, the starting point that gave me my theme was the guy in the center—a memory-sketch of a person I had seen in the day, whose arrangement of features (hairline, nose, sunglasses, chin) suggested some kind of hoodlum. The other sketches are play-variations on the original, varying the features, proportions, masses, angles, and so on, while preserving the theme. It’s fun to experiment this way—sometimes you can branch very far off from your point of origin and get quite unexpected and interesting results! One thing suggests another.

Observation from reality gives your inventions the weight of conviction! So truly observe and record your surroundings.”

“See, Observe, and Remember,” as the Famous Artists School summarized in a saying for their students. How long it takes to understand even some of what this means, and how much is hidden in this seemingly simple phrase!

LET’S BREAK THAT PHRASE DOWN: 1) “SEE”: Don’t just look, see. Spot a worthy subject.

Focus on something definite. Don’t just let it all drift by.

2) “OBSERVE”: Be active, not passive. For example, notice both general attributes such as silhouette, masses, angles, etc., and also specific characteristics and details of your subject.

See new things in subjects you think you already know all about.

Think about what you are looking at!

3) “REMEMBER”: Lock all your observations into your memory, so that later they are there for you to use. “Remember” means: Memorize... as you “see” and “observe”! That way, you can remember later.

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Life drawing classes are an important source of “raw material” for drawing the figure, which of course is central to cartooning.

Cartoonists often say (myself included!): “But I don’t have time to go to life drawing classes!” Of course such classes are extremely helpful if you can get to them, but all is not lost if you can’t.

There are other ways of gathering visual information for your drawings. You see, you can draw anytime, anywhere. Even when you don’t have paper! In fact, an artist should be always drawing, with or without paper! Sounds strange... but it’s true! In effect, every day is a “life drawing” class! Remember that your final “paper drawing” is a later step in the process which we discussed above. Your “mental drawing” always comes first, even when you are drawing from a subject in front of you—and you don’t need any paper for mental drawings! You can always observe and record useful things for your drawings, or even compose drawings and designs themselves, strictly mentally.

Now, with all this seeing and observing, how can you tell if you’ve “observed” successfully or not? Here are a couple of interesting exercises to try: The first one you could call “predrawing,” which serves as a prompt to stimulate you to observe more; the second one you could call “post-drawing.” (And yes, I know it sounds awfully dreary to do “exercises,” but...)

EXERCISE #1: PRE-DRAWING: Try to draw something which you’re sure you know well, without looking at it or checking it before you start, such as your own room, or a good friend’s face, or whatever. A good subject to draw is your telephone—usually composed of fairly basic geometric forms, and something which you’ve looked at thousands of times. Shouldn’t be very difficult, right? So why not do it as well as you can, right now, just from memory. After you’ve finished, go and look at the real thing, drawing in hand, and honestly compare your drawing with the reality. Your drawing from memory is a diagram of your mental image of the subject, your memory of it. When you compare that mental image with the real thing, using your drawing, you can get quite sobering results—usually you discover that your mental image is filled with various misconceptions, that you routinely observe the things around you far less accurately than you thought before you tested yourself. When you realize that, it can spur you to develop more accurate methods of observing and recording what you see. And all this will be a huge help later, when you tackle the blank page—when you must create alone and unaided, drawing only from your “memory bank.”

EXERCISE #2: POST-DRAWING or IMAGINED DRAWING: Well, say you’re at the doctor’s office waiting to go in. You sit there for ten minutes. When you go home later, can you sketch out the room you sat looking at for ten whole minutes of your life? How detailed a sketch can you make? Just a crude diagram of the basic arrangement, or something more involved? It’s an interesting exercise to try. Your drawing, done later, will be an exact map or record of exactly how much and how carefully you observed and memorized of what you were looking at.

You can extend this “post-drawing” exercise to become more accurate in your observation and memory by more intensively packing your memory with details as you observe. You could even call it “imagined drawing.” Does that sound like a puzzling

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name? It means not only observing carefully, but actually doing imaginary drawings as you look at a subject in front of you. You can do this either as a formal exercise for its own sake, or at moments in your day when you must be idle, when you don’t have access to drawing materials and want to stave off boredom.

So, what I mean by “imagined drawing” is this: whenever you see an interesting subject for a drawing, pretend to be drawing it. Look at the subject (it helps to start with a fairly simple subject and work up to the more complex) for a moment, as you would if you had a paper and pencil. Then turn away, as if you were actually going to draw.

Visualize yourself doing the later paper drawing—project yourself forward to that moment—and try to predict all the information you will need to make it successful. Then gather the information now, beforehand. You don’t actually draw anything, because in this exercise you don’t really have a paper and pencil—the point instead is to examine your “mental image” of the subject in your “mind’s eye,” develop that image as much as possible, and lock it in. And you don’t have to memorize the subject from your particular view or perspective

PAUL RIVOCHE

LEFT: This was a sketch, done later from memory, of a real basement. It was interesting in itself, but also serves as an example of a starting point for later design work. I’ve added notes to show the kinds of elements that tell a story, and which could be incorporated into purely imaginative designs to give them believability. There are all sorts of interesting things like these around us.

BELOW: This is an example of a drawing done from imagination, but incorporating real memory-elements observed in the city. The background environment shown in a drawing—in this case an industrial street—can be a “character,” with as much of a history as a person has. Keep in mind that each element you choose—its type, location, and condition—reveals a part of this history: scars, scrapes, surgeries, modifications, repairs, etc.

Convincing indications of human usage (e.g., lighting, markings, pathways, etc.) also give a feeling of “life” to any kind of setting, be it high-tech or low-tech, plain or fancy. This all creates interest for the viewer; nothing is duller than a generic, plain street behind your characters. Just as you would emphasize the unique features of a face when doing a caricature, try to isolate the unique details that will give your background a specific “flavor.”

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PAUL RIVOCHE LEFT: Suicide Slum rough. I like to do a lot of roughs when exploring a design, playing with different variations. This one was a rough design for the storyboard artists on a Superman episode. Subjects like this can be fun, playing with familiar mechanical forms by putting them in strange combinations and contrasts, exaggerating the scale, and so on, all the while putting in enough functional elements (steps, vents, fences, lighting, etc.) to make it believable for the viewer.

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

angle as you regard it; instead, study and memorize its three-dimensional forms and structures, independent of a specific viewpoint.

So, you’ve turned away from the subject; when you are no longer looking at it, is an image of it still there in your mind? Yes? No? How clear is it?

How long does the image linger?

Does it disappear from your mind the moment you look away, the moment actual “visual data” are no longer actually streaming in through your eyes? Sometimes I find it helps to close my eyes, to hold the afterimage of the subject I just looked at.

Nevertheless, you will probably discover that your mental image wasn’t all that clear in the first place, and also that it fades away quickly as soon as you are no longer looking at the subject. That is the first important realization. Then you can start observing more carefully: turn back to the subject and really observe, noting its silhouette, its lines, shapes, and forms, its points, angles, curves,rhythms, and so on; try to stock your memory so that specifics will still be there when you later start drawing. As you look, try to imagine everything you’ll need to know to do a drawing of the subject, in the order that you’ll need it, from the first main lines you will put down to the smaller details which lock into those bigger shapes and forms.

You may need to glance back and forth many times from your subject to your mental image, building up that image. You may even speak to yourself inside, saying things like, “OK, the overall silhouette makes a large oval shape, with a smaller circle half as wide intersecting at the top; there’s a right angle over at the left where the arm bends, and a pointed shape above it, and...” These mental word-notes can 72 THE BEST OF DRAW!

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help lock your observations and impressions into your memory, by making your memories verbal as well as visual.

Try this for five or ten minutes, or as long as suits you, until you can “see” a clear mental image of your subject even when you are no longer looking at it. Then go somewhere else and try to draw your subject, from your stocked-up memory bank, and see

PAUL RIVOCHE

LEFT: “Miranda’s Trailer” and “Powers’ Penthouse rough.”

Designs such as these ones sometimes depend largely on memories: memories of specific elements that can be incorporated to set the scene, memories of light and shade, memories of mood, and so on... extract your memories, filter them, and put them into your designs. There’s a lot more stored inside you than you may think: don’t just rush around externally to find that perfect piece of reference; also look around internally, in your personal memory-bank, and raid it mercilessly for useful information. Go ahead—think over and recall all the things you’ve seen, and adapt that quirky second cousin of yours into the perfect villain; or use your impressions from that Florida trip to give your background design real conviction; shamelessly steal your bank teller’s haircut and add it to your character—and so on. It’s amazing what’s packed in there, waiting to spring out, when you start digging.

what happens. You may surprise and inspire yourself— because if you’ve done this exercise diligently, you should be able to draw a fairly accurate depiction of your subject purely from memory, in far more detail than is possible from your “unstocked” memory. Also, the image of your subject will last longer in your memory, helping you when you later start designing something out of thin air. You can then “cannibalize” all your memories of real subjects, incorporating bits and pieces into your design, squashing, stretching, morphing, and so on.

This also applies to life drawings done in a class—you should be able to redraw a reasonably good version of the longer poses later when you go home, or else, what were you doing when you were sitting there staring at the subject for an hour?

Aren’t you memorizing some or all of what you see? That may sound blunt, but it’s all too easy to go to years and years of life classes, but not really learn all that much—you just get mounds of big scrubby charcoal-stick “artistic” drawings collected in your THE BEST OF DRAW! 73

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basement. You don’t learn to draw the figure without reference, from your imagination, if you always do only those highly-toutedby-art-teachers “expressive” drawings. You could term that kind of drawing “reactive drawing”: momentary reactions to the stream of visual data coming in the eyes. If you make yourself wholly dependent on that stream, you can find yourself incapable of drawing when that stream is no longer there. Why? Because you haven’t “locked in” your memories and observations, as discussed above.

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You haven’t memorized the forms and structures of the figure. So, if your aim is to help yourself later, when you draw cartoons of whatever type from your imagination, then you need to actually set yourself to “record” as you observe, whether during your day or at a formal life drawing class. All this of course applies whether your subject is figures, backgrounds, or anything else.

Again, you will only have a memory if you observe actively. If you just let everything you see during the day wash over you, not much will really stick in the specific way that you need it to stick if you are to draw it later—it all just flows by.

Observing “actively” is a way of locking in your memories, so that they are there, later, when you want to retrieve them. It’s similar to the reason a very good high school history teacher gave me years ago, when explaining why he wanted his students to take notes on his lectures: because it forced them to translate everything into their own words, making for more effective memorization. Instead of just letting the lecture go in and out of our ears, we had to listen, convert the ideas we heard into our own point form notes, and then write them down with our hands. He explained that in this way, we would “hear” what he said many times: once when he said it, once when we mentally translated the idea into a point form note, once when we actually wrote it down, and yet once more when we later re-read our notes. The purpose: to make us remember better, and to make us better understand what we were hearing, by having to organize it as we were hearing it. Something similar happens when you make your observation LEFT: Two stages of an animation design: line and tone.

Problems of arrangement, form, and perspective are worked out in the line stage, leaving concerns of lighting, mood, pattern, etc., to be dealt

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RIGHT: Sources of inspiration are everywhere! There are endless varieties of subject matter to observe and jot down during the day. The drawings done this way are not necessarily for show, but function as a personal log or shorthand—a file bank of ideas you can draw/design from later, using them as a starting point. The more you draw from life, the more comfortable you can become “inventing” your designs. And real life is usually far more daring and unpredictable in its designs than we are: to take only one example, real heads can be much more “pushed” and cartoon-like than you’d think possible, until you start observing them carefully.

These are all sketches of real people— some done on the spot, and some executed later from memory.

BELOW: Raider Ships rough. Try to conceive your designs as fully threedimensional, solid forms. As you play with them, visualize and draw them from a variety of angles. Although obviously necessary in design for animation, where things move, this also applies even in “static” applications such as a comic books: roughing your designs from different viewpoints forces you to truly consider them three-dimensionally. It’s too easy to cheat if you draw your design from one angle only. These were rough designs for a storyboard for a Superman episode.

“active” instead of the default “passive” setting, when you “see, observe, and remember.” (Note: Of course it’s impossible to observe in this active way constantly, but even a little goes a long way!)

Why is all this important? Because all this seeing and observing and recording (and I should also emphasize constant drawing of course—playing/ doodling/sketching/inventing) stocks up your mental bank beforehand. That way, when you need to start designing, you have a vocabulary to draw on, things to choose from. You’re not just trying to conjure images up out of “thin air.” If you’ve never observed and recorded in your mind the different kinds of vehicles, or sofas, or whatever, then how can you decide which sort of sofa is right for your design, to give it the right “feel”? You’ll just end up automatically drawing the same darned couch (for example) as everyone else in animation and THE BEST OF DRAW! 75

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comics, that cliched puffy sofa-thing!!

But of course there are hundreds and thousands of different couch designs to choose from, and the same thing applies to most items you’ll draw... trees, vehicles, costumes, hairstyles, you name it! Observing and recording the endless variety around you, in the “here and now,” will be a big help when you start dreaming up imaginary characters and worlds. You will find ways to inject the variety that you observed in our real world, into your invented one.

Another important benefit of observing, remembering, and drawing from real life is that it trains you to better understand three-dimensional forms in all their complexity. Nowadays we are awash in all sorts of photographic imagery. We are endlessly bombarded with a far greater number of photographs than earlier generations, through all the different media now available.

Reflexively, you’d think that this would mean that student artists today would therefore begin from a position of advantage compared to earlier ones, since their “memory banks” would be wellstocked with all this imagery. But actually I would argue the opposite—because the surface familiarity that you get from this constant, casual image-stream is not the kind of detailed structural understanding of pure three-dimensional form and structure that an artist needs to do a successful drawing. We think that we know the forms and structures of things, but we only know them superficially, as surfaces from photos; in actuality we have probably 76 THE BEST OF DRAW!

ABOVE: “Janus Theatre.” This design was a “stage set” for a scene taking place at the back of an old theatre. I tried to incorporate a variety of objects, textures, and patterns, to create visual interest and set the scene: the abandoned popcorn maker and massive old film projector; a discarded carpet, bundled up; extra film canisters; various crates; an exaggerated fuse box; and so on. Many of these objects never existed quite like this, but I tried to create the feeling that they could have.

never really seen them at all, in the way spoken about above. We are always one step removed, instead of using our mind, sight, and other senses to directly perceive form and structure.

The point is that all regular photographic images—whether in a newspaper, magazine, TV or computer screen, and so on—are already two-dimensional. If you use them “verbatim,” they lock you into one specific viewpoint—ie. the angle from which the photo was taken—and the set of 2-D shapes generated by that one angle. In other words, they are already translated into a twodimensional language, the language of photographs. Photos are seductive, and look like a shortcut, simply because they are already flat, as our drawing will be. But the very fact that they are flat means that they are incapable of giving us three-dimensional form information in the way that a real object can, and that 3-D information is really what a piece of reference should give us; the reference shouldn’t be a crutch, a shortcut to the ultimate 2-D pattern of lines and shapes that is our final drawing. That final

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©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

DRAWING AND DESIGN

ABOVE: Two versions of a design for Batman Beyond: the line drawing, and one of two tonal renderings used to show this museum hall with lights on and off. This was the “dark” version, created by using Photoshop to alter a scan of an earlier “light” version. I created masks to hold out areas that I wanted to leave unaltered, such as the night sky showing through the window glass, the floor, and the light panels on the pillars, and then simply darkened the rest using the “brightness/contrast” command. Considerations of silhouette dictated much of the arrangement of the foreground shapes; the aliens on display had to be visible clearly, yet not block the view of the hall and spaceships behind. Consequently I was very careful about how the silhouettes overlapped as the different elements receded into space.

pattern should be assembled in our mind, in that dream-image, from our understanding of the 3-D forms and structures of our subject as we walk around it; it shouldn’t be traced or copied directly from the flat surface of a photograph.

An already-trained eye, versed in the various geometric shapes and intersections, can interpret and extract useful three-

dimensional information back out of photos, and I would argue that as being the best use of photos, for raw information; but to a student they are too easily a fatal trap, because the student is tempted to copy the flat surface patterns of the photo, not interpret the photo actively and perceive the real three-dimensional forms that the photo is only a representation of. We’ve all seen drawings that are uneasy mixtures of photo-information and “cartooned” information that came directly out of the artist’s memory-bank. Some of the many hallmarks of this mixture are things such as: a tendency to be overly detailed, to copy as outlines various visual oddities and shadow-edges that are produced by multiple light sources in the photo, but are not actual 3-D forms; a jumping back and forth from a “cartoonier” style (parts drawn with no photo) to a more “realistic” style (parts drawn from photo); poor composition or “staging” of shapes by slavish adherence to the photograph; and oddities of scale produced by photographic lenses, which when copied literally in a drawing may look very strange indeed.

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When you apply the ideas listed above, it makes designing— whether you have to design an object, vehicle, character, or setting—into an interesting, exciting process, a process of exploration. The whole world, and especially the piece of the world you see in your daily life, becomes “reference”! This may sound obvious, but it’s surprising how often people avoid this realization when faced with a design challenge. The first instinct often seems to be to turn to how a previous favorite artist tackled the

Paul Rivoche is a Toronto-based freelance commercial artist and designer. Paul can be reached via e-mail at: privoche@yahoo.com

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

BELOW: Mall and Turbine roughs. Photos can only help you so far along the design process. At some point, after examining them for any and all useful elements, all “raw material,” you have to set them aside and plunge in unaided. That is where the adventure begins! You voyage on alone—and sometimes you get immediate results, and sometimes it’s a long hard process of digging until you produce one useable idea. After looking at reference of malls and industrial buildings, I did these rough pencil drawings which I then photocopied and added black masses to with a big chunky marker. If your design doesn’t work at this rough stage, it won’t work later on, even with lots of lovely finicky rendering.

problem, using that as a kind of reference and starting point. I would suggest that, while it can very interesting and educational to see how others solved a similar problem, and it shouldn’t be ruled out, there’s also a danger of being limited by their solution—of being overly influenced by it. Turn instead to your own stream of “reference” coming from your daily experiences; in it will be found the answers to many of your design questions. Of course, for more exotic designs involving subjects not in one’s local neighborhood or era, obviously research involving photographs is necessary. In that case, photos are a great help as sources of raw material that can then be restaged and reworked as one sees fit. And in any kind of “fantasy” design, there is no direct reference at all; the final drawing, as always, must come solely from the imagination-memory-bank.

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BIG BLOWN BABY TM AND © 2008 BILL WRAY.

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Bill Wray is bigger than he’s ever been. He’s huge. Fresh off the One man show of his paintings in Texas, Draw! Editor Mike Manley catches up with the boundary pushing artist.

From the glory days of Ren & Stimpy, his own hilarious comic tribute to Jack “KING” Kirby, Big Blown Baby, to Hellboy Jr., his monthly gig at Mad magazine with “Monroe,” Wray remains one of the busiest and funniest artists working in both animation and comics.

Interview conducted via e-mail and copy-edited by the artist.

DRAW!: Tell us a bit about your background, your childhood.

Were comics and animation important to you?

BILL WRAY: Yes, I lived for Carl Barks, died for Bugs Bunny cartoons and learned to masturbate copying Little Annie Fanny.

DRAW!: OK, maybe some things should stay private! When did you start drawing or reading comics?

BW: I was looking at comics before I could read them.

DRAW!: So you mostly grew up in California? Do you think the proximity to L.A. helped getting into the biz?

BW: Oh sure, we had the animation business—the big comic book companies were in New York, but we had cartoons, Western Publishing, Disney, and underground comics up North.

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BILL WRAY leading huge oxen calmly down the street. I attacked a pack of dogs that were zeroing in on my little sister. Hong Kong, that was no big deal, but I had to get rabies shots in the stomach, that was no fun. But I did get a pile of comics after each shot.

DRAW!: Wow. Were you getting into comics because of your being away from the American culture? Do you remember being attracted to certain artists or types of art? Did you see any foreign comics at all?

BW: I liked the same stuff as when I was in the USA: Barks ducks, war comics, Superman, Harvey Comics. I wasn’t into Marvel heroes yet. The comics were sold to G.I.s. I have no memory of any Chinese comics.

DRAW!: Were you drawing by this time? Did you ever draw stories or just pictures?

Kirby moving out to Sherman Oaks was the real beginning of a West Coast access to New York. When Roy Thomas came out, we had a direct pipeline.

DRAW!: Didn’t you live overseas for a while? Vietnam?

BW: I was an Army brat so we traveled extensively till I was about 11. Then we settled in Southern California. We were in Vietnam for about eight months, then we were evacuated during the Tet Offensive. We went to Hong Kong and that was cool, as they had comic book stalls with piles of American comics. I’m still amazed that I was allowed to roam the city alone at the age of nine. Vietnam as well... I could have easily been kidnapped.

Maybe that’s what my Dad was hoping for.

DRAW!: Obviously this seems like a really powerful memory and time for you. Do you feel it impacted you as an artist in any way? I mean being exposed to this type of situation? War, chaos, new cultures, danger, etc. This really has affected so many important artists throughout history, even in our business.

Anytime you met Jack Kirby, you were likely to get some war story. It affected his art strongly. One of the things you are known and popular for, is taking things over the top, pushing the envelope, kicking the sacred cows right in the udder! Do you pull from those childhood experiences and put that in your work in any way?

BW: A long deep question that I don’t really know the answer for. I was lonely, but never traumatized too badly. I never saw a dead body or had a friend killed. Some quick cut memories: I saw a rabid dog shot in Vietnam. My Dad was a big shot, so we lived in a French villa. A thunderstorm knocked a huge tree down in our back yard. My Dad had it re-planted upside down and had wood planks nailed to the root mass to from a platform. I would climb up and look all over the whole city of Hue. It rained for months on end in Vietnam; the atmosphere was literally like a river. One day it somehow rained tadpoles. I would see little boys my age 80 THE BEST OF DRAW!

BW: At first just pictures—lots of WWII themes, B- 17’s blowing up Germans and monsters. Later cars. Serious comic book drawing started in high school. I was introduced to underground comics around that time. They made me realize I could do comics, because they were so crude with stories that shocked me more that EC comics did a year or two earlier. My first major comic was my frog characters mixed with Vaughn Bodé’s lizards.

The Witzend issue with the Bodé’s cover where the hooded freak is blowing the girl’s brains out blew my mind out, too. Around that time I went to the first San Diego con and found a copy of Rich Corben’s Rowolf. I still remember looking around the room to see if I was going to be arrested or something. That had me going. I never dreamed of beating off to a comic book until I saw a Corben girl, but when you’re 13....

DRAW!: So reading comics was encouraged in your house? I know you said your dad was an artist.

BW: My mother gave me Peanuts collections and Tintin albums.

She had a flare for art, but put it aside to be a housewife. Later

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she let me buy underground comics—I don’t know if she knew how raw they were or not.

My Dad lost interest in me once I was past the cute toddler stage.

When I was about 3 or 4 years old we did do an oil painting based on my child scribbles of sea life. It’s an abstract memory, I think based mostly on a “posed” photo of us doing it together. He helped me one other time when I was twelve; taught me how to draw an engine block when I got into hot rods. A shame he didn’t spend more time showing me drawing tips, as he could have helped me excel and lessened my resentment for his lack of attention. The irony was he wanted to be a teacher, and was an incredible artist. He gave it up for the military because of WWII. That Hitler freak ruined my childhood.

LOBO ALL CHARACTERS AND ARTWORK ™ AND © 2008 DC COMICS

DRAW!: So your parents were into comics and were artistic, at least to a fair degree, to be able to pick out some of the best material and expose you to Tintin, Peanuts, etc. Were they more into strips instead of comics?

BW: My mother just liked those collections. Those are the only ones she gave me. She wasn’t really into comics, she just would be attracted to anything that was the best of its kind.

DRAW!: Did you go to art school?

ABOVE LEFT: The Wray family in Hue, Vietnam, with servants and father’s assistants. You can’t tell from this angle, but the tree Bill is leaning on is upside-down.

LEFT: Young Bill in Costa Mesa, California, about age 10. Bill’s favorite comic then was Turok, Son of Stone.

ABOVE: Unpublished page from about ’91, Lobo’s Dog, a one-shot written by Keith Giffen and penciled by Bill that was killed because it had a concentration camp for dogs in the story and many other tasteless moments.

BW: I tried, but the teachers at my JC (Orange Coast Collage in Costa Mesa) were into putting TVs into sandboxes and drawing your feelings with ink and sticks on rough wooden planks with your pants off and the rules out the window. People who wanted to learn to paint and draw formally were to be pitied and then shamed into enlightenment. I would bring in Frazetta and Leyendecker books and be openly ridiculed by my teachers for my ignorant desires to do crap.

Color, design and lettering were helpful—they couldn’t make up convoluted manifesto for that stuff, but I dropped out and went to work for pro cartoonists despite the naked models and cute coeds.

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DRAW!: This seems to be such a common story amongst us cartoonists and animators. The constant slapdown in high school, and often in college as well, by the art establishment. You’d think they’d be happy to have students who were so into drawing, passionate about it, driven—but I guess not. Did this type of experience harden you or drive you in some way to prove them wrong?

BW: Actually I enjoyed high school, as my teachers wanted to be hippies and fornicate with the students. More than one was fired for giving girls rides home that ended in pregnancy. My art classes were totally open to free expression, music, drugs and making out. I kid you not. I didn’t learn much, but I was pretty self-motivated so at least I was drawing all the time.

My teacher, Mr. Stoia, was a great guy, but into a mid-life crisis flux. He covered for me, but was an enabler for bad behavior because he wanted to “relate” to us. His generation had just missed the free love boat and still wanted to take that ride. So we all did our thing. I won art awards—for what I don’t know—and barley passed my real classes. I have no idea where I got my drive to draw, as it was easy to fake your way through life in my little world, but by junior college I wanted more.

one we looked up to, as his art was so accomplished from day one. Rick and I were basically a team, always trying out for jobs together. I assisted L.A. fantasy artist Bill Stout for a while. He taught me how to work hard. I worked for Howard Chaykin and he thought me how to dress. I briefly went to work for Al Williamson on my first visit to New York, but he was so bored with his comic strip he ended up working for me doing all the backgrounds on a comic I was inking.

DRAW!: That must have been fun having Al ink your work?

BW: It was a weird double-edged sword. I came there seeking a father figure, mentor type and he was working for me? But my stay there was one of the best times I ever had. I thought I had a friend for life when I left, but I realized later I alienated him with my youthful lack of tact and selfcontrol. Something that I’m still working on.

DRAW!: So you would say that by your mid-teens your were very serious about perusing cartooning and animation as a career? Or did you figure it was a step until you got into illustration? What was your method of self-study? Did you try and buy books or study old strips, painters, and illustrators?

DRAW!: I know you mentioned to me once that as a teen living in California you visited some artists and animators, did any of these old timers help you out?

BW: Yes, a retired Disney guy was helpful; he taught me some basic animation tricks, but no formal drawing lessons. He used to sculpt maquettes for Disney and HannaBarbera merchandising. Sadly I wasn’t aggressive enough to get a lot from him.

But the encouragement and kindness meant a lot. He also helped me get work at Disney and H-B.

BW: Yes. I always had a huge library and copied all the time to learn.

DRAW!: What were you taking with you to each new job?

BW: You mean learning?

DRAW!: Yes. ABOVE: Bill’s gun phase lasted until he turned hippie in high school and he hasn’t owned one since.

DRAW!: Well that’s pretty great, being able to find a sort of mentor to at least put you on the road, point the way. I had the opposite experience when I tried to get into Hanna-Barbera. The old-timer I talked to told me to “Forget it kid, animation is a crap business. It’s dead, do something else.” I did find a mentor in commercial art though, and in high school he helped me out a lot. Did you have a group of fellow artists you hung around with that were also trying to break in?

BW: In high school there were guys who could draw in school, but the party atmosphere derailed them. The guy who was the best artist, a real “natural,” ended up driving a bus—art was to easy for him. Maybe that’s why I had drive. Good drawing was very hard for me grasp. I’m still hoping to do a good one day. I met guys later via comic book clubs and the San Diego con.

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BW: A little step with each penciled and inked job. Not much with just inking, a dead-end job really.

DRAW!: What was your first job and how did you break in?

BW: Doing comic book inking at Disney for their foreign comics market. I thought I was a golden child, working at Disney at 16. I liked Disney, but hated the work. Not inking comics mind you, but their convoluted methods of doing them. I had to light box everything from the penciled art on tissue.

Drove my eyes crazy and the work looked traced, so I quit and went to work for Russ Manning on the Tarzan foreign comics.

DRAW!: How did you meet him? Did he give you any instructions? Was he easy to work for?

BW: Rick and I went to work for him I think via Mark Evanier who knew every cartoonist in L.A. We aped Manning’s style for

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ABOVE: A typical page from Hellboy Jr. showcasing Bill’s great use of drybrush inking.

Stevens got to know him better, as he assisted on the Tarzan strip.

DRAW!: Did Manning give you specific instructions or just try you out and correct you as you went? Were you following layouts?

BW: Hoberg penciled, I inked. He just swiped Russ as much as possible. I didn’t look at Russ as much as I should have; I was into Frazetta. Russ would sometimes pass a job with no changes, sometimes make me do them, sometimes he would do a major paste up himself. You never knew what would happen.

DRAW!: Did you want to do comics or animation more, was there a preference or was there just a general interest in both?

HELLBOY JR. ™ AND ©2008 MIKE MIGNOLA

BW: I loved animation, but I think I realized early that the business was dead and I really wanted to be an illustrator anyway. Comics were a fun way to make money from my childhood hobby, but over the years I went through different cycles deciding what my focus was going to be only to change my mind and turn in another direction. the overseas market that couldn’t get enough of Russ’s approach.

As I said, Russ was the strong, silent type and I worked mostly at home for him. The only time I worked at his studio was to do corrections, so that was a “strictly business” atmosphere. Dave

DRAW!: So you really wanted to be an illustrator then. Sort of like the classic American illustrators like Rockwell, Cornwell etc.

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BILL WRAY about Ken Riley, the illustrator who was sort of a grand pupil of Howard Pyle, the Dean of American illustration? I know there is an excerpt of Pyle’s working methods or philosophy in Andrew Loomis’ book Creative Illustration. Were you following in this way? Lots of figure drawing, etc.?

BW: Frank Riley was Cornwell’s assistant and long-time Art Students League teacher. He created a technique based on Cornwell’s teachings and others’, old masters’ techniques refined by guys like Pyle. The Riley Method was a combination of all those things broken down to 10-value step pallet. Most of the great illustrators of the Fifties are Riley students; almost every great paperback guy took his class. I can’t explain it all here, that’s an article in itself.

ARTWORK ©2008 BILL WRAY

ABOVE: Sketches for an unrealized Hellboy Jr. story, “Hitler’s Big Day,” a story that may still see the light of day.

BELOW: Prototype model sheet for the Cartoon Network pilot of King Crab.

Jack Faragasso’s painting class at the Art Students League. We were doing the “Riley Method” based on Cornwell and old master techniques. I learned to paint, but never had the drawing chops to be as good as my heroes, so I just decided to play to my strength—cartooning.

BW: I was at H-B first, but got fired by Doug Wildey for embarrassing him at the networks for being late and drawing extreme violence on a storyboard (a joke gone wrong). In those days TV animation was beyond tame. To appease parental groups the networks hired child psychologists to find something wrong with the shows. As they liked their well paying jobs and could rationalize they were saving the world’s children, they found more things to censor every year. First you couldn’t have a character point a spear, then no spear, finally threatening gestures were verboten. This was rough as the networks were mostly buying action shows. Filmation

©2008 CARTOON NETWORK. ARTWORK © 2008 BILL WRAY

DRAW!: Can you be a bit more specific here? You are talking

DRAW!: You worked at the old Filmation studio, was this your first animation job?

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ARTWORK ©2008 BILL WRAY

ABOVE: More Hitler sketches for the unrealized Hellboy Jr. story.

BELOW: Warm-up sketches for a recent Mad Osama Bin Laden parody.

was a wasteland of drunks who couldn’t cut it at Disney when all the film studios’ animation units closed in the Sixties. The work was so demoralizing I was bordering on alcoholism myself.

DRAW!: Can you elaborate on what was so bad about the joke you drew?

BW: A jungle girl pulled a thorn out of a lion’s paw and I drew a Monty Python-ish gush of blood pouring out. The real panel was underneath it, ready to be revealed as a joke. Doug had a wonderful sense of humor, but in the rush to finish I forgot about it and Doug didn’t catch it. After he sent it in, the network called, seriously angry, and since Doug hadn’t noticed the offending panel, he rigorously defended the board, telling the network they were crazy. So Doug had a lot of egg on his face when they showed him the bloody panel. He fired me and I was blacklisted at H-B for as long as he was there. I tried twice to clear the air with him, but he refused to admit there was a problem. My drawing sucked anyway, and I was slow. If I was really talented he might have looked the other way.

DRAW!: What was your job at Filmation?

BW: I was in the layout department.

DRAW!: And what did that entail? Blowing up and key posing from storyboards?

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BW: Yep! What we did was fake layout; I didn’t learn a thing there. You were encouraged to trace the model sheet as much as possible. Never add expression or a good pose, which cost money. It was the ultimate de-evolution of character layout.

DRAW!: I know the ’80s was a bad time in the animation biz, but still there must have been some enjoyment in doing cartooning for a profession instead of flipping burgers?

BW: I liked comics, but the animation business in those days was at its all-time low, it sucked the life out of you. I mean I suppose some people can get some enjoyment from humping a corpse, but it kept me in a state of drunken nausea. Animation was in its death throes, thank God The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy and Pixar revived it years later.

DRAW!: So you really felt like some factory worker then. Just doing eight hours of piecework each day. Nothing exciting you?

DRAW!: What did you do to keep going? Is this where you met John Kricfalusi?

BW: Yeah. He couldn’t get a job there, (at that point) his style was too eccentric. His girlfriend is who I met first—she was inbetweening there. I didn’t want to meet John, as I was trying to put the moves on her. She would always start to talk about what a genius he was and I would change the subject to what a great sweater she was wearing. When Eddie Fitzgerald (a storyboard artist there) showed me one of John’s drawings, I though it was horrible, but had something cool about it. Kind of like a retarded Basil Wolverton meets Hanna-Barbera. We ended up being best friends and partners for a few years and did some odds-and-ends short films (that’s when Ren & Stimpy was developed, along with other projects we couldn’t sell,) until I decided to quit beating my head against the wall. I was convinced the animation business would never improve, so I went to New York to learn to paint. Leaving John to his all night meat and beer parties.

BW: Sometimes you would get your hopes up, like when Filmation got the Terry Toons stuff. But they turned it to crap and the networks wouldn’t let you do anything resembling comedy. I’m telling you, we were not allowed to do anything creative whatsoever.

ARTWORK ©2008 BILL WRAY

AQUAMAN, AQUALAD, MERA ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

BELOW: More Osama studies for Mad. RIGHT: Warm-up sketches for a short Aquaman parody in Bizarro Comics.

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DRAW!: When did you move out East and start attending school?

BW: When I realized the work I was doing wasn’t teaching me anything except how to get high and get paid for it. I basically quit the business and decided to move to New York in ’84 and go to the Art Students League. That decision was encouraged by a teacher I was take classes from privately.

DRAW!: Would you say this had a big fundamental impact on you as an artist? Was there an adjustment going from one coast to another?

BIG BLOWN BABY ™ AND ©2008 BILL WRAY

BW: It was huge—I felt excitement and commitment from the students and the teachers. This was a school where they didn’t offer any accreditation; you were not there for a bogus degree, you were there to learn. I had great teachers and some average ones, but they all could draw really well. The students were inspiring; the best people went there, including top illustrators taking refresher courses. Another school was opened downtown called the Academy where old masters’ techniques were being revived.

It was the slow re-launch of figurative art of the ’80s.

DRAW!: So you started taking classes there full time? Were you still trying to get or do comics work to pay the bills?

BW: Yes, I did both—I was able to move because I was getting regular work doing horror stories for Bruce Jones. He quit packaging comics to write for Hollywood, so I was forced to take a job assisting Greg Theakston and through him I started getting work at DC.

ABOVE: Cover pencils for the second issue of Big Blown Baby.

DRAW!: And what were these jobs?

DRAW!: What was your first comic job for Marvel, and what were some of the early books you worked on? I know you told me once you worked on the first Star Wars comics.

BW: Inking mostly, but I did to some fill-ins for Mike Gold and was in an anthology who’s name escapes me. I did loads of coloring too.

BW: I inked half a Kirby book with Mike Royer and did oddsand-ends inking for Roy Thomas during most of those L.A. years in the late Seventies, early Eighties. I mostly inked over Rick THE BEST OF DRAW! 87

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RIGHT: A cover from the unpublished Lobo’s Dog.

Hoberg, as we were party pals and broke in together.

Sometimes Dave Stevens and Bill Stout helped out, as I wasn’t very fast and we were always given jobs with short deadlines. If it wasn’t for Russ Manning, Jack Kirby, Mark Evanier, and Roy Thomas there never would have been a West Coast comics scene.

DRAW!: What Kirby comic was that? Were you back in California by then, or still in NYC? BW: “What If... the Marvel Bullpen Were the Fantastic Four.” When I did my first Marvel work, I was still living at home in Newport Beach, California. I didn’t work with Royer—he recommended me.

DRAW!: Now when you are working for pros like Manning and Royer, are you picking up techniques from them? Are they showing you tricks with the pen or brush?

Can you say what you were learning from them?

DRAW!: Wow. That must have been fun inking Kirby!

How different it was then in the business. I mean in the Eighties you could get pick up work on short stories, jump around a bit. Polish up your craft on different subjects.

BW: I didn’t get a regular gig because I was on a skut boy skill level. I didn’t know it then, but I was handed rush fill-ins and 88 THE BEST OF DRAW!

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

BW: Pros gave me a few tips, but I already was a slick self-taught inker. Stout may have shown me a few things, so I would draw more like him. Mostly it was use this pen or this brush, go to work, and don’t sleep on my time.

f*ck-ups by others. Because I was too green for a monthly.

Chaykin fell behind on Star Wars and the regular inker wouldn’t agree to pencil and ink an issue in a week, but hungry kids like Rick and I would. We were on fire when we did the comic because we got to see a preview of the movie and knew it was

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REN AND STIMPY ™ AND ©2008 VIACOM INTERNATIONAL INC.

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ABOVE: Unused sketches for Ren & Stimpy video box covers.

great. We didn’t sleep for a week and still our issue came out pretty good, especially since Stevens inked the main Luke heads.

We drove up to Los Angeles, proud of ourselves, fried and wired. We couldn’t wait for Roy’s reaction. He couldn’t be expecting much with the rushed time frame, so we knew we had come through big time. Roy answered the door in his bathrobe and grabbed the art without looking at it and slammed the door in our faces muttering apologies about how he had to get it ready to mail. That was a sobering moment. I’m sure he had no idea how crushed we were not to get an ounce of feedback. He had been in the business to long to remember how important those early jobs were to an artist.

DRAW!: That’s really true, you crave that encouragement in the beginning. When would you say you started to get steady work?

BW: I never had a real job past 16— DRAW!: When did you go back to L.A. and when did you start back in animation? Was it Ren & Stimpy?

BW: Yeah, I promised John I would go back if we could do a cartoon our way.

DRAW!: Whom were your heroes coming up? Who were you studying artistically?

BW: Everybody at EC except Jack Kamen. Kirby, Kurtzman, Frazetta, Toth and Wood were the main ones in comics.

Animation wise: Disney, Bob Clampett, and Chuck Jones.

Currently my favorites are Ketcham, Frank Robbins and Earl Oliver Hurst.

DRAW!: But would you say at a certain point the more “cartoony” or exaggerated work started to appeal to you more? I know when you are young you can wrongly assume that because something is less photo realistic it isn’t as good. Because Fraze-tta and Kurtzman are in some ways at opposite ends of the spectrum as far as the rendering and sweaty muscle stuff, yet both are essentially cartooning in the best sense since both idealize the form so much. Frazetta’s three legged horses and blown out anatomy.

BW: I liked both equally; the “cartoony” stuff came easier. The hardcore drawing was a bitch. I don’t remember favoring one or the other when I was a kid.

DRAW!: Was there a point where you started to consciously analyze this?

BW: Never did have a day it happened. You pick up things over the years. I just gravitated to the best of both worlds. I don’t think one is better than the other to this day. I just think good cartooning is as valid as realistic drawing. My work blends both worlds.

DRAW!: So you packed up and headed back out to L.A. in what year? Did you start right away on Ren & Stimpy? What was your job there?

BW: In 1990. I didn’t work on the short that sold the series, but started on the first show as soon as I hit L.A. I was the head of the background department, did some storyboarding, and a came up with the basic plot on the unaired “Man’s Best Friend.”

DRAW!: Were you still trying to do comics work?

BW: I was still doing some inking for a while, but soon stopped trying to get any more as I was so busy at work. I penciled an THE BEST OF DRAW! 89

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BILL WRAY Japanese cartoons. That evolved into the thing they call Adult Swim. Of course I still think it a great concept and was a huge missed opportunity for a hit show.

DRAW!: Since you were in charge of this baby all the way, what did this entail?

BW: Well I ran it, but had help from top guys like Stephen DeStefano who did the (final) character designs on most of the characters and re-drew my storyboards. Dave Cooper did the prop design, Scott Wills did some color keys and I swept the floor.

DRAW!: Ha ha. What a great team. They are all so talented, they must have made your job easy. And Wills has gone on to do great stuff on Samurai Jack. How did Big Blown Baby come about?

ARTWORK ©2008 BILL WRAY

BW: In the late Eighties I heard Harvey Kurtzman speak at a DC-sponsored talk, just before he died. I was so shocked by the appalling shape he was in, I couldn’t listen to him, but I couldn’t walk out either. I did what I do a lot when I want to cry, I draw as an outlet. I did an angry drawing in my sketchbook I had with me. It was a sketch of a really angry muscle-bound baby. I went home and started to draw the comic in my spare time. It was a form of extreme self-expression harking back to the kind of work I wanted to do ever since I saw my first underground comic.

ABOVE AND RIGHT: Pencil layout and finished pen and ink for a personal drawing of an Amazon Woman into dressing in super-hero costumes.

entire issue of a comic written by Keith Giffen called Lobo’s Dog, but it ultimately proved to be too controversial for DC to publish as it had a concentration camp for dogs sequence. I was also doing Big Blown Baby at night as an outlet for my drawing, and was painting all day long.

BW: I developed it for Nickelodeon right after Ren & Stimpy ended naïvely thinking they would want to continue to work with us. After they turned it down (in record time) I set it aside and took a job art directing Space Jam. Later, when Hanna-Barbara was still going, they invited me to develop something for them. I brought in the Crab and they liked it. Then Turner bought them and happily Cartoon Network liked it enough to pick up a pilot. It was to be the first “adult oriented” cartoon designed to run at night. The pilot had its problems due mainly to trying to introduce an ensemble cast and complete a story in 7 minutes, but to their credit CN saw its potential. We developed it further, starting the first stories and shaping the series. Sadly they lost heart when the idea of an expensive adult show seemed too risky and it was decided to do the low budget, low risk experiment of buying edgy 90 THE BEST OF DRAW!

ARTWORK ©2008 BILL WRAY

DRAW!: Recently you had your own pilot for a show at Cartoon Network called King Crab. You produced a great pilot for it, which probably still runs. How did you go about developing and pitching this?

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My favorite Kirby comic was Thor, so I decided my premise was: What if a Thor as a baby god came to earth with all his powers and the emotional restraint of a baby. The whole thing ended up being a rude tribute to Kirby, somehow going over the radar of the Kirby collector. I pitched it to Randy Stradley who tersely told me it was trash, and that Dark Horse would never publish. Undaunted, I decide to take it seriously and got my pal Robert Loren Fleming to punch the dialogue and decided to pitch it to Andy Helfer at DC. While waiting in Andy’s office, we ran into Scott Hampton and George Pratt. We gave them the original art and they read the entire first issue screaming with laughter from the first caption. That was a gratifying moment for us when we realized we were not the only ones who found it funny. Andy came in and immediately wanted it, but said he would have to cut the nudity and profanity. We declined, but emboldened we went to Archie Goodwin at Epic, who smiled as he read it and didn’t say a word for 20 hellish minutes. Needless to say he passed. And we sobered up. Later Bob Shreck decided that Dark Horse would be interested in it and somehow convinced Mike Richardson to publish it.

DRAW!: Any plans to return to Big Blown anytime?

BW: I want to. I keep hoping Dark Horse will grow balls again and want to continue it or at least expand it a bit for a trade.

HELLBOY JR. DRAW!: How did Hellboy Jr. come about? Did you pitch it to Mignola? He’s like a crabby Little Hot Stuff.

BW: Actually Hot Stuff was crabby. Mike was crazy for Big Blown Baby. Unsolicited he did two pin-ups for it. Can you imagine? One of my favorite artists was a fan of something I did.

Then Bob Shreck left Dark Horse and the baby died with his exit. I can’t remember how it happened, but basically Mike felt bad for me and I agreed that we should do something together.

Hellboy Jr. was never meant to be Hellboy as a child, it was a way for me to do a milder version of BBB and work with Mike.

DRAW!: So Hellboy Jr. isn’t meant to be funny goofy stories of Hellboy as a tyke? More an excuse to do wacky cartoony stories. Farce, with good cartooning?

BW: Exactly. I wanted to write more and just to have fun with our favorite cartoonists, like Dave Cooper, Hilary Barta, Steven DeStefano and Pat McEown.

DRAW!: How did you two work together on it? Those issues were so great, and you had such a good line-up of talent.

BW: He told Dark Horse he wanted to do the book and suddenly it was green. We agreed it would star Hellboy Jr. I would write the stories and feature all our favorite cartoonists. I think I said to Mike I wanted to do the adventures of the Ginger Beef Boy, and I still remember how he slowly repeated the name and then just gave me a free hand. Everybody wanted Mike to do a story, so he drew one and asked me to dialogue it, I can’t tell you how honored I was by that gesture.

ABOVE: A page for Hellboy Jr.

Eventually Mike tired of the book due to a combination of relatively low sales on the later issues, along with editorial being uncomfortable with my raunchy humor. The good news is it looks like there will be a collection with a new story and unpublished sketches.

MONROE DRAW!: Well today your regular big time gig is doing “Monroe” for Mad. That must feel good to have a regular gig in such a prestigious magazine. I mean Mad’s probably past the heyday now, the culture has caught up and passed it with cable TV, Howard Stern, etc. How did this strip come about?

BW: Mad’s heyday is when you grow up with it. Nothing is fresh reading it for 40 years. After 15 years of trying to land a job, I gave up trying. Ironically they called and gave me a tryout for a job when I finally accepted I wouldn’t be working there, and after some stumbling I landed “Monroe.”

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this geeky? Did you have any specific ideas in mind? I notice you give him this strange antennae-like hair. Was this to help make him stand out—read better?

BW: It’s hard to remember. I think I had the script, but not actual description. To be honest, I was so busy art directing Space Jam combined with the fact that I didn’t think (after my many rejections) they would hire me anyway, that I didn’t spend a lot of time designing him. I made him a little weird kid, picturing him with Dennis the Menace proportions. That first version was rejected as being too young; they didn’t want a little kid, they wanted an adolescent about junior high age. His antenna-like hair was based on two ideas: the kids then were really doing a lot of stupid haircuts and I want his to be the stupidest ever. The second part is the hair acts as an element for expression, the same way Bugs Bunny’s ears do to register surprise or sadness.

Over the years I got rid of the bowl cut on the back and streamlined the hair into full-on antennas. I wanted him alien-like, a not so subtle visual to have him not fit in with his peers. The first version of his mom was considered too ugly, so she was refined. I slowly over the years brought her back to the original version except with longer proportions.

MONROE ™ AND ©2008 E.C. PUBLICATIONS, INC.

DRAW!: How does the process on the strip go? Do you get a full script and reference if you need to draw someone specific?

BW: Yes, I get a panel layout with the dialogue in place. They encourage me to make suggestions and add gags. A vote of confidence I appreciate.

DRAW!: Do you submit pencils?

BW: Yes, everyone does.

DRAW!: Is there a lot of back and forth between you and Mad? BW: Sometimes I get it right and everything goes through. On the average there are a reasonable amount of small changes.

Every now and then we clash when I’m too passionate about trying to keep jokes I like. Then I cave in and do lots of redrawing.

They are all saints for putting up with me.

DRAW!: How much time to you have for each episode?

BW: We seem to always be on deadline, but I think I like the fact it forces me to do a stripped-down style.

DRAW!: In what way? Compared to whom? Wally Wood?? I mean, I’ve seen the strip, and you are putting a lot in and using Duo-Shade, etc.

BW: I know what you mean, but if you look at enough strips you can see when I’m rushing it.

TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES DRAW!: Why did you decide to go with the Duo-Shade technique on “Monroe”?

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ABOVE: A panel from the very first “Monroe” episode in Mad. Below it, the original pencil version and design of both Monroe and his mother.

BW: They don’t make Formatt dot pattern sheets anymore.

Somehow they still make Duo-Shade board. It’s a treated paper that has “invisible” lines that are “revealed” by applying a stinky liquid you apply with a brush. I love it, as it’s the fastest gray tone process and really flexible. I’ll be really sad when they quit making it.

DRAW!: What are your tools of the trade? Be specific: paper, pencils, etc.

BW: For comic penciling I like Clutch pencil holders with those “turquoise” pencil leads—usually HB or B. For storyboards, sketching and layouts, Tombow Mono Bs and softer—the lead is like “butta.” All the best animators love them. I draw on whatever paper they give me, but if I have to buy it, Strathmore 2-ply “kid” finish.

Inking is done with the Hunt 102 or a Japanese point called Deleter Comic Pen 900. Brush inking is a Winsor-Newton Series 7 #2 or #3. I’m finishing up my last big bottle of Pelican #17

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CARTOONING and have never been totally happy with it. I’ve been using some Japanese ink called Comic Super Black which seems pretty good and am soon to open a big Speedball Super Black—I can’t judge them very well as I pour them all into the same open ink container. I have boxes of Hunt 102s (Speedball) I’m not using, as I’ve switched to the Japanese Deleter points, as they are tougher.

The Hunts last a page or so and break; the Comic Pens last for entire jobs and beyond.

I paint on Strathmore 500 Series illustration board (vellum surface—the best!) when I can afford it. When I paint for Cartoon Network I steal their Crescent cold press 300 board, but that has suddenly turned into sh*t paper. The surface starts to rip up instantly now (I think due to low rag content) so they are shopping for something else. I mostly use Cartoon Color’s

BILL WRAY

acrylic cel paint, but lately I’ve been delving into tube watercolor. I use lot of different brushes from Robert Simmons to Grumbacher, but I mostly use flat brushes (of all sizes) for everything but the details. For that I use the Series 7 again. Of course there are different brushes for different techniques, but I “force” the flats to do my bidding.

DRAW!: You are painting or keying (color keys) backgrounds for Samurai Jack at this moment. How much back and forth do you get from the director or art director? What does this entail specifically? How much time do you have?

BW: Genndy goes over the show with me key by key and has a very clear idea of what he wants. I try and give that to him, but

SAMURAI DUO-TONE

SAMURAI JACK ™ AND ©2008 CARTOON NETWORK

Wray’s pencils and inks from the DC Samurai Jack one-shot— with extensive use of Japanese graytone scenes and dry brush. Tones were cut out with a utility knife and applied by hand.

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SAMURAI JACK ™ AND ©2008 CARTOON NETWORK

More pencils and inks from the DC Samurai Jack one-shot—this time on Duo-Shade, an illustration board where you bring out the graytones with a chemical applied with a brush.

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BIG BLOWN BABY ™ AND ©2008 BILL WRAY

©2008 BILL WRAY

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©2008 BILL WRAY

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: A typical page from the Big Blown Baby miniseries. A “Sparky Bear” page from the last Hellboy Jr. oneshot, written and drawn by Bill. The back cover for Big Blown Baby #4.

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sometimes I go off on my own, then he pulls me back to his line of thinking. It’s challenging working on the show, as Scott Wills is such a master painter who’s work is so tight—I paint rougher, so some times my stuff confuses the Koreans who have to use the color keys for reference for painting the final backgrounds.

The most gratifying thing is Scott’s confidence in me despite his superior technical skill. That shows self-confidence and opens the show to different styles. I think Samurai Jack is the best looking show ever done on TV. And is better than most full length features.

DRAW!: You painted the illustrations in the titles for the show.

How did you work with Genndy Tartakovsky and Scott Wills, the background supervisor, on this?

BW: I was used mainly because Scott didn’t have enough time to do them. I worked closely with Genndy as described above, except this time I did the final art.

DRAW!: You do great dry brush technique, how do you do that?

Do you have a specially trained brush? It a rather painterly approach to use in a traditional comic setting.

BW: No, I just take the Series 7 brush and brush it on a piece of scrap paper once or twice till it’s almost dry and the brush is flattened out, the hairs spread apart. Then you lightly pull the brush across your paper, barely touching the brush hairs to the surface so you literally make each hair make a tiny line. All the lines side-by-side give a soft, scratchy texture called drybrush. The opposite of trying to keep your brush in a point for a clean thickand-thin line.

DRAW!: Do you have to have the ink at a certain consistency for this?

BW: There is probably an ideal “thickness” but I never pay attention.

DRAW!: I notice your pencils are looser, full of a lot of energy.

Do you do this to force or keep some of the drawing for the inking stage?

BW: I’m frustratingly pragmatic, for most of my technique isn’t broken down that far into a theory about look or spontaneity. In the case of pencils it usually has to do with time, subject, interest. I add more of those ingredients the tighter I go. The more time I have the more I try and vary the shots to not repeat myself, to do an angle I’ve never tried. When I have to rush, it gets to be formula to a degree. If I’m in love with the subject and if I have time, I’ll do lots of research. Another element of time is when I find that if I’m rushed, I just copy the reference.

If I have more time, I design it. An example would be if a have to do a cartoon of a celebrity. If I’m rushing, I just copy a photo, creating a recognizable but stiff semi-realistic drawing. If I have time I’ll do a dozen drawings, each more cartooned (designed) then the last until it becomes a pleasing cartoon caricature.

DRAW!: Since you work back and forth between both comics and animation, both pen and ink and fully painted work, would you say one influences the other more? And do you prefer one over the other?

BW: Not really. Changing up seems to keep it all fresh for me.

The ideal thing would be to do my own show or comic book my way, but who wouldn’t want that?

Doing a little bit over everything makes it easy for me to cherry pick the jobs to a degree, and if I’m going to work for others I want to be on the stuff I enjoy the most.

DRAW!: You recently had a show of your work down in Texas. That must have been very exciting. You did a lot of new paintings for it. As a commercial artist entering the “fine art” realm, how did you find the experience?

BW: The month of painting for the show was fantastic. the freedom to do what I wanted was gratifying creatively, but a calculated financial risk. I’m glad I found out I could do 15 paintings without a work order for each one. I’m not sure if I have found myself yet as far as my “look,” and I have a daunting task ahead of selling myself to this new art world. To really get on top you have to devote yourself full time to self-promo. That’s the hard part for me. I just want to paint and have the work magically sell itself.

LEFT: Cover Art for a Ren & Stimpy CD.

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1.

1. Thumbnail idea from sketchbook: Sometimes I may fill pages with ideas to “find“ the best one. In this case the client and I came up with an image before I started drawing, so it was just a matter of the composition working out.

2. Sometimes I blow up a thumbnail and trace it. I’m this case I did it by eye with plenty of examples of Hank Ketcham’s Dennis art around me for inspiration and to keep it ‘on model’.

3. I arrived at this drawing by taking drawing #2, making a Xerox copy to size and taping a piece of Saral transfer paper to the back of the copy and then taping it to my illustration board. Then using a red ball point pen (so I can see where I’ve been) I traced the drawing to the illustration board and then cleaned it up a bit more.

4. The final painting: For a detailed painting description on paintingmethods see the tutorial about this issue’s cover starting on the next page.

4.

3.

DENNIS THE MENACE ™ AND ©2008 KING FEATURES SYNDICATE. ARTWORK ©2008 BILL WRAY

2.

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PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP

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PAINTING THE COVER: A COLLABORATION BETWEEN WRAY AND DESTEFANO. Working back and forth between De Stefano and Wray via fax machine for this issue’s cover, I merely stood on the sideline, made a few suggestions, and watched these to past collaborators and friends come up with a great cover for this issue. I rejected the first idea by Stephen, because I felt it didn’t really communicate the idea of an artist working in his studio, which is sort of the theme I was going for, the collaboration that an artist also gets from his models or subject matter. By Stephen’s second sketch the idea was nailed.

– DRAW! Editor, Mike Manley

STEP 1: Stephen submits cover rough via fax to Mike—Mike, Stephen and Bill agree that while the cowboy cover is a dramatic composition, it’s not as clever as the Animal Models idea.

DESTEFANO: My final sketch, and as good as I’d ever get it. Unfortunately, I still felt like something was lacking, like I just hadn’t nailed the composition. When Bill’s final painting came in—I freaked! I was ecstatic—Bill shrunk things, moved them around slightly and totally pulled everything together into a piece I’m entirely proud to have my name on. Brilliant, Bill—Whew!

STEP 2: After some discussion about composition issues and strengthening the gag idea, Stephen does a final pencil. This is in fax form to save time.

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PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP

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STEP 3: Bill takes the faxed pencils and slightly alters the composition again after consulting with Stephen. Then using Sarel transfer paper taped to the back of a recomposed Xerox copy, he traces the image off onto Strathmore 500 Illustration board (Heavy -Vellum).

STEP 4: Bill tightens up the blue pencil with graphite.

STEP 5: This is a small Xerox copy of Step 4 with a rough working out of the gray tones as a value study for the painting. Having the value painting clear in your mind before you start your final is essential in illustration to help you create a guide to know where you’re going.

STEP 6: This is a Xerox of the value study with the colors roughed in with Tombo brushes markers. This is a cheat only for an old experienced pro. It’s essential that the beginner do actual studies in paint to help them figure out where they are going, especially in a painting as complex as this one. If you have a short attention span and try to jump to the final without knowing where you are going, you will get as lost as if you are taking a journey to a new land without a map.

If you’re not confident of where you’re going, you will end up going in a circle until you create a muddy mess of overworked color.

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STEP 7: Ordinarily I paint the entire painting at once, but I this case my scanner was too small to show the entire painting so I did it in sections. I first covered the figures with airbrush frisket paper before I laid in the black and red background color. Step one (of the painting process,) is “laying in” the background. Always work from the back to the front, light to dark.

STEP 8 AND 9: I lay in the flat (mostly) mid-value colors—no blending—just keep it simple, concentrating on getting your values right. Your overall goal is to keep it as simple as possible. The lion and bear are finished, so look to the monkey for your example on this step.

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PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP

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STEP 10: Now I have laid in the textures that I’m using in this case as middles values that round our “flat style” forms. These textures are applied with a dry brush technique, modeling the table, chair back, the guy’s pants, and small details on the skin, like the elbows. To get the soft “dot texture” on his nose, beard, shoes and elsewhere, I’ve used a Makeup Sea Sponge (taping off the area first) and careful “dabbing” on a slightly darker value of the flat color I’m working in.

STEP 11: The final tightening. I now go about adding in the “accents” generally slightly darker outlines of the flat colors and more finial details like the hair on the arms and head. I do some minimal highlighting—restraint is important at this stage. I chose not to add highlights in the eyes, as that is a cliché best used for Disney video box covers and baby animal paintings. One highlight tip: Never use pure white. Use the local color, just a little lighter.

THE FINAL COVER.

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IN FASHION

Digital illustrator Celia Calle shares her unique insights into creating iconic covers for comics

DRAW!: You graduated from Parsons School of Design with a BFA, and you’ve won awards in fashion design. Some of your clients include Jean-Paul Gaultier Jeans, Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Big clients. How did you go about building this list? Do you advertise in the various advertising annuals or journals?

CELIA CALLE: Not during the time when I worked in fashion, these were mainly based from my own portfolio after graduation and meeting with the designers themselves, e.g., from working with them (or with their respectives).

DRAW!: Did you grow up wanting to do fashion illustration and comics?

ABANDON GIRLS ©2008 CELIA CALLE.

This interview was conducted by DRAW! Editor Mike Manley via e-mail and telephone and transcribed by Steven Tice

CC: Actually, neither. I wanted to be a fashion designer and do animation in-between my fashion career. Yes, I had pretty unrealistic goals. But when I worked in the “Fashion Industry” (especially as a designer), I no longer sketched or painted as much.

Instead, I was sent out to chase after the perfect buttons and renaming color palettes that sounded exactly the same to my ear.

Fussing over a stupid hem line, that required little talent. It was a nightmare... and complete boredom for me. I got assigned to “Illustration,” mainly because during job interviews, most of the designers awed over my presentation (portfolio) and drawing skills and usually over-looked my designs.

DRAW!: You live in the center for illustration—New York City.

Were you born there?

CC: I was born in Boston, raised in Texas, and have probably spent most of my life in New York City.

DRAW!: You were working professionally while in school and getting paid for it?

CC: Yes, I did work outside of school. And yes, I got paid for my work, but very little at the time.

DRAW!: Was your first work traditional methods or did you start right away with working with the computer?

CC: Pencils and paper. All traditional.

DRAW!: How did you get introduced to working on a computer? Did you start out on a PC or a Mac? CC: Mac. After college, like all good children, I was searching for full-time work. After a year or two of being a full-time assistants to ‘up-coming’ fashion designers (at the time) Amy Chan and Jeffery Costello, I landed a full-time job as an illustrator with a 102 THE BEST OF DRAW!

small company that worked on “Fashion Trends” (1995-96). The art director/supervisor, Ben Veronis, he and I shared the same office. Sometimes, he would ask me to help him scan a few things, and every day he would show me something new. Soon, he helped me set up my own station at home. Since then, I am forever grateful to him. I call him my computer-Jedi-master “O Ben.” DRAW!: Did it take a while to learn to approximate your techniques in the virtual world of the computer versus the real world of traditional media.

CC: I suppose I’m still learning no matter which medium we are discussing. There’s never an end to these things. But for what I do know now, it was all pretty much by accident and having the basics placed on my plate. The rest just fell naturally into place as I continued.

DRAW!: Did you start out trying to reproduce in Photoshop what you were doing in traditional media? How did you do this?

Was it trial by error?

CC: To be very honest with you? I really don’t remember. I defi-

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ABANDON GIRLS ©2008 CELIA CALLE.

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

CELIA CALLE

nitely did not try to reproduce what I did in traditional media in Photoshop. With the tools that it supplied then, it wasn’t possible.

I started off using lots of airbrushing, and stuck to the only tools I was familiar with (and sometimes still do). A lot of “trial by error.”

CALLE: Starting with the bottom layer—I would trace over the rough sketch, defining the lines, and start with a new fresh, clean pencil. Scan approx. 500dpi grayscale into Photoshop. Clean up minimum noise, using LEVELS. 1: Taking file into Painter and using the BRUSH tool, I will start with a quick light wash to areas needed. Then I bring the drawing back to Photoshop, with the painted layer, Placed on MULTIPLY. 1A: I select objects out, and place into a new layer with the girls and objects only.

2: In Photoshop, using the PAINT BRUSH tool, I start by selecting the areas I want to color, using FILL IN [paint bucket] the clothes, jackets, pants and tops. Using solid colors, I LASSO to select the areas I want to lighten or darken. Using the SMUDGE tool to smooth out wherever necessary.

3: I apply details to the clothes, such as pinstripes, burnt marks, using the selection tool, FILL IN. CONTRAST and LEVELS to highlight areas needed.

4: Touch-ups and Shadows—Redefining the images and areas. Again, using the LASSO, I select areas under LEVELS, to bring them up or down.

5: Touch up, Shading—using the SMUDGE tool, or BRUSH, to soften up hard edges.

6: Add-ons—additional objects, such as the ribbon, numbers on the measure tape, I add highlights to the screws on the ground.

7: The final shadow and detail touch-ups: Such as tip of the nose, hair, shine to their garments, the dress forms, etc.

BACKGROUND: The circle. I use a thick, flat BRUSH, creating an abstract “Tire-like” circle, placed behind all layers, to hold the entire illustration together.

DRAW!: How has the computer effected the way you work, your process?

CC: Take “speed” for instance, I can barely remember how I got by without one. I no longer have to re-draw everything if there’s a correction needed or demanded by the client.

If a client wants specific colors added/revised, it’s just a simple adjustment.

The downside of all this (virtually), is that I rarely have originals in my portfolio anymore, most of my work today just sits in discs and files that no longer apply.

DRAW!: How do you feel about that? Do you feel uncomfortable not having original works to hang on your wall or show later?

CC: Yes, I am very sad of not having many originals to show anymore, and the physical THE BEST OF DRAW! 103

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CELIA CALLE DRAW!: When you get a new assignment, do you immediately start thinking of how you will approach it via the computer, Photoshop?

CC: Yes, most of time it’s the same routine. Actual pencil sketch first, scan, and color.

TECHNICAL SIDEBAR DRAW!: What’s your studio set-up like?

CC: Like a Bat Cave. Only less glamourous. A Mac G4, and I have all your basic software/programs (Illustrator, Painter, Dreamweaver, Word, Quark, IE). But 99% of my work is mainly completed in Photoshop.

KITTY PRYDE, MECHANIX ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

DRAW!: Why Photoshop as opposed to Painter?

CC: I’m usually a stick to “know how” kind of person. I am just more comfortable with Photoshop. But for some of the work, I use Painter mainly to capture a real paint texture. But I always finish in Photoshop.

DRAW!: You work on a Wacom tablet?

CC: Not really. I mainly just use the mouse (again, a “know how” and “familiar to” sort of thing).

DRAW!: What size do you use? I know some artists, like me, like the larger tablets, but some are fine with the smaller tablets.

CC: I have both big and small tablets. The small one just sits better at my station.

DRAW!: Do you have high speed access, use Fetch or something similar to send files to clients via the web?

ABOVE: Cover Art for Marvel Comics’ MekaniX #1.

CC: Yes, I do Fetch at high speed. aspects of feeling/touching actual paint. It’s sometimes not by choice. Having to do “actual” paintings for fun and for myself is very time consuming. Being able to have all this requires a pretty calm and secure lifestyle.

DRAW!: Does the “virtual” aspect of the piece change your relationship with the piece?

CC: Not really. My work will always be my work, regardless of what medium. Especially now, we have the technology of getting life-size paintings printed on canvas. The options are always available when we need it.

DRAW!: So most of your work interfaces with the computer now?

CC: Yeah, it’s kind of like my uniform. It’s my best friend (next to my dog, of course). I’d feel unattached without one. Like with most of us, it’s a pretty big part of my life now....

DRAW!: So then I take it most of your clients don’t want the hassle of having originals scanned, etc.?

CC: Most of my clients are commercial/editorial. Supplying “ready to print” artwork plays a big role in their favor.

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DRAW!: When you do an illustration, do you start with a sketch and then import that into Photoshop, or do you draw it directly in Photoshop?

CC: I draw it on paper first, then I scan most of my work in Photoshop. I Scan the drawing or sketch in at 600-700 dpi in grayscale, because some of the art is later used as posters and they need to be high resolution.

DRAW!: Do you have it all preset? Do you use a certain type of pencil so it looks a certain way when you scan it in? Do you scan at a saved scanning preference?

CC: No, it’s just a habit of what I use and what’s convenient. I don’t really have specific pencils.... It’s just a habit of using a mechanical pencil, .5 mm lead and loose-leaf or photocopy paper.

DRAW!: Like regular twenty pound copy paper you buy at Staples, etc.?

CC: The color copy paper, not the plain Xerox paper. [laughs] DRAW!: Color copy paper?

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CC: Yeah, the color copy paper, it’s thicker and the surface is smoother. It’s just a habit of working on that. It’s not that I have a preference.

want a background, I usually select my objects/drawings away from the base layers, and have them stand on separate layers.

And later I would bring in the backgrounds.

DRAW!: It has a very nice drawing surface.

DRAW!: Your work has the feel of a watercolor. It looks like you’re not working at 100% opacity with the pen or the brush.

That you are sort of building up the work in washes, using the brush at a lower opacity and sort of building things up?

CC: Yes, it’s smooth. It’s easy to smear without having it blow away.

I also like regular number two pencils sometimes, but they tend to give you thick lines as they dull down, and I don’t want that. I mainly developed a habit of using just the basic tools and supplies prior to my graduation, because I didn’t really have much money during school, so I just used copy paper, and have since then.

DRAW!: Well, a lot of artists, myself included, use loose sheets of copy paper to draw and sketch.

CC: Really?

DRAW!: Yes. They use copy paper. I like the ink jet paper myself, because it’s a little bit heavier and it has a nicer surface.

Also, when I do storyboards, it’s always on basically that same twenty pound paper, then they just run it at legal size through a Xerox machine.

CC: Yeah! I do that a lot... how would you describe it? As far as the opacity, I don’t really calculate or save preferred settings, it’s just whatever feels right at the moment. How much color I need and how much of the density of color I want. As far as the size of the brush, it depends how big the file is, the drawing is. I will just go over the illustration in a series of washes... usually starting with the darkest areas (where the shadows are), hit the middle value, and lighten up areas where ever highlights are needed.

DRAW!: So you work from dark to light?

CC: Yes... mainly.

DRAW!: Well, that’s a very sort of a traditional way of working, especially in oil or gouache.

CC: Oh, okay. Good, so I’m not the only one. [laughs] DRAW!: No, a lot of people work on that paper.

CC: In some other tutorials that I’ve seen, most artists seem to work on tracing paper.

DRAW!: Yes, some artists work on tracing paper, some work on vellum.

CC: Vellum! I tried that, too, but that drives me crazy because it’s so smudgy, it smears way too fast, and my hand smudges along my drawings, and I lose the lines and the little details from my sketch.

KITTY PRYDE, MECHANIX ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

DRAW!: Right. A lot of the illustrators work on vellum because then you can put two or three different layers over and work on different elements and arrange elements in a different way, and be able to sell all the elements and then maybe do your final tracing.

CC: Ah, yes, I understand. It’s a necessity when you start incorporating more objects into your subject. Especially for storyboard artists. I think for me, a light box is a nice substitute for now (as to using tracing paper).

DRAW!: So once you get a sketch or the main drawing that you like, you scan it into Photoshop, and then you save it as a bitmap or a grayscale?

CC: Grayscale. Then I will clean it up like everybody else does, clean up smudges or lines I don’t want. It used to be where you had to erase it and just trace over your drawing. Now in Photoshop, you clean it up very easily. Next I create a new “blank” layer over the drawing, have the new layer set to “multiply,” and then color over my pencils. That way you can see your pencils while you’re coloring it. That will be my first layer most of the time. It depends on how I’m going to work it. But if I

ABOVE: Cover Art for Marvel Comics’ MekaniX #2.

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CC: Yes, that’s what I mainly worked with before digital medium.

CC: The cover to Fight for Tomorrow was all done in Photoshop.

But with the “Abandoned Girls,” I started out using a little bit with Painter. So it depends on which job, and what I’m going for.

I select the areas I want to lighten up or darken more. Take for instance, on the boy’s face in the Fight for Tomorrow cover, with the ski cap—first, I apply my medium tones and dark areas I want. I then select highlights where ever needed (e.g., around the nose, chin, and cheekbones, whereever I feel that needs to stand out. I will select them with the lasso tool in Photoshop, then under the photoshop menu, I use levels to help bring out the areas I want lightened or darkened. I rarely paint over it.

DRAW!: Do you like to generally have a texture to the surface of your work?

DRAW!: Oh, I thought maybe you’re using the DODGE and BURN tool or something like that.

CC: A texture?

CC: No, no DODGE and BURN. It’s like the most simple tools, like using crayons. I can’t be bothered with all these fancy methods. It becomes too complicated for something so simple to me.

Wherever you see an area of my work that’s shadowed (for instance, around the neck and his right side), I will usually select the area where I want darkened, and then I’ll use the levels to bring it down, instead of painting over it. But to areas where I actually paint over [BRUSH tool], it’s usually just for touch-ups, to help soften up rough edges. So it doesn’t just look generically selected and highlighted.

DRAW!: Now, this is all in Photoshop, right? This is not in Painter? Do you ever take it into Painter and apply texture?

DRAW!: Yes, you know, like a watercolor texture or wash or dry brush?

CC: No, I don’t really have a set texture applied to my work. It’s basically the paintbrush tools used in Painter and it’s the paintbrush when I use Photoshop. When people ask about how I get that painterly feel, it’s really a SMUDGE tool in Photoshop.

Since I’m very familiar with working in watercolor from back in school. I’m very comfortable using wash on my paintings, or capturing that look.

DRAW!: So you’re achieving that watercolor feel with the SMUDGE tool?

CC: A little bit of the SMUDGE tool. Not too much, because otherwise it gets messy and dirty. So just a very little around the edges where some of the tones need blending. Most of the time,

DRAW!: Okay. So you take the tool and you go back over the edge of the form where the dark and the light hit to sort of blend it together so it doesn’t have that hard edge, the digital edge, that raster edge.

CC: Yes, that’s exactly it. Like the tip of his nose, I would do the same. I would select it with the LASSO... and for some other areas, I would sometimes use the GRADIENT tool just to make it quick—for easy smooth outs. [laughs] It’s called the easiest and fastest way to color.

DRAW!: Well, that’s the amazing thing about Photoshop. Every time I talk to an artist who tells me now they color something or how they paint something, they have a very different, a very personal way of using the program.

CC: Yes, I can imagine.

DRAW!: To me, that’s the best thing about the program, that you can come at it from a personal angle of what works for you.

You don’t have to do it exactly like somebody else did.

STILLA ©2008 CELIA CALLE.

CC: There are probably easier ways to color or go about doing these steps, but this is what I find most simple and it makes sense to me. It’s 80% of how I usually work and color my drawings. It’s quick and simple. Especially since everything’s on a tight schedule here. I rarely have much time to mess around with fancy pens or try out “new, improved” tools.

DRAW!: Right. Well, I take it that most of the illustration work you’re doing is high pressure deadlines, as opposed to comics where, you might have a couple weeks to do a cover, or maybe even a month. I take it in illustration, often you’ll get a call and they’ll usually want something pretty fast, sometimes even overnight.

ABOVE: A self-promotion piece entitled “Stilla.”

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CC: Yes. Especially for editorial. They give you last minute, and I love it.

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THE PROCESS—Celia CALLE

STEP2: QUICK BRUSH IN PHOTOSHOP—Using the BRUSH tool and variations of OPACITY, I block in covering areas.

STEP3: BLACKTINT OVERLAY—I overlay a black tint on the entire image.

I select FILL in the MENU, and fill the layer at 15-30% MULTIPLY.

STEP4: TOUCH-UP—Using the LASSO tool and the BRUSH tool I select areas of dark and light. Using the GRADIENT tool or SMUDGE tool I soften breaking edges. I add pupils to the eyes and scars to the face with the SELECTION tool and BRUSH.

FIGHT FOR TOMORROW ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

STEP 1: PENCIL CLEAN-UP IN PHOTOSHOP—I scan my pencil sketch into Photoshop and clean up areas as needed, using LEVELS.

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CELIA CALLE DRAW!: But then they also probably pay you fairly decently because of the bad deadlines.

CC: Well, that’s why I love it. [laughter] They pay you generously for such a small amount of time, you know. [laughs] And we usually don’t have time to fuss about it either.

DRAW!: So do you usually work pretty closely with the art directors?

CC: For editorial, yes, and for advertisements sometimes pretty close. Because you need to understand what they want, and you want to get to that point fast and not have too many people in between.

FIGHT FOR TOMORROW ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

DRAW!: Do they usually supply you some sort of a comp or an idea, a sketch?

CC: They would give me the basic ideas of what they want. If they have a certain positioning of how they see it [the advertisement/layout], they will probably draw it out for me first, using the classic stick figures. As for the editorial, they usually don’t.

They just give out a description, and have you guessing. So you supply them with a few quick sketches until they decide which idea gears more in their direction.

DRAW!: So you usually give them two or three ideas, sketches?

STEP5: CAP & FINAL TOUCH-UPS—Again, using the LASSO tool or BRUSH tool, I create the cap and minimal texture, under TEXTURE/GRAIN I fill-in soft grain, using SELECTIONS and LEVELS to shadow and lighten areas wherever needed.

CC: About two—three tops—rough sketches. I think any more after that it comes to a point, it’s as if I’m doing animation. [laughter] Where had you placed all the rough sketches together, and did a flip book, you can see it actually move, like “Look!

He’s running!” [laughter] So yes, I would usually only provide up to three drafts, unless it’s for someone I’m very well-acquainted with, or someone I’m friends with. They can definitely have more than just three shots at it.

DRAW!: Now, I wanted to ask you if you have an agent?

CC: I just recently got one, but it’s not for editorial and it’s not for ads.

It’s an agent for what I want to do in the long run: Animation. I would love to have my work become animated, STEP 6: 1) Using the SELECTION tool, I try and capture a feel of real “shattered glass” by randomly selecting away, in EDIT under the MENU, using STROKE, placing pieces wherever necessary, wherever it fits and looks balanced to the eye. Using shadows with the AIRBRUSH or BRUSH tool, and light OPACITY—selection to MULTIPLY—I go over areas, chip away edges, where I want cracks and depth. Highlighting areas, using the SELECTION tool, soft GRADIENTS capture a glass-like texture.

2) INVERT the entire image.

3) I highlight areas by using the SELECTION tool and cover using the GRADIENT tool.

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FIGHT FOR TOMORROW ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

LEFT AND BELOW: The pencil sketch and final layered version showing the couple embracing. Calle’s process here is the same as wtih the boy’s face.

not necessarily drawing each frame. Not storyboards, but the character and story design. So having just recently gotten myself an agent, it’ll be a while before I get myself in the works. But as far as reps and agents for my own work (past and current), none.

DRAW!: You also have a pretty cool web site. How much time do you devote to that every month? Do you maintain that yourself?

CC: A good friend of mine, Charles Lee, had it set up for me in the beginning, and then it got to the point of having to keep bothering him just for updating; it became such a pain. So he kindly showed me a few steps, and I took it from there on. I mostly update it myself now, maybe at least every three to six months or whenever I feel like it.

DRAW!: So you try and keep it fresh with a bunch of new work that you’ve done?

CC: Yes, I put up a few samples of new stuff that I’ve done.

DRAW!: And what do you use to do your web design? Are you using Dreamweaver or Go-Live to update it yourself?

CC: Dreamweaver, yeah, it’s so easy too. I never realized how easy it was. [laughs] DRAW!: How important would you say your web site is to you as far as getting your name out, having a presence out there on the web, and generating work. Do you refer your clients to it regularly?

CC: Well, the web site has definitely saved you from expending all that energy and efforts of having to send out an actual portfolio. I think before having a web site, when art directors wanted to see your work, you had to FedEx your big fat book to them. It can become a very frustrating process because it takes a while before they have your book returned. But with the web site, art directors can just take a look at exactly what it is that you do and can either pass or contact you, or even decide whether they need your actual portfolio. Before the web, having to show your work, you had to send them samples, and you’d spend most of the time THE BEST OF DRAW! 109

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LEFT: The final illustration showing all of the layered elements.

FIGHT FOR TOMORROW ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

sort of weird kind of look, like, “What do you mean, check out your web site?”

CC: And now it’s the question, “Do you have a web site?”

and effort just making samples, like promo kits. But now I hardly even remember how it’s done. Instead of constantly updating your promo kit and making postcards, now you get clients without even handling your actual book. They already know what you do, because you have a web site. As far as importance, I think the web-site is the best thing ever invented for self-promotion.

DRAW!: I agree. And it seems like in the last three years, it’s gotten to the point where if you say to someone, a perspective client, “Well, you can check out my web site,” you don’t get that 110 THE BEST OF DRAW!

DRAW!: Right. Because there seemed to be a holdover where a lot of the agencies and people didn’t have internet connections, or they had a bad internet connection, they had 56K, or 28.8 so they couldn’t go look at your web site because it would take nine hours to load.

And now it seems like that’s pretty much the way to go. It’s standard to have a web site and you can refer people to it.

CC: It’s exciting, yeah. It helps show your work to more people without having to box it. It’s also a fantastic way to download all the energy and the creativity that you want to show. Even for film makers with their demos, instead of having to say, “Oh, I wish Disney would do something like this,” or “I want to show this to so and so,” you can basically do it yourself. Or even just

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something to amuse yourself for fifteen minutes and then you’re fine. [laughter] It’s instant gratification.

CC: That was from the Internet, so that kind of gives you an idea of a good response.

DRAW!: Would you say that your web site brings you a fair amount of income, enough that it returns enough that it pays for itself, the maintenance of it?

DRAW!: They’ll come across your site and fire off an e-mail and say, “Well, I like your work, it’s very interesting. What are your prices, etc?”

CC: Well, first of all, the Internet is so cheap now. I think, in the beginning—you and I probably remember when we started—it was like 80 dollars a month. Mine was at $89.99 (per month) or something—90 bucks—just to keep the host. And it didn’t even offer you that much space. Now they charge as little as seven dollars a month. That’s nothing. Mine is pretty cheap now, maybe like 20 bucks a month.

CC: Yeah, it’s not just all “Oh, I love your site!” [laughs] It can be more professional sometimes.

DRAW!: Well, what would get me was the bandwidth.

CC: Oh yes, that too. How much bandwidth do you use, on a regular basis?

DRAW!: My site was actually fairly big, and there was a lot of images on it, so people could spend an hour looking around on my site or reading some of the comics or looking at the art that I put up there. So initially the ISP that I had my site with, gave me one gig of bandwidth.

DRAW!: I suppose you also get a fair amount of people asking you how do you do what you do? Young artists asking for pointers.

CC: Yes, a lot.

DRAW!: And do you have a tutorial on your site?

CC: I have a “frequently asked questions” section. It takes you to the link, “step-by-step” magazine, so they can order that issue.

I’m just not good at explaining how I work. It’s very non-literal.

If you sit next to me, I can show you exactly what I do, but if you want me to describe it, it becomes very difficult. Because it’s not something I calculate when I’m working. I don’t usually like to plan what I am going to do, I like to work freely. So, it’s

CC: Oh gosh! That’s just enough for downloading your index page!

DRAW!: I was going way over that, and they were killing me.

For every meg I went over, they were charging me....

CC: Like 97 bucks or something per extra bytes, right?

KITTY PRYDE, MECHANIX ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

DRAW!: Yeah. So I have a good web host now. He doesn’t even charge me bandwidth, he just charges me a decent monthly fee.

And if I need... for instance, to do a job like this magazine, where I want to put the files up on my server. And I say, “Well, gee, I need an extra two hundred megs so I can fit the magazine up on the server and my publisher can download it.” My service guy at www.routerdog.com will go right in and create that for me, so I can put it up there. It’s great that way, because then I don’t even have to worry about burning a CD or anything, I can just FTP the book onto my server and John [Morrow] can download it.

CC: Yeah, the bandwidth is pretty generous on mine, too, it’s unlimited.

DRAW!: Would you say your web site does bring you a regular amount of work?

CC: I can’t really put that into perspective, but it helps. I can’t really answer that question, because I don’t really know where...

DRAW!: Where people are seeing your work?

CC: Yes. It pays for itself, that’s for sure. At the same time, it helps generate you. Maybe one out of every five hundred viewers will probably contact you for possible work.

DRAW!: Like, the work for Marvel—I think you said someone contacted you via the Web?

ABOVE: Cover Art for Marvel Comics’ MekaniX #3.

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just at that moment of how I feel about the particular illustration, of what it needs, and what needs to be done.

DRAW!: You said you give rights for one year on your illustrations, and put that in the contract on your invoice, unless the client stipulates they want a buy-out. Has anyone ever objected?

CC: Usually early in the project, most agencies would ask for a price quote, they usually want the “buy out” option as well. At the moment, it’s been mostly with 1-5 years usage price. No objections.

DRAW!: Do you advertise in the trade annuals for illustration, and do you feel it’s worth it to buy a spread?

CC: I advertise in The Alternative Pick. Although there are so many of these trade books available to us. I have to keep my budget under control, so I limit myself with them. Buying a spread is completely for one’s own preference. I personally go for the spread... mainly for egotistical reasons. [laughs] But it’s not very practical when you’re trying to keep your budget under control.

COMICS DRAW!: How did you become interested in comics?

CC: I started liking comics mainly because of the artwork, plus the easy reading. I was in love with Batman, Detective Comics was one of my favorites, the character being so fine, tall, dark

and mysterious, not to mention how I loved the cape (especially how some of them were drawn). I think it’s the art, mostly, the drawings that were “flowy” and beautiful. On the other side, I loved Snoopy, a.k.a. Peanuts! From the Sunday papers, and the all the Calvin & Hobbes books for their story. But like most of us, I had to go through college and make a real living (by my parents’ books). So as a dedicated “comic fan,” it somewhat tarnished along the years... but I would still race home to watch my favorite cartoons back in college.

DRAW!: Really. what cartoons were you into?

CC: Bugs & Daffy (Looney Tunes), Robotech, Batman the Animated Series. Animated films: Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Dumbo, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories [mainly for the visuals], Vampire Hunter D, Iron Giant, etc.)

DRAW!: Did you still collect or read any comic books at that time?

CC: Collect comics? Not really. I would pop into comic stores to see what’s on shelves and shop for familiar items, but the need to collect, wasn’t at mind.

DRAW!: You said you used to follow comics, but not religiously. But you were sort of interested in the different styles and art.

What was it that attracted you? What types of stories, things like that? Or artwork?

CC: As for stories, they were mainly Batman. The later ones, I really enjoyed reading Batman Adventures. The drawings were great and fun. At the time I really didn’t know their names (and some, I still don’t), I saw the artwork and fell in love with it. I later found out—some of them being Alex Ross and Bruce Timm.

It was their work (among a few others) that I was pretty drawn to.

It was only later that I realized who they were. And there are other artists that I can’t seem to recall their names now, but I know their artwork. It’s a little more of a classic... DC comics?

DRAW!: Like the old, classic... the Detective artists like Jim Aparo or people like that?

KITTY PRYDE, MECHANIX ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

CC: Errr... I feel like a complete idiot not being able to give you their names right now. Since most of the old comics are stashed away at my parents’ house.

DRAW!: I find it interesting to talk to an artist who comes in from outside of comics but is attracted to the imagery of comics—not a fanboy in a big geek sense—and what it is that they find attractive? Because you’re not a fan boy, you’re not, “Oh, I have to have every issue of such-and-such.” You’re attracted to the art and the images.

CC: Oh, totally. It’s the artwork that I always loved more than anything, and I don’t think I hesitated on that, ever. And I admit that. Gosh, I have a cover here with... let me see if I can find the cover art. Like, this latest issue that I picked up of Wonder Woman, there is this Nazi guy and she is kind of beating him up.

DRAW!: It’s a Wonder Woman comic?

ABOVE: Cover Art for Marvel Comics’ MekaniX #5.

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CC: Yeah.

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CC: [laughs] I like what he did with Batman [in Arkham Asylum.] those drawings in there were pretty twisted and I loved it! Very Francis Bacon.

DRAW!: Okay, I can see that.

BATGIRL ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS. ILLUSTRATION ©2008 CELIA CALLE.

CC: I always loved Batman the Animated Series. For the art and for their story. I remember how I’d run home from school just to watch that, at three or four o’clock on the WB. If there was a class going on, I would like, “Oh, I’ve gotta go home now! [laughter] DRAW!: Skipping class to watch cartoons! [laughter]

ABOVE: Calle’s take on Batgirl.

BELOW: Calle’s personal Christmas card, done in the wake of 9/11.

DRAW!: That’s probably Adam Hughes who did the cover.

CC: Yes! Adam Hughes! Thanks! I picked up that because I thought that cover was just so beautiful.

DRAW!: He does beautiful work.

CC: That’s what happened! So I would run home just to watch my continued episodes. And I didn’t even realize who Bruce Timm was then, until I got on Shane Gline’s board (www.shaneglines.net). It was just something I was never very curious about. Especially having studied fashion, I was never aware or took much notice on the “comic/artist” aspect of things.

Instead, I would be more curious about fashion illustrators, such as René Gruau, Tony Viramonte, and Theirry Perez. So now, I feel super-unattached in front of all these talented “comic artists.”

I would get so embarrassed, [laughs] “Oh, yeah! I love your work, but I just didn’t know your name!” [laughs] But hey, I forgive the kids who do the same thing to me sometimes. “You’re a girl?” [laughter] So yeah, that was mainly my interest in comics.

But as far as drawing, the interiors, the whole story, I had always thought the whole interior layout thing is too time consuming... such a lot, too much work (for so little to accommodate). But if I am asked to give you a layout of the interiors of these comic books, I would probably take forever, only because I can become so obsessed with it, and the need for it to be “perfect” can drive me nuts!

BREAKING IN DRAW!: How did you end up doing the covers for Marvel and

CC: Yes, he sure does! I pay a lot more attention to the art than who drew it, and it’s always been a real problem with me. But it’s the honest reason. Even with Heavy Metal magazines. I actually own more of the Heavy Metal issues because there’s just more artwork in there. And the stories, I never really had time to read them. But the artwork is less, in a way, “commercial” with Heavy Metal, I think.

DRAW!: Well, it’s certainly much more European....

CC: Or that way, if you want to....

DRAW!: Because they’re importing a lot of work from overseas, so it’s not just super-heroes, it’s a lot of fantasy or science fiction.

RED CROSS ©2008 CELIA CALLE

CC: I guess it’s the art that I’ve always cared for most. Not that I don’t care about story. It’s mainly because for my own personal drawings, I like to always be better at it. So I intend to find things that attract me, or that would improve me. I also love the paintings by Ashley Wood. His work is quite unique. As well as Dave McKean.

DRAW!: Yes, another big Photoshop maven.

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BELOW: An illustration done for Nike.

DC? CC: Marvel? The editor, Andrew Lis (XTreme X-men and Cable), contacted me out of the blue. He found my work on my web site. As far as DC goes, I went to the Comicon International: San Diego 2001, and my beloved sister, Victoria, handed one of my promokits to Will Dennis (100 Bullets) at the Vertigo booth. Not long afterwards, I got a call from him. That’s how it was.

DRAW!: When they approached you from Marvel to do those X-Men covers, had you been an X-Men fan before that?

CC: I have friends who are big X-Men fans, so I was pretty familiar with who they were and what they were about. And especially after the first movie (X-Men), I think all of us (even non-comic readers) became very aware of them.

DRAW!: Do you go to the comic shop now since you are doing more comic work?

CC: Oh, yeah, of course. Although not much more than before.

The comic shops are pretty close by, and many are here in the city. I will pop in just to go around, check out the book covers and walk out. [laughter] Go in, look around, and if I see something I like, maybe buy a few and then walk out. But I never had the interest of properly reading it. Again goes the same reasons and interest.

DRAW!: Do you do a lot of drawing and sketching away from work, just for your own enjoyment?

CC: Oh, definitely! It’s what I wake up to! I can’t wait to get on with my own projects, y’know? Sometimes when I receive new assignments, you just have to do it, because it’s work. But then you’ll get free time in between... I just can’t wait to work on my own stuff and draw my own subjects. It’s mostly things and ideas that I want to download from my head. It’s not necessarily just to keep myself in knowledge, up to date with skills, or anything. It’s just fun, and it’s something that I love to do. But there are times 114 THE BEST OF DRAW!

when I’m not inspired, I can go on for periods of weeks or even months not doing a thing with my personal work. If I’m not inspired, I don’t force myself. I don’t force myself to the table.

There’s no point.

DRAW!: You don’t sit there, just keep drawing and crunching up pieces of paper— CC: No. DRAW!: —and throwing them into the basket?

CC: That will happen sometimes. And sometimes I’ll be bored and suddenly think up “Oh, you know what? I want to draw a girl hanging upside down. I think that would look cool on the web site.” So I will jump to the table and draw out a girl hanging upside down. One or the other. It’s either you’re bored and you scribble out a mess or “Oh my God, I have to do this!” [laughs] DRAW!: Sometimes I find that the process of sketching before I work is sort of like blowing the dust off to get at what’s underneath. And you might have to do a bunch of almost noise or junk sketches to get everything in tune or something.

CC: On a very bad day, if I can’t get it right, I can have hundreds of raw sketches (tossed away). But there are very good days, where you have one shot and you don’t want to mess up that original piece because it has all of the energy and all the movements there, that when you trace over, it becomes very stale and it looks traced over, it loses a certain energy. I hate the feeling of losing that energy.

DRAW!: And that first sketch always has the energy. And you may never get it again. You can never, it’s like it’s almost impossible...

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CELIA CALLE DRAW!: So there’s no pressure, there’s no external pressure.

CC: Yeah, I would constantly catch myself saying, “Well, I can do it tomorrow, I can do it tomorrow.” So you actually never get the work done.

And because of that, I think work has kind of spoiled me in that aspect.

BLUE TRASH ©2008 CELIA CALLE.

DRAW!: So would you say your work week is a 40-hour work week or more?

CC: It all depends on your mood, like I said before. If you can, it’s great. If it doesn’t, it sucks. [laughter] Sometimes you can’t get that energy back, or it’s just that little thing that you totally need... “the inspiration.” For example, a Christmas card I did from a year ago, (a girl playing a violin with a red-cross striped over her), Something like that for instance, a thought would pop up, “I feel like drawing a girl, nun-like, playing the violin, something peaceful,” and it’s what I wanted to portray, especially after what happened to Sept 11. The inspiration (of wanting to create something pleasant or visually appealing) will come naturally.

CC: My life is about my work. I even dream about it. And some of my work is from what I dream about (no kidding)! I wake up and I’m at work! [laughs] Nah, drawing is my life. It’s everything to me. It’s my identity. It’s entertainment. And if I’m not working on it, I’m thinking about it. And if I’m with someone, I’m talking about it. Without it I am one super-bored person. I hardly consider what I do is “work.” If it’s something you love, and get paid for it? Damn. [laughter] DRAW!: Well, I think that’s the best kind of artist to be.

CELIA CALLE is a freelance illustrator living in New York City. You can contact her and view her work on website: www.celiacalle.com

DRAW!: One of the things I like about doing the interviews with different artists for DRAW! is finding out the process and the way they go about working. Because I know many cartoonists and many artists I’ve interviewed never draw unless they’re working. They don’t keep a sketchbook or they don’t just doodle on loose sheets of paper. There are a lot of artists out there who, if it isn’t for a job, they.... It’s like not chopping wood, they’re not in the forest.

CC: [laughs] Well, I think work in general has gotten me lazy with my own “personal” work, because I just feel like there’s no deadline and there’s no purpose, and it’s kind of like, “Ah, no one’s waiting on it.”

PHOTO © WALTER BRINSKI STUDIOS.

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THE PEN & BRUSH ARE MIGHTIER THAN THE PENCIL

By DRAW! Editor Mike Manley

©2008 BECKER AND MAEYER. ARTWORK © MIKE MANLEY

The job of the inker in comics is probably the most misunderstood of all of the crafts, yet the inkers skill can have the biggest effect on the drawing itself, second only to the penciler. They are called a variety of names from embellisher to finisher—and often very inventive curse words under their breath by many a comic penciler if they botch a job inking a precious bit of drawing. Being both a penciler and sometimes an inker myself of other artists’ work, simply put, inking is drawing in ink with a pen or a brush.

It’s not tracing, despite that funny scene in the Kevin Smith movie. After all, once the pencils are erased, the art that’s left is what the inker interpreted from the pencils, good, bad and ugly. I liken the inker to the conductor of an orchestra. The conductor studies a piece of music intensely, and interprets the arrangement of the composer of the original work or musical score. He should have a thorough knowledge of music principles, the original composer’s work, and the various instruments. He knows where the strings come in and how loud they should be. Well that’s what a good inker should do. He or she should be a good artist in their own right, draw well, understand the fundamentals of drawing, composition, anatomy, perspective, line, and have a great skill with the pen and mastery of the brush. Where the penciler fails or there is a question, the inker will have to cover that gap, interpret and add what needs to be finished—be it a black to balance the composition, or to fix an eye, hand (sometimes whole figures) or a bit of

ABOVE: The final inked illustration and the penciled sketch, for a door alarm instruction manual. I loved being able to use the rag to add texture on the cave wall and keep the pencils loose so I can keep the inking fresh.

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off drawing—like a plastic surgeon. Many times I’ve had to fix eyes, add fingers, redraw entire figures (upon request by the editor) and arrange features properly on the face, etc.

One of the things I advise younger students or beginners is to draw directly in ink with a pen or a brush. Fill lots of sketch paper with drawings and doodles so you loose any fear of the pen or brush. As you become used to drawing in ink as opposed to just making a slick line, you will begin to draw in ink with an authority and truth. A slick line that does not describe the form in space is just a mark on paper, not a head, or hand, a figure, etc. Diligent practice will quickly build up your skill and confidence. Most young artists feel more confident with a pen as opposed to a brush because a brush takes more skill to master.

But once you do, the brush is the most incredible of drawing tools. The variety of line you can make with a brush is endless, much more varied than the pen because of it’s organic flexibility.

Every inker or artist drawing in ink has a unique line, like handwriting. I suggest grabbing a selection of pen nibs and brushes and then experiment. Play around with them and see how they react. Like a test drive of a fine sports car, grab some scrap paper and go for a ride in line. You’ll naturally come to find a nib or brush that fits your way of working best. The standard nib that most comic inkers seem to prefer is the Hunt 102.

Many inkers are now also using Pigma and Zig markers, as markers have gotten really, really good. But no marker can beat the snap of a good pen or brush, at least not to me yet.

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TOOLS OF THE TRADE PENS: After nearly 20 years as a working professional cartoonist, I have experimented and tried many, many different pens and brushes. Through trial and error I have narrowed down my arsenal of tool to a handful.

A

B

A) The Hunt 108. It’s probably my overall favorite pen nib. I can get the widest variety of line widths and flexibility. It’s flexible quill gives me a nice thin-thick stroke that’s great for lush pen inking. The nibs are not as good today as they were 10 years ago. It seems the metal they are made of isn’t as heavy a gauge. Every once in a while I get a nib that will last for 10 pages before it snaps, but sometimes they snap after 3-4 pages of heavy comic inking.

B) The Deleter Free Penholder and the 200 or 250 pen point. They are larger dowel type points that give you a stiffer pen line, which is good for a steady line thickness. It’s good for doing a lot of heavy classic “hatching” with the pen. They are available from: http://www.omochabox.com BRUSHES: Nothing beats a good Kolinsky sable, but they are getting very expensive and I have a batch I bought in the Eighties I’m saving for more personal work. I dole them out like Scrooge giving a raise. But synthetic brushes have also been getting better, and I’ve found a very inexpensive one which works pretty well. The Loew Cornell 795 Round: I use the #2 and #3. It’s not as flexible as a Kolinsky, and the point will wear down fairly fast, in 10 pages or so, but for an inexpensive brush, I recommend it.

DON’T THROW AWAY THAT OLD BRUSH!: It happens to every brush eventually. It splits, and no amount of brush soap or cleaning can save it. It gets stray crazy hairs which ruins the point and makes it unusable for fine inking. But instead of tossing that old brush into the trash, keep it!

Old brushes are great for a variety of things. If they are not split too badly, they are great for filling in large areas of black, which can save a better brush from the hair-splitting punishment. Or you can use them to get some really cool textures, lines and dry brush. Take an razor or utility blade to that old brush and cut it at an angle. You can get all kinds of great textures by doing this.

RAGS: I learned to ink or apply texture with a rag or sponge by seeing some art by my friend Ricardo Villagran. He had this page of comic art with this great texture on it. I asked him how he achieved this and he held up this ink soaked dish rag. So grab any old rag, or mom’s old dish towel. You can cut them into smaller pieces for easier handling. The rougher the texture the better., then dab on a bit of ink (I use a dropper or a brush) and then dab the rag with your finger on the paper. Use a few scraps of extra paper and experiment till you find a texture you like. You can also use a sponge to get a similar effect.

HUNT 108

TOWEL OR RAG

COTTON BALL

BRUSH CLEANING TIPS

DRY BRUSH DELETER

My tips on brush cleaning are simple: 1) Keep cleaning the water. I have a big jar next to my desk where I rinse my brush often. I change the water two times or so a day when working. If the phone rings, I take a second and clean out my brush. If you allow the ink to harden in the brush it will ruin the point quicker.

2) If the brush is really dirty, I will take a cap full of rubbing alcohol and roll the brush in it.

The alcohol dissolves the shellac in the ink and breaks it up. Then using either brush soap or even hair shampoo (after all, it is made of hair) I wash the brush well and bring it to a point and let it dry. Consistent brush care will help keep a brush for a long time.

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BATGIRL ™ AND ©2008 D COMICS.

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SAMURAI JACK ™ AND ©2008 CARTOON NETWORK

TOP LEFT: Here is a page from the Samurai Jack one-shot penciled by Bill Wray. To help Bill out on a tight deadline I chipped in and inked a few pages from Bill’s rough, energetic and fun pencils. This can be a challenge but I take it as a good opportunity to stretch a bit, and the important info is already there in Bill’s pencils. And since I had worked on the Samurai Jack TV show as a storyboard artist, I was already familiar with the style.

BOTTOM LEFT: This is the final page in ink. I added a bit of texture in the first panel with a black Prisma Color pencil.

ABOVE: Here is a commission I did for a fan where I drew it on a paper with some tooth to it and used both a Prisma Color pencil for the sky and a combo of rag and Prisma Color for the wall the ladder is attached to.

Drawings like this can be a great way to experiment with techniques.

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LEFT: Here is a page from Dexter’s Lab #33, penciled and inked by me.

I usually don’t pencil this tight for myself to ink, but sometimes on a licensed book like this, you need to draw tighter since it goes through a multi-stage approval process.

BELOW: The same page inked by me. I used a lot of pen on this as Dexter’s style is rather hard.

BOTTOM LEFT: In this panel did use some dry brush/spilt hair inking with an old brush. Textures like this can really help give a page some variety and life.

DEXTER’S LAB ™ AND ©2008 CARTOON NETWORK

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ELVIRA 1) The first thing I do when inking a page is take my Rapidograph and triangle and rule the panel borders. Then I take a few minutes and study the page looking at the blacks, gray tones and textures that will have to be interpreted into either solid black in ink or into a texture with a pen or a brush. In this case I’m lucky, John Heebink’s pencils are beautiful. John’s also a best friend, so it makes it fun as I have inked John’s work many times before. Also an added benefit is that John’s work is really solidly drawn and very textural. It is a challenge and fun at the same time as it requires me to interpret and to stay sharp on the drawings, not to lose any of the life and drawing, especially in the faces and that great detail on the skeletons. There are a lot of gray tones here in the pencils that I will have to decide how I want to handle in ink texture-wise, to keep the effect or intention John had in his pencils.

My typical way of inking is to start with a pen first. I go in and do as much as I can with the pen, then go back with a brush, tickling, feathering, depending on the style of art, realistic, cartoony, etc. I select the type of pen nib based on the style of inking I am going for, and this is based on the style of the art.

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ELVIRA® AND MISTRESS OF THE DARK ARE ™ AND ©2008 QUEEN “B” PRODUCTIONS.

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like a Hunt 108 which is pretty flexible, or a brush. Choosing a pen nibs is like choosing a dance partner. Are you gonna tango, waltz, or breakdance? Some nibs like the Hunt 108 give you a line like this, sort of lush. Others, like the Deleter nib, give you a line less flexible. Every inker I know seems to have a favorite pen nib, I on the other hand choose my nib based on the line I want for the job.

I usually work on several pages at once, especially since the ink line a pen puts down takes a while to dry sometimes, especially in humid conditions. If it’s humid I always run my air conditioner as I hate having the paper become limp with the extra humidity.

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2

ELVIRA® AND MISTRESS OF THE DARK ARE ™ AND ©2008 QUEEN “B” PRODUCTIONS.

3

inked in pen and I could go in and do a fair amount of good pen textures as well since this Elvira is a black-and-white comic, so I won’t have to worry about a colorist overpowering the work with some of that muddy coloring that seems to be so popular today on too many comics. Now I’m ready to go in with the brush and finish the page off. Work time at this point is about two hours.

2) I continue working on this page. I go through and do most of the major figure work with a 108 nib. I do Elvira’s figure first since she’s the main figure, then I work on the skeleton warriors.

They are all done in the Deleter pen nib. Its stiffer line I think complements the hardness of a skeleton. One thing about working in pen is that I have to set the page aside and let it dry fairly often, and the pen lines take longer to dry. Sometimes I have a small clip-on fan attached to my drawing desk. If the drying time seems to be taking too long, I’ll turn the fan on and lay the wet pages in front of it to speed the drying time.

Here is a scan where I adjusted the contrast to show the pen work done so far. The skeletons really lent themselves to being

3) Taking a Loew-Cornel #2 synthetic brush—which is pretty good, though nowhere near as good as a top-of-the-line Kolinsky Sable—I go in and fill the blacks and ink the hair, Elvira’s pants, and shadows on the ground. Next I go in and finish the background in a slightly radiating line pattern. The last thing I do is erase the page (I use a kneaded eraser, as it takes up less ink and I don’t get all those erase crumbs) and white out any little smudges, mistakes, wayward lines, etc. Then I give the page one last once-over where I may spice up a line here or there with the brush, if need be, to add a final touch to a line weight and I’m done. Total working time: around 3-4 hours.

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LEFT: This is an example of direct pen sketching and drawing. It is a loose page from one of my sketchbooks. I drew everything here directly with a pen and brush without penciling first. This sort of direct drawing in ink, I believe, is essential to gaining skill with the pen and brush, mastery of the instrument—but it’s also fun!

THE DIGITAL WAVE BELOW: What constitutes inking is only going to keep changing, morphing, becoming more impacted by the advancement in desktop publishing, as the comic publishers adapt into their production what has been common in the commercial art world for several years. DSL, FTP and high-speed Internet access, CD-Rom, DVD, digital tablets, you name it.

I have already digitally inked illustrations and have done jobs where I ran the pencils out in nonrepro blue on comic illustration board and inked the job. This Catwoman piece by Mike Oeming and myself is a prime example. To promote an issue of Catwoman Secret Files we were doing, Oeming penciled this piece then e-mailed it to me. I opened it in Photoshop, converted it into a non-repro blue and printed it out at 250 dpi on DC comic board with my Epson Photo 1200, and then inked it.

Next, I scanned the piece back in and e-mailed it off to Mike and DC. I’m still pretty old school. I think inking is best when done on 2- or 3-ply bristol with a pen or brush. I can, and do, work digitally, and I like it, but I still prefer having that ink smudge on my index finger and gray smear on the outside of my right hand at the end of the day from inking.

THE FINAL INKED VERSION:

CATWOMAN ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS.

THE ORIGINAL GRAYSCALE FILE I RECEIVED FROM OEMING:

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1: Here is another great page by John. there is a lot of opportunity to have fun here with all of the textures. After a few minutes study, I start by separating the foreground figures from the background (the statue of Elvira) and the middle ground (Elvira herself).

2: I finish the penwork on the skeleton and start a bit on the foliage. In this case I did Elvira last.

3: The finished page. The texture and spotting of blacks by John and strong composition make this a great page and made it fun to ink.

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INSTANT CARTOONIST

STEpheN DE STEFANO

Interview by Mike Manley Transcribed by Steven Tice

DRAW!: So this interest was genuinely supported by everybody in your family, it wasn’t looked down on...?

DRAW!: Why don’t we start at the beginning, okay, and go over your career a little bit. How did you get interested in comics?

Did you read comics as a kid? What about animation? Is it something you’ve always wanted to do?

SDS: I think they didn’t understand it very much, but they knew that it had some notoriety to it and that it was a big business, so nobody said, “I forbid you to be an artist,” or anything like that.

They were fairly supportive, yeah.

STEPHEN DESTEFANO: Okay! Well, I always wanted to be a cartoonist, because I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember.

DRAW!: So when did you start drawing? When would you say you really started drawing your own comics or animation or whatever?

DRAW!: So you wanted to do comics and cartooning right from the beginning, as a kid?

SDS: Yeah, I just loved cartoons. And the good thing was that my oldest brother loved cartoons. My whole family liked cartoons.

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SDS: Well, gee. I guess my first character was, like, Herbie the Pig or something like that when I was five. [Mike laughs] Or maybe earlier. And then my first super-hero was a character named Fastman, which I was really proud of. That was probably when I was six or seven. And he looked just like the Flash except that he had a cape, which I thought was really spiffy.

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COMICS & ANIMATION

STEPHEN DeSTEFANO

DRAW!: It made him cooler because he had a cape.

SDS: Yeah, yeah! Capes made everybody cooler. But, yeah, I was drawing since I was really little. They tell me that when I was three or something that a neighbor would come by and ask me to draw Mickey Mouse and I would do it.

DRAW!: Wow! SDS: Well, I dunno. It was just something that I always liked to do. My dad would bring home paper. He used to work at a Ford dealership, and I don’t know what these pads were for, but they were huge pads of paper. And he’d just bring home reams of them and I’d fill them up.

’MAZING MAN AND ALL RELATED CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

ABOVE: Probably the only “official” ’Mazing Man size relation chart drawn by the artist.

BELOW: An un-inked page from the first ’Mazing Man Special. A good example of where the artist’s head was at in ’86, and how much his art would change.

DRAW!: That’s similar to my growing up, because my grandmother used to work for Chrysler. She was a secretary there, and she would do the same thing. She would bring me home just tons of old papers and markers, pencils and such, because a big corporation like that is always tossing stuff out.

SDS: Yeah. My dad worked at a Ford dealership as a mechanic, and like I said, I don’t know what these pads were for, but on one side they had a grid that the mechanic would write in, and on the other side they were blank. And by the time I got through with them, they weren’t blank anymore.

[Mike laughs] DRAW!: Now, did you have favorite cartoons or favorite characters as a kid?

SDS: Oh, yeah, absolutely. My favorite characters then are probably still my favorite characters today. Popeye is probably my favorite character, except possibly for Bugs Bunny. And Batman is my favorite super-hero, I loved Adam West and stuff like that when I was a kid. I just thought that was amazing.

DRAW!: Well, I think for everybody who’s in our generation—I assume you’re probably somewhere around forty?

’MAZING MAN AND ALL RELATED CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

SDS: Nearly, yes.

DRAW!: That was like the coolest thing ever when you were a kid, watching that TV show.

SDS: Yeah, yeah! And then you grow up a little and then there’s that whole backlash against it, against the camp thing.

And I guess I sort of fell in for it, Batman should be serious and it should be really dark and angry and stuff like that. I guess I fell for that for a while, but in my heart I always loved that so much. And now that’s Batman to me.

DRAW!: [laughs] And they’re rerunning the Batman show on TV Land. It’s fun to watch them now, as an adult.

SDS: They’re amazing! For me, they’re the best representation of super-heroes on film, ever! [laughter] Except for maybe the Fleischer cartoons, the Superman cartoons.

DRAW!: Did you seriously start trying to pursue cartooning in any real way in high school?

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SDS: Yeah! From the time I was thirteen, I was in correspondence with Bob Rozakis at DC Comics, who was the production manager at the time. And I just wrote to him because who wrote comics that I knew? I don’t know why. He wrote the column in the back of DC Comics called “The Answer Man” back when I was a kid, so I figured he was the guy to write in to. So I had been writing to him since I was thirteen, and by the time I was 15 they needed a gofer at the DC offices. So I went up and I worked there for a summer, and then I worked there the next summer as well. And when I graduated high school, I just didn’t want to go to college, because I knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to be a cartoonist. So somehow I actually made that swing. Which is astounding to me today, as an adult, thinking, “That can’t work!

That’s ridiculous! Go to college, do the smart thing!” But I just....

DRAW!: You had your backup plan!

SDS: Yeah. But I just decided I wanted to go into comic books, and that’s what I did. By that time, animation just had gone by the wayside. I never really thought I would go into animation.

DRAW!: So this was, I take it, late Seventies, early Eighties?

SDS: It was probably about ’83 when I graduated high school.

DRAW!: And that was a pretty bleak time in animation.

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SDS: Yeah, that’s true. There was nothing to look at. I remember the first time Duck Tales came on, and that was probably near that time, and I was thinking, “Y’know, these are famous characters, but they look so stiff and they look so dull and they don’t look anywhere near as interesting or expressive as they did in the older cartoons.

DRAW!: There’s no squash or stretch or exaggeration.

SDS: Yes! There was absolutely no life to the whole thing. But, yeah, cartoons and animation had gone way off the radar by that point.

DRAW!: Had you thought about trying to go out to California or anything and get into animation before that?

SDS: No. Not in the least. Never. I mean, animation was sort of a pie-in-the-sky sort of thing that I’d had when I was five. My family would tell me that one day I’ll work for Walt Disney or one day I’ll draw Road Runner for the cartoons or something like that. That just sort of went away. It seemed like a childhood thing, and I became much more interested in comic books as a way of expressing myself.

DRAW!: So comic books became more of a real thing for you, then, at that point?

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LEFT AND RIGHT: Rough layouts and rough textural inks from DeStefano’s art in Legion #9.

SDS: Yes. DRAW!: And that could be a real occupation, you could see you could actually support yourself making a living doing that.

SDS: Yes. It was also an obsession, too, because I collected them. I was buying them all the time, and that’s pretty much all that I was seeing. I stopped watching cartoons with real interest, as something that was integral to me. Because there were no good Popeye cartoons anymore, there were no good Bugs Bunny cartoons being made... they were all from the past, and that’s what I wanted to be involved with, but that wasn’t going on anymore. But Michael Golden and Marshall Rogers were drawing Batman, and that seemed interesting!

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

DRAW!: So how were you educating yourself and teaching yourself about the craft along the way? Were you trying to read articles in the Comics Journal or meet guys at shows? Living close to New York, were you able to actually meet cartoonists at all or learn anything that way?

SDS: Let’s see, the only real schooling that I’ve ever had, or official sort of schooling, I had one year at the High School of Art and Design. It was so far away from home. I grew up in Queens and it was in Manhattan, so I had to take a bus and the subway to get there, and that was a drag, so I didn’t really want to go. So that’s the only official schooling I’ve ever had.

DRAW!: And who was teaching there? Did you get any courses with any cartoonists, or rub shoulders with anybody?

SDS: Actually, I never did, I never had. I mean, I had a teacher who claimed he created Tony the Tiger for advertising. I suppose that might have been true, but I never really knew much about him other than that. And no, I didn’t go to very many conventions. I probably only started going to conventions after I got involved with DC as a teenager. So I didn’t really know very many people in comic books at all. I didn’t really read the fan press, either, but I bought all the sort of commercial books that you could buy, like the Smithsonian Book of Comic Books and the Smithsonian Book of Sunday Comics or something like that. And it was through that that I realized that there was some sort of pecking order, that this stuff was good, but this stuff was great. So that caught my eye. I knew the origin of Batman, but then Kurtzman’s war comics really sort of interested me, because they kept getting all this attention, and they perplexed me.

They irked me, in a way.

DRAW!: Why did they irk you?

SDS: Well, maybe not ‘irked’, maybe ‘irked’ isn’t the right word to use. They unnerved me, they challenged me. That’s probably a better way to put it. They were so potent, so emotionally charged, yet so stark and so simple. They kind of looked like Batman’s origin, but yet so entirely different. I knew when I saw Kurtzman’s drawings—I mean, this was something special.

And to this day when I draw, I have to say, in the back of my mind I hope I’m having a similar effect on some kid somewhere reading my stuff. I hope I’m irking the sh*t outta some kid! That’d be great!

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DRAW!: Now, when you were going up as a teenager, were you exposed to the craft end of it since you were going up to DC? Did you see original art? Did you start to glean little bits of information by looking at original pages or by seeing people work in the bullpen or anything like that?

SDS: Gosh, that’s stuff I haven’t even thought of in such a long time. I probably did. I remember, it must have been Joe Orlando or Dave Manak at DC who first told me what nibs to buy, and I remember trying those out. And I was really awful. Y’know, I was fifteen. I remember my first attempts at inking.

DRAW!: Well, my first inking pen was a laundry pen. I had no idea. I said, “Oh, here’s a pen! I’ll buy it and I’ll try it!” [laughs] SDS: Well, it’s still good, it turns out. Occasionally a laundry pen’ll work. [laughter] DRAW!: Well, I think that’s interesting. You go up, you go to DC, you’re exposed to a professional environment of cartooning. You get somebody like Joe Orlando, who’s been around forever, to come and say, “Hey, kid. No, you buy this brush. You buy this pen.

You buy this paper.” So at least you’re not stumbling around in the wilderness trying to draw with sticks and parchment or something.

SDS: Right. Yeah, I was really fortunate in that way. Mostly what I did in my first summer at DC was erase pages. And occasionally I would do mild pastey-uppy things and fill in areas on Gene Colan pages when he was doing Batman where paste-up had obliterated something, I filled in blacks.

DRAW!: Well, that’s good, though. You read all the classic cartoonists, they all started sweeping somebody’s floor, they got to erase a page.

SDS: Yeah. Then, after I’d erased, like, ten pages that day or something, then the production guys would jokingly tell me that the 128 THE BEST OF DRAW!

LEFT: Storyboard revisions for a commercial American audiences will never see. They were created for a Japanese bank.

ABOVE: A Popeye drawing produced by the artist to somewhat “update” the characters.

shavings caused cancer. [laughter] I guess I took it good-naturedly.

DRAW!: “Sorry, kid! Those are asbestos!”

SDS: Yeah. If it ever occurred, I’d know who to sue. [Mike laughs] I didn’t know it at the time, but it actually was a real education, because I was a really lazy kid and I didn’t quite realize what an opportunity it was. But I was a teenager.

DRAW!: Well, you seem to have made the most of it.

SDS: Well, I tried. It’s kinda funny. As I grew up, Road Runner, Popeye, Bugs Bunny sort of went by the wayside, and I concentrated so much on super-heroes. And then I got to DC and I wanted to be a super-hero artist. And it just never worked, I could never really draw that stuff to the extent that it needs to be drawn. And the funny thing is that the cartoony stuff was always in the back of my head. And that was the thing that I should have been doing. And it’s really odd that I went to a company that’s famous for its super-heroes to sort of develop a humor style. I don’t know what I was thinking!

DRAW!: Did you ever try to get in at Mad? SDS: No, never. Mad was something that I bought occasionally as a young person. But I didn’t really have a passion for it. And it always looked—I could never draw like Mort Drucker. That was ridiculous! He’s a genius! That looked like so much work to me that it was more like... reading Mad was more like looking at advertising. “Wow, that’s for really intense people! That’s not for me! That looks too hard!”

DRAW!: So you were really sort of drawn towards the classic script cartooning like the Popeye or Katzenjammer Kids or things like that.

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SDS: Yeah, very much.

DRAW!: And there really isn’t much like that in the mid-Eighties in comics. That stuff had all pretty much died out.

SDS:: Yeah. I always read the funnies from when I was little through a teenager, and always loved it, but by the time my first professional work was published, that stuff didn’t excite me very much. Then, one day my first editor at DC—the editor on my first book, Alan Gold—suggested that I look at Krazy Kat. And he was a huge fan of Barney Google, so he showed that to me. He was also a huge fan of Carl Barks, and he kept pushing the Ducks on me and stuff like that.

REN AND STIMPY ™ AND ©2008 VIACOM INTERNATIONAL INC.

DRAW!: So you were not really aware of some of this stuff before then?

SDS:: Y’know, when I was reading books by Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff or whatever, I’d see these articles about what a great artist Carl Barks was. I was twelve or something and I would flip past it because I’m thinking, “That’s not for grownups!” Or “That’s not real art! Where’s Batman? Where’s the origin of the Big Red Cheese?” So I was aware of things like Barks, and I was mildly aware of the history of pop art, but it wasn’t something that I really pursued until my late teens, my early twenties. Then I started to get rabidly interested. I felt like that’s where I can get a real education. I still do that today.

DRAW!: !: Now, after you started working at DC and you started working on your first couple jobs, when did you first start getting involved in animation?

SDS: My first animation work I sort of consider was when I started working for Disney Comics. By that point, I had discovered how great Floyd Gottfredson’s work on Mickey Mouse was.

DRAW!: Yes, great comics. And around what time was this?

SDS: About, ’88, ’89. Disney put out the word that they were looking for cartoonists, and there wasn’t much going on for me at that point, so I got in touch with them and I did Mickey Mouse samples. I was stunned because I got the job to draw the Mickey Mouse comic book. And that was an education, because I had never really looked very closely at the construction of the characters. If I thought about it, I might have, “Oh, that’s a circle, and that’s a bean,” and so on.

DRAW!: Mickey’s difficult to draw. You draw one little thing off and he looks weird.

SDS: Yeah, to this day I can never get Mickey Mouse right. He’s a really hard character to draw. But that I

TOP: DESTEFANO—Thumbnails from a later Ren & Stimpy episode. Probably my third or fourth board. At this point I realized that I could clean up some of my thumbnails and use them as an actual board drawings, eventually doing entire boards on tiny post-it notes—not a bad idea if you’ve got character layout as a luxury on the show.

ABOVE: DESTEFANO: Title card designs from the Games-produced episode, “An Abe Divided,” the second cartoon I’d storyboarded.

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consider my first attempt at animation style stuff. And that felt like something to pursue. Just stylistically, not even animation as a job, just the style felt like something to pursue, for me. So I kept concentrating on that and a few years after that I got a call from Bill Wray, who said that Spumco was looking for people and would I like to try that? So I said, “Sure,” and I sent some stuff into Bill, and he showed it to John Kricfalusi and then I got a job.

DRAW!: So did you leave New York and go to L.A., then, to work in the studio?

SDS: Yeah.

DRAW!: And how was that experience?

That must be very different from being at home, working by yourself.

SDS: Yeah, that was really big for me. That was probably one of the biggest things I’ve ever had to do, because aside from working two years at DC as a teenager, I’d never really had a staff position; I’d never had an office to go to every day. So that was really hard; that was really frightening. I probably spent the first year just adjusting to the fact that I had to do that. And in the end, I don’t think I ever really did adjust, because when the show was reshuffled and I came back to work for Games Animation—the studio that took the show over from Spumco—the one thing I said was, “Well, I don’t want to work in-house, I want to work at home.” So they said okay. Because I find that I can’t actually work around people. When I’m around people, it’s time to talk and play, and when I’m alone, it’s time to work. So it’s really pretty difficult for me to work in a social situation.

DRAW!: So you found that your days at Spumco were broken up between talking and trying to get yourself focused at work?

SDS: Yeah, it was hard. It was an exceptional group of people that John had assembled. I’d never met such an array of talented people. It was really intimidating.

DESTEFANO: A sequence I like fairly well from one of my better boards, for the episode “The Space Scottsman.” It was one of my last efforts as a Ren & Stimpy board artist. By this time I’d gotten something of a hang of drawing the characters. I even got to do a voice on this short! Again, by this time I was practically doing the whole board in a thumbnail format.

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DRAW!: Oh, really? So you didn’t find that something that charged you up? You found it intimidating to be in a shop that had that many good people all working on one project?

SDS: I think once I got over my nervousness it got really exciting, but because I

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Ren and Stimpy as well as John or Chris Reccardi or Bob Camp or something. So I’m like, “Yeah! Let me draw the backgrounds!”

So I became background designer for a couple more months.

DRAW!: Wow. Well, you were sort of the utility player. You obviously had the drawing chops to do that, because backgrounds are hard.

SDS: Yeah!

DRAW!: That’s the part of the cartoon that a lot of times, even on a “cheap” show, a lot of effort goes into the backgrounds.

And you pan by the thing in three seconds, and you busted your stones designing this big, intricate background.

was shy and I was so nervous about being in a situation like this—going to an office everyday, not really knowing how to be social and political and stuff in an office—it was really hard for me at first. And then, once I did click into it, it was amazing and an extraordinary education. That’s probably the best education I’d ever received. I always think of that as my Master’s Degree or something like that.

DRAW!: Just being around all those top artists? And what were you doing there? Were you doing layout or boards?

SDS: I was told I was hired as a board artist. And when I got there, I was told that there were too many board artists, so I was going to be—for my first two days, I think I did backgrounds for Bob Camp’s cartoons, and I was working in the basement. [laughter] They put me in the basement of the building, which I couldn’t figure out! I don’t know what that was about. And by the end of the week they had made me an assistant to a guy named Mike Fontanelli, who is an astounding draftsman. And he was a layout guy, so I was going to do assistant layouts for him. So I was a layout artist for four months or something, and then they told me that there was no background designer on the show, and since I’d done all the backgrounds for Bob, and I was doing all the backgrounds for Mike, and nobody at the studio really liked to do backgrounds, and I found out later that everybody thought background designer was a cheap-ass job. If you couldn’t draw, you became a background designer. That was sort of the feeling amongst the layout guys, they wanted to draw the characters. But I felt too intimidated by the characters. I couldn’t draw

SDS: Yeah. I thought it was a great honor to be the background designer. I mean, everybody there knew how valuable a guy like Maurice Nobel was to Chuck Jones, but nobody really wanted to design BGs. But I had experience in comic books, where you had to draw everything. So that was perfectly fine with me. I was really excited to be the background designer. Unfortunately I never got it, I never became as good as I’d hoped. Especially while I was at Spumco. I think it wasn’t until a year or two later that I finally designed backgrounds that I thought were okay. But I thought it was a great job. And I was really excited, too, because then I got to work with Bill Wray, and I got to see these drawings that I was making really blossom and turn into something really beautiful. Because Bill would take them and he’d make them into amazing paintings. Or his staff would take them—Scott Wills, Glenn Barr—and they’d make them into something really, really amazing. So that was a real treat, too.

DRAW!: Yeah, those were great backgrounds on that cartoon.

So influential to this day.

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ABOVE: Notes from John Kricfalusi himself on how to best design for animation.

BELOW: Design notes and a lovely back ground rough by John K for “Son of Stimpy.”

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SDS: Yeah, they can be. We had some really amazing painters. Like I said, when I think back, I tend to think of Spumco and Ren & Stimpy as sort of a pantheon of... it’s like the Justice League, all these super talented people come together. I was sort of like the Snapper Carr of Spumco. [laughter] DRAW!: “Backgrounds by Snapper Carr.” [laughter] So did you stay in L.A. after Ren & Stimpy ended, or did you go back to New York?

TM AND © 2008 WARNER BROS. TV ANIMATION. SUPERMAN TM AND © DC COMICS.

SDS: I stayed in L.A. for I think maybe eight or nine more months. Because after Ren & Stimpy ended, that was pretty much it. And the ’94 earthquake hit, and I was like, I don’t like earthquakes. And L.A. was beautiful and it was really nice and everybody was nice, but it wasn’t really where I’d lived, I didn’t consider it home.

But then I got a call from Lynn Naylor, who was going to be directing on the new Felix the Cat show. And Lynn said that she needed an assistant director and she liked my stuff and she liked me and she wanted to know if I would want to work with her. And what, do you say “no” to Lynn Naylor? What am I, stupid? [Mike laughs] I said, “Yes, of course!” I wanted to work with Lynn.

DRAW!: And you had worked with her, she was also a member of the Ren & Stimpy crew, right?

SDS: She was. I didn’t work very closely with her.

Lynn’s the sweetest person alive, I think, and we’d just chat a little bit. But when she offered me the job, I was so flattered, because I didn’t even think that she was familiar with my stuff. But that was an opportunity I really could not turn down. Lynn, aside from being an extremely nice person, she’s extremely talented, so I felt like it was something I had to do.

DRAW!: !: Well, yeah. And the thing I’ve found for myself, working in animation for the last few years, is that the talented people always want to work with other talented people. Talent seeks other talent. It’s like magnets and metal or something. It’s like on Samurai Jack, Genndy Tartakovsky has got a lot of really talented people, a lot of ex-Ren & Stimpy people on the crew.

ABOVE AND RIGHT: DESTEFANO—Examples of my thumbnails for a Superman storyboard. This was fun!

SDS: Well, that’s one of the sad things about the original Ren & Stimpy crew. There was a big rupture when the show split between John and Nickelodeon, so that did split up the studio staff, obviously. Some wanted to stay with John, others felt like it was time to move on anyway. But the respect, for the most part, for one another’s talents was there, and there was sort of a big family feel to it, so they pretty much follow each other wherever they go, practically. And more people are added, some people drop out and stuff like that. Yeah, a lot of the staff on Samurai Jack are ex-Ren & Stimpy people.

DRAW!: So in the mid-1990s, you’re in L.A., you’re working on Felix the Cat. Where did things go from there?

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SDS: Well, the first season of Felix ended and after that I decided that it didn’t seem like Lynn was going to return to the show or even to the point where CBS wasn’t sure if they would want to renew the show, so that began to wind down. And I decided I was going to work on a pilot that Bob Camp and Jim Gomez were creating at the time, and then I felt like my time in L.A. would be over. Soon after that, I moved back to New York. And then I just started taking freelance stuff.

DRAW!: And you were not doing comics, I take it, during your Ren & Stimpy time?

SDS: I wasn’t doing many comics. I did some. I did four issues of a book called Instant Piano.

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time to get off the ground, so by the time the first issue was due, I was working on Ren & Stimpy, so that’s where Instant Piano was all created.

DRAW!: So who were all the guys involved in Instant Piano and how did you come to meet each other? Was this through the course of working on animation?

SDS: No, it was all in comics. I probably met Kyle Baker first, at a San Diego convention. I met him and Mike Mignola at the same time. Then around a similar time I had met Mark Badger at a New York convention, and he had an assistant named Robbie Busch. And I think it was Robbie and Mark who figured out that they wanted to do comics with people that they really liked.

And they were friends with Kyle and they were friends with me, and I knew Kyle, so we all sort of got together.

And then Robbie said, “I know this guy named Evan Dorkin. He’s really, really talented. We should bring him in.” And I’m like, I don’t know who Evan was, but I said, “Oh, okay, fine.” So we all got together at Kyle’s apartment in downtown New York. And Evan sort of burst upon the scene with full force, and we all fell in love with him. So that was pretty much the origin of Instant Piano. We all went to dinner and we all drank and tried to come up with a title for the damned thing.

And Kyle kept insisting that the title should be called Kyle’s Big-Dick Funnies. [laughter] And we were looking at the back of the Village Voice or the New York Press that was sitting on the bar next to us, and there was an ad that said “Instant Piano,” that you could learn to play the piano instantly. [Mike laughs] So we thought that was brilliant, so that was the origin of Instant Piano.

DRAW!: So was each guy able to go off and do his own thing and then you just gathered it together and put the book together?

SDS: Yeah....

DRAW!: How was it structured? Was any one guy sort of like the ringmaster to put it together?

DRAW!: Yes, Instant Piano! I wanted to touch on that, because that book was sort of the inspiration that got me to do my Action Planet Comics anthology.

SDS: Oh, cool! I’m flattered to hear that.

DRAW!: Yeah, I remember walking into the shop one day and seeing this and going, “Wow, this is great! Where did this come from?” You had not started Instant Piano while you were still in L.A.?

SDS: Instant Piano was created five years, probably, before it ever saw print. And it was just because five guys were drunk off their nut in a bar one night. That makes it sound more anarchic than it really was. I mean, it was sort of a planned thing. We all decided to get together, we wanted to do an anthology, and we all liked each other. So that was good. And it took an awfully long

SDS: In a way, almost. Yes and no. It was so bizarre the way the whole thing was. Mark was the oldest of us and Mark was probably the most mature, so Mark got the John Lennon position, I think. Mark was the guy who would say, “Aw, c’mon, guys... y’know... we have to do this, and this has to get done.” And so much of it was based upon how hot Kyle was at the time. So Kyle was really integral to the whole thing. Evan was getting red hot at about that time. So we all tried to pitch in as best we could. And we scheduled meetings and we’d say, “This is what I got,” “This is what I like.” Sometimes—not often enough, unfortunately—we’d sit together. I think Kyle and Evan—who were doing strips together at that point anyway for Reflex Magazine— would write. Or they’d sit and they’d come up with something.

And Robbie and I would do that a lot, and Mark and I would plan to do that. I always feel sad that we never actually jammed or contributed to one big thing. But that was sort of the process.

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STEPHEN DeSTEFANO And then it got much, much harder as—Mark was the first to move out to the West Coast—he moved out to the Bay area. And then Kyle moved out to Los Angeles because he had the deal with Warner Brothers. And then a little bit after that, I moved out to Los Angeles for the Ren & Stimpy show. And Evan was left here in New York, so he sort of felt all alone. Robbie also moved out to Los Angeles and we were roommates for a time, so Robbie and I were always in touch. And the whole thing just went from five guys drinking to “put a call in to guys from the Coast and see what they’re up to,” and “what’s Illinois have to say about this” and all that sort of stuff. [Mike laughs] So it wasn’t as breezy as it was initially intended to be.

DRAW!: So you did four issues, right?

SDS: Yes. DRAW!: And that was though Dark Horse?

SDS: Yes.

INSTANT PIANO ©2008 BY MARK BADGER, KYLE BAKER, ROBBIE BUSH, STEPHEN DESTEFANO, EVAN DORKIN.

DRAW!: Do you remember who approached Dark Horse and how that happened?

ABOVE: DESTEFANO—A rushed drawing done in a San Diego hotel room

by DeStafano with a little help from Robbie Bush, intended as a handout/flyer in ’94. Good God, I used everything from a crow-quill to a laundry marker on this baby.

BELOW: Oh, this is a heart breaker. This is the original sketch for my final cover concept for the third issue of Instant Piano. Bill did the final painting and graciously presented it to me after its publication. I loved it!

Unfortunately it did not survive my disastrous move from L.A. back to NYC.

SDS: I think it was probably Mark’s idea, because Mark was close with those guys. Badger had been doing The Mask, I guess, in the early days of Dark Horse. And he was friends with Randy Stradley and Mike Richardson, so he said, “I think Dark Horse would be interested in this.” And they were. ’Cause like I said, Kyle was red hot at the time and Evan was really starting to heat up, so they were pretty interested to do it, I think.

DRAW!: So why did it end? Did you guys just—everybody was being pulled in their separate ways too much at the time?

SDS: I think so. Evan always claims that it was only supposed to be four issues, anyway. I don’t remember that, actually. I remember that it was just supposed to be something that we would do until we didn’t want to. I think we were just too all over the place, and I think it sort of trickled down before it even went into print, that Dark Horse would appreciate it being just a four-issue mini-series or something like that. [Mike laughs] So that was what it turned out to be.

DRAW!: There was a whisper on the wind, “We will appreciate if this is only four issues?”

SDS: Yeah. I don’t really remember how that happened. Maybe we decided before. Or maybe it was decided by issue four. I’m not even sure, I can’t really remember.

But I don’t have the recollection

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that it was originally supposed to be a three- or four-issue miniseries. I think we started out thinking that we would be the new Zap! or something like that. And we barely made it to issue four.

DRAW!: From that, sort of seeing, “Here’s four buddies getting together and doing their own thing,” that was the inspiration for me to do my Action Planet Comics and invite all my buddies to do their own thing.

SDS: That’s cool. I like to hear that. Did it work out for you better...? [laughter] DRAW!: Well, we only did three issues, and I’ve done a couple other one-shots since then, but... that, we could trail off and go into a whole ’nother long subject if we start talking about the direct market. Which I’m happy to do, but I don’t want to do it in the middle of your interview.

SDS: I wouldn’t have much to contribute anyway, because the business of comics always really mystified me.

DRAW!: So after Instant Piano and after Felix, where did you end up?

You ended up back out East?

SDS: I ended up back in New York. And I think the first thing that I’d worked on was probably the Earthworm Jim show, for Universal. Then Lynn Naylor called, and asked if I wanted to be involved with her work on the Hercules and Xena movie. The person that got Lynn involved with Felix the Cat was her friend, Anne Leuting, who was the executive producer of Film Roman Productions, and Anne moved over to the same position at Universal, which was a bigger pond. So Universal was trying to develop the Hercules and Xena animated direct-to-video feature. And that was pretty much all Universal did was direct-to-video, for all I know that’s all they do, direct-to-video animation. So Anne said Lynn’s got to be involved. So Lynn was the director and again, pretty much the same Ren & Stimpy crew was the whole staff on that show. And I also was part of the staff from New York, which was kind of crazy, because I had a weekly paycheck and stuff, which was really great. So I was a storyboard artist and designer on that feature.

DRAW!: I had a similar experience working with Warner Brothers, being on staff being long-distance. Did you have to report in daily? Did you have to fax roughs in every few days? How did that work?

JINGLE BELLE ™ AND ©2008 PAUL DINI

SDS: We were in pretty constant communication, but it wasn’t the sort of thing where there was a checking-in process. It was more like, I guess they really trusted me, and Lynn and I were talking a lot. And it was just a matter of when they needed stuff, and if I thought I could get it done at that time, that’s when they got it. Or if I thought that I couldn’t get it done at that time, I would let them know, and they’d get it whenever I thought that I could do it. But it wasn’t official or anything, it was very nonchalant. So I was really grateful. Again, looking back, I’m really impressed that I had that freedom. So that was good.

DRAW!: You did storyboard, eventually, on Ren & Stimpy, right?

SDS:: Yes. RIGHT: DESTEFANO—Layouts for the “Jingle Belle” story from Jingle Belle’s AllStar Holiday Hullabaloo. Shane Glines finished the art and stuck pretty close to what I drew, and only changed a few things like the last panel on the second page.

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THE WILD THORNBERRYS

LEFT: DeStefano—My “writing” process. I wrote around a lot on this “Wild Thornberrys” assignment trying to find ideas. I passed ideas back and forth between Nickelodeon editors Chris Duffy and Dave Roman. We agreed on a basic story, then it was up to me to pull it all together... hence this story outline. Which brought me to...

BELOW LEFT AND BELOW: My thumbnails from the story and even a character sketch for a new character.

LEFT: Stephen’s thumbnail for page 10 of the story is shown here at full size.

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DRAW!: So that was your first storyboarding?

SDS: Yes. DRAW!: And then you went from storyboarding Ren & Stimpy to storyboarding Felix to Xena?

SDS: Yeah. And I probably had little freelance jobs for friends at that time, too. I storyboarded an episode of Beethoven, which I actually did a voice for, also. What other shows did I freelance on? It seems to me there were other things in there, but I can’t think of one; I dunno, I think I cleaned up stuff for a Film Roman show called Heap or Swampy-Joe. Jeez, I can’t even remember.

DRAW!: How did you learn to storyboard? The actual mechanics of it?

Did John K. or somebody sit you down and give you the basic, “This is how to do pans and how to mark up all the camera stuff.”

SDS: It wasn’t really technical. The interesting thing actually is that the more I storyboard, the more I realize I’m a really lousy storyboard artist.

I’m a good cartoonist, I’ll say that for myself. But I think I’m a bad technical person, because when I do work now for the New York studios, which are extremely technically-based, they’ll look at my stuff and they’ll say things like... I can’t remember, what’s the big complaint that I always get from the New York studios? “Hook-ups.”

DRAW!: Oh, okay.

SDS: But my argument always is, you’re not telling me if it’s funny or not. Because, like, nobody on Ren & Stimpy would care if things hooked up. They didn’t give a sh*t.

DRAW!: They would leave it up to the animator to hook it up.

THE WILD THORNBERRYS ™ © 2008 VIACOM INTERNATIONAL INC.

SDS: It didn’t even matter; if the story was well told, concisely and with clarity, hook ups mean crap, really. But it has to be funny. And that was the way I learned. Now, that’s not to say John wasn’t technical. John was an amazing technician and there were guidelines. I still have John’s “How to Storyboard.” But God bless John, it was less about, like, fields and stuff like that, than it was about funny and telling the story—really good storytelling. And that was the real learning point. I’m a good learner, but I don’t get taught very well. It takes for me to sit and look at stuff instead of just hear something and automatically be able to turn it out. Partly I learned from looking at what Bob Camp was doing, I learned by looking at what Chris Reccardi was doing. We had another truly brilliant storyboard artist named Pete Avonzino, and he taught me quite a bit. And then I tried myself, and then I’d fail and stuff like that. And Bill Wray was really great, too, because my first storyboard on Ren & Stimpy wasn’t really as good as I would’ve liked, and Bill came to me and said, “If you want to pitch your boards to me, I’ll give you some advice or I’ll give you my reaction, and we’ll see how that goes.” And I did for my second storyboard, and from then on things were much better. Because you can’t live in a vacuum, particularly in animation.

ABOVE: Here we have my official layouts, which I submitted as a script to Nickelodeon Magazine for the assigned artists to work from, and the final art from the Wild Thornberry Special Magazine, penciled by Scott Roberts and inked by Willie Blyberg.

DRAW!: Well, I found that sometimes to be a little hard. Like on the recent Turtles job I did where you get a pile of drawings and, “Okay, go make a show,” and really no other instructions. And on TV, the storyboard artist is really the director. I mean, you make everything happen, everything hits the road when you do it. If it’s a bad script, if it’s a good script, THE BEST OF DRAW! 137

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STEPHEN DeSTEFANO if you “plus” it, all that stuff. I was doing all kinds of little pluses, adding stuff, adding little bits of action that actually make the story flow. That all falls upon the storyboard artist to be able to do that.

SDS: Right.

DRAW!: Or the director to catch that you’re not doing it and say “can you add this?” or “this is not working.”

SDS: Yeah, absolutely. It is really hard. Since those days at the studios, I’ve been freelancing storyboards, and it is really hard to storyboard in a vacuum. You don’t know in the end what the program is going to look like anyway, because it’s gotta go through so many different people, whereas if you’re in the studio, at least you get a sense of what’s going to happen and what happens.

DRAW!: Yeah, that is true. But it seems that more studios are hiring freelancers now because it’s cheaper for them.

SDS: Yeah, that’s true. That was another sort of revolutionary thing. I think.

I’m not really sure what the state was before Ren & Stimpy, but John insisted that he had layouts on the show.

DRAW!: Which is actually pretty unusual because most shows are not laid out here, although I think they do do some layout on some of the Cartoon Network shows like Dexter and Powerpuff Girls.

SDS: Oh, really?

DRAW!: Yes, because when I worked on the comic they would send reference, so I will see that there are specific drawings they do for certain scenes, because those are styles where you have to sort of figure out things, really heavily design-oriented. “Well, what does Dexter look like if he was laying down?” You know what I mean?

SDS: Right.

DRAW!: It’s a flat show, it’s a 2-D show, but you want him to do something that... it’s usually just left or right, people are walking left or right. Or going forward or back. But if you want to do some guy laying sprawled down on the ground, you have to figure out, like, “How would I draw the Powerpuff Girls doing that?”

SDS: Yeah. Woo. How do you draw the Powerpuff Girls doing that? [Mike laughs] I can’t even picture that!

JINGLE BELLE ™ AND ©2008 PAUL DINI

DRAW!: So you’re saying that John K. had layout. So he had to add that into his budget, I guess?

SDS: Yeah. And I don’t think very many studios thought very much about layout before that. For a while, on the influence of Ren & Stimpy, layout was sort of big for studios. And then, little by little, they got rid of it again, because it’s expensive, so they think.

DRAW!: So you learned to storyboard by studying other people’s storyboards and then sort of getting little bits of technical help here and there along the way, I guess, on the various studios on the various jobs.

SDS: Yeah.

ABOVE: Another page for Jingle Belle’s All-Star Holiday Hullabaloo. Shane Glines finishes over Stephen’s layouts.

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DRAW!: So you basically learned on the job, then?

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SDS: Yeah, I did. My career is kind of funny, actually, because when I think back to my first printed comic book work, I cringe. It’s hideous. It’s really awful. I’ll say this: I was a teenager. Keep that in mind. [Mike laughs] Yeah, I always learned on the job. I always got paid to learn, because I really never draw for myself. I almost never draw unless I’ve got a job in front of me.

DRAW!: So you don’t have a sketchbook, you don’t sit there and practice?

SDS: No, I don’t. I should, and things would probably go a lot more smoothly for me if I did, but I just don’t have the energy.

DRAW!: [laughs] After the job, after the day at the board, you don’t have the energy to sit there— SDS: No. DRAW!: You don’t start out by warming up or doodling?

DEXTER’S LAB ™ AND © 2008 CARTOON NETWORK

SDS: No, no.

DRAW!: You just hit the boards and just go.

SDS: Yeah. Yeah, I think about that a lot, because... I guess in my head I’m sort of doing sketches, and I try to figure out ways to solve things and stuff like that. If I’ve been given a new model sheet, I always look at it and think about it a lot. But it would probably be time better spent if I were actually sketching things.

I’m always sort of torn when people ask me if I like to draw or not. I’m always sort of torn, because I’m not entirely sure I do.

I’m not entirely sure that I don’t. But I do like to tell stories, and this is the best way for me to do it.

DRAW!: So you like the end result but not necessarily the trip.

SDS: Yeah. Although I am getting more and more interested in the trip.

DRAW!: Do you think that’s because your skill level has grown so much that you find it less frustrating now?

SDS: I think I’m trying to find more things to frustrate myself with. [laughter] Because now I’m interested in printing and color and that sort of thing. And my first work, I didn’t think of that at all. It’s always more about how you can refine whatyou’re doing, how you can get more control, how you can see your entire vision through, that sort of thing.

DRAW!: Now, do you think that this also comes from your continued study of the classic strips, guys like that, and seeing how they put a lot into the finished product, the way it was colored or...?

SDS: Yeah, definitely. It’s sort of important to me—the stuff that I put out, that I create, that I produce, has sort of a watermark to it.

DRAW!: So you really want your work to have that persistence of vision from the beginning to the end so that when people look at it, they go, “Oh, man, that’s a DeStefano job.”

DESTEFANO: This page from “Dexter’s Ark” remains un-inked because I actually light boxed and finished it on Duo-Shade board. I actually lettered in the dialogue myself. I feel this is an important part of drawing the page, integral to composing how much room to leave for text. I don’t always letter in dialogue, but I do if I feel really strongly about the job.

SDS: Or even saying, “That’s a good job. That shows me something that I didn’t expect or I didn’t even know I was going to ask for.” I would like for the readers or the viewers to be entertained, to be surprised in some way. I feel like I can move that along at a better pace—this is my feeling, I don’t know if this is true—if I have more input on everything.

DRAW!: So let’s talk a little technically now, since this is sort of the guts of DRAW! Magazine. When you’re doing something like that last Dexter job, “Dexter’s Ark” as an example, when you read the script, do you go through and do little layouts or breakdowns? Do you work in sections? How do you approach breaking down the job, getting the art onto the board.

SDS: When I get my script... and that was a good script, because it was actually from my Instant Piano pal, Robbie Busch, and that was good because it was written by a friend.

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so that was good. When I get a script, I’ll do little thumbnails on the script. I’ll figure out what it is I want to do and how I want to tell stuff and how I might want to break down the dialogue. Bernie Krigstein has always been a huge influence on me, because I remember what he did with that story, “Master Race,” how he actually broke up the dialogue in certain ways to control the pacing, so I do that a lot these days. Mostly I start with my little thumbnails and then it depends. Usually I’ll jump right to the boards from that, but not always. Sometimes I’ll go do layouts.

DRAW!: How tight are your little thumbnails? Are they scribbles that nobody but you could decipher?

DRAW!: Because I know, I’ve done the same thing, where sometimes when I get an idea I’ll jot it right down on the script. And sometimes if I go back through a bunch of old scripts and I see something that I’ve scribbled on it and go, “What the hell is that? I don’t even know how I figured anything out from that.”

SDS: Yeah. Unfortunately, that occasionally happens to me on the job, too. “I know I drew this last week, but I haven’t got a damn idea what the hell I’m thinking!” But not too often.

Again, it’s little shorthand notes, little doodles.

have to go really quickly. And most likely I’ll use a felt-tip marker at that point. It depends. If it’s for somebody else, if somebody else has to see it, I’ll roughly “ink” it in felt-tip marker.

Sometimes this stuff has to be faxed, and I just feel a rough black ink line translates better than a rough pencil line. If it’s for me, it might just be maybe pencil, probably just a #2 pencil. But it’s very rare that I’ll go to that stage. Like I said, if I have to get other people involved... occasionally I might need an assistant or something like that, or if other people have to see it, then I’ll do the whole marker bit, but usually I don’t do too much of the layouts anyway.

DRAW!: So then you make your thumbnail, most of the time, then you just go directly and draw right on the board paper?

SDS: Yeah.

DRAW!: And do you rough out first in non-repro blue and then go back in and tighten it up in pencil for your clean-up?

Do you work scene to scene? How do you approach that?

SDS: Pretty much.

SDS: I guess I sort of jump around.

I always sort of try to give myself variety. It’s very funny. A job like the Bizarro book, I think, was drawn in so many different ways, with plate-finished paper, with vellum-finished paper.

I always try to throw myself a screwball on every job because I guess I’m trying to keep myself awake. So sometimes I’ll use non-repro blue. If I MR. MXYZPTLK ™ AND don’t have any around, I ©2008 DC COMICS might just use a #2 and then go in with a darker pencil.

DRAW!: And it’s really for pacing, right, to sort of break down the pacing?

SDS: Yeah. And like I said, there might be a second step, like I said, to layouts, but mostly I’ll go right to the pages. And things will change there, too. I almost never keep what I’ve got for my thumbnails.

DRAW!: Now, if you go to the second stage, if you go from thumbnail to layout, do you have a grid you Xerox and then you blow up? How do you transfer it from there? What’s your process from there?

SDS: If it’s something that I’ve got to do really, really quickly, I do have my layout paper which is 8.5" x 11" paper with a comic book grid layed out on it, and which I can just blow up to 11" x 17". And it’ll approximately be the correct size, but that’s if I 140 THE BEST OF DRAW!

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DRAW!: And now you’re usually penciling for yourself to ink, right?

SDS: Yeah.

DRAW!: So how tight do you have to make your pencils? Do you leave a little bit of the looseness to it so you can do some of the drawing in ink?

SDS: Yeah, I do. If I’m inking a job, which I generally try to do these days, I’ll try and draw enough that my editor knows what I mean. But the odd thing is, when the pages come back from the writer and the lettering process to be inked, I actually will go back in and pencil things much more tightly. Unless I feel confident that I really can draw with ink.

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COMICS & ANIMATION That happens, like, 30% of the time, and the rest of the time I’ll feel like I need to go in and pencil more particularly.

DRAW!: Are you mostly a pen or a brush guy?

SDS: I jump all the time. It’s really funny, when I was at DC as a teenager and Joe Orlando was telling me how to ink, somebody put a brush in my hand. And I’m thinking, “This is like inking with spaghetti! What is—?

This is impossible!” So right there and then, I decided that I was a pen guy. And you know so many of the great comic strip cartoonists—George Herriman and Charles Schulz, for example—are pen guys. So that works fine for certain things. And then when I grew up and came to love guys like Kurtzman and Caniff and Frank Robbins and stuff like that, it was clear they were using brush for a lot of their work. So that really intrigued me. So for years I was using these brush pens.

The Sumi brush pens.

DRAW!: Those are fun to work with.

SDS: They have waterproof ink. And then, to my horror, I discovered that they stopped making them!

pen and ink and brushes and nibs and stuff, because that’s how stuff was done. Now, a lot of that stuff is done in Illustrator or people are using clip art. Cartoonists are, like, throwbacks to the ancient druids or something.

SDS: [laughs] Yeah, I fully agree with that. That’s seems pretty much what we are.

DRAW!: So once you find something that you like, you tell the other guy, then everybody goes, “Oh, yeah! Did you hear about those new Zig markers or the new brush?”

SDS: Yeah, yeah. So, unfortunately, I couldn’t ink with those things anymore, so I taught myself to ink with a brush. On any given job, I might use both.

It depends on what I want for the panel. The style of inking might change, panel to panel. I generally feel much more comfortable with a pen. I have a big lettering pen, for all I know. But I like the fact that I can’t noodle with it because it’s got such a bold line, a very thick line.

DRAW!: Who made it? Was it an old Esterbrook or something like that? Or a Gillotte?

DRAW!: That always happens! That’s the bane of the artist... you find a pen, a brush, a pencil that you BOTH PAGES: Character designs from Bizarro Comics. I was really really like. It works really trying to find something to connect to, or call my “own” with the well. The next time you go in Mxyzptlk character. the art supply store, they go, BELOW: I loved this design. Unfortunately Bizarro Comics Editor Joey “Oh, yeah, they stopped makCavalieri felt it was way to far off from the character’s original look. ing those.” [laughs] SDS: Yeah, it’s horrifying! The best example, I think, of what you’re talking about is Kyle had this nib that he loved, so he bought, like, I don’t know how many gross of them, because he knew someday they were going to be extinct. So he’s got twelve crates of them in his house, or something like that. I think it was really smart! He loved this nib and he always wanted to work with it.

STEPHEN DeSTEFANO

SDS: I don’t know. Who is this? [looks for it]

DRAW!: I’m always fascinated to find old pen nibs, because there were so many companies that made pen points in the past, and every once in a while I’ll stumble across MR. MXYZPTLK ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS a box of old pen points, and find new ones, “Wow, I never heard of that company before!”

DRAW!: He’s smart, because basically that’s what happens. Especially in the Eighties and Nineties, it was the extinction of the art products.

SDS: Yeah, because of the computer?

DRAW!: Because of the computer and the fact that... you know, you go back to the Forties and the Fifties and there were hundreds of commercial artists using

SDS: That’s cool. [examines pen] It’s a 513ER and everything else has ink on it.

DRAW!: I wonder if it’s an Esterbrook, because they used to be a major company. They were a very big....

SDS: Could be. Globe? Something Globe. [laughter] So all you people out there who want to ink the DeStefano way, go out and get a 513 Globe. That’s all I can tell you.

DRAW!: What’s your typical work day like? Do you just wake up and pencil in the morning and ink at night? Is every day different for you? How does that work for you?

SDS: It depends. Every day is sort of different. Generally, I need something to ease into the day, so I’ll try and do the easiest work in the morning. I’ll try to save blocks of easy work for the morning and the early evening, and if I have to write or I have to lay something out, I’ll do that in the afternoon. If I have to tell a story, I can’t do any of that stuff with music on, I have to THE BEST OF DRAW! 141

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STEPHEN DeSTEFANO SDS: Yes, I’ve been the Popeye licensing artist for the past nearly 15 years. So, yeah, I’m a licensing artist, I’m a storyboard artist, I’m an animation designer, I’m a comic book artist, but I always define myself as a cartoonist.

DRAW!: Sort of covers everything nicely.

SDS: I feel so, yeah. And I don’t know of very many comic book artists who actually call themselves cartoonists, but animators always call themselves cartoonists.

DRAW!: And it often seems in comics “cartooning” is an ugly word, it’s a four-letter word.

SDS: Yes, and it’s unfortunate. I always feel it’s cartooning if it’s telling stories with pictures.

DRAW!: So who are your influences right now, who are you looking at or pulling from to draw inspiration?

BIZARRO, MR. MXYZPTLK ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

SDS: Well, [laughs] my influences are sort of esoteric right now, actually. Well, not so esoteric, but for me it feels esoteric, because I’ve been looking at a lot of Barry Smith right now, which I never did as a kid.

DRAW!: Really?

ABOVE: A page from the Bizarro Comics hardcover graphic novel.

RIGHT: DESTEFANO—Part of my responsibility as a background artist at Spumco was to come up with title card concepts. I loved this job, though it could be pretty hard to do. These are for the infamous “Man’s Best Friend” episode, which introduced the fully formed George Liquor to the world.

really focus. So all the hard stuff I’ll save for the middle of the day—“thinking” work. It used to be that I could actually ink in front of a television, because I used to think that was sort of... um... I don’t want to say “brainless,” because that makes it sound like an idiot does it, but it’s just sort of a Zen practice, really. Or it’s like doing basic arithmetic. It’s technical, but it’s also like you’re just sort of going along with what’s there. So I used to be able to do that in front of the television, but that’s changed a bit now. But, yeah, that’s generally my day. It also depends, I’m usually juggling different jobs, so it depends on who needs what, it depends on what’s hot or not, it depends on when something was called in. So it changes, usually, from day to day.

DRAW!: So how do you define yourself now, since you’re an artist who kind of straddles both comics and animation? You might be doing a storyboard job next week, or you might be drawing an issue of Dexter’s Lab... you do Popeye art, too, right?

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SDS: Yeah! It’s really, really weird, because I’ve got this friend, and he showed me Barry Smith’s first work, a Daredevil job, I think, and he said, “I loved this when I was a kid!” And I looked at the guy and I thought, “You are insane! This is awful!” But my friend kept showing it and showing it to me, and I kept thinking, “Well, it’s got some charm to it.” And in the past couple months, I’ve decided I need all the Conans, which I’m struggling to afford, but I’m doing. But influences... well, there are the constant influences, the things that I’ve always loved and I feel continuously feed me, and then there are the day to day influences like Barry Smith, which I feel compelled to look at.

DRAW!: So, who are the constant influences?

SDS: Always Segar, Kurtzman, Gottfredson... Kirby always.

Probably a bit of Milt Gross thrown in there.

DRAW!: So artists who were really cartoonists?

SDS: Yeah. And then ephemeral things, influences that I can’t feel in a tactile way, because they came from animation directors. They didn’t necessarily draw anything, so the animation guys are harder to get a tactile feel for, but someone like Bob Clampett is always in my mind. Somebody like Tex Avery. That’s always with me. The feeling of a Fleischer cartoon, that’s always in me. But I couldn’t say.... My Popeyes tend to look, I’ve been told, more like the Dave Tendlar Popeyes or the Seymour Kneitel Popeyes than they do Orestes Calpini. So there are a lot of different Popeyes that you can draw, even from the Fleischers. But there are certain animators that I really loved as a kid that I sort of brought with me up to this professional point.

DRAW!: These were Fleischer animators on the Popeye cartoons?

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STEPHEN DeSTEFANO REN AND STIMPY ™ AND ©2008 VIACOM INTERNATIONAL INC.

SDS: Yes. DRAW!: So you were talking about the constant influences and the muses that are sort of there but you can’t say directly you could look at your work and say, “Oh, that’s such-and-such influence,” or whatever.

SDS: Yeah.

DRAW!: I know what you mean in a way, because Chuck Jones and the Hanna-Barbera cartoons and stuff, the Warner Brothers stuff, has always been such a huge, huge influence on me ever since I was a little kid, because I just rabidly watched that stuff.

Almost on a molecular level. And it wasn’t until I started trying to do my own creator-owned work that these influences suddenly rushed back to the surface, brought me back to really wanting to be doing this more cartoony work. Then I realized how much of an influence that stuff is, and how much of that stuff is just packed in there. It’s like permanently etched in your brain. It’s like being able to remember all the incidental music from the Munsters. [laughter] SDS: Right, that’s what it’s like!

DRAW!: I can remember every little bit of music from the Munsters, I can tell what’s going on. I don’t have to look at the TV, because I remember watching those things as a kid.

SDS: Right! Of course, now I’m trying to think of all the incidental music for the Munsters. [laughter] But yeah, that’s sort of interesting, actually, because you had an honest-to-God superhero career. I had sort of a half-assed super-hero guy instead of really doing super-hero comics.

DRAW!: It’s funny. My first samples, which I ended up getting work with, were cartoon stuff.

SDS: Oh yeah?

DRAW!: It was this character I came up with,Trax Rover. And my first time up at Marvel, I was showing work that was very cartoony. It was sort of like Preston Blair’s Fantastic Four kind of stuff, Preston Blair crossed with Jack Kirby. And I remember the reception was basically “Oh, no. No, no. Jack Kirby’s a bad word up here, we don’t really do that anymore.” Then I went from that into my Alex Raymond/Rip Kirby phase.

SDS: Yeah. But it’s an amazing talent to be able to jump from both worlds. I mean, I can’t think of very many people who can do that. That’s very impressive, Mike. And you’re a good example, you could probably relay to super-hero people better than most how hard it really is to draw cartoony.

DRAW!: It is!

SDS: How hard it is to draw in animated style, in traditional cartooning style.

DRAW!: It’s very demanding. Those Nine Old Men at Disney, the drawing ability that those guys had was just phenomenal.

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tor/cartoonist you want to pull out of anywhere. But it is really hard. It’s much harder to try to draw Charlie Brown than it is to draw Conan.

SDS: Yeah. [laughs] I don’t think I could draw Conan very well, but I think the pervasive feel that I’ve always gotten being in comic books is that drawing cartoony—I was called a “bigfoot” artist once or twice, which sort of perplexed me.

DRAW!: And that’s not even a term that people probably use anymore, “bigfoot.”

SDS: Yeah. Well, that was a bigfoot editor who told me that. But the feeling was that cartooning stuff is easy, but super-heroes are hard to draw. And I think it depends on the person, on the artist’s ability. I don’t think I could draw Conan, or Batman very well, but not because I don’t have the ability. Drawing, technical drawing, is really mostly about problem solving. I’m not a bad problem solver—if I have to, I can be a fair technician. My mind’s just not there, though, my brain just can’t adjust to a super-hero mentality. Well, “can’t” is maybe a harsh word, but it’s difficult for me to draw super-heroes. And going back to the Warner Cartoons, I don’t think there’s ever been more exceptional drawings of sheer emotion than those guys were able to create. And who’s to say what’s a better drawing? That’s not a “technical” drawing, that’s not “anatomically correct” or something like that, but what’s our point? To be anatomically correct or to get across an extreme emotion as quickly and as beautifully as you can. So somebody like Rod Scribner, an animator for Bob Clampett, that’s astounding! His expressions, his poses—again, going back to my references to Kurtzman’s sheer emotional power—that’s as hard a thing as I could possibly think of to do. Then the people that can jump from both sides, they just blow my mind. So I think that’s really amazing that you could draw super-heroes.

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ABOVE AND RIGHT: Some of the the final sequence from DeStefano’s Superman: The Animated Series thumbnails.

DRAW!: Well, as a kid, there was a lot of warring going on with me, because I loved Jack Kirby and loved Neal Adams, and they’re at opposite ends of the spectrum.

SDS: Pretty much, yeah.

DRAW!: And for a while, when I was younger, I gave Neal’s work more weight because it was realistic, and thinking as a kid, well, realism is more important. And then the further and further I go along, the less and less that is important. Because if you want real, you just go get a camera.

SDS: Right. Yeah, what’s truly amazing when you’re drawing: is it to be representational, or is it to get across the story and the emotion, to communicate? You don’t necessarily need to draw anatomically correct figures or appropriate perspective to communicate. It helps in certain things, but in other ways.... It is really interesting.

DRAW!: And the most popular cartoon characters throughout the world are the simplest, are the most cartoony, because those are the ones that cross all the cultural boundaries, because then you’re really getting down to the real basics of conveying information.

SDS: Yeah, it’s really amazing. Is it a matter of drawing, or, when you get that point, it’s like it’s a matter of designing, and designing is an extremely hard thing to do, to get something to its most basic form, to convey an idea. It’s really amazing.

DRAW!: Well, I think the sad part is that it’s very hard now, as a cartoonist outside of animation—unless you sell a newspaper

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strip—it’s really almost impossible in comic books to find a gig where you can do that kind of honest cartooning. There are very, very few places left. You’ve got the few books that DC puts out, maybe Mad magazine, and then you really start running out of places. Maybe advertising, there’s some stuff, the occasional job.

SDS: Yeah, really. It’s true. I’m not super-up on what you can do on the computer, but maybe that’s a new place for things to develop. If they do develop, I’m not sure I might recognize it, because my head’s back in 1943....

DRAW!: But you know, everything old is new again. I was having a young artist help me do some backgrounds recently, and I was showing him an old art director’s annuals from ’40s and ’30s, and if you look through them, a lot of design looks modern. 50 years ago you didn’t have TV to compete with, so a lot of the top talent went into things like film or strips or advertising.

Animation still needs artists. Even if it’s the cheapest show on TV, they want talented people working on it.

SDS: That’s true, and that’s one of the great things. It was interesting that I spent a lot of time in my youth working in comic books, and I was trying to draw funny and I wasn’t getting much of a response. And I wasn’t getting paid very well. And for whatever reason, I decided that’s what I wanted to do. And then I went into animation and I was getting a tremendous response, and people were really complimentary. And beyond that, people could teach me things, and said, “Well, that’s pretty good, but if you do this, you can get better.” And there was constant feedback and there was a constant dialogue. And there was lots of money. [laughter] Anyway, there was a constant source of money, let’s put it that way. But it’s a weird thing, because at the same time... so now I’m back in comic books. And I like comic books. I real-

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ly feel that’s the best way for me to tell a story. There’s so many layers to animation, there’s so many people involved.

DRAW!: Yeah, comic books is still the best personal way to tell a story, because you can have a disagreement with the director on something, you can say “Well, I think the shot should be set up like this,” and he can say, “No, no, no, I think the shot should beset up like that.” In comics, you’re the alpha and omega, basically.

SDS: Yeah, and that is what I love. It’s you and a pen—that’s pretty much a comic book. Eventually, if you haven’t written it, yeah, you have to have a writer, there’s going to be an editor, there’s going to be a letterer and colorist and production people, and then there’s going to be a printer. But that’s relatively few steps, fewer collaborations, compared to the process that goes into animation and how much can go wrong within that process.

DRAW!: Well, you’re not sending your stuff to some foreign culture and having somebody over there—.

SDS: “Can you Koreans finish this?” [laughter] “In a few months I’d like to see what you’ve done. I know you don’t understand English, our humor, but believe me, it’s funny!” Yeah, I don’t understand how it works, but we were making it work for a while, to an extent.

DRAW!: So are you working on any animation right now, or are you mostly just back doing comics?

SDS: Yeah, mostly comics. But for a while I was making all my bread and butter on being hired for storyboarding pilots for the Cartoon Network. So I did Evan Dorkin’s pilot, Welcome to Eltingville, for the Cartoon Network, then immediately jumped THE BEST OF DRAW! 145

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REN AND STIMPY ™ AND ©2008 VIACOM INTERNATIONAL INC.

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ABOVE: More great expressive storyboards by DeStefano from the Ren & Stimpy episode, “A Friend in Your Face.”

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ABOVE: DESTEFANO—From the back of a comic page. I often doodle on the back of a pages (but then, what comic artist doesn’t), generally trying to feel comfortable with the characters I’m drawing.

STEPHEN DeSTEFANO

SDS: And even if I wanted something, I couldn’t get it! So it was like, “that’s fine,” since I was getting work at DC, and I’ve always got stuff from King Features, from Popeye, and I’ve actually started writing some stuff for Nickelodeon Magazine, so that was cool. I sort of miss it, I wish I could keep my hand in it, but not so much has come up over the past year or so. So I’ll just go where I am, and like I said, I love comic books. I feel like that’s my medium.

DRAW!: Well, I think it’s great to be a jack-of-all-trades, because if you do that, you can do the backgrounds, you can do different styles, you can do comics or whatever. I loved that issue of Legion that you did. How did that come about? Be-cause that’s kind of odd, when you think about it. I mean, you’re doing cartoony stuff, to go do sort of a straight super-hero job.

onto this pilot for Debbie Solomon, an extremely talented cartoonist in downtown New York. She had a pilot going for Cartoon Network as well called Private-Eye Princess. It was a half-hour, just like Evan’s was. So I was storyboarding that for her, and that was like six or eight months or something like that.

It was a huge job, but it turned out really well. But I felt like, man, I’m exhausted!

DRAW!: It is hard. That’s the one thing, when you go from comics to doing animation, it’s a mental adjustment, and it’s not only long hours, which can be demanding on your back—physically demanding—it’s also very mentally demanding.

SDS: It can be for me. There’s so much socialization and politics going on because there’s a lot of people involved. And you’re not just dealing with people abstractly and occasionally on the phone, as you would in mainstream comics, where you sort of sit around drawing for a few weeks and then you turn your stuff in.

You’re working head-to-head with people. And, on the whole, they’re generally nice people, but everybody has their own idea of what they want. And really, it might be some of your product, but you’re only just helping, it’s not your product. So that’s really mentally demanding; it’s really sort of mentally draining.

DRAW!: And every show is different. You’ve got to get into it, you’ve got to become the characters, you have to find some way of getting a hook. You go from doing, I dunno, Kim Possible one week, and the next week you’re doing Turtles.

SDS: Oh, man, that’s really hard, to jump from style to style to style. That was really tiring, too, because from Evan’s style, I had to jump to Debbie Solomon’s style. She’s a great cartoonist; she draws really funny. I loved drawing in her style, but it’s more of a New Yorker cartoon type of thing. So that was much different from what Evan was doing. It was so schizophrenic. So after I finished Debbie’s thing, I decided, “Boy, I’m really tired of animation.” I think I just wanted to stay away from it. Then I found out that the New York animation industry had died!

DRAW!: [laughs] So you didn’t have to worry about that!

ABOVE: DESTEFANO—Here is an awesome example of the sort of note I sometimes leave for myself near my drawing table. I think I made this up for myself when I was drawing a super-hero story (which was never printed) a few years ago. I was trying to convince myself that, despite the fact that characters had “realistic anatomy,” they still needed structure and charm as epitomized by the work of Floyd Gottfredson [Mickey Mouse]!

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SDS: Well, that was an anomaly of some sort. [laughs] I think editor Mike McAvennie just wanted to do something different in the Legion. He just wanted to be light for an issue. And he contacted me, and unfortunately, I was right in the middle of “Dexter’s Ark.” I definitely wanted to draw the Legion, but I was pretty embroiled in turning out as fine a job as I possibly could do on Dexter. So taking on the Legion at the same time was gonna be a squeaker, but I did it.

DRAW!: I just think that “Dexter’s Ark” is the job of the year.

SDS: Thanks, I really, really appreciate that.

DRAW!: And I think it’s great that Genndy Tartakovsky has the faith and the ability to trust other people to do their own interpretation of their character instead of making it some stale, model-sheet comic book.

SDS: Yeah, that was the impressive thing. I was really, really pleased with that... I can’t thank Genndy enough, actually. I should make that clear, this should get in print, because Genndy really protected that job. I penciled that job, and it went to Cartoon Network Consumer Services or whatever, and they said, “What is this? I don’t know what this is, but this isn’t Dexter,” essentially. And editor Joan Hilty got the word and everybody said, “Well, let’s see what Genndy says, and Genndy’ll be the final word.” And Genndy said, “That’s it! That’s what he’s gonna do.” So I was really, really lucky.

SDS: And then, on the heels of that, I did that Legion thing, which unfortunately I had to turn out in two weeks. But that was a blast, because, like I said, I always wanted to draw superheroes. I don’t know how it came out, but at least I had a hell of a lot of fun.

DRAW!: I think it turned out great! And you know, I think comics were designed to be drawn fast. All the guys that we admire, the greatest generation of cartoonists, were guys that sat down and had styles to be able to blast out two, three, five pages a day.

SDS: I think that is one of the most marked differences between cartoonists of today and cartoonists from yesterday. You hear how Milton Caniff would talk in old interviews, and you know what Jack Kirby was doing, what his motivation was. Jack wanted to feed his family, and Caniff wanted to sell papers. They were two supremely talented craftsmen, but they pushed and totally broke through the boundaries of their craft. But they always put it on sort of a commercial level. And it’s us guys today who are always putting it on this artistic level, that we’re supposed to be creating something lasting, that this is a work of art.

DRAW!: Well, it’s great to have a cartoonist in charge, because then he can say to the suits, “Shut up! This is great! This is beautiful, this is great cartooning!”

SDS: Yeah! And I’m glad that Genndy’s on top, because he’s in a position to not be shouted down, and because, like I said, he protected that job. I felt like I couldn’t exactly draw in Genndy’s style, but I felt like I could adapt it through certain things, through certain “common denominators” of style. I felt like I connected to enough of the show’s stylistic mannerisms that I could draw in comics. So I got out all my Kurtzman and I got out all my Gene Hazelton—who’s the guy that drew the Flint-stones comic for years—and that’s how I adapted the whole thing.

DRAW!: Again, I think that’s such a great job.

SDS: Thank you, thank you very much. I appreciate that. That makes me feel really good, because I worked really, really hard on it, and that said, I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done.

DRAW!: The Eisner goes to you, my friend!

SDS: [laughs] Well... “New Talent Most Deserving of Recognition.” [laughter] DRAW!: Yeah, you’ll come up with your cane and accept it, [elderly voice] “Thanks, kids!”

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ABOVE: A self portrait of the artist, done in marker, and drawn in his Henry Boltinoff style.

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The Figure in Light and Shadow

BY BRET BLEVINS

T

©2008 BRET BLEVINS.

he variety of possible stylized treatments of light and shadow are virtually without end, but because DRAW! is aimed at the fields of illustration, cartooning and animation as well as traditional art disciplines, this article will present simplified principles of using light to define or dramatize form for visual clarity. Since most drawn imagery (and all commercial art) is intended to communicate with a viewer, the ability to be clear is a handy asset.

I’ve included sensitive drawings made only for aesthetic ends, and commercial artwork that serves other demands—their differences must serve as an introduction to the infinite breadth of light and shadow treatments possible in two-dimensional drawing. A deeper exploration of the subject is too vast for the space we have available in this article, but I want to stress the depth of this subject, and encourage you to enhance your picturemaking adventures by further study of the myriad applications of light and shadow found throughout the history of representational art.

We’ll start with a simple explanation of the visual properties of light as it functions in the natural world; to perceive visual information our eyes are entirely dependent on the presence of light—bright or faint, we must have a degree of light that falls within the perceptive range of our optical organs. In print this sounds absurdly obvious, but stating it is the key to shifting our attention to the framework that an artist must “see through” to effectively organize the light and shadow information. To translate the enormously complex range of shades visible in nature into a compelling drawing an artist must see patterns of light and dark areas in a manner that can be simulated by his drawing medium. Usually this means simplifying the seen information, and understanding the mechanics of light falling on an object is a crucial aid to the simplification process.

These two drawings of Batman explain this basic contrast in approach— the first is rendered as if the actual threedimensional form was being struck by light from the upper left...

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In this three-stage demonstration, ILLUSTRATION 1 the first image has simplified the forms receiving light (from the direction indicated by the arrow) into clean angular planes—the plane that most directly faces the light source will be defined by the lightest tone in your drawing (usually the white paper). As the plane turns at an oblique angle to the light, receiving less illumination, we drop the tone to a middle gray—as the third plane turns away from the light we fill it with shadow. This simple illustration explains an invaluable technique for clarifying what you see and restating your perception into a form that aids drawing. Of course you wouldn’t render every form into this chiseled block structure (though it’s good ILLUSTRATION 2 training to do so), but learning to mentally break the planes apart as you look at an object helps you understand what you see in terms of drawing light and shadow.

The second image has softened and melded the planes into a smooth cylinder—but because we’ve noted the changing angles of the surfaces receiving light in the blunt manner shown in the first image, we’re able to blend the tones together and achieve a convincing illusion of roundness.

In the final image the cylinders have become the anatomy of an arm and simple shadow shapes convince our eyes we are looking at a human limb. The explanatory floating curved arrows following the form are wonderful tools to help work out the gradations of light on turning surface. I often use these on a piece of overlaid tracing paper to work out a tricky bit of lighting. In the portrait demonstration I’ve constructed a head by building up a structure of planes—the form-following arrows indicate how I was thinking about each change of direction—this allowed me to fabricate reasonably accurate skull, face and neck forms out of my imagination using prior knowledge gained through study and experience.

In the second image I was free to focus on refining the details of interior edges and more subtle turns of form (such as the nostrils and eyes) because the big planes were safely in place. Now indicating a direct but soft light toward the left side of the head is a much simpler problem, because I know where the planes are, having made several mental and physical (drawn) excursions over the territory. Although this head is imaginary, having this process behind you is a useful aid in drawing from life, because it helps you understand what you are seeing when you observe actual light on actual forms. The 150 THE BEST OF DRAW!

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important lesson described in these demo illustrations is more a tool for thinking about what you are seeing (or inventing) than a technique for making a drawing. The only difference between any non-drawing person with normal eyesight and an artist is the special way an artist sorts, interprets and translates seen information into the language of drawing. Learning to make marks on paper is physical and easy—learning to think and see like an artist takes a bit more time and concentration. I can’t stress enough the importance of using your mind more than you use your pencil. It eliminates so much frustration and stress from the drawing process.

Anything that reduces frustration is welcome, because our subject is full of other complications; light and shadow can also be arbitrarily distorted to create an endless variety of visual effects and connotations. For the purposes of this article, we’ll divide our topic into two broad areas—light and shadow derived from actual optical mechanics as they function in nature, and invented light and shadow intentionally distorted toward a particular esthetic effect. These two applications can share many rules or none, depending on the image desired—needless to say, this short article can only hint at the endless possibilities.

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The second is simplified into the more familiar cartoon language of an exaggerated, symbolic, flat, stylized caricature of light and shadow. This image is iconic and blatant, simplified for impact—but the distribution of light and shadow areas are extrapolated from the optics of the natural world and distorted for clarity, drama and dynamic compositional effect.

As you can see, aside from the actual schematic shapes, they have little in common. Yet both are shaped by observation and the optical facts of visible light.

Regardless of rendering style—using light and shadow to create an illusion of three-dimensional form on a flat two-dimensional surface requires careful observation of the behavior of light in nature, and good judgment in translating what you see into the limitations of drawing. These limitations are severe—your paper is flat and twodimensional, an actual figure in space contains planes of depth not available to your drawing, so you are not duplicating nature—you are symbolizing it by “fooling” the human eye with the tones and edges you indicate, chosen for their ability to create a convincing illusion. As I mentioned above, this requires a special kind of multilayered seeing. (Which any sighted person can learn.)

To draw well, a “double awareness” must be developed that enables your mind to observe all the available information and simultaneously select, shape, edit or embellish this input to suit the needs of your drawing. One of the challenges of making representational figurative art is sorting out the overpowering wealth of information nature provides. Many drawings get into trouble because the artist is so conscious of the personality or physical reality of the subject that he/she loses the detachment to be aesthetically selective and the image becomes a directionless mess of observed but unharmonized details. A good drawing is not a complete depiction of what is seen—that’s what a camera is for. In representational artwork you must judiciously lie to communicate an essence of the truth!

This is tough because unlike the study of form, anatomy, rhythm, movement and gesture, observation of natural light on real form is often inherently confusing—the complexity that can arise from multiple light sources, reflections, variety of surfaces and textures receiving varied intensities of light can be overwhelming. It’s important to understand that study of light and shadow (like all the elements of drawing) is a process of making prejudiced selections—you must incorporate only the information that is useful to your drawing, shape it toward an esthetic goal, and sublimate or delete the rest.

I stress this because light and shadow is the most subtle, variable, ever-changing aspect of seeing, and often confuses or tricks the eye. Thus simplifying form-defining light and dark patterns is vital to successful drawing. In most drawings, it is invariably best to limit your light sources. Two sources can be

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very effective if handled carefully, but one is always stronger, and usually more pleasing to the eye.

Howard Pyle once advised his students; “You can paint a fine painting with two values (tones). You can still do it with three, but if you find yourself facing a painting with four or more values, throw it out and start over.” This is first-rate advice for any medium—as it relates to our topic of shadows, too many light sources dilute definition of form, making it difficult to “sum up” all the important information in a strong arrangement of dark and light shapes. (I want to stress this is no hard rule—any drawing or painting is successful if it works, but as complexity increases, so do the opportunities to fail.)

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Another key to using light and shadow well is a grasp of the importance of edges. Not all edges are alike, and sensitive handling of the edges in your drawing is crucial to creating convincing illusions of light defining form in space. The world is littered with drawings that are a mere spread of details crowded across a surface—often an attentive discernment of soft and hard, “lost and found” edges would improve the effect of volume and liberate these same drawings from their prison of flatness.

The subject of flatness brings us again to the contrast shown in the Batman illustrations on the previous page—in animation and most cartooning, light and shadow is intentionally “flattened” into simplified patterns that are suggested by or extrapolated from the mechanics of natural light, but bear no resemblance to an actual three-dimensional form in light (except possibly a harsh strobe-like illumination). Part of this is due to the intended reception of the artwork—a sensitive naturalistic drawing attempts to capture more than appearance—it’s after a deeper essence of the subject, a quality of perception that a viewer will live with over time, gradually developing a relationship with the image that continues to reveal nuances of substance.

An illustration or cartoon image is almost always part of something beyond its own lines and shapes—it exists as a segment of a larger whole (as in animation or comic books), or refers to something else (a book cover or advertisement image).

This requires it to communicate instantly and boldly—essentially it is more important that commercial art be “read” quickly than perceived in depth. This is a root of the blatant, unsubtle treat-

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ment of light and shadow in the majority of commercial art.

So it’s important to know what kind of drawing you intend to make, then gather and arrange your information accordingly.

Careful study of these examples will help clarify the differences between natural observation-based drawing and contrived stylization of the same principles of light and shadow dynamics to create impact and instant communication.

KESTREL In this set of comparisons, the first image is a subtle drawing that was made with pure observation and unconscious emotion (meaning no particular effect was intended—I was just responding to the model). The matching images are contrived illustrations—the subtleties of the natural observation drawing have been converted into telegraphic design elements.

Note particularly the character of the edges and how they differ. The lovely subtlety of this gentle drawing is a response to the quiet beauty of the model seen in diffused mid-afternoon daylight. The gracefully curled limbs and the heavy spill of her hair fill this image with sensuous rhythm. The grayed environment allows the lit forms to swell forward and the shadows to recede into space. The contours were so appealing in this pose I’ve accentuated most of the light-receiving edges with a line—I could have erased these same edges into pure light tone, and the character of the drawing would be altered—not better or worse, just different. Each image can be handled in many ways, guided by your mood or intentions.

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LIGHTING THE FIGURE The second image has been turned into a typical ILLUSTRATION 2 commercial line rendering, and much subtlety (and beauty) has been sacrificed. But the shading choices made here have been guided and informed by the observed natural light and shadow of the original image. The mannered linework and crosshatching are a long-standing device born out of the nature of pen and ink drawing, etching and offset reproduction technology.

Light and shadow has been greatly simplified and rendering into symbolic language—the variation in dark and light of the actual lines is slight—variety of gray or light tones is indicated by line density, thickness, number and placement. This drawing is designed to be inked.

ILLUSTRATION 3 The final drawing is a pattern of stylized shapes in high contrast, similar to the inked Batman portrait.

Compare this drawing to the original image and note how many details of light on form have been reduced to bold shape pieces—the only attempt to vary the treatment of edges are the spiky repeated “feathering” marks along round forms where light meets shadow. The hair has been sharpened into angular design shapes—there is no softness anywhere in this drawing. This harsh boldness is a staple of commercial art imagery, especially when reproduced at a small size. It’s poster-like impact is powerful and clear, but many pleasures of drawing are absent from this approach—all the subtlety to be found in natural observation has been stripped away and the light and shadow effects are caricatured and distorted.

Bearing in mind the difference between natural light on real form in nature and contrived distortion, we can now explore a few principles of manipulating light and shadow for

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a desired effect—.

Once again (see DRAW! #1-5), rhythm is our fundamental concern—to create convincing invented light and shadow, the light and dark areas must work together in a rhythm that “feels” right to the viewer, no matter how far from reality they might be.

Let’s take a sketch done from life and play around with different invented light sources.

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KESTREL’S BACK The first image is a watercolor sketch done from life—the others are the same pose with imaginary light sources (indicated by an arrow) rendered in pencil.

In all but one there is a single light source—the double lit drawing (#4) is by far the least immediately pleasing.

It is dramatic in a brittle, brassy way, and of course this may be the desired effect in a particular instance, but you can see how quickly a solid impression of form is compromised by more than one light source.

Multiple light sources create endless complexity, and require a separate article of their own. The intention here is to present an introduction to thinking about light and shadow as a tool for defining form in figure drawing. If clarity of form is the primary goal, simplicity is always best.

Study these illustrations carefully, noting how the shadows create a rhythm that explains the graceful anatomy of the figure— and simultaneously a rhythm of dark and light flat shapes on the paper that make a pleasing design.

Obviously, it’s crucial to do as much life drawing of models in natural light as possible to develop a sense of how the shadow shapes define the rhythm of the human body’s planes and contours (good sculptures and figurines are a great help, too—but the living body is the best source).

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In the following gallery of examples I’ve applied the concepts above, though in the narrative illustrations light and shadow has also been contrived and manipulated across the entire content of the images—the backgrounds and props have been shaped by light and shadow (in harmony with the figures) for dramatic effect or clarity. You can see how powerful this aspect of composing is for creating mood and atmosphere in storytelling—but that’s a subject for another day!

See you next time!

Bret

STORM ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

LEFT: This image of Storm uses double lighting for strong graphic effect—the outer contours of her body are delineated by smooth and crisp white-againstblack shapes, in contrast to the softedged inner shadow rendered in drybrush technique. This suggests the softness of her flesh, as the gentle sweep of the brush strokes in her mohawk suggest the texture of hair. The mechanical gray shadows applied to the dove and gloves serve to separate their surface textures from the figure’s.

RIGHT: The cabin scene is melodramatically lit from a single source—the fireplace. This allows exaggerated use of black shadow shapes to “carve” sculptural form out of the white ground, creating a spooky mood. This sort of image requires careful planning of the composition to arrange the overlapping shapes for clarity, and judicious manipulation of the facts—for example, I eliminated the strong black shadows that would logically be cast by the objects in the lower right corner of the frame in order to discourage the viewer’s eye from lingering there. The figure grouping is the focal point of this picture.

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RIGHT: Wolverine is lit starkly from above, the shadows running along the planes and striations that turn away from the light source—except the exaggerated glowing teeth and eyes. Here again the distortion is intention to play up drama and impact.

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WOLVERINE ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

LIVE WIRE, LOS LANE ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS.

LEFT: Livewire is the light source here, casting stark shadows along the turning planes of Lois’s form. The stylized interior black shapes on Livewire’s costume aren’t really indicating shadows, they are graphic conventions that add impact to her form. Their shape and placement are derived from invented “double-lighting” though.

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ANARCHY, SPIRITS OF VENGEANCE ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

LEFT: This two-page story sequence of the character Anarchy is predominately lit from above (presumably moonlight), but other light sources are indicated where appropriate—in the first panel Anarchy is catching some up-light from the motor cycle headlight.

In the second panel the unconscious figures leaning against the tree are also lit by the headlight. As Anarchy is knocked from the bike, a judicious bit of double (reflected) light runs along the bottom of his figure—this illumination may or may not have been possible in a purely logical sense, but I added it for drama and clarity purposes—in complicated images such as this one, a bit of “fake” light that clarifies form and adds impact is often needed.

In the fourth panel Anarchy casts a shadow on the ground—this is a storytelling decision—it leaves no doubt he has struck the forest floor and is no longer moving through space, which sets the stage for his dodge in the following panel—where his shadow has disappeared! This is also a conscious distortion for clarity—the silhouette of his left hand is crucial to a clear statement of his action—a “proper” inclusion of a cast shadow here would confuse the composition.

RIGHT: The need for clarity of body language eliminates the cast shadow again as Anarchy lands in a crouch and is stuck from behind.

In panels two, three and four the scenes are top lit—with a bit of manipulation for clarity. For example, in panel three, Anarchy’s left bicep would logically be lost in the shadow of his opponent’s left forearm—but if I had done so the structure of Anarchy’s arm would be obscured and appear “flat,” awkward and possibly confusing. I dropped the shadow of the flare gun that may logically have fallen along Anarchy’s thigh in the following panel for the same reason—I sketched it in, and though it read fairly well I decided to take no chances and used the black shadow in the barrel of the gun to “grab” the viewer’s eye and telegraph the action.

In panel five the light source is the shooting flare gun, casting stylized shadows that allow us to read the villain’s facial expression clearly.

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BATMAN ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS INC.

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LEFT: The lighting in this Batman page is constructed by using the searchlight as the single light source in every scene. The only obvious “cheat” occurs in panel four—logically Batman’s face and flaring cape would be entirely in shadow, but to do so would create a confusing spiky shape that would kill the clarity of his pose and lose the drama of his facial expression.

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FIDDLER, SPYDER, STARMAN ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS.

LIGHTING THE FIGURE

These two images use stylized lighting to achieve their effects—in the first panel the Spider is double-lit, surrounded by flames—the stark ridges of the floor would not logically catch light along their edges so strongly, but rendering them this way creates a dramatic radial pattern that helps to visually propel the fired arrow into the violin by sweeping the viewer’s eye across the composition. The arrow and splinters are strengthened by losing the double lighting in the top half of the foreground figure.

In the second panel the scene is top lit, framed by the “knockout” shapes in the foreground, which caught a bit of light only along one inclined plane. This keeps the foreground from appearing completely flat, like cutout stage scenery.

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VIGILANTE ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS.

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The final page uses extreme polarization of light and shadow to achieve a powerful illusion of strong light. The sharply stylized shadow shapes are carefully composed and wherever possible the contour line along the lit side has been eliminated, tricking the viewer’s eye and mind into completing the forms. This high-contrast approach is full of dramatic power, and heightens the challenges of composition—every edge, overlapping form and cast shadow shape requires close attention, but the results are worth it!

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DREAMING DESIGN THE DESIGN PROCESS

In my previous article I discussed some ideas about the role of observation and memory in drawing and designing.

Now I’d like to outline some thoughts on the process of how I go about designing for comics and animation. I won’t pretend that this will be an exhaustive listing of every last bit of that process, nor that my approach is for everybody; but I will offer some suggestions that I believe apply to most design challenges, regardless of whether the item to be designed is a background character, costume, or a vehicle. Some of these thoughts are specifically about science fiction design, because that is the subject matter I most enjoy and have done the most of; but the general principles I’m talking about can be applied to any subject matter, not just science fiction.

Some designs arrive in an instant, fully formed; you see them clearly in your mind’s eye, and the only challenge is whether or not you can trace them down on paper quickly enough, before they dissolve and vanish. In my experience, these “instant designs” are the rare exceptions. And sometimes these “design miracles” which arrive fully fleshed out later prove to be full of problems not first glimpsed in the heat of enthusiasm. In most cases I find that arriving at a sat161 THE BEST OF DRAW!

isfactory design takes work, experimentation and struggle, and involves following an “evolutionary process” of growing the design from first roughs to final drawing.

At any rate, when you are a working designer in a production situation, you simply cannot rely on “miracles.” You cannot always expect to instantly jump to the final solution.

You need a working understanding of how to break down a design problem into steps, which can more easily be solved one at a time. Especially because even the most inspired designer will have “off ” days, when the designs won’t flow easily. In those moments, having a problem-solving approach can make all the difference in getting things back on track quickly.

Having a working process doesn’t mean having a rigid formula; it really just means taking an analytical approach to the problem at hand. It means organizing your thinking a little, before plunging into drawing. This organized approach, instead of being a limiting constraint, really can instead serve to free you up, by eliminating confusion and clarifying your thinking. It gives you a set of guidelines, to keep you on track, and also help you in trouble-shooting if you discover

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PAUL RIVOCHE you’ve gone off the road into the ditch. These guidelines form a structure within which you may freely experiment with variations until you arrive at the best possible solution in the time available to you. Now let’s begin at the beginning: 1. RESEARCH: I hope that the necessity for this step is obvious. But just in case it isn’t: research is vital. You must understand, to a reasonable degree, what you are attempting to depict, or else your depiction will inevitably fail. You must understand the subject’s structure, its varieties, and its mechanics, even it’s history. And it’s not good enough to assume that you already know something. In any case, as I discussed in my previous article, often we know far less than we imagine we do about things, mistaking passing surface familiarity for intimate understanding. As the old saying goes, “Ignorance ain’t what you don’t know, it’s what you ‘know’ that ain’t so!”

Research, or the lack of it, may determine your success or failure. By spending some time on research, gathering information about and images of a given subject, you will discover things that you missed, even in familiar subjects or settings. Research uncovers gaps in your knowledge, useful details that you had never noticed, or a chance image that serves as a perfect starting point from which to evolve a design. Research often suggests many more possibilities for designs. Even if you are creating a wholly imaginary, fantastic setting, vehicle, or character, researching the nearest real-world equivalent is still worthwhile.

RESEARCH SOURCES: A. Real-life research: If you’re designing something that exists in your city or area, e.g. a train station, barbershop, whatever, go and visit a real one and take notes—both sketch notes and “mental notes.” Use your surroundings for suggestions of form and content.

B. Photos: These can easily be obtained on any subject. Sources: newspapers, TV, Internet, books and magazines. The Internet is a great help for reference photos, especially when the deadline is short. There are many image search sites such as Google, Altavista, etc. The images are usually low-resolution, but often still provide enough information for the purposes of doing a comic/animation drawing.

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

LEFT: To design these related views of a futuristic log cabin, I did some quick Internet research to learn about the details of log cabin construction. After that I experimented with various exterior designs, playing around with combination of forms until settling on this one. Once the exterior view was finished, it was easier to imagine the living room, and the study; I tried to match the window details to keep things consistent and believable.

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ABOVE: STEELWORKER ILLO—This design was suggested by the worker in the photo shown here. His haircut seemed somehow appropriate for the character I had to design for a comic book story, who was a depressive steelworker. The subject in the photo had many other interesting features that suggested possibilities for exaggeration—his nose, eyebrows, ear, etc. After a lot of sketches I settled on the version shown here in pencil; also shown is a panel from the final Tom Strong comic.

BELOW: For TV animation or comics, designs often have to be completed extremely quickly. That’s where observation and memory can help. In these examples I had no reference—there really wasn’t time because of the deadlines—but I based them on familiar settings from today: the cyber cafe was suggested by coffee shops, and the hotel was a typical arrangement, with an expanded scale.

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

Research becomes more fun when you see it as an interesting learning experience in itself, and not simply as a tedious chore that must be gotten through to get to the “REAL” fun of drawing. I’ve found that the effort expended on research will always turn up something useful, instead of wasting the very same effort going in futile, frustrating circles trying to design a subject you haven’t researched. And even if you don’t end up using all the information you have gathered— and you usually don’t—it may comes in handy on some later project, or just for general knowledge.

TOM STRONG ™ AND ©2008 AMERICA’S BEST COMICS, LLC

C. Memories: Examine your memory carefully for useful reference material. For example, if you are designing a character, a person you know could provide a great starting point. Think through the faces and personalities of some of the many people you’ve met through the years up until now. There’s a lot of raw material there—the way they stand, dress, move, and speak. Or—the apartment where you lived 20 years ago could have precisely the arrangement you are seeking for the background design you are creating. And so on...

Visualize different people you know, places you’ve seen, examining them for possible useful material or starting points.

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2. ANALYZE YOUR REFERENCE: UNDERSTAND THE KEY FUNCTIONAL ELEMENTS, STRUCTURES, AND SYMBOLS: Once you’ve amassed a sufficient amount of research, the next step is to soak yourself in this reference for a bit.

Familiarize yourself with your subject, without worrying yet about the actual design you have to do. Just concentrate on learning and understanding. Sketch from the images. Study the photos. Try to figure out what the “essence” of the subject is: the essential thing or things, which, if removed, would make the subject no longer functional or recognizable. For example, say you have to design a public swimming pool, for a scene in a comic book, and you want to do it convincingly. So you look through your reference, and try to filter out from all the different images

ABOVE: It’s not enough to have the right parts in your design—the way that they are arranged makes a big difference as well! Anyone who has ever assembled Swedish furniture knows this.

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what the key elements are that are common to all public swimming pools. After you look at enough reference you start to see recurring patterns.

So first study the key functional elements—and simultaneously try to understand the structure of the subject—the arrangement of these key parts of the whole, in relation to each other.

By “functional elements” I mean the different basic parts of a structure (in the case of a man-made object) that allow people to use it or interact with it. Of course there can be many of these elements, depending on the complexity of the object. A child’s tricycle has only a few functional elements; something like an ocean liner has many more. But to design either one, you would have to first understand the key basic working parts, and how they are arranged in relation to each other. Why? Because a certain minimum number of elements must be present together for any kind of “machine” to function. A door must have hinges so it can swing, and a handle or doorknob of some kind to be grasped; if any one of these is missing, it cannot function properly as a door—it is now just a mass of items, not a working door. Similarly, a telephone must have a mouthpiece to speak into, an earpiece to listen to, buttons to dial with, a device to sound a ring when a call comes in—or else it is not a telephone, but simply a mass of different materials.

Those two examples are obvious, because a door and a telephone are relatively simple items; but the task of identifying elements and structures becomes harder as you deal with more complex subject matter. As a layout artist asked to design another angle of an already existing design, you may not have to deal with all these questions. But as a designer asked to create a design from scratch, you must understand and identify these key elements so as to work with them in your design.

Let’s go back to that child’s tricycle for example: its functional elements are things such as: • 3 wheels and the pedals = the propulsion system • The seat and back standing-step = passenger accommodations • The handlebars = steering system • Front basket attached to handlebars = cargo hold • Bell = navigational aid/warning device So those are the parts which a tricycle must have; and the manner in which they are arranged is the structure which makes those parts work together to become what we call a tricycle. I’ve chosen a simple example on purpose—but structures get much more complex. Instead of the tricycle, substitute, say, a large football stadium. If you had to design a futuristic stadium, you would first have to analyze present-day ones, with a view to understanding their functional elements, their systems, and their structures. When you look at structures carefully you realize that each part has what you could call its own Functional Zone—the boundaries beyond which a part loses its “place” and therefore ceases to function. The parts of a machine, or the elements of a structure, must be arranged in a certain logical way for it to function.

To give a design a “feeling of life,” it’s also useful sometimes to think in terms of systems, as humorously noted above with the tricycle. Consider the different systems—i.e. groups of functional elements that work together—which it may employ. A human body has a circulatory system, nervous system, muscular system, and so on, all of which give it life; similarly, many other

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sorts of “bodies” have various systems of their own. Buildings have ventilation systems, heating/cooling systems, lighting systems, security systems, plumbing systems, and others. Cars have many of the same systems as buildings, because they also relate to the support of human life, and also some different ones—such as a propulsion system, steering, etc., which are unique to them.

Why does all this matter? Because presumably you want your design to be believable—to have a feeling of life, even if it’s a completely imaginary setting. If you don’t sufficiently consider elements, structure, and systems, your design may lack that essential feeling of organization that real-world items have.

Without directly analyzing the exact reason why, a reader instinctively feels it if something is missing.

SYMBOLS Note that any design you tackle will ABOVE: TURLEY’S BOXING OFFICE—In this rough design, the challenge was to clearly establish the seedy be set in either the past, present, or office of a fight promoter. Details such as the wilted plant, torn chair, cracked floor, and a general state of future. Secondly, your design may be disrepair established the seediness; the punching bag, posters, lockers, and old trophies all said “boxing.” completely real (i.e. exactly following Functional elements such as the overhead fan, vent, power panel, wiring, and so on, are all things you might the way things really were or are), comfind in this kind of converted-warehouse space, and contribute to the believability of the setting. pletely imaginary, or somewhere in between—for example, if you are drawlem, you discover that there is a baseline set of key symbols necing some kind of “parallel universe” or re-imagined present or essary for people to recognize something as “a gas station.” At past. If you are designing something in the real past, or real prethe very least, there must be a set of pumps that connect in some sent—as opposed to some imaginary re-invented past or preway to the vehicles, and an area for vehicles to drive up and sent—then your task is a bit easier because real reference can be refill. It also wouldn’t hurt to have some kind of cashier’s booth, found. You will still have to do a lot of distilling and rearranging a big sign, and other elements, but those are secondary. Now you and so on, usually to suit the demands of the story, but at least obviously can’t just put ordinary gas pumps from today into your you have definite images to follow. This is not the case if you futuristic gas station; you have to jazz them up somehow. The have to design something that never existed before, that is wholtrick is this: to “futurize” the details while still preserving the ly imaginary. If it’s some piece of futuristic hardware, or even “readability” of the basic symbol. Change the skin of that gas some element of a re-imagined past era, there is no direct referpump—but make sure it still can be identified as such, because ence to give you the final lines, shapes, and forms that will make it’s a key symbol of a gas station. If you forget about all this, you up your drawing. might design all kinds of futuristic stuff that could be in an This is where your understanding of symbols comes into imaginary gas station, but the audience still might not realize play. Symbols are always important, but are perhaps most imporclearly what the setting is supposed to be—because the symbol tant when designing these imaginary items. Why? Because in the that gives immediate recognition is missing. This is even more so ebb and flow of a story, whether in comics or animation, your if you choose an angle for your establishing shot that obscures design must be immediately recognizable to the audience, so it crucial symbols—if, for example, in your one shot that is availcan make its contribution to that story. And it must be recognizable to establish the scene, you fill the view with a cashier and a able VISUALLY. If you have to rely on a lot of accompanying rack of candy, the audience won’t necessarily know that you’re verbal explanation—either spoken or written—to make your establishing a gas station. It could be the interior of a convedesign clear, you can slow the story down, and use up limited nience store or similar place. space in tedious exposition. And how do you make your design I’m emphasizing this because very often in science fiction VISUALLY recognizable? You rely on the known symbols that design, artists expend a lot of energy designing all sorts of comthe people of today associate with a given item. That’s all you plicated gizmos but forget all about symbols. Their justification have to go on—the chain of associations already established in is to say that they have license to do this because things will all people’s minds. be very different in the far future. That may be so, but because Pretend, for example, that you’ve been given the assignment they’ve ignored symbols, the result is that their futuristic gas stato design a futuristic gas station. When you examine the probtion—consisting perhaps of a giant sphere festooned with THE BEST OF DRAW! 165

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umpteen impressive techno-doodads—can’t immediately be visually recognized as a gas station by the audience. It has no resonance—it doesn’t hint at anything known to the audience in the here and now. Sure, the captions or dialogue may have a long explanation of how this refueling station transfers its fuel via unseen ether-based osmosis, but that won’t change the fact that the design is difficult to “read,” because it has strayed too far away from the symbols that the audiences of today have in their heads, the elements and arrangements which they associate with “gas station.”

If you have any doubt about what the key symbols are for a given subject, you can go on a little field trip and play “The Symbols Word-Association Game” with the nearest available willing test subject. Simply ask the person to list off the top of their head, without hesitating, the things they first think of when you say “gas station” or “casino” or “French Bistro” or... you name it. They will list the first images that come to mind, which they associate with the subject. It’s remarkable how universal the symbols in people’s heads often are, at least when it comes to design subjects that people are commonly familiar with. Once you have the list of key symbols

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

These designs relied on the use of symbols. The exterior shot and the pan of the interior farmhouse [right and below] were supposed to establish the somewhat shabby headquarters of a “Space Cult” reminiscent of hippies from the 1960s. I used various elements to suggest this, symbols that would trigger associations in a viewer— ”flower power” shapes, chubby lettering, a lava lamp, pot-bellied stove, and so on. These intentionally contrasted with high-tech items such as the inset TV screen and wall circuitry. For the TV studio design [top], the requirement was to have the viewer understand very quickly that the setting was a TV studio in the near future. So I stuck to familiar forms for the general layout of the set and cameras, but just added extra details to them, to make them appear more futuristic. Of course there are any number of other ways you might design such a studio that would be closer to the future technical reality, but I didn’t want to stray too far from present-day symbols in case the design didn’t “read” quickly.

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identified, you decide which are the most important, and which are lesser, in your design. Once you’ve sorted out the above ideas, and it’s a lot easier if you have, then it’s time to proceed to the next stage: roughs.

STORYTELLING—SERVING THE STORY: As you design you must juggle various factors. One important factor to never lose sight of is the necessity to serve the needs of the story, whether a comic story or a piece of animation. After all, the story is the reason for the entire exercise. Any amount of “pretty drawings” will still fail if they don’t make their contribution to the story.

Your design may help put across a specific story point, establish a setting, give key information about a time and place,

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

ABOVE: ESCAPE POD ROUGHS, VARIATIONS ON A THEME—Once I had my basic “theme”—this escape pod needed to be spherical, and a bit odd looking to fit in with the design of the villain’s mother ship—I started playing around with variations. It’s fun to try out different combinations and arrangements of elements, watching the effect that each change has on the overall “feel” of the design. Once a promising direction emerges, I would usually start doing drawings from other angles, to flesh out the design three-dimensionally.

set a mood, and so on. To make sure it does this successfully, you must read the script carefully and understand where the characters in the scene will make their entrances and exits, the pathways of their movements, and any special items to be set up so they can play their role in the story. You must plan things out.

Making a small diagram often helps to keep track of all this.

For example, if the script describes the hero climbing down a wall, grabbing a cable which then breaks, resulting in the hero landing on a narrow ledge below, then all this must be built into your design while still satisfying the other basic requirements we spoke of above. ©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

3. ROUGHS: VARIATIONS ON A THEME THE IMPORTANCE OF DOODLING, EXPLORING, EXPERIMENTING So you’ve done your research, understood the functional elements and structure of your subject, isolated the key symbols; in doing all that, usually your theme will have emerged—your main idea, the way you are going to treat the subject. Now it’s time to begin roughing. You use what you’ve learned as guidelines, as boundaries not to be exceeded, and start playing variations on that theme, exploring various possibilities until a solution starts to emerge.

Learn to sketch freely at the rough stage and not be all “precious.” Feel that no one is watching you—you are not on stage.

No one necessarily has to see anything from this stage, so experiment as boldly as possible. Some artists find it helpful to get a stack of cheap bond paper to encourage an “improvised” feel to the work. PLAY around with mini-roughs, doodles. The goal should be to invent, without “locking in” the design too early. If you rigidly attempt to go “straight to final,” the results can be stiff and unconvincing. So EXPERIMENT! Draw as many variations as occur to you... not spending too much time on each one.

I find that it’s crucial to think in terms of 3-D forms as the building blocks of a design, instead of only thinking in lines or shapes—which are only two-dimensional.

Creating a design requires the ability to “play on paper”: to visualize many variations on a theme, and note them down. So I repeat: now is not a time to be timid and precious with your drawings: at this rough stage, don’t be afraid to flip, flop, squash, stretch your designs—retrace them—perform radical surgery on them. Intersect two designs and use the new combined whole, which results from this collision. Or, cuts away 90% of a design that you sense isn’t quite working, and keep the remainder. Play with scale—take some small element and blow it up and make it the main design. Look for the unexpected solution. Try to “think outside the box.” Sometimes the solution is far simpler than you first think—but sometimes it’s also far more complex. You don’t have to “play it safe,” because it’s all just thinking and experimenting and playing on paper. Free yourself up to try any variation you can think of, as long as it’s still recognizable. You must simultaneously be playful and ruthless: playful enough to delight in new variations on your design theme, but ruthless enough to unsentimentally discard anything that isn’t working or contributing to the effect of the whole.

ABOVE: Starting with the little sketch of the aircar in the upper left corner, I’ve created some variations in Photoshop by adjusting the placement and proportions of different elements of the original. Each change creates a different character: for example, a long nose creates a “sports car” feel, whereas a short-and-stubby look suggests a more conservative, slower personality, and so on. Obviously the possibilities are endless, and it’s great fun to experiment this way with a design. The key idea: don’t regard your creations as if they must be static. Make them rubber, fluid entities—by playing with variations. Adjust them until you arrive at a satisfactory result.

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GETTING STARTED: DOING THE DRAWING, GETTING IDEAS AND INSPIRATIONAL SOURCES 1. Precedent: other artists’ work, from present day to past.

Don’t just swipe/trace/copy—use others’ work as a springboard, to get inspired.

2. Start from the concrete—Use real things and places as starting points, but play variations on them, working towards the abstract. This is more easily done in science fiction design, because you can afford to get more exotic, being less tied to the literal. For example, if you have to design an alien kitchen, start from a real one, and go onwards from there, “pushing” it as much as possible until you arrive at a satisfactory result.

3. Or the reverse—start from the abstract—found things—and move towards the concrete, let your abstract starting-point suggest designs, arrangements, etc.—similar to how you look at cloud-shapes and let them suggest things to you.

Make the small large, the large small. For example, use the forms of a real location, but change the details, or conversely take the details of a real place, but change the forms.

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

CHOOSING THE APPROPRIATE LINES/SHAPES/FORMS Think: what overall “envelope” forms are right for your subject? Start with basic forms. Should that piece of architecture be predominantly composed of cubes, giving more points or “sharpness”? Or should you employ more rounded forms—for a softer, less threatening feel? Verticals?

Horizontals? Each line, shape, and form has different emotional associations connected to it, which is a whole field of study in itself. For example, sharp pointed forms are threatening, softened chubby forms are friendly and cute, repetitive waveforms can be soothing, and so on.

The forms must also “turn” well, to be recognizable and pleasing from different angles. This is particularly important

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

These were all rough designs done for storyboard artists. In the two views of the shoreline from a Batman Beyond episode [above], the story requirement was to establish an ominous mood—nighttime in an industrial waterfront area, and specifically, I had to make sure to set up steps down to the water because a character scene took place on the beach. In the water plant layout [left], I drew the design as a possible shot, while also showing the location where the script called for two characters to be hiding with a stolen vehicle, while overhead helicopters searched for them.

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if your object must move, as in animation. You don’t want the silhouette to be identical from all angles—that would make it hard to recognize which way the object is heading. So if you’re designing something for movement, you need to give it an immediately recognizable front and back, up and down... that reads in the silhouette. Spheres and cubes are symmetrical from front to back, which makes them confusing. So differentiate the silhouettes of your designs. Never just draw them from one angle (unless, of course, they are only used once and never seen again from any other angle).

START WITH LARGEST MASSES: SILHOUETTES—NOT DETAILS For simplicity try: A. Doodling really small/simply—or B. Doodling at regular size but with a really thick pencil or marker (which is the same thing stated differently)—if it doesn’t work that way it won’t work larger and all detailed...

C. Just doodle in symbol-silhouettes THE USE OF DETAIL FOR EMPHASIS PATTERN-SPACING OF DETAILS Generally, the simpler a design is, the stronger it is, and the more clearly and quickly it communicates. Detail for its own sake is usually just a distraction. The trick is to learn to use the appropriate amount of detail for the subject, and the style, which you are designing in. Often a picture can be arranged in a way to suggest more detail than is really there. This involves the viewer

ABOVE: Here is an example of using a real item as a starting point—as a springboard for inspiration, borrowing the forms. I did a sketch of my basement stairs—I liked the way the forms interlocked. The first idea they suggested to me, shown in A, was a downshot of a city. I kept the slanted ceiling of the stairway, changing it to the roof of some fantastic building, and removed the sidewall of the stairs to allow for a view of the city beyond.

After that I just kept adding to the drawing. In design B, I used the stairs’ forms as a starting point for designing an interior. I again used the dominant slanted ceiling, and this time made the right wall a full-height window. After that the other items fell into place—since I decided it was a living room, it seemed natural to add the couch, which in turned dictated the positioning of the lights, and so on. You could keep going from here; these are only two examples. If you get stuck, this is a great way to generate ideas and movement: try to picture dream-variations of the things around you.

LEFT: GEOMETRIC FORMS CHART—There are endless possibilities of form available to the designer, starting from the geometric basics shown in this chart. Using the whole range of these forms, and applying variations of them, gives you a larger “form vocabulary,” and helps avoid repetition and staleness in your images.

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more—since they have to employ their imagination—and is also less work for anyone down the line who uses the design, such as layout artists, background painters, etc. (in the case of animation). For example, instead of drawing every building in a skyline, at equal distance—and killing yourself in the process—try putting a few major ones in the foreground that set the scene and set the style of the architecture, giving the character of your city at a glance. Then, in the smaller negative spaces left between these buildings, fill in successively more distant buildings. If you stagger them carefully, you’ll find that this takes less work than drawing every last building in a wide shot, and also has more depth and dynamism.

FOCAL POINTS: WHAT TO EMPHASIZE OR GIVE WEIGHT TO In a design, the artist’s goal is to have the viewer focus their attention where the artist wants it. To that end, you can use various devices to focus the viewer’s attention. One of them is being aware of “form focal points”—put a line, shape, or form in your drawing that contrasts with its surroundings, and the viewer’s eye will be attracted there. Similarly, the placement and “pacing” of details can direct the viewer’s attention. If you put a detailed section into a region of the design that is quite simple, the detail will be noticed. Or the reverse—simplicity, emptiness, placed into a very detailed area, will draw attention. It all has to do with creating an area of higher contrast by whatever means you can think of. The viewer’s eye will inevitably be drawn to that area of higher contrast (you could call this “The Contrast Principle”).

THE FEELING OF LIFE: INTERNAL LOGIC—BELIEVABILITY Whenever humans use a man-made item, or operate in an environment, they still have basic needs that must be addressed.

They must navigate and communicate; they must have heating or cooling, light and air; they must sleep; and so on. To satisfy these requirements, any ordered space created by humans will reflect 170 THE BEST OF DRAW!

ABOVE: VEHICLE-SILHOUETTES—It’s crucial to remember the silhouette as you design. It’s the first thing perceived by the viewer, and is key to whether or not your image “reads” clearly. It’s better to spend time working out an interesting silhouette than merely adding lots of detail for its own sake—try designing only in small silhouette-shapes, instead of starting with interior forms and details.

these needs. There will be a lighting system of some kind, signage, air circulation, etc. The exact mix of items will of course depend on whether you are dealing with a room or a vehicle or a plaza, and so on. But my point is that in order to create a logical, believable design; you must keep this idea of human function and usage in mind as you proceed, if you want your design to be believable to any degree. A simple way to check if you’ve accomplished this is to project yourself into your scene, and walk around in it imagining that you are interacting with it as the characters really would—sitting in the chairs, working the controls, and so on. If you do this, any problems will immediately become apparent.

A good example of a “realistic” designer, whose work it pays to study, is Ron Cobb, and another one is Syd Mead, although I find his designs often more fanciful. Cobb’s designs are carefully thought out—a door on the Nostromo, from the movie Alien, looks like it actually functions, with consideration to human usage. There is lighting, signage, air vents, and so on shown—all basic things that humans need to function in an environment.

If you don’t give attention to this consideration of function and human usage, if you don’t consider the internal logic of what you are depicting, then you may end up with oddities such as: alien streets with no street signs or lights, but lots of traffic— which is orderly, but mysteriously there’s no sign of control; rooms arranged with furniture that show no consideration for entry path, exit path, or functional groupings; massive guns drawn so lop-sided that there is no believable way that the hero could pick them up with one hand, or balance them to fire, and so on. I could give more examples, but the basic idea is to THINK more about the internal logic of what you are drawing.

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To do this kind of design, become a student of the mechanical, of architecture, of all your surroundings. This means: when you walk down the street, or watch TV, or whatever, don’t just notice people’s faces for drawing ideas. Study the infrastructure, and log as much as possible in your brain for later regurgitation/transmogrification when you are drawing. Load up the mental file banks with mechanical/architectural/natural raw material, which you have to have a good supply of to create this kind of thing convincingly.

Notice the varieties and classifications of windows, vents, doors, drains, pipes, cables, panels, trim, etc. Know what detailing and shapes say “big rig” and what says “weekend runabout”... you take all this raw material, digest it, and often useful details will re-emerge as you begin to rough.

Sometimes I find it helpful to make a design checklist as I work: • What is the function of the space (i.e. kitchen, meeting room, bedroom, etc.)?

• Where are the human pathways? Entrances? Exits? Where are the stopping points/seating?

• Where is the signage?

• Where is the lighting?

• What/where are the various mechanical systems (i.e. ventilation, electrical, etc)?

THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THINGS: A. CHARACTER DICTATES ARRANGEMENT Another very important point that can easily be overlooked: you need to get a good sense of relationships BETWEEN things, not only the things themselves. It’s too easy to just study items separately—learning to draw a chair, or a TV, or a telephone, as a separate item. But the way you get real personality in your design work is to ALSO study and be sensitive to ARRANGEMENTS—i.e. the RELATIONSHIPS between objects, and also between the different parts of a given object. That is what creates personality and mood, not only the objects themselves. The combined arrangement of all the objects—say, all the pieces of furniture in a room—creates a kind of larger “metaobject,” a bigger whole. You can put more character into your designs—whether you’re designing costumes, backgrounds, vehicles, or anything else—when you become more sensitive to the nuances of those larger wholes, which the elements of your design combine to make.

For example, in a given room, say you gave 3 people the same 5 objects (couch, coffee table, chair, lamp, and TV wall unit). Ask each person to arrange the objects to suit themselves, and observe what they do (you could equally do this exercise also on paper, asking 3 different artist friends to draw their versions). Probably you’d find that each person would arrange things differently. Each arrangement would reflect their different personalities and priorities: a prissy person might cram the furniture tightly together, a careless person would arrange them haphazardly, and so on. We know all this intuitively—when you visit a new acquaintance’s living space for the first time, you immediately learn a lot about them by “reading” their space: their choice of furniture, the arrangement of it, whether it’s well-kept, organized, unorganized, etc. It’s these sorts of relationships between objects

ABOVE: FACTORY-LOGIC—With a little thought and experimentation, you can make your designs more believable. If you project yourself into the scene and imagine it in use, you can discover flaws in the details and arrangement of your elements—flaws which in real life would become apparent very quickly. It would be all to easy to stop at version “A” of this little factory, but something doesn’t seem quite right about it; after discovering the errors in the scene, and making a few adjustments, it becomes more convincing—version “B.”

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and arrangements of objects which you must be acutely aware of when you design—because your audience will be reading your imaginary design for clues about personality, the same way as if they were visiting a real place for the first time.

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

B. FUNCTION ALSO DICTATES ARRANGEMENT I hope this is self-evident—that, for example, the arrangement of a lab is different than the arrangement of a meeting room or a bedroom, because these spaces have different functions to perform.

A way to demonstrate this principle—that function dictates arrangement: with the very same set of elements, try some experiments. For example, imagine that you have an empty room and a number of stacking chairs, that is all. What different functions for that room can the mere arrangement of the chairs communicate?

ABOVE: INT. ABANDONED WAREHOUSE—In this design, the arrangements of the elements were dictated by story requirements. The abandoned warehouse served as a hideout and meeting place for a gang, so I chose an upper level hidden from the street as the location. The chairs are arranged in a semicircle around the makeshift table, creating a focal point for the scene, and the litter, weathered textures, and various broken items create the necessary “rundown” feeling.

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ABOVE: DR. FATE’S STUDY/PAN—Because this design included lots of details, I found it helpful to first make a checklist of possible items that could be included. This helps to stimulate ideas by separating drawing problems—i.e., the technical challenge of how to draw something—from design problems—the process of sorting out what to draw.

A. If the room functioned as a meeting room for equals, you might arrange the ten chairs in a circle, all pointing inwards—so everyone can see everyone else and trade ideas equally. There is no hierarchy, no higher and lower, implied in the arrangement.

B. If the room functioned as a classroom, led by one teacher, you might arrange the chairs in a traditional grid, all facing in one direction. Or in sub-groups of chairs—each one of these could have its own leader. This implies a hierarchy.

C. If the room functioned as a courtroom, you might arrange a judge, jury, witness box, council tables, and audience (at bit harder to get across with only chairs but...)

D. If the room functioned as a place of arbitration between two parties that have a dispute, you might arrange two groups of chairs facing each other, with a central chair in the middle (the arbitrator).

As with many of the things discussed above, there is a lot to this idea of function dictating arrangement, when you start examining your surroundings.

ANACHRONISMS In a design, the elements must look as if they belong together, in order to be believable. If something contrasts too much with its environment, and looks out of place, it will draw attention to itself (“The Contrast Principle”) So if you create this kind of eye-catching contrast, do it for a specific reason, not by accident. Things must belong to an object or scene both functionally and stylistically.

For example, if you draw an old-fashioned study/library, with leather chairs and book-lined shelves and a floor globe and so on, you set a certain mood. By the clues imbedded in the scene, the viewer deciphers the time and place of your setting.

This creates an expectation in the viewer, an expectation of coherency and consistency. If you then suddenly throw in an element clearly out of place either in terms of style or function—

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ANTHROPOMORPHISM A constant force to watch out for in design work is anthropomorphism. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition defines this as the: “attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.” If you use this intentionally in your designs, it can reinforce their power; if unintentionally, you may create an unwanted humorous response in the viewer.

The main idea is that people are always seeing human characteristics in the things around us. It doesn’t take much suggestion for people to see faces in a cloud pattern, or figures in the gnarled forms of tree trunks. If you are doing a “serious” design and you accidentally draw a control panel’s patterns to resemble a happy face, you’ve created an unwanted distraction. On the other hand, especially if you are drawing in a somewhat more cartoony style, then you can intentionally use the effects of anthropomorphism to imbue whatever you are designing, be it a vehicle, a rock formation, a house, etc. with a certain character.

A good way to think of it is how Preston Blair talks about different characters in his books on animation cartooning—about how there are different basic patterns of components for character types (i.e. thug type = big chest + arms, small head, low brow, etc.). Well, what often isn’t realized is this: that the same sorts of recipes apply to inanimate objects as well! You give your imaginary spaceship, or car, boat, plane, or whatever, a distinct CHARACTER! And people will feel this character based on a comparison to a human body: if your spaceship is top-heavy, broad-shouldered, and bulky, with a “low brow,” people will know right away that it is a thug! If it has lots of sharp points, it is dangerous and unpleasant! Or, lots of soft silky curves, very feminine—not scary! And so on—it’s an exciting thing to discover how to apply this, as you play with design!

4. FINALS Finals are like “polishing” what’s already there. It’s too late to make fundamental changes; now is the time to finalize the details of what’s already there. All of the major problems should be solved by now, the key decisions made, in the above series of decisions.

For the final rendering, especially in the case where you are doing only one view of an object, choose a point of view that best presents the major symbols. This should be obvious—you don’t show a delta-wing aircraft head-on or from the side; if it’s important that people see that fact immediately, you’ll have to use some kind of downshot or upshot so that the delta shape shows in the silhouette. If it’s a design for a storyboard you may actually make the design work as a shot, such as a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal pan, or with a specific area for a truck-in. If the script tells you that besides establishing a setting, something is specifically featured in the shot, then you need to show that clearly. It may be a doorway for an entrance or exit, a tree that a character must climb, a fence that a car must crash through.

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

say you put in a modern artist’s fluorescent lamp clamped to the desk in this supposedly old-fashioned library—you violate that expectation of consistency. The out-of-place object is an anachronism. The Oxford Concise Dictionary defines an “anachronism” as “a person or thing out of harmony with the time.” In this case, probably both the style and the function are wrong for the era. If you put something odd like this into a design, you should do it for a reason, and this reason should eventually be explained or be apparent to the viewer. If you catch the viewer’s attention in this way, you create a question in his or her mind; if you don’t resolve that question, the viewer will be bothered. If you see a priest dressed in his robes walking down the street, but he has a motorcycle-gang leather jacket on top of his clothes, you want to know why! Because it contrasts with our expectations of a priest.

The idea is that you expect a normal grouping of items that are believable together that relate to each other and work as a whole. In a modern-day kitchen, we expect to see a certain core group of items together, that function together to create what we call a “kitchen.” So you expect to see a fridge, stove, cupboards, sink, etc. If you put something unusual in your kitchen, that will call attention to itself.

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ABOVE: SPACE CRUISERS—In some designs you can almost feel a suggestion of human, or animal characteristics, as in these spaceship sketches.

How much to play this up is one choice of many, as a design evolves.

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ABOVE: HOWARD’S HOUSE-STAGES—This illustration shows four stages of a final design. The final pencil drawing, upper left, is inked in with a marker—I like to use a Pigma or a Fountain Pentel. Then I scan the image into Photoshop at 400 dpi, upper right, which is more than enough resolution for this kind of work. After making sure the scan is clean, I use the paint bucket to flood in the flat black areas, lower left, which saves a lot of time. Sometimes I also use a brush set to “dissolve,” to add some stippled gradations. Then I print that out onto a piece of bristol paper and add more gray tones with marker and black Prismacolor, as shown in the lower right image. This hybrid method is one approach of many possible ways to render the final image; choose a method which suits the style of the project, the time available, and the level of finish required.

Whatever the case, if you set up the design drawing properly, the board artist can usually just take your sketch as is, xerox it down, and add characters, thus simplifying his task.

In terms of drawing the final, usually I start with a line drawing and then add the tones separately. Often in a production situation time is short, so if I have a sketch that’s approved I’ll ink the rough pencil sketch, even if it’s on bond paper, instead of recopying it all carefully in pencil onto a nicer piece of paper and then inking that. The original doesn’t really matter because I’ll be scanning it anyway sooner or later. For inking linework I like to use various sizes of Pigma markers. In the case that a pencil sketch is approved for inking but changes must first be made to it, I’ll scan the sketch and make the adjustments on the computer in Photoshop, print the sketch (flopped horizontally) onto a piece of inkjet paper, turn the paper over, rule in a perspective grid in non-repro blue marker, and ink my linework in black, now reading the correct way again. Then, I’ll scan that, again fixing it up if necessary, and add tones on the computer or by hand onto a printout of the final linework. If I’m doing tones by hand, I like to use warm Pantone gray markers, black Prismacolor pencils, and a Pentel white-out pen.

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FINAL THOUGHTS AND CONCLUSIONS 1. VISUALIZE FIRST! Before drawing—and as you draw— imagine variations on your theme.

2. Main symbols, main masses/arrangement—get these right first.

3. When you have a direction working, then get into smaller details, patterns, and textures...

GOOD DRAWING AND GOOD DESIGN GO HAND-IN-HAND And, of course, if you’re not thoroughly put off after all this design talk, you must make sure that the drawing is solid (intersections, perspective, etc.) Drawing and design are “in” each other. Each will only be as good as the other—they need to both work for the design to work, to communicate. A poor drawing will be unable to put across even the best design to the viewer, and likewise a poor design will not be successful no matter how technically well done the drawing itself is.

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BY BRET BLEVINS

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he value of sketching is impossible to overstate. Habitual sketching will sharpen your perceptions, teach your mind how to see with ever greater depth and subtlety, and transform your hands into skilled instruments of visual expression. It’s also a lot of fun—for a person in love with drawing, sketching is the path to the good life!

Constant drawing is the surest means of becoming a fluent draftsman—if you are searching and stretching to improve the accuracy or emotional eloquence of every mark you make. This distinction is crucial—filling reams of paper with repetitions of learned rendering tricks or minor variations of familiar contrived imagery is not what I’m describing. You must draw as a process

of informing your perceptions—increasing your understanding of rhythm, form, shape, light and shadow, composition, your mediums and tools, and unlocking access to the core of your imaginative powers. This sounds like a daunting task, but a relaxed, playful attitude will work wonders and make sketching a pleasant and satisfying addiction.

If sketching doesn’t appeal to you, or seems to be a waste of effort because there’s no money in it (a common stigma among commercial artists), decide to develop a joy for observing everything around you and a hunger for creating images. Don’t allow the act of creating art to become a chore—you can choose to approach your work with an attitude that feeds your spirit as well ABOVE: The old farm sketch (done in the late 1980s using a medium-soft HB pencil and a kneaded eraser) accents the linear contours of the forms—many small lines build up the shading within outlines. The overcast winter day weakened contrasts and softened the shadows into gray.

LEFT: This Fairy-embellished life drawing (drawn with a soft 6B Rexel Derwent graphite pencil) is recent and more elegant in treatment; very simple, subtle lost-andfound contour lines edge the forms—the volume of the masses are shaped by smooth gray tones rubbed in gently with a finger.

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as your stomach. With proper enthusiasm it’s possible to eventually escalate that conscious choice into an obsession—then you’re on magical ground and every sheet of blank paper becomes a rewarding invitation to soar. Any act of intense creativity both drains and inspires the mind, opening the way for new ideas and skills to arise, building and building your store of experiences. The more energy you expend, the higher you rise— and constant practice is the pragmatic aspect of this ascent.

Just as a musical virtuoso hones his or her talent by daily revisiting scales and technique or an athlete depends on specific physical exercises to achieve and maintain superb performance, diligent drawing is the training regiment of the master draftsman or draftswoman. Aim high and always shoot for the the moon— it’s the only way to find out how far you can go.

The rewards of this enthusiasm are far greater than just filling your studio with stacks of filled sketchbooks—the practice of sketching develops technical facility as it nurtures your curiosity, observation skills, and sensitivity to ever more subtle perception, and this will enrich all your work. Until you make a considered drawing of a subject, you’ve only glimpsed it—never really seen it. The process of drawing an object, atmospheric effect, or emotional impulse carves nuances and depth into your consciousness that cannot be gleaned through casual observation, and builds a storehouse of memory that will inform all your future work.

A devotion to sketching also enriches your experience of living—using your eyesight becomes a constant delicious adventure. No two trees are alike—no two leaves on a tree are exactly the same shape, size or color—the veins and patterns on each

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TOP: The rotting barn was drawn was drawn the same day as the sketch at the top of page 59, and the technique is identical—more attention is given to contour and texture than the sculptural effects of light and shadow.

ABOVE: My small son’s peaceful sleeping face inspired a spontaneous recording, with a fairly hard pencil on the nearest surface handy—the back of a comic book script page.

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ABOVE: Blowing palm trees and rolling surf seem to cry for wet media— fortunately I had a small portable box of cheap cake watercolors and a single brush with me. I used melted ice in a paper cup to moisten the paint (salt water is no good for painting) and recorded a quick impression of this warm scene.

LEFT: I did this still life study with an 8B Rexel Derwent wash pencil and a beat-up old inking brush. These wash pencils are rich in tone, very flexible and a lot of fun—you can draw just as you would with ordinary graphite pencils, but wetting the marks produces a sumptuous velvety black wash, and when dry it’s possible to erase quite a bit of the tone back out. The softer grades create the widest range of tone—choose a paper sturdy enough to handle the strain and try these wonderful pencils.

leaf create their own individual kaleidoscope of visual delight— the panorama of visual wonder is endless if you train your eyes to savor each seen detail. If I sound rapturous, it’s because I am—and I want to infect you!

On the following pages I’ve gathered a variety of images that only hint at the unfettered fun a compulsive sketcher can have— I’ve made hundreds of thousands of drawings and learned something from each one, either positive or negative. This is important—a failed attempt can teach you as much or more than a successful one—learn to appreciate this fact. Every bad drawing I’ve made taught me how not to do something. Don’t set impossible standards of perfection or precision when sketching—no one else ever has to see the drawings. Don’t be precious or pon178 THE BEST OF DRAW!

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THE POWER OF SKETCHING derous, just respond to the impulse to record something that strikes you, by any means at hand—you’ll notice that a sketch reproduced here of my sleeping son was drawn on the back of a comic book script page. Don’t hesitate— draw on napkins, envelopes, paper bags—it’s the act of making the drawing that counts.

I also believe it’s invaluable to attempt a drawing of anything. Don’t reject the most common objects or sights around you as unworthy of your attention—they can be fascinating challenges, and drawing them will broaden your appreciation of the marvels of light on form—or if you are so moved, the wild possibilities of stylized distortion or symbolism. Let your imagination become amazed by the very act of perceiving—you won’t regret this leap of faith.

Dream visions are another powerful source of imagery, and are sure to have personal resonance (even if you don’t know what that may be!). I find making images from remembered dreams very therapeutic, even if the images themselves are frightening or disturbing. The process opens access to an emotional intensity that you can consciously tap for other work.

I’ve included a few studies made from photographs, though I find this the least satisfying source for sketching. A photograph is already a simulated flat depiction of a mechanically recorded instant, and your starting point is the photographer’s work, not your own response to the content. Photo studies can be very useful, especially if the subject interests you and the real thing is unavailable to draw from. I advise caution, though—the danger of drawing from photographs is real and severe. Photographs are frozen fragments of the human field of vision— flat arrangements of dark and light shapes that resemble something you may recognize—but they are not an accurate representation of reality, or of the way our eyes perceive depth, color and atmosphere— always go to the real world source if possible.

I usually sketch from photographs as a change of pace, to record some technical information about an object’s construction or design or because one strikes my fancy in some way. Use them sparingly.

The preparatory work for commercial assignments are

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included here as examples of the fruits of compulsive sketching.

This is a great and essential function of sketching— it’s a marvelous tool for the exploration of visual ideas. There is a looseness and freedom in these conceptual stages of searching for designs and character personality that grew directly from my approach to sketching. I begin every doodle with the willingness to toss it in the garbage can if it doesn’t work, and that cavalier attitude is invaluable for opening the flow of inspiration. As I mentioned above, playfulness is a key to spontaneity.

It invites fertile invention because there are no harsh conditions or expectations cramping the impulse to frolic and explore.

A few days ago I did the fairy drawings seen here in a manner new to me—I was transforming the live model before me into a fantasy creature as I drew her—I didn’t change the features and ears after the session. It felt odd at first, but I enjoyed it.

In the classes I’ve taught I’ve found that most students (of all ages and levels of experience) have a debilitating fear of defacing a blank sheet with their tension-wrought marks—beginning is an agony for them. If you suffer similar qualms, buy

ABOVE: I grabbed a 6B graphite pencil to jot down an impression of my daughter practicing the violin, and used the same pencil to outline a life drawing model before splashing a monochromatic wash over the shadow pattern falling down his back.

RIGHT: This nude resulted from a quick five minute warm-up pose, and shows that focus, concentration and long familiarity with drawing tools enable an artist to capture an enormous amount of information and atmosphere in just a few moments.

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I used a conté crayon to draw this clubby group of Saguaro cacti—these delightful crayons mellow any subject with a rich warmth. The crumbled texture of the marks and their pleasant earth-colored tones imbue drawings with an antique quality that’s filled with charm. Smearing conté with a finger or blending stump creates soft deep tones.

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LEFT AND ABOVE: These two embryonic (I intend to add wings and other details) fairy drawings were done from a live model. I distorted her lovely features into a fantasy creature as I drew—this was a first for me and I’m not sure I prefer it to fictionalizing the drawing later, after the session.

Though fun, it felt strange to be grossly caricaturing the charming face in front of me. I felt a bit sheepish, but I’ll think it’s important to try anything. You never know what might result!

a 500 sheet ream of the cheapest copier paper and move through it in a week—warm up by covering a dozen sheets with scribbles if need be, then draw quickly and fiercely (the subject doesn’t matter)— intending to discard most of the pages.

Draw images flitting on the screen as you watch television—sit in a park or mall and sketch the passing show—draw scenes from memory, things that happened to you or you read about—don’t judge the finished results as if they were destined for a museum. The point is to become familiar with the act of making unpressured drawings—grow comfortable with the intimacy of responding to your intimations.

You can’t make love in a suit of armor. Take the concept of sketching seriously, but don’t approach it soberly—have fun and remember that the drawing itself is only the souvenir of an experience. The really important event is the act of perceiving and discovering the means of sharing a quality of that perception with others.

See you next time!

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This life drawing was made with Prismacolor pencils on medium-tone colored paper. This is a terrific technique for achieving rich drawings very quickly—by using dark and light colored pencils (monochromatic against a dull brown surface in this case) you can use the ground as your midtone, and scale up the lights or push down the darks with great speed. The pre-toned background creates an instant environment to work against, saving lots of rendering time. The Prismacolor pigments are very thick and heavy, giving the final image an impasto effect resembling a painting.

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WORKING FROM PHOTOS The monkey photo studies were made by sketching in the forms with a non-waterproof felt tip Flair marker, then revisiting them with a sable brush dipped in water—the bleeding marker ink creates a pleasing purple-colored wash that is quite easy to control (if the brush isn’t oversaturated with water).

This figure study was made over 20 years ago with an HB graphite pencil. I drew many of these photo studies in the course of learning human anatomy and found them useful—I wouldn’t have the patience or desire to expend this kind of energy to copy a photograph now. A live model is so much richer in information and character. If you don’t have access to live models, good photos can expose you to figure proportions and flat graphic rendering techniques—but aim for a life drawing class and get there as soon you can!

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This nightmare image was recorded after a troubled sleep disturbed by stress and deadline pressures. Dream imagery is always powerful, and attempting to capture it opens channels into your memory and subconscious that allow you to return there and tap intensity that can strengthen other work. Keep a sketchbook and drawing tools next to your bed.

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The Hollywood monster photo copies were made with ink, sable brush and steel nib pens. As a tyro I did a slew of these studies, from of all kinds of photographs, as a process of learning how to translate photographed textures into line rendering techniques. Some of the coarse textures in the portrait were made with a Q-Tip dipped in ink.

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These figure studies from The Atlas of Foreshortening were made with the same tools as the monkey heads on page 66—a wet sable brush applied to Flair marker line sketches. I’ve also made life drawings using these tools, but this can be frustrating—if the drawing turns out fine, you must accept losing it. (Flair marker ink soon bleeds and fades if exposed to light.)

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NEW MUTANTS ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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LEFT and RIGHT: These are pages of sequential storytelling images, again on tracing paper. Prior to this stage I had conceived ideas for each panel, and noted them in crude chicken-scratch “thumbnails,” often right on the margins of the script (in this case a plot). After deciding on the size and shape of each panel and ruling them in, I shift my mind into “sketch mode” and treat the entire page as a composition, lightly swirling my pencil through and across the frames, creating a pleasing rhythm and paths for the eye to follow, trying to use the figures and background forms as pure instruments of shape and pattern (leaving room for speech balloons and captions, of course). As this develops I begin to construct mass, “fleshing out” the forms, constructing anatomy and character details. Finally I use a marker to clarify convoluted patches of complex overlapping forms by outlining them. The key to the process is to remain loose and inventive, watching and reacting to the entire image and letting it emerge gradually. This is so much more fun than building a picture methodically, like a bricklayer.

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NEW MUTANTS ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

THE POWER OF SKETCHING

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JOHN CARTER OF MARS ™ AND ©2008 ERB INC.

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All these except A are exploration sketches for comic book projects. The John Carter of Mars image is one of many I drew after revisiting the novel in preparation for a Dark Horse series. The character sheets are the initial designs for a comic book arc based on Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. The insane creature shown in A is another sketchbook remembrance of a lunatic I met in a dream. I woke before getting his name.

NIGHTBREED ™ AND ©2008 CLIVE BARKER

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NIGHTBREED ™ AND ©2008 CLIVE BARKER

A

NIGHTBREED ™ AND ©2008 CLIVE BARKER

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THIS PAGE: The images of Stuart Little are initial tracing paper sketches for illustrations from one of my favorite children’s books.

NEXT PAGE: The sheet of doodles and the dapper bird are playful explorations—whimsical daydreaming on paper—calisthenics to limber your imagination. Let your mind wander and speculate—who knows what might pop out. The preliminary sketch of the Animator illustration shows how the freewheeling approach I’ve been discussing informs my professional work. The searching scribbles that developed into this rough drawing were made with exactly the same attitude I bring to unassigned sketching—I let my imagination suggest the swooping lines, finding pleasing rhythms and shapes, guiding my hand and watching the image evolve until I like what I see. This image was drawn on tracing paper—I then placed this under a sheet of bristol board and switched my tactics to careful precise delineation, choosing a harder grade of lead (3H) and making a careful pencil diagram for an inker to follow.

PAGE 192: This page contains idea searches for a space-woman illustration, first attempts at the character Sleepwalker, and a couple of dragon doodles. All of the art shown in this article was created without precise preconception, and this is the whole point. Learn to use sketching as your physical method of visual germination and your drawings will constantly surprise you—and keep you eager to sketch and sketch and sketch!

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THE JOKER ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

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SLEEPWALKER ™ and ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

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SKETCHING TOOLS These are the tools used to make all the drawings shown in this article—the only expensive items are the two sable brushes—everything else shown can be obtained at a craft/art supply store for under $25.00. (Except maybe the Q-tip—raid the medicine cabinet for this instrument.)

The watercolor tin is a cheap set intended for children, but the color and handling quality is sufficient for sketching—the conté crayons are a waxy brand imported from Russia—they crumble easily but cost little. The pencils, blending stump and markers are cheap and sold everywhere. The use of steel pen nibs is fading, but most shops still carry a limited array—try them. Don’t settle for the dead, rigid, characterless lines produced by Rapidiograph pens—these ghastly little abominations are responsible for the death of lively pen and ink drawing.

Avoid their life-killing coldness. The Tuff Stuff mechanical eraser is a fairly recent product, but very handy for fine-edged erasing and “tidying up,” especially if you’re working at small size.

The other requirement for sketching is of course, paper. The choice of papers is immense—experiment with as many surfaces as you can afford to try—you’ll find a few that become favorites.

I’ll draw on anything handy, but for most sketching I prefer Dick Blick’s inexpensive Blick White Sulphite Drawing Paper, 60 lb

weight. The surface tooth is excellent and the sheets can take quite a bit of dry media handling. For washes or dipped ink drawings I like Blick AllMedia paper or for even tougher treatment, a good quality Bristol Board.

For quick doodling ordinary copier paper is fine for both pencil and markers. Any sketchbook full of high rag or cotton content paper is suitable for a wide variety of attack—just be aware that the cheapest sort of papers and sketchbooks typically found in department store aisles are largely synthetic or last quality, and will repel your advances in a variety of frustrating ways. Drawing is challenging enough—you don’t need the avoidable annoyance of fighting the paper surface.

Now lay aside the magazine and start sketching!

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A DIGITAL LIKENESS

An interview and demo with caricaturist

ZACH TRENHOLM San Franciscan Zach Trenholm is a busy artist. He’s not only a top, in-demand caricaturist, but is also a scholar of the art form. This interview had to be slightly delayed because Trenholm was fighting a tight deadline for Fortune magazine the very day DRAW! Editor Mike Manley called to conduct it via phone.

Trenholm’s easy going demeanor and laugh definitely kept him from “hulking out” over the last minute changes to the illustration he had just e-mailed over to the art director....

This interview was conducted over the phone, transcribed by Steven Tice and copy-edited by Zach Trenholm.

DRAW!: So Fortune magazine called you up this morning and gave you a quick assignment to draw, an illustration featuring....

ZACH TRENHOLM: Larry Ellison, CEO of the software firm Oracle.

Basically they wanted ’em him pointing directly at the viewer or the reader and holding a fistful of bills— pretty straightforward. I thought I could knock it out by the requested five o’clock East Coast deadline (I’m here in California) and did. After emailing the illo over, I guess an editor got...

DRAW!: Got a brainstorm?

ZT: Yeah, exactly. After getting the art, the art director, Robert Dominguez, got back to me immediately with an editor’s request that Ellison now be turned into the Incredible Hulk. He wanted him appearing angrier then had been done and as the Hulk it could be accomplished in a timely, pop cultural refer-

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ence sort of way. I guess the barrage of summer movie promotionals really does have an impact. So now I needed to ditch the body I had just spent the last few hours doing and quickly redo him as the Hulk. To be honest, I’m not much of a super-hero artist (even an anti-hero like the Hulk). But here’s what I typically do in a situation like this: I go straight to the masters, and the master in this case would be none other than Jack Kirby.

DRAW!: [laughs] Go find some cool, old Jack Kirby Hulk examples....

ZT: Exactly.

Find a Kirby take on the Hulk. Which incidentally I was able to easily do online.

DRAW!: Did you try to incorporate Kirby into your style?

ZT: Oh, that’s impossible. That wouldn’t work at all. For starters, he excels at foreshortening, and I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around that too terribly well.

DRAW!: When did Fortune originally call you with the assignment?

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CARICATURE ZT: I got a call around 9:30 this morning here in San Francisco, so it was around 12:30 there in New York. And the art director needed it by 4:00 or 5:00 New York time, so I needed to really knock it out.

DRAW!: What’s your first step? Do you draw up a rough and then... do you go on the web and try to find as many pictures of the person you are going to draw as possible?

ZT: It depends on the art director. In this case, he supplied me with two pictures basically from one of the same sources that I would have gone to, which is Corbis (an online public access photo archive). Another is Google’s search engine for images.

DRAW!: Is that what you send to the art director first, or do you send him the sketch?

ZT: No, I’m really bad about that. Unless they’ve worked with me before, I probably give ’em a slight case of hives the first time around [laughter]. What I do instead for my own creative flexibility is, after making sure I’m clear on what’s needed concept-wise, I simply just proceed with it and then provide the more or less finished illo the first time as a proof. The client then has the option to make any fixes or revisions as they see fit.

Most of the time though, things are pretty much accepted without any rework.

DRAW!: Right. So you could go to Google, and search under “Larry Ellison” and hope to find some pictures of the subject.

DRAW!: So there’s not a lot of back and forth changes, “move his arm, move his leg”?

ZT: Well, never on that micro of a level, but as I mentioned earlier with Larry Ellison, he went from being simply himself in a business suit to needing to look like the Hulk, or to being the Hulk.

ZT: Google’s my last-ditch place to go actually, because if what you’re looking for has a common name, such as “Larry Ellison”—you’re going to bring up a lot of image files titled “Larry” or “Ellison” or both that won’t necessarily be him....

DRAW!: Now, do you charge them extra to do that, because you had essentially already finished the illustration?

DRAW!: So you need to try and narrow the search criteria.

ZT: [laughs] It’s interesting that you ask that. No, I never really do that—I lack the business cajonés I guess [laughter]. The majority of my art directors are quite fair and in the particular case of Fortune, they were already paying me a couple of hundred dollars more than normal because of the shorter turnaround. As a matter of fact, when I got the commission, he told me they were going to compensate me X amount for it and as I thought that sounded overly generous, told ’em to knock off $100 instead.

ZT: Right, so even though the art director sent me reference, I still always go online myself to see if I can conjure up anything better, especially any type of candid or off-guard reference. That’s always ideal when striving for the most definitive likeness.

DRAW!: Do you draw something quickly in pencil and scan it in, just so you can mess around with the shapes of his face, to get down the caricature, the likeness?

ZT: No, no... I pretty much do a tight sketch. Particularly with the face. The rest I can approach like that, such as the body and background aspects....

ZACK TRENHOLM

DRAW!: Really?

ABOVE: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison “Hulking out” from Fortune magazine.

LEFT: Neo and Orpheus from The Matrix.

DRAW!: Now, is this in pencil, or is this on the Wacom tablet in Photoshop or...?

ZT: No, it’s done in pencil on paper, and after scanning the sketch into the computer, I convert it into a template for tracing over in Adobe Illustrator.

ZT: Yeah, but this was, of course, before I had to re-make him into the Hulk. [laughs] So after spending another couple hours or so converting him into the Hulk, I then asked if he wouldn’t mind boosting it back up to the originally quoted fee.

DRAW!: Do you have a standard day rate for this, do you have an hourly rate that you figure for yourself in case things like this happen, where they go haywire, or do you just have a standard way of...?

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by the publications and I pretty much take on the jobs that I do based on who’s calling.

DRAW!: And what interests you, I guess?

ZT: Yeah, that’s as equally important. It’s basically two things; the more esteemed the mag or newspaper, the more inclined I am. And then of course it depends on how famous the individual to be depicted is. The more well known the individual, the more timely the individual, then the more I want to take the assignment on.

DRAW!: So you can keep your portfolio fresh, so to speak?

ZT: Well, yeah, but it’s not entirely based on portfolio reasoning.

Speaking of such, I actually don’t even have one anymore. I’ve got my website, and then I have some folders that I slip tear sheets into, but I haven’t had a tangible portfolio, y’know, something you would show an art director, in probably about ten years.

DRAW!: Wow. So most people, then, if they want to find out what you do, or to find out the kind of style you have, you are referring them to your website?

ZT: Right. Well, they usually find me—mostly by seeing my work.

DRAW!: They’ll see your byline and then look you up online and give you a call?

ZT: Right, that’s usually how it works. I also send out a promotional postcard every couple of years or so. That way if they’re not already familiar with what I do, they’ll hopefully take the time to visit my web portfolio and that will (once again hopefully) lead to a commission at some point. At least that’s the idea behind the nefarious scheme.

DRAW!: So, most art directors who you have not worked with before are people who are either coming across your work in a magazine and seeing your name and then contacting you via that, or contacting you because they come across your website?

ZT: I would say, at this juncture, it’s people who are already familiar with me. I’ve been working long enough so that there’s already a...well, I’m hardly well-known, but I would say that I’ve been out there long enough so that most art directors have usually seen something by me at some point. They may not click on the name, but they probably know the style. As far as tripping across my website while roaming the web, that’s fairly unusual.

Most site visits are due to specific search engine inquiries and not like, by coming across a link attached to illustrations I’ve done for the online mag salon.com over the years.

DRAW!: Now, is that where you started, with Salon?

ZT: Well, my career actually didn’t start there, but yeah, I would say that it really began to pick up steam there. I’ve long been their resident house caricaturist....

BELOW: Producer Weinstein and directors Scorsese, Rob Marshall and Stephen Daldry done for The Wall Street Journal.

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CARICATURE eventually end up twenty feet down...

DRAW!: [laughs] ...in a landfill somewhere!

ZT: One doesn’t have that luxury anymore. [laughs] DRAW!: Everything gets archived forever now.

ZT: As fresh as the day it was published [laughter] and just as accessible.

DRAW!: No yellowing or degrading.

ZT: No, none at all. Just plenty of ongoing wincing on the part of the artist. [laughs] DRAW!: So would you say a day like today, where you get up and you get a phone call from an art director giving you a job with a fairly short deadline, four, five, maybe six hours, is a fairly regular occurrence for you?

DRAW!: Were they your first, say, steady client?

ZT: No, before that I had been doing a smattering of regular freelancing and even had a stint as staff illustrator at the old San Francisco Examiner. Although initially hired for my skills as a caricaturist, I was also expected to do more general-type illustrations for the various sections of the paper. But you’re mostly right, after the Examiner, Salon became my first steady freelancing client.

ZT: No, no. Thank God it isn’t! Usually I get anywhere from three to about six or seven days’ turnaround. It depends on how large the job is or how immediate they need to go to press with it. The three other deadlines that I have at present are all due late next week, which is nice.

DRAW!: Now, what year was that?

ZT: Fall of 1995. Salon was actually founded by ex-Examiner people, editors and reporters and....

DRAW!: !: So you sort of followed along?

ZT: Exactly... even illustrating the prototype issue that was shopped around to get....

DRAW!: To get the funding?

ZT: Right—to get funding, investors. So I’ve been with them since their inception. For the first couple of years I was doing illustrations for them on a very regular basis, and for a short while, when things were particularly flush, was even on a monthly stipend so they could keep me available for any sudden deadlines. At this stage I now have countless Salon illustrations just floating around out there in web limbo. Much of it now embarrassing. [laughter] DRAW!: I guess it’s also a really good training ground, because even if you feel like you have an off day, well, then the next day you have an opportunity to do something different or something new.

ZT: Exactly, exactly. But the problem with working for the Internet, or being part of the digital age is that at least with dead-tree media of the past and present, you could hone and practice your skills at some small or obscure publication and be assured that whatever crap you produced at the time would

ABOVE AND RIGHT: Examples of Trenholm’s work from Salon featuring Oprah and Stalone.

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DRAW!: So that gives you time to do a little studying, I guess, or warming up.

ABOVE: Sir Anthony Hopkins and Elijah Wood.

ZT: Much of its spent procrastinating actually. [laughs] But some of the time is put to good use by seeking photo or video reference that I’ll need, either, as I mentioned earlier, via the Internet or through my own photo morgue, which I’ve been compiling for almost 20 years.

I’ve acquired to help in this whole process is a digital camera.

DRAW!: So you still cut and clip and put things in your own morgue?

DRAW!: !: Do you run it in with a firewire or something into your computer?

ZT: Yeah. I subscribe to upwards of 15 publications and get a couple of daily papers. I let ’em stack up, and then force myself to periodically cull them for interesting photographs. Everything from personalities to interesting pictures of just about anything—nature, cities, cars, landmarks, concepts, societal types, body stances, etc.

ZT: No, it comes with a USB connection.

DRAW!: That’s interesting, because I know a lot of other artists, myself included, have stopped doing that, because you usually seem to find anything you want on the Internet if you spend a little time searching.

ZT: I find that I spend way too much time doing that though.

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DRAW!: What kind of a camera is it?

ZT: It’s just a low-end Minolta DiMAGE, still a fairly good camera. It does the job.

DRAW!: So you can run the camera into your computer and download the photos?

ZT: Yeah. You can download the pix directly into your hard drive and open them up in Photoshop. And it’s really useful, because I can stage myself or get one of my kids to. It’s much more easy than trying to find the right picture in my files or go hunting on the web for it—just create it myself.

DRAW!: Yeah, I’m currently trying to decide which camera I want to buy myself. I’ve been doing that for about a year, and every time that it seems like I’m going to buy one, then it seems,

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oh, they bring out a new one, and the five megapixel camera’s a little bit cheaper. You know how it is. You sort of feel like, “Well, if I buy it now, tomorrow they’ll come out with the ten megapixel camera for what I just paid for the five megapixel camera.

so, that he started doing the sort of conceptual art, like Dadaism, that he became known for.... Hmmmm, did I finish your question on the T-shirts, on the silk-screening of Disney and Warner Brothers characters?

ZT: Exactly. Anything you buy that’s of a digital nature will have a built-in regret factor. The next day, you’ll either hear or read about something either cheaper or more powerful....

DRAW!: Did they ever get in trouble for that?

DRAW!: Now, when we talked before, you were telling me a little bit about your family. You were saying that your parents used to do silk-screen T-shirts of Disney characters?

ZT: Yeah, it was a small, short-time business endeavor they had back in the late Sixties and during the time we were living in S.F.’s Haight-Ashbury district. What they did was to take Disney and Warner Brothers characters like Porky Pig, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, etc., and have ’em depicted doing, shall we say, “alternative lifestyle things.” I think, if I remember rightly, they had Porky Pig smoking a joint, Popeye complete with a big gold earring and a bottle of booze, and a stoned Minnie flashing a Peace sign—all doing, y’know, fun stuff.

DRAW!: [laughs] They didn’t have you drawing any of the characters in this manner ?

ZT: Nawww, I was actually seven at the time.

DRAW!: Were you aware that they were doing that, that Porky Pig was smoking a joint, or did you just think, “Cool! Mom and Dad are making Porky Pig!”

ZT: They actually did. They eventually received a cease-anddesist letter from both Warner Brothers and Disney.

DRAW!: So they had some narc, there in Haight-Ashbury, some trademark lawyer dressed as a hippie? [laughs] ZT: [laughs] Most likely. They were designing these T-shirts, printing them up at Bay Area silk-screening companies, and then taking them around to various head shops as well as selling them independently at flea markets. Eventually, I imagine, one of these T-shirts found their way to someone who’s interest in them went beyond the novelty factor.

DRAW!: One of Walt’s pool parties or something. [laughs] ZT: So they ended up getting that... I wouldn’t say it was a polite letter from the attorneys, but I’m sure it was far less aggressive than they’re sending out these days regarding matters of this nature.

DRAW!: Well, there was that artist, Dan O’Neill, who did the Air Pirates, who did that neo-underground Mickey Mouse comic, and he got in a lot of trouble, too.

ZT: Honestly I can’t remember what I thought. I imagine I viewed it with some sense of normalcy—a natural part of being a child of hippies. We were certainly at center of the whole Haight-Ashbury scene of the late Sixties; living around the corner from Jimi Hendrix and probably a block or so over from Janis Joplin.

DRAW!: Wow. Did you ever meet them at all?

ZT: Actually, if I did, I don’t remember. The only thing like that that I do recall was a party thrown by the Jefferson Airplane.

They had this small mansion, a really nice one over on Fell St. near Stanyan that had been totally painted black. The one thing that stands out, memory-wise, about the house beyond that was this life-sized stuffed alligator that they had glued to the side of the place. I don’t remember anything else about the occasion, like meeting Grace Slick or perhaps even banging a tambourine if they played. [laughter] DRAW!: And I guess, being seven...

ZT: ...you’re sort of oblivious to this stuff. It was definitely more my parents’ thing.

DRAW!: So your parents were artists? Did they support themselves through their art?

ZT: For my step-mother it was more of a hobby and as for my father, yeah, but it was only later, when he was in his mid-30s or

ABOVE: Rosie O’Donnell.

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ZT: Yeah, I’m sure that at various points in time different cartoonists have done things of a similar nature, and depending on the extent of the usage & appropriation, they’re merely slapped with an attorney’s cease-and-desist letter or actually hauled into court.

DRAW!: Did this have any influence on you as far as making you want to draw or how you look at drawing or creating?

ZT: I don’t think so. I had already been into drawing and cartooning on my own by then. One of my earliest ambitions oddly enough, was to become an alternative, or as it was regarded back then, underground cartoonist.

DRAW!: Like Robert Crumb or Spain etc.?

ZT: Yeah—exactly. I wanted to model myself on Robert Crumb.

Not on a philosophical level mind you, just wanted to replicate his achievement.

DRAW!: Did you ever meet any of the more famous underground artists?

ZT: Some of them, yeah. Not so much during the time I lived in the Haight, but later, after the family moved up north to Mendocino County, I would return to the city while in my early teens to make all the comic conventions. There was usually a section set aside for the undergrounds and that’s where I could be found.

DRAW!: You also said, when we were talking before, that you were also sort of interested in trying to do, like, Marvel comics for a while?

ZT: No, not really. My interest never went beyond that of a fanboy and collector, and that only really lasted from the age of about nine to 13, when, in the process of getting rid of most of our possessions, I was forced to sell my collection so that my father and I (by this time he was separated from my stepmother) could go and live in Mexico. I ended up selling... it must have been, easily, 2,000 comic books or more and I think I probably got a grand total of 13 bucks or so for them from some second-hand shop guy.

DRAW!: Geez.

ZT: [laughs] I thought I gotta swell deal at the time, too.

TOP RIGHT: An early example of Trenholm’s work of the Ayatollah Khomeini from the college newspaper circa 1979.

ABOVE: General Tommy Franks.

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DRAW!: Now, why did you go to Mexico?

ZT: Oh, my father wanted to go down there mostly so that he could live cheaply & concentrate on his art.... That was the main

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DRAW!: And what were you doing in Mexico, were you doing art, too?

ZT: Sure, I was still cartooning but I was spending an equal amount of time playing on the beach, running around with the local kids, etc. Mexico in the ’70s was fantastic. I picked up Spanish fairly quickly, too, and ended up doing much of our communicating, like handling travel arrangements, hotel rooms, haggling over the price for a pair of huaraches (hand made sandals)—all the way to ordering my dad a beer; “Señora, una cerveza, por favor.” [Mike laughs] My father never learned more than 15 words or so during the entire time we were down there.

DRAW!: And was he doing these neo-Dadaist paintings down there, or was he doing something different...?

ZT: Well, actually they were mostly collages, which he created by combining images from magazines and other objects, like cigarette package labels, costume jewelry, pins, hood ornaments, coins, etc. Basically anything that caught his eye and that could be juxtaposed with other elements to make an artistic statement of sorts.

DRAW!: Now, when you came back to the States, I take it you finished your high school here in the U.S.?

ZACK TRENHOLM

ZT: I think there is a natural tendency towards that. The more you draw, the better you get and with that comes a certain refinement in your line.

DRAW!: I think that’s true. There’s a lot of cartoonists that do that. Artists like Alex Toth, for one, who started out being a lot more detailed, worked toward being simpler and simpler. It seem to be the good path to follow.

ZT: You’re right. As Mies van der Rohe infamously once said; “less is more.” I think one just gravitates in that direction over time, whatever their style.

DRAW!: Have you ever tried to just, for interest, to go and do something that’s more detailed, or do you usually do things very streamlined now?

ZT: Well, I wouldn’t say my work is that streamlined, just efficient on the details [laughs]. But there was a time, nine or ten years ago, when my work derived a lot of inspiration from the caricaturists of the 1920s and ’30s who in turn had been inspired by the modern art of the period, like Cubism.

DRAW!: What led you to this?

ZT: I’m not sure. My interest in that aesthetic, often referred to as “Art Modérn” or “Art Deco” caricature, probably got started

ZT: Actually, I never finished high school. I took the GED instead, and by the age of 16 was enrolled in junior college.

DRAW!: That was an art college?

ZT: No, not art school. That came later... just a community college. I became a journalism major but took classes in everything from sociology to political science to fulfill requirements.

The school’s newspaper was the journalism class and as I was made its art director at the start of the semester, ended up not having to do anything that journalistic, such as writing....

DRAW!: Did you do cartoons and caricatures and things then?

ZT: Yeah, very much so. I was doing a lot of caricatures and political cartooning for the paper.

DRAW!: Were you studying old artists or being influenced by—illustrators?

ZT: That would be the caricaturist David Levine. I was really into his approach.

DRAW!: So did you then become interested in doing that type of editorial work and then delve back and study guys like Al Hirschfeld and people like that?

ZT: No, I wasn’t particularly keen on Hirschfeld at the time. I was definitely more into detailed, representational caricature.

DRAW!: So you’re saying the more you drew, the more refined and simple your work tended to become? But in the beginning more detailed work appealed to you?

ABOVE: Covarrubias-influenced work by Trenholm from the ’90s featuring Yasser Arafat.

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in the mid-’80s after coming across examples of such stellar practitioners as Miguel Covarrubias, Paulo Garretto, Al Frueh, Ralph Barton.

DRAW!: So do you find yourself sort of metamorphosing into something different, constantly growing, absorbing and changing?

ZT: Well, I don’t imagine my style gradually morphing into anything too radically different than what it’s been for the past ten years. But yeah, back when as I was starting out, I went through period of rapidly changing influences and thus spent a lot of time switching from one crutch to the next.

DRAW!: I think a lot of artists go through that phase, where you lean a little bit on the crutch, that influence, and it’s very easy to find a solution to a problem from other artists, because they’ll design or solve a problem, and it seems so appealing. Like, “Yes! All the answers are right here.”

DRAW!: It’s like finding a buried treasure or a favorite old book that somebody had up in the attic.

ZT: Exactly. A couple of these artists I’ve even been able to make contact with. Both are now in their 80s and 90s, and it came as something of a shock to them to have a another caricaturist, who wasn’t even born at the height of their careers, now approach them after all this time with a desire to discuss their work. Each of them said it was the first time it had ever happened.

DRAW!: I’m sure! They feel like they labored in obscurity or something.

ZT: Exactly.

DRAW!: Well, thanks to DRAW!, that won’t happen to you. [laughs] ZT: Thanks, it’s appreciated. [laughs] The web, if it continues in the direction that its going, will probably make it harder for most artists, writers, etc., to simply disappear. Somewhere, someplace online they’re sure to be found.

DRAW!: Do you do a lot of drawing, sketching, outside of your work?

ZT: Exactly. But it hinders you if you let it go on for too long. And not only does it hinder you, it’s never really you anyZT: Not really. I rarely have ways. But there was a time when I was the opportunity to draw just very much “yet another bastard son of for the hell of it, for the Miguel Coverrubias” as I liked to joke pleasure of it. It’s a job— before I began pursuing my own guess that sounds pretty mergraphic vision. I have to admit that cenary....

I have a real... um... I should say “lack of appreciation” for illustraDRAW!: Did you used to do tors whose official, professional more of that and you’ve fallen style is based too much on the work out of the habit of it? of another illustrator or cartoonist. I mean, it’s one thing when you’re ZT: I would say probably about starting out to learn from someone, ABOVE: More Covarrubias-influenced work, this time with ten years ago, before I started but before you jump into the marketNancy Kerrigan. working professionally, I drew a place, it’s essential that your work lot more in that regard. But stand on its own and not have any sort these days it’s enough just to of direct resemblance to another’s—at least someone who’s still stay on top of deadlines. When I’m feeling more disciplined alive. [laughter] though, what I try to do every day is draw about eight to ten DRAW!: [laughs] Well, I guess you could go back 30 or 40 years and rip off people and take their styles and it would be fresh today, because most people wouldn’t even know.

ZT: True. In fact, later, over time, as I’ve continued to research caricature, I’ve discovered artists from the later part of the twentieth century, such as from the 1950s and ’60s, who are virtually unknown today. Most never achieved any sort of presence where scholarly or historical works on the medium are concerned. Not even a footnote. And many of these guys were brilliant.

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likenesses very quickly while reading the newspaper or watching the news.

DRAW!: You mean you’re, like, drawing from TV if you see somebody’s face on TV? ZT: Exactly. I do quick, one- to two-minute sketches and then compile them into large binders. Once again, not entirely for fun, but to have a leg up regarding any future commissions that I may receive. The idea here is that hopefully I’ll already have some

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CARICATURE sketches of the requested individual when the time comes and that will mean less work.

DRAW!: How often do you do this?

ZT: I go back and forth. Sometimes, when I get caught up in deadlines it sort of falls by the wayside, but I would say that I get back on track every couple weeks. I’ve been slacking off lately though. [laughs] DRAW!: So you are sort of, then, drawing. You’re sketching.

You’re doing it so that you’ll be able to possibly use these sketches later.

ZT: Well, only faces, though. Faces are really what interests, motivates me. And because of this, all that other stuff that goes into an illustration, bodies, background details etc., I usually need to work very hard at.

DRAW!: Do you like to go and, say, draw abandoned buildings or— ZT: Yeah, or interesting body stances, like trying to imagine what it would be like to draw somebody turning a certain way or doing a certain task. That stuff is difficult, so I rarely do it.

Obviously if I made a serious effort to sketch this stuff on a regular basis it wouldn’t be, [laughs] but since I don’t, I’m always needing to seek out specific reference material.

DRAW!: The palette’s different....

ZT: Yeah, they change everything around. Everything that allows you to work speedily. Funny as it sounds, I actually do buy these upgrades in moments of supreme motivation and/or stupidity, but they end up just sitting on my shelves, shrink-wrapped and all, collecting dust. I miss the time when you were able to learn a craft or tool and then spend the rest of your career simply honing and improving your skills at it. Working in the digital realm completely throws that concept out the window.

DRAW!: Why do you do it digitally as opposed to, say, drawing it, inking it, and then importing it and coloring it in Photoshop that way. Or converting it into a vector drawing with Stream-line and then importing it to Illustrator, Painter or whatever you wanted to do that way. Why are you inking it in Illustrator? Is it faster?

ZT: Well, it’s slower in some respects, faster in others. For me, it’s more about the flexibility, and because of that, it would be hard to return now to using traditional media. When I joined the San Francisco Examiner, it was a prerequisite of the art department that I work in Adobe Illustrator, but if I could do it all again, I think I would continue to work traditionally but use

DRAW!: When you’re sitting there in front of the TV and you’re drawing, as an example, Walter Cronkite or somebody from TV, are you doodling in ballpoint pen or in pencil or marker?

ZT: It’s always in pencil or litho-crayon, and I try not to refine it too much, so to keep them spontaneous and fresh. It’s an extension, I guess, of my being a quick-sketch or entertainment caricaturist as well. I probably do a lot less of that these days due to scheduling conflicts with publication stuff, but in years past I used to entertain frequently at conventions, festivals, upscale parties, everything and anything except kiddie events. [laughs] It’s surprisingly good income too—I charge around $125/hour and on that basis actually end up making less on illustration work, hour for hour than I do sketching at special events. Not as stressful either.

DRAW!: Like having to turn Walter Cronkite or someone else into the Hulk. [laughs] ZT: [laughs] Right, right....

DRAW!: Do you stay on top of the current software. When the new Illustrator comes out, do you immediately go buy it?

ZT: No, not at all, not at all... in fact, I’m down-right resistant about it. The problem with working digitally, as with Adobe Illustrator, is that they upgrade the program at least every year and a half, and when they do, they change the interface remarkably. Shortcuts change, they switch.

RIGHT: Author Lewis Carroll. More of Trenholm’s work from Salon.

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ZACK TRENHOLM working digitally ZT: Well, that’s always been important to me. I’ve always thought that the problem with most digital drawing programs like Illustrator, Freehand or Painter for that matter is that a good thirty to forty percent of the artists style is directly related to the program they use. They’re just not that customizable yet. For me, that was a important thing to avoid. I also didn’t want my style to be fixed in a particular point in time years from now, meaning I didn’t want my stuff to look like it was Adobe Illustrator 0.6, circa 1999.

DRAW!: Right. So you tried to do things like avoid using a lot of filters and things like that?

ZT: Exactly. I try to avoid all the tools that actually help speed up the process of working. [laughs] DRAW!: No “lens flair.” [laughs] ZT: Right, no gradations, etc., the sort of stuff that would be instantly recognizable as being from the program. I wanted a style that was independent from the software, one that could easily revert to being done with traditional media if need be. Around the time I was exploring this, I was also discovering illustration of the 1950s and ’60s and getting a great deal of inspiration from there. Artists such as Jacque Kapralik, Ben Shahn or Aurelius Battaglia, for example, all share a wonderfully spare and stylized approach of simple color and linework that helped me. Not a lot of texture—very flat and two-dimensional....

DRAW!: Now, when you’re working with your regular cadre of clients, do they usually send you a layout? Do they give you a sketch? Is this something where they’ve worked with you before, so they let you come up with the idea yourself?

ABOVE: A recent Mark Wahlberg study.

Photoshop for its editing advantages.

DRAW!: They wanted you to be able to do your work digitally?

ZT: Right. At the time I was hired, the paper was in the process of computerizing all aspects of its operation, including the art department, for reasons of efficiency, flexibility, speed and I imagine, eventual profits. I had been doing my illos up to that point using Winsor & Newton brushes, doing gouache for color work. I tried replicating my style in the version of Adobe Illustrator out at the time, which I think was 3.0, and found that it was near next to impossible—taking about ten times longer to do than it would have naturally and even then never looking quite right. I tried using Streamline to convert scanned art into vector paths but it also required a lot of extensive tweaking. So after much time & effort I realized that I needed to discard my style and experiment with Illustrator till I found an approach that was more conducive to working in it, but that didn’t appear to be too computer-generated....

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ZT: Yeah, other than how they’d like ’em depicted, I usually have complete latitude. It’s rare to receive a sketch, although sometimes I request one if the concept or layout is particularly complicated. Beyond that, I’m usually just given a size, a timeline and a maybe a stipulation to either box it or keep it a free shape.

DRAW!: Do they give you type placement?

ZT: No, they basically can wrap type around anything I give them. Quark, Pagemaker, etc., have long made type specing extinct.

DRAW!: Are you working with your figures on a layer and your background on another layer?

ZT: No, I approach things real simply. That’s something that would probably be a good idea to do, but once again, I try to use the Illustrator on its most basic, elementary level and not get too caught up in stuff like that. The furthest I go is to keep certain elements grouped and locked while working on other aspects of the drawing.

DRAW!: You know, that’s one of the things I always find fascinating about doing this magazine. Last issue I interviewed Celia Calle, and now talking to you, I can really see everybody uses these programs in really different ways, personal ways. Some artists have a lot of layers, some, like you don’t have any layers.

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ZT: The New Yorker is good, and Fast Company is excellent too.

Patrick Mitchell, the art director over there, has long made it a major design aspect of the magazine. Let’s see, what else... well, Entertainment Weekly used to be another where illustration was an integral part of things, but recently it has changed.

DRAW!: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite magazines, but you’re right, it does seem they’re using more photos and less drawings.

ZT: Yeah, I recently had an exchange with David Cowles, one of their regulars regarding EW’s re-design and he aptly described it as “the Maxim look.” That men’s mag is apparently so successful these days that many others are now racing to imitate it not only in terms of its content but appearance as well. That probably doesn’t bode too well for illustrators.

DRAW!: I guess everybody will jump on that, and in a year or two they’ll reinvent themselves again because that will be old.

ZT: Well, I hope so. Magazine illustration has had a good run since the early ’80s, and it would be regrettable for it to diminish now. You know, there’s a precedent for this; illustration had another heyday back in the 1920s and ’30s and when Life magaIt’s really amazing that there’re so many approaches to a digital illustration. But everybody is really coming at it from a really personal perspective.

ZT: Well, the problem with these programs is that they’re not as artist-friendly as they’d like you to believe. Sometimes I think it really helps to have the mentality of an engineer, because the process of creating digital illustrations is about as fun as doing a blueprint.

DRAW!: I find that to be more true with Illustrator than Photoshop. I think Photoshop, you know, a pencil’s a pencil, an eraser’s an eraser. But in Illustrator, it is more like, well, you’ve got to use this thing over here. I’m not very good at it, myself, because of that—it seems sort of mechanical. I’ve never spent a bunch of time trying to do illustrations with it.

ZT: I totally agree. And the thing with Illustrator versus Photoshop is that with Photoshop, you’re using it mainly to manipulate and enhance traditionally done art, rather than creating it wholly from scratch. Drawings done this way always have a hint of sterility or soullessness about them since they’re completely machine generated. It’s something I’m always feeling a need to work against. The one good plus about vector-based illustration though is that it’s resolution-independent, meaning that you can reduce the art to the size of a postage stamp or blow it up to the size of a billboard and not lose anything in the process.

DRAW!: Right. Do you try to stay current with illustration, yourself? Do you study the field?

ZT: Oh yeah, very much so. The majority of the publications I subscribe to use a great deal of illustration.

DRAW!: What are your favorite magazines for that?

TOP LEFT: Whoa, Nelly!

ABOVE: Grrammy-winner, Norah Jones.

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ZACK TRENHOLM DRAW!: Do you follow political cartoonists at all, like Pat Oliphant and people like that?

ZT: Yeah, I like his work. I wouldn’t say he’s a keen caricaturist, although he does better caricatures than the majority of political cartoonists that are working at the moment. Another caricaturist whose work I like and who has just come to mind is Eric Palma.

DRAW!: Yes, he’s really good. He also does a lot of work for Entertainment Weekly.

ZT: Right. David Cowles too, my good pal Gary Smith of The London Sunday Times, Charlie Powell, Chris Pyle—they all do terrific stuff as well.

ABOVE AND RIGHT: Jimmy Kimmel and California Gov. Grey Davis.

zine reinvented itself, it created a photographic standard that a lot of magazines soon followed suit on.

DRAW!: And then, after the second World War, they really started using a lot more photography.

ZT: Exactly. It wasn’t really until the ’60s that illustration—and for that matter, caricature—had a kind of resurgence in the form of artists such as Edward Sorel and David Levine.

DRAW!: And illustration had artists like Bob Peak and Bernie Fuchs and other people like that.

ZT: Right, right, exactly.

DRAW!: And that lasted all the way into, oh, probably the mid’70s, and then things seemed to change again.

ZT: Yeah... things kinda plateaued and then had a resurgence after Tina Brown took over The New Yorker in the early ’80s and brought back the sort of illustration The New Yorker was known for back in its early days.

DRAW!: Now, who are some of the caricaturists that you like or whose work you follow today?

ZT: Let’s see... Richard Thompson is a fave. Wonderful stuff that differs a great deal from my own.... He does a weekly political panel for U.S. News and World Report and the occasional illustration for The Washington Post. Definitely one of my favorites.

Consistently solid likenesses....

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TOP: Internet CEO roundtable done for Fast Company.

ABOVE: Julia Roberts.

LEFT: Eminem.

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From pencil sketch to Adobe Illustrator—THE PROCESS

STEP 1: Zach’s first step in doing this spot illustration of Cybill Shepard was to compile photo reference of Ms. Shepard. He does this by visiting an extensive clipping file of personalities that he has built up over the years and by the Internet, which has become an excellent source for material with its thousands of celebrity shrine or fan sites. After studying the collection of pix of her, Zach lets his mind, rather than eye, take over. With regards to likeness and character, it is far more selective and interpretive—retaining what is essential and ignoring that which is inconsequential. He usually achieves his likenessess in anywhere from one to five sketches, although it can sometimes take upwards of 50 sketches to obtain the same desired effect. He states that he knows when a likeness is successful: “It’s when the subject looks more like the caricature rather than the other way around.”

STEP 2: After he gets the likeness where he more or less wants it, he then moves on to the other elements of the illustration, sometimes doing a complete sketch (as he has here with Shepard), but more typically drawing each aspect separately (i.e., head, body, rocket, exhaust clouds etc.) and then later composing the “parts” collage-like, on the computer. Zach finds this way not only faster than working out compositions on paper but that it also allows for unlimited experimentation.

STEP 3: The sketch or sketches are then scanned into the computer for conversion into templates for tracing in Adobe Illustrator. Since time was of the essence in this case, the treatment fairly straight-forward and the magazine familiar with his work, Zach proceeded directly to final art without providing a detailed sketch to the publication. Working digitally makes this possible. He sends all his illustrations, finished or otherwise, initially as “proofs.” If after seeing the artwork the client has any changes or additions, he can easy make those corrections to the original file and send the illustration again.

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STEP 4: Producing illustrations in a vector-based drawing program like Adobe Illustrator is definitely to the far left of being a creative process, but Zach finds it ideal for the simplified style of caricature he practices as the software allows him to easily and incrementally manipulate a portrait towards getting the best results possible.

Contact Zach and see more of his great work at http://www.zachtrenholm.com/

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INKING AND COLORING YOUR SKETCHES IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR

By Alberto Ruiz

T

he approach described in the following steps has very little in common with techniques used in photo editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Painter, which manipulate pixels to achieve the end result, instead you will be outlining and coloring simultaneously by tracing over your sketch and by overlapping vector shapes.

1

PREPARING AND SCANNING YOUR SKETCH Since you would be basically tracing over your own sketch, using more than just the “pen” tool, It helps tremendously to have a very clear image to go by. Think of it as drawing on top of a light box, you’d need a lot of guess work to trace over a fuzzy, cluttered sketch.

“Clean up” your drawing as much as possible before scanning, by erasing unwanted lines, excessive shading and smudging. Although your lines don’t need to be perfect by any stretch, the closer your sketch resembles the final image the better. A low resolution scan (anywhere from 72 to 150 dpi) is pretty much all you need to use as a template in AI, a high-res image would only slow things down to a crawl.

1 I scanned this image at 100 dpi, to allow for zooming in very close on heavily detailed areas such as the gun, I then saved the scan in TIFF format (you can also place other file formats in AI but TIFF, JPG and GIF files are preferred because of their small size).

If your drawing lines are still not sharp after scanning, open the sketch in Adobe Photoshop and play with the “Levels” slider—Command+L (Mac OS), Ctrl+L (Windows)—to adjust the image to an acceptable clarity.

PLACING YOUR SCANNED IMAGE IN ILLUSTRATOR After creating a new document in AI choose File > Place. A dialog box will prompt you to select a file to place. For this demonstration I chose draw_girl.tif from my desktop. Check the template box and click the “Place” button. (By the way I work on a Mac, so my screen and dialog boxes look different than the ones on a PC, the process is the same though.) By selecting the “Template” option, AI dims the placed image by 50% (the default value—you can change the opacity level by double-clicking on the layer’s name). This helps you see the lines and shapes you’re creating as you ink or trace over the sketch. You can also resize, skew, flip or rotate the template at will after you unlock its layer (padlock icon on the layer palette).

AI also locks the Template layer and generates a new one (Layer 1) right above the template. 2

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PLANNING YOUR LAYERS Managing a complex illustration is made easier by nesting groups of objects into layers. You should create as many layers as you deem necessary, not just to organize, but also to simplify the tedious process.

You can lock and hide layers to isolate and protect their contents or to avoid the obvious cluttering.

To further prevent or minimize the guess work and confusion on the work in progress, I identified and defined the various areas in my image before I start inking by grouping elements in the image based on their overlapping order, and creating individual layers for each group.

4 Because of its complexity I divided the hair into two groups. The shapes behind the girl’s face became Layer 1 (I double-clicked on its name to rename it “Hair Back”). Next I created a second layer by clicking on the “Create New Layer” icon (folded page) located on the layer’s palette (bottom row)—I renamed it “Girl’s Face”—followed by the hair overlapping the girl’s face in its own “Hair Front” group (Layer 3).

List of layers created for this image, in overlapping order from back to front: 1—Hair Back 2—Girl’s Face 3—Hair Front 4—Left Arm 5—Right Arm 6—Torso/Legs

SPLITTING THE HAIR 6 I then grouped them together—Command+G (Mac OS), face as one global shape with the pen tool, using a 0.25 point Ctrl+G (Windows)—and set the group’s attributes to No Stroke black “Stroke” (outline) and “No Fill,” matching the lines of my and “No Fill.” I selected all the elements I had drawn up to this sketch as closely as possible. point (including the main hair shape) by choosing “Select > All” The intersecting lines that make up the mosaic-like pattern from the top menu bar and clicked on the “Divide Filter” from inside the hair were drawn individually using the same stroke the Pathfinder palette. and fill properties as the big shape. In order to apply the 7 After the filter was applied I deleted the residual shapes and “Divide” Pathfinder filter effectively, all the lines were drawn proceed to color the various objects. past the main hair shape’s perimeter.

5 I started by tracing the contour of the hair behind the girl’s

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After finishing both hair groups, I got them out of the way by hiding them from view. This was accomplished by merely clicking on the eye icon in the Layers palette. Hold down Option as you click on the eye icon to show/hide all layers but the active one.

FACE VALUES Before I started tracing the contour of the head I created and named a new layer for the face, then I clicked and dragged the new layer and sandwiched it between Layers 1 and 3 (the “Hair” layers). I set my object’s attributes to “No Fill” from the icon at

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the bottom of the toolbox and mixed a medium flesh tone for the Stroke.

Zooming in at 300%, I drew a quick outline of the face using the Pen tool. I kept the flesh colored Stroke without a Fill to be able to see the pencil outlines I was tracing over; I always get very excited at this point in the image because faces are my favorite things to draw. I began to lay down the rest of the objects in the face, as always, working from back to front, I completed this part of the image in a very short amount of time, mostly because I don’t have to be too careful about drawing parts of the image that will eventually be covered by overlapping objects,

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After most of the objects in the face were drawn, I held down Command (Mac OS)—Ctrl (Windows)—and clicked on the face outline to select it and switched the Stroke to Fill by clicking on the two-headed arched arrow (located between the “Fill” and “Stroke” icons at the bottom of the tool box), and began to add the high-lights and shadows.

ALBERTO RUIZ

FLESH TONES I usually mix my colors as I go. I try to limit my palette to three shades of any one color: the object’s main color, a darker shade for shadows and one for highlights. This forces me to simplify the drawing, and it also makes for more dramatic lighting.

AI saves the current color palette you create within the document automatically, so if you mixed a set of flesh tones you really like in a previous file, you can import it at any time by choosing “Window > Swatch Libraries > Other Library” and selecting the file you wish to import a color palette from.

SOFT GRADIENTS To complement the freckles and create a soft shadow, I placed three rectangles filled with the default black-&-white gradient from the Swatches palette at different angles, straight across the width of the face.

16

17 To achieve a smooth blend, in

the Transparency palette I set the blend mode to “Burn” and the Opacity to 80%.

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ALBERTO RUIZ TORSO, HIPS, ARMS AND FIREARMS The torso and both arms were put together on separate layers, using the methods described earlier, main shapes got divided to generate highlights. Outlines were drawn mostly to keep same color shapes apart.

The right hand was added after the illustration was finished.

The original sketch shows the girl leaning on a vehicle, her hand barely visible.

A SIMPLE MASK I created the mesh for the gun handle easily by selecting the Rectangular Grid tool and clicking and dragging across the screen. (To specify the amount of horizontal and vertical dividers beforehand, click once on the screen while having the tool selected.) I skewed the grid to my liking with the aid of the Shear tool and masked the grid into the ellipse by selecting both the grid and the shape and choosing “Object > Clipping mask > Make” from the top menu bar. You can also use Command+7 (Mac OS)—Ctrl+7 (Windows). Make sure that the shape is always in front of the objects(s) you wish to mask. 22

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ALBERTO RUIZ

THE FINAL ILLUSTRATION

You can contact Alberto and see a lot more of his fantastic work on his web site:http://www.brandstudio.com THE BEST OF DRAW! 217

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MISSIONS NOCTURNAL

From hard boiled detectives, giant monsters and super-heroes to the macabre, illustrator Dan Brereton covers it all with his lush and evocative brush strokes.

The busy artist shares some of his working techniques.

INTERVIEW BY MIKE MANLEY TRANSCRIBED BY STEVEN TICE

DAN BRERETON: I started drawing monsters as soon as I could draw. They were the first things I felt I could draw, people never interested me as subjects, nor machines or architecture. I’d draw a hillside full of caves in profile and then fill the caves with reclining monsters. I don’t have a recollection of doing this, but my mom has shown me some paintings that I did when I was two, two-and-a-half years old. She has one that’s a blue, pink and red watercolor. My mom painted a lot back then, and she’d set me up sometimes with brushes and paints. The painting is entitled “Pecos Bill” because it reminded me, for some reason, of the Disney character. I think just the colors, because there’s really nothing going on in the painting, it’s just a bunch of colors smashed on there. It’s probably one of the first examples of painting that I have. But as soon as I got to the point where I could actually sit down and think about what I was going to draw, it was monsters. I drew horned monsters with big teeth. Little more than stick figures, you know? One day in kindergarten we had an hour to kill and the teacher asked us what we wanted to do, so I piped up and suggested we draw monsters! She wanted to encourage me, I guess, so she indulged the request and the whole class had a ball.

I was like the expert and I remember classmates coming to me with their drawings for approval and advice. It was like my first comic book convention appearance in a way. That day must have sparked something. It surely reinforced my love of creatures and the idea of excelling at something. I’ll never forget that day.

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THE NOCTURNALS ™ AND ©2008 DAN BRERETON.

DRAW!: So what got you interested in drawing and painting monsters and horror material?

Were you into that as a kid?

DRAW!: So you liked things like the Godzilla movies, I take it?

Things like that?

DB: know what? This is really weird, but I watched Ultraman on a daily basis. I watched Speed Racer, I loved the Warner Brothers cartoons, I loved the Groovy Ghoulies and Scooby-Doo and stuff like that, but Godzilla I could not get into. Because it was just a big rubber suit with a guy in it, and it just seemed really fake to me. And a lot of the Godzilla movies that were out when I was a kid were the ones with little Minya, and the more friendly

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DB: Yeah. It’s not even subtitled. And I just watched it. I just took it all in and realized what they were really trying to do with what they had, with the technology. One thing I was really, really into as a kid—about eight, nine or ten years old, around the time I was reading comics—were those Sinbad movies.

DRAW!: Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts and all those Ray Harryhausen movies.

DB: Oh, Ray Harryhausen was such a huge inspiration to me at that time. That was who I was really into, because I would see those commercials for those movies on TV, and I would beg my parents to take us to see the Sinbad movies. They never would.

So I didn’t see the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad until I was a teenager. I think it came on TV. STARFISH ™ AND ©2008 DAN BRERETON

DRAW!: Were you also into the Universal Monsters?

DB: No, that stuff was just scary. See, I grew up being afraid of the dark, and scary movies would just send me right over the top. So I couldn’t have watched a movie like Creature from the Black Lagoon when I was a kid; it would have just freaked me out too much.

Godzilla stuff was just lame. It wasn’t cool like Ultraman. I didn’t draw monsters from films or TV, most movie monsters scared me too much. I had what I guess you could call night terrors or something. I was scared to walk down the hall to use the bathroom at night and would imagine things wanting to get me in the darkness.

My parents didn’t leave a single light on in the house at night and it was creepy. Years later when Poltergeist came out, I could totally relate to the scene with the clown, toys and clothing that always looked like devils and creatures in the dark. I would spook the hell out of myself. Its not like I had a bad childhood, either. My parents are great people and they encouraged my imagination. I just had this over-active imagination, like, to a fault. Comic books were my salvation, I loved super-heroes instantly and I loved stories where they triumphed over the villains. The first comic I ever saw was Captain America battling the Red Skull, drawn by Kirby, I knew I was home. The only time I wasn’t drawing monsters or aliens was when I was trying to draw Cap.

DB: I hadn’t really seen Gamera when I was a kid. See, I got into all this stuff later, when someone in ’95 or ’96 sent me some tapes of the more recent Godzilla movies of the early ’90s, and I was like, “Oh, this is cool!” They’re somewhat low budget, but they’re pretty well done for being low budget, and I really liked what they were doing. And I totally got into them. I completely fell in love with the Godzilla stuff. Old, new, you name it. I bought a Japanese laser-disc of the original movie, the Japanese version.

DRAW!: Right, the one without Raymond Burr?

©2008 DAN BRERETON

DRAW!: So were you into the Gamera movies at all?

TOP: Starfish of the Nocturnals.

ABOVE: BRERETON—I’m a big fan of the old lurid girlie magazine cover paintings—and chose a stark red and black chiaroscuro background to frame this femme fatale.

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STEP 2 BRERETON: What you’re looking at here are the pencils for the painting itself. The drawing is done on the 13” x 20”, two-ply Strathmore bristol sheet (500 series—the only kind I use for covers and painted pages if I can help it) that I’m painting. It’s kept simple.

The shapes and details I need are there—the rest will come out in the painting. As with the rough sketch, I’m leaving myself choices to make later. I’ve also redrawn her face to make her less ferocious, and more like a cat stretching languidly. It has a quality to it I like now. I can relate to this drawing and am looking forward to painting it. I’m aware that I haven’t given myself much room to really describe the tomb she’s perched on... but I did enlarge the moon so it partly frames her head and hair. I’ve also kept the bats in the background to a minimum because I have done bats and more bats on another cover in the series, and in general, I have a tendency to “bat it up” a lot, so I held back here.

VAMPIRELLA ™ AND ©2008 HARRIS COMICS

VAMPIRELLA © AND TM 2008 HARRIS COMICS

STEP 1 BRERETON: The irony is, I tell people all the time, don’t send in the sketch you think is weak. Don’t show them something you don’t want to do. I sent my editor four or five sketches, done on 8.5” x 11” paper— this being one of them, but it was my least favorite. I’d done some others that were actually a little more detailed, and were a little more exciting to me. If I’d hated this sketch, though—which I didn’t—it never would’ve been sent in.

The thing I didn’t like about this piece was the facial expression. It was supposed to be cat-like and feral, but I wanted something more attractive—softer. It had little in the way of strong lighting and neat things going on with the figure from cast shadows and stuff I generally like about figures. As it turned out, the editor liked this one quite a bit, responding to the cat-like pose that I’d originally liked about it. Since I’d done three covers already I was really happy with, I didn’t fight it. I wanted to make her happy and I was thrilled to be doing four Vampirella covers. The rough for a cover should be simple in the beginning. Too much detail means less leeway later on after it’s approved. Since I’d done this one as an afterthought to the three or four others before it, I’d left it relatively simple.

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STEP 4 BRERETON: I took care of that problem with the tomb by extending the bottom of the painting digitally—and adding more detail on the stonework. Chances are it will be cropped on the cover, but it can’t hurt.

I’ve upped the saturation of reds a bit, as well as making the darks a little darker, because bright colors and dark shadows can come out muted in publication. Overall, I’m happy with the results, and I can’t wait to see it with the logo, because I know that the right treatment with the Vampirella logo at top will make this cover sing. Illustration isn’t supposed to be about the finished painting—it’s about the printed piece, and I’ve tried to lay a groundwork the production people can bring to a stunner of a finish.

VAMPIRELLA ™ AND ©2008 HARRIS COMICS

STEP 3 BRERETON: The image on the left is the finished painting. But I’m not done yet; I still need to scan the piece. I know that once I scan it in, and look at it on the computer screen, I’m going to make changes here and there. There’s nothing like seeing it shrunk to the size of a postcard to show you the errors and flaws. Because the last three covers were heavy on the reds (they were all kept to a monochromatic range of red and black and grey), I kept the background neutral and grey with just a touch of warmth in the moon. the bulk of reds are in the foreground in order to create a sense of depth and concentration of color on the figure.

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HALLOWEEN TOWN

JESS ACRIDGE ©2008 BE AFRAID PRODUCTIONS.

STEP 1: BRERETON—For this job, I started with several sketches, very rough. It came down to the difference between fewer characters or a gang of them. The client chose a gang of them to give the idea of a lot of stuff going on at their Halloween attraction out in Arizona. So they sent me a pile of photos of the western town and how it had looked on past Halloweens, and I incorporated the architecture into the background. They’d sent me a few shots of the town at night, which helped a lot. I then shot a roll of reference of my dad holding different poses and firearms and set about doing the drawing on the big sheet of bristol board (approx. 16" x 24") starting with the foreground characters, moving back to the buildings. I had the drawing completed in one night and then taped the whole thing to my drawing table.

I taped off the drawing well and laid down a wash of warm orange hues over the whole thing. Later I went in and laid that green color over the buildings with reds in the sky that would later be shaped into flame-like clouds by adding blacks to the sky. I let it dry, and the paper stretched tightly after drying. The warm orange hue I laid over the painting set the light source tone for the entire painting. This is an important step in painting: killing the white of the paper. It keeps the range of color in control and saves your lightest values. (Later, if you need a pure 100% white somewhere, you can always use white gesso to make it.) At this point, I left the painting alone and went to bed or concentrated on some other job.

STEP 2: BRERETON—The multiple figures, crowded so tightly, were daunting. I began with the background, wanting to establish the atmosphere before moving to the figures. It seemed like a good idea to start at the top for this big painting, since the background is all at the top third of the piece. The next night, I finished the background buildings and sky. I was really happy with the way it came out, and had the spark to get over the anxiety I had about the gang of figures. I used a brush loaded with a mix of Middlemen dark purple and Alizarin to sort of draw in the figures, establish the light pattern and darks, etc., to give myself a place to focus on the painting. I started with the three figures in the foreground. At the point I stopped to take this picture, it was at the end of the second night of painting. The next day I left for Comic-Con in San Diego and didn’t sit back down to work on this piece for at least a week. From there I moved to each character in the middle ground, and when I was done with them, I blocked in the pumpkins and jack-o’-lanterns in the extreme foreground. Having the entire painting’s darks blocked in before laying the bulk of the colors in isn’t a typical approach in watercolor—watercolorists tend to work light to dark—but it helps me see the painting as a whole. So much of the work is done when the darks and shadows are blocked in, the rest is a breeze. It’s akin to spotting blacks on an inked page, then moving in to the details and linework.

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JESS ACRIDGE ©2008 BE AFRAID PRODUCTIONS.

ABOUT PHOTO REFERENCE AND MODELS: BRERETON—Photo reference is crucial to me. Lighting is so important in what I do; if the lighting isn’t right, it affects the entire piece. Even if your subject is zombies or something equally fantastic, the light pattern still needs to be believable. In fact, believability depends on good lighting. I don’t use a flash, and I use strong light sources. The shapes you’ll get from good lighting you can’t make up, and they will sell your figure more than drawing the entire figure in great detail.

STEP 3: BRERETON—I lay in the color, the details, and the modeling of form. Layers of color and detail are added in different parts of the painting. I tackle one section at a time: the foreground figures, then the extreme foreground, then the background zombies, keeping in mind the focus needs to be on the three figures—the grave digger, the sheriff and the skeleton in the coffin. The rest of the cowboys end up demanding too much attention, so I go back and simplify their colors, details, all the while keeping the darks to a certain level where they won’t compete with the main figures. Diffusing the darks and the level of brightness in the color helps to create distance. I removed a ghost framed against the moon that was crowding the sky line. I worked on the skeleton a lot to keep it from competing with the sheriff figure; it was important that the two figures not melt into one another. I realized a little late that I could have designed several areas of the painting better; I had to work with what I had. Eventually, after four nights of painting, the illustration was done.

It went much quicker than I thought it would, which made me very happy.

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ABOVE: Layouts for The Simpsons’ Lord Of The Rings parody. BRERETON—Spontaneity and exaggeration in layouts is the main ingredient for powerful imagery in the finished stages. Often something I drew in about two seconds right off the top of my head becomes the entire inspiration for the finished piece. The gesture sketches are the backbone for the action, attitude and character. My first impression isn’t always my best, but I find my best work in sketches and layout come from this sort of gunslinger approach to thumbnails. Thumbnails often hold three times the power of the finished piece, and sometimes I find myself more in love with the roughs than the finished piece.

TOP RIGHT: BRERETON—In the case of The Simpsons, I couldn’t exaggerate enough! I did my best to keep the energy of them in the finishes. The story was supposed to look as much like an actual adaptation of Tolkien as I could get, to contrast with the Simpsons, and it worked for the most part, but the goofy Simpsons feel started to creep in here and there. I think it actually increased the humor in the story, so it worked out well in the end.

RIGHT: Detail from one of the panels

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DRAW!: How ironic. It was just to real for you?

DB: Yeah! Black-and-white stuff, first of all, I thought was creepier than color. I don’t know, I just couldn’t handle that stuff. That’s why, I think, when I discovered comics and super-heroes and things like that, and even monster comics, I could totally handle those.

Marvel super-hero comics were perfect, the perfect sensibility. Because I wasn’t even into those monster magazines, those black-&-white magazines that Marvel did. They were just a little too creepy for me. It’s almost embarrassing to say it, but I was kind of a lightweight when it came to horror, as a kid.

Up until I became a teenager. I remember when Trilogy of Terror came on TV for the first time. I took a bath and ran in my room, avoided it completely. My mom tried to tell me about it, to reassure me it wasn’t that bad, but the idea of a little tiki god chasing Karen Black with a spear was too much... it was too much like my own dark fantasies and I was only like 8 or 9! I remember kids talking about the horrors of The Exorcist when that was in theaters, and I didn’t want any part of that stuff. I watched The Omega Man in the fifth grade, and I swear it gave me nightmares for a full year. I just couldn’t get over it. I hate to admit it, but I was a wuss as a kid—not what you might expect at all. I’ve had conversations about Rob Zombie about this. As a kid, he loved all that gory horror stuff like it was candy. I was fine with Disney critters. It might be why I do a book like Nocturnals where the monsters are the good guys. I didn’t get into the horror and scary stuff till I was 13 or so, the first R-rated film I saw was Alien. I read the graphic novel and the novelization to gear up for the scares—it helped. I got over my horror movie fears eventually.

DRAW!: So you weren’t immediately fixated on blood and gore like a lot of horror fans are?

DB: Oh, never things that had blood and gore. It was always creatures of the imagination. I sat and drew monsters. They weren’t monsters that were crunching bones or doing violence, they were these imaginary creatures. And I’ll tell you one guy who I really identified with at the time was children’s book illustrator Mercer

GI JOE ™ AND ©2008 HASBRO

BRERETON: This piece started with a color rough (center right) that I did as a scribble of a sketch with washes of color, then scanned in. I don’t do color roughs often, but I wanted them to see the color treatment I had in mind because it was important to the composition, which is rather simple. I really liked the pencil sketch for the finish (left)—something about the Baroness’ face really appealed to me. But when I got into the painting stages, I started to feel that, since she is a villain, she ought not to be so cute—it really didn’t fit the feel of the illustration, so she ended up looking much more evil. The tilt of her torso and where I had to crop her chest makes her end up looking much chestier than she would if you could see her entire torso line—believe me, I wasn’t trying to go crazy there.

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THE NOCTURNALS ™ AND ©2008 DAN BRERETON

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JESS ACRIDGE ©2008 BE AFRAID PRODUCTIONS.

ABOVE: BRERETON—For this cover to Nocturnals: The Dark Forever, I worked out a pleasing montage and I instantly knew what the color scheme would look like.

This is not unusual for me, I tend to get an image in mind in color and rather than try and nail it down on a comp, I let it come naturally. There have been times when this approach hasn’t worked out, but 99% of the time, I have the palette well in mind.

If you look closely, you can see I made few changes.

LEFT: BRERETON—The painting of the rawhide ghost town character, Digger Payne, was something I could have done off the cuff quite easily.

The comp for it—done in monochromatic blues and ink washes—was kind of pleasing when it was done, but they needed a higher level of finish and warm, autumnal tones, so I gave that to them. I’m still partial to the rough.

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ILLUSTRATION Mayer. Maurice Sendak, too—Where the Wild Things Are—but Mercer Mayer has done a whole bunch of books with monsters and stuff like that, and I really loved his work. I really loved the imagination and the coming up with the new creatures. I never wanted them to be violent. Because the monsters that I made up were my monsters. They were somewhat friendly.

DRAW!: So you were more into making up your own monsters than just drawing Godzilla or the monsters you saw on TV? You were more into creating your own worlds and letting your imagination run.

DB: Yeah, I drew my own stuff. I never tried to copy stuff. The only time I remember trying to draw anything that was pre-existing when I was a kid was I tried to draw Captain America several times, I tried to draw Luke Cage, things like that. But I never really got very far with it. I would lose interest. So I was always coming up with my own characters, I was always drawing monsters straight out of my imagination. I think that’s one of the reasons I liked drawing monsters so much, because it didn’t require any knowledge; it didn’t require you concentrating or focusing on something else. You could just sit and do it for its own sake. I tell you one thing I would say to any parent who’s trying to develop the kid’s imagination or get a kid into developing their imaginations: have them draw imaginary creatures—stuff out of your head that doesn’t require any sort of rules. Just freedom, just complete freedom. Just sitting down and just drawing what comes right out of your head. There’s just a great joy in that. I still love that. It wasn’t until I got to high school or a little older that I started to really get into horror. I think Stephen King was my first real introduction to how cool horror could be and how fun it could be.

DAN BRERETON

Frazetta to do a couple of them, and it was like, “Holy cow!

What’s this?” Frazetta totally reinvented Conan, breathed life into him. Who would remember the character if not for Frazetta’s contribution? And then you get a little older and you discover that without a guy like Roy Krenkel, there probably wouldn’t be the Frazetta that we knew. And without Heinrich Kley, N.C. Wyeth or Dean Cornwell or Mead Schaeffer, Hal Foster....

DRAW!: Yes, exactly. Frazetta’s one of those artists that I think that’s a bridge to the past generation of great illustrators... he’s such a key artist that he can also lead you back to the past, to the great illustrators, painters, pulp artists and great cartoonists.

DB: I always wonder about something: look at Walt Kelly, who started drawing Pogo in the ’50s? Forties? Look at the funny animal stuff that Frazetta was doing when he was younger and then look at Pogo. Is there a correlation there? Was somebody looking at someone else’s stuff? Was Frazetta looking at Walt Kelly at one point? I don’t know. And then you look at Buscema, and there’s so many similarities between Buscema’s work and Frazetta, and you think, was Buscema influenced by Frazetta?

And I met John Buscema—I was really lucky to meet him that one year he went to San Diego—and I had a nice talk with him.

And I asked him about Frazetta. He liked Frazetta’s work, but he didn’t go on about it like, “Oh, he was so great!” But you got the feeling that he was looking at his work. I always used to wonder if Buscema was inspired by Frazetta. I really don’t know.

INFLUENCE AND PHILOSOPHY DRAW!: Were you also getting into things like Bernie Wrightson and Frank Frazetta and that boom of ’70s fantasy art?

THE NOCTURNALS ™ AND ©2008 DAN BRERETON

DB: Yeah in high school, I totally got into Frazetta and Wrightson. When I was in grade school it was Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, John Buscema. They were my three main focuses as far as art.

And then as I got into my teens, it was William Stout, Bernie Wrightson, Frank Frazetta. Once I discovered Frazetta, I thought there’s no better artist on the planet, and there never had been and there never will be. I basically felt like he was the pinnacle. And, for the most part, I still do. Frazetta is just such a huge influence on everybody, to the point where most people don’t even mention it anymore. They don’t think that it’s worth mentioning.

DRAW!: Well, it’s easy now to take artists like that a bit for granted.

DB: The Leonardo da Vinci of what we do.

DRAW!: Right. And especially fantasy art—there would be no Lord of the Rings movie looking the way it does without Frazetta.

DB: No. And there would be no Conan the way we know Conan today without Frazetta, because until Frazetta drew Conan, nobody gave a crap about Conan. There were just these musty pulp novels that Avon or whoever were reprinting, and they got THE BEST OF DRAW! 227

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DAN BRERETON DB: Liefeld, yeah. You look at their work and you see that they established this house look that is still so heavily prevalent in comics.

DRAW!: Well, it basically replaced the de facto Jack Kirby/John Buscema Marvel Comics style that was the sort of house style of comics. The ’60s era style.

DB: Well, look at DC Comics. DC and Marvel, you’re looking at the house styles of John Romita and John Buscema, Jack Kirby.

And then at DC you’ve got Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino— DRAW!: Curt Swan....

©2008 DAN BRERETON

DB: And Dick Giordano, those kinds of looks. I know I’m leaving out a bunch of awesome guys. José Luis García-López. You name it. And they’re being replaced by this other look. And at DC, especially, forget about the Image style, there’s this DC house style now. It’s this sort of really realistic, rendered style. And I just look at this stuff sometimes and it just boggles my mind. John Cassaday and Bryan Hitch, those two guys, I look at their work and I go, “Holy Christ. I’m in the same business as these guys?”

They’re incredible! But, at the same time, as incredible as these guys are, their work leaves me.... From a technical point of view, I’m stunned, but I get weary looking at it. I think, “I can’t draw, I stink.” [Mike laughs] But the stuff leaves me cold, emotionally. So from a technical point of view, I’m stunned, I’m in awe.

DRAW!: I think all of his peers were. It’s hard not to be, because Frazetta was so huge, so popular, but I somehow think Buscema was more inspired by Alex Raymond and Hal Foster than Frazetta. And Frazetta was heavily influenced by them as well. It all goes back to the same well.

DB: Yeah, I think he was inspired by the guys that Frazetta liked, too. Raymond and Foster and Wally Wood... the adventure strip artists. Burne Hogarth, Foster....

DB: Yeah. I always thought Conan was all Buscema, and I really like his Conan. And then you discover, oh, there’s this guy named Frazetta who painted these Conan covers, and you look at those and you think, “Wow! These are pretty cool, too! What’s going on here?

These guys, do they know each other?” No, they didn’t, but they’re all in the same family. They have the same fathers and uncles.

DRAW!: Right. That’s a very good way of putting it.

DB: If you look at, say, the Image house style...when I say that I mean back when Image first started, you had Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane... who was the other guy?

DRAW!: Liefeld?

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DRAW!: I think those artists of that generation all were inspired by the strip artists; that’s the material that they read as kids. Milt Caniff or Foster or Raymond... the great illustrators in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, etc.

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DRAW!: Well, there’s not much humor in it... the way there was in Kirby’s stuff.

influences—to be able to draw as good as them. In your case, it would be somebody like Frazetta.

DB: No animation in it.

DB: Yeah.

DRAW!: Yeah, there was a bit of humor—the old Spider-Man stuff had a lot of humor in it.

DRAW!: Where I think, to the average comic-reading fan or person looking at art, they look at most modern cartoonists drawing super-hero books today and they see all this attention to detail, and to the average person, they equate detail with sincerity and quality. That means if the artist was really, really rendered up, his drawing is really good. It’s easy and obvious and lays there and requires the reader to do little work to complete the connections. There it all is. Not much mystery.

DB: They’re British.

DRAW!: British? Can you explain that?

DB: Not really. But it’s rendered heavily, worked endlessly. If you look at a lot of the other British stuff that was coming out in the late ’80s, early Nineties, guys like Steve Pugh and... who drew Grant Morrison’s first book over there? He has a real great style... Steve Yeowell. He had some animation, some humor, some opinion to it. And that’s the stuff that really gets my juices.

That’s why I think I like Bruce Timm’s work so much. People who are working on his end of the spectrum get me a lot more excited. I’m juiced to it.

DRAW!: That’s why I really liked what Darwyn Cooke was doing on Catwoman.

DB: Yeah! In fact, I was just looking at that stuff. I actually happen to have a copy of it someone gave me, and I was just looking at that stuff. I love the way he draws figures. There’s some opinion to it, there’s some juice to it, and there’s also this sense of... you’re not just going to be super caught up in rendering. You know what I mean?

DB: It means, “Wow, he put a lot of work into this.”

DRAW!: So there’s always this eternal argument going, this little battle going back and forth, within some artists in the industry. Maybe not huge, but I certainly talk with many artists about this, because the fans never raise up an artist like Toth. The artists raise up a guy like Toth as sort of the ultimate—an artist who got really close to perfection in the medium.

DB: Well, you have to get to a certain level as an artist to be able to understand why it is that Toth is a genius. Just like when you’re studying art, and your teachers are pushing Picasso on you, and you’re like, Picasso, Van Gogh, these guys sucked! They couldn’t even friggin’ draw! Give me a break! Picasso draws a nostril in the middle of the face? Well, then you come to realize, well, okay, Pablo Picasso mastered drawing the figure when he was a boy.

DRAW!: Yes. But I think, as an artist... it’s all so personal. It’s your taste, some like detail, some like exaggeration, some simplicity. It reminds me of the old Alex Toth argument. Many artists hold up a guy like Alex Toth as being the artist’s artist.

Sort of the artist’s ultimate goal/example of less equals more. Yet fans’ taste is often reversed—more equals more, or better. I think, if you’re an artist, your interest in the comic is more based upon your desire, in a way, to emulate your art heroes, your

CATWOMAN, BATGIRL ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

LEFT: Nudes on watercolor paper. BRERETON—I love the figure; the cast shadows, the value changes within shadows, abstracted shapes, attitude and pose, composition, negative space.... My biggest joy has always been painting and drawing the female figure. Phil Hocking, who taught for many years at CCAC in Oakland, once told us in figure drawing class one morning, that when you master the human figure, you can draw anything. I began to wonder what happens when one get so adept at this, what then? I asked Mr. Hocking about the fact that he must have been drawing the figure for three decades or more—and what was left for him to learn or see? That’s when he started talking about Picasso as a young man, having more or less mastered the figure from a classical point of view, began deconstructing the figure, reimagining drawing and painting. it was the first time I really started to get that there was a world of art out there besides comic books and Frazetta.

RIGHT: BRERETON—A birthday gift for my girlfriend, who loves these two characters. Watercolor on paper—as much as I love the standard superhero poses in my favorite comics, it doesn’t tend to hold my attention as an illustrator. I prefer quieter moments—a chance to see a side of the character in repose. You can squeeze a lot out of good lighting and shadows, they tell a story all their own.

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THE CROW ™ AND ©2008 FALLEN BIRD PRODUCTIONS INC.

THE CROW: BRERETON—The assignment for this Crow image gave me an opportunity to do a little portraiture of Brandon Lee. I started with the prismacolor sketch on the far right— which was originally just the prelim sketch—and ended up being the drawing I physically painted over. I fixed the pencils with acrylic matte medium, then painted over it with watercolor and acrylic washes, sometimes mixing acrylic gesso with the watercolor. (I do this a lot to get an opaque or pastel shade) the effect of the water-based medium on the matte medium created a very painterly look without sacrificing a bit of the drawing, which is the backbone of the piece. I also loved how the fixative “bleeds” the prismacolor, making it more brilliant in hue and creating a “soft focus” sort of line. Matte medium is a great way to create an instant surface for painting over a drawing, while protecting the drawing if the painting isn’t going so hot and needs to be wiped off—something I learned from Barron, who often fixed sketches to paint later, or add to a larger piece.

He transcended and went up into the stratosphere artwise. And most people don’t get that stuff. They just don’t have the education, they don’t have the patience to understand why it’s important or what makes it great. And Van Gogh, oh my God. I couldn’t have cared less about Van Gogh before I got into school, and now I look at his stuff and it is so simply beautiful. It burns with emotion and passion. It has all these things that I guess just took people a while to figure out were there, just like it took me a while.

DRAW!: Well, if you go into an art gallery, the work that the average person would buy is work by someone like Thomas Kincaid, because to them, they look at it and it’s very detailed and it’s got all the glowy light and everything—that’s good.

HALLOWEEN GIRL ™ AND ©2008 DAN BRERETON

DB: That’s “good” artwork. That’s like my great-uncle. One day he comes over and he shows me this painting of a boat in a harbor. It was totally photo-realistic. The watercolor painter had obviously taken a photo and tried to do as photo-realistic a job on it as possible. And he shows it to me and goes, “See that? That’s Art.” [Mike laughs] He was basically telling me that what I do is not ’good’ art because I don’t make it look real. And HALLOWEEN GIRL: BRERETON—Evening is one of my favorite characters to draw. Imagine, after all those years of super-heroes and monsters, first reading about them in comics and then illustrating them, she is really refreshing. The drawing is watercolor over black prismacolor, done at the table of a comic book show. I probably did some clean-up in photoshop, which I’ve taken to doing after scanning art in.

I’m never interested in relying heavily on digital tools—they’re just tools. The drawing and painting is always done in the physical world, with digital tools helping to come in at the finish. Maybe after I’ve come to learn it better I’ll be able to do more, but to honest, I don’t mind having a limited knowledge, because I’d hate to become dependent on it.

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then of course I show him a panel of my comic where I had taken some reference and done a portrait of someone’s face, and I said, “What about that? Does that look real enough for you?” and he nods and says, “Well, that’s good.

That’s good, right there.” But basically anything where you use too much imagination is not artistic to the average working guy.

“Everyone’s got that, that doesn’t cost anything.” Almost as if the technique is worth something to someone. Because they can’t do it—they see something they can’t do. But you show them Alex Toth and they have no concept of how that works, how he makes something with such a small amount of work happen. They don’t see the design, they don’t see the inherent understanding of structure and character and storytelling and design that he had; they just see four lines that make a guy’s face, and they don’t get it.

Whereas if you show them that same drawing and it has fifty million hatch lines on it, they see the construction involved in it and they think, “Wow! That’s a lot of work!” Maybe because we value quantity over quality, as Americans. That might be why a guy like Toth is so highly regarded in Europe and less so here.

Because we like detail.

DRAW!: We like big portions on everything: french fries and art. I also think that he is more regarded by people who are well north of thirty years old. If you’re much younger than forty, you probably never bought an Alex Toth comic, and you’re probably not even very aware of his artwork. Or his influence amongst his peers.

DB: And those people are not aware of the fact that any HannaBarbera stuff they liked, they could thank him for it.

EDUCATION DRAW!: Did you have any art schooling?

DB: I did four years in the San Francisco Bay Area. I attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland for twoand-a-half years, then when their illustration department was looking like it was going to be phased out by the Evil Design School, four of us transferred to the Academy of Art College in

JANE ©2008 ERB INC.

TARZAN’S JANE: BRERETON— Colored pencil with watercolor wash. I did this piece in a sketchbook full of depictions of Tarzan’s girl. I was blown away by many of the pieces in the book, but inspired too. This was originally a two-page spread, something I enjoy doing in sketchbooks. After scanning the piece, I used photoshop to play with it, and touch-up the area where the two pages met. The winding trunk shapes and twisting vines are prime material for creating a strong composition that carries the eye through the piece from left to right, from background to foreground.

Simpler compositions are best—if it’s strong enough, you can build off it and it remains powerful.

SF. It was a great move, they had a huge illustration program.

The following semester, 15 more students followed us. Since then, CCAC has gotten much better after Barron Storey took over as head of the illustration school there, I’ve heard. I studied painting, drawing, some design and art history. Art history is something I never would have figured I would have liked, but it was a great experience. I wouldn’t be where I am, working in the field I love, without the experience of art school. I got my first comics job out of art school; the very first was designing characters for a Doctor Doom/Doctor Strange graphic novel, Mike Mignola hired me to do. I’d met him when he visited one of my teachers in class one afternoon, where he saw my student work.

Later, he asked me to design some characters for this scene where Strange is dueling with a bunch of mystics. It was fun.

Mike paid me, and that’s my first gig in comics as a comics artist. A little over a year later, I did some painted pages for a class semester project and they became the first seven pages of the Black Terror mini-series I did for Eclipse. I hadn’t done them as an audition piece, per se, but to see if I could actually pull off painting comic pages. By Christmas, I’d shown the pages to Eclipse and they hired me right away to do the book. I walked on a cloud for months until my fourth year of art school ended.

DRAW!: What about sketching and studying. Do you sketch a lot?

DB: Not like when I was in art school. I don’t sit and draw trees and stuff; I don’t do figure drawings, workshops. I should do them and I would like to do them. There’s nothing where I live that’s really viable for me. When I moved up to the Bay Area, there was a community college course they were offering at the high school.

And they had a life drawing class, and I went in there and did that class for one session. I showed the teacher all my work. I showed him my Lady Justice covers and some other stuff I was doing. This was back in ’95. I said, “Really, I just want to get in some drawing time. I feel rusty with the whole life drawing thing.” And he didn’t understand that, for a professional artist, going and drawing figures THE BEST OF DRAW! 231

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DAN BRERETON is like a cop going to the shooting range. You really gotta get time in with the gun and know the weapon. Otherwise, you shouldn’t be carrying it. And that’s how I felt; I felt like I really had to get some time in drawing from the figure. And he expected me to do his class. He expected me to come back with book reports on artists, things like that. [Mike laughs] Okay, that’s great if you’re in a class, but I already went to art school for four years. I wanted to just draw. That didn’t work out. I went to one session and I didn’t go back, and it’s too bad I couldn’t do more of it. It’s really important. But for me now, when I sketch, it’s mostly I jot down visual ideas for characters and stories and things like that that I want to do. I do a lot of sketching at shows. When I go to comic conventions, I do a lot of drawings.

DRAW!: So you don’t keep a sketchbook specifically to draw for learning?

GATCHAMAN ™ AND ©2008 TATSUNOKO

DB: I have lots of sketchbooks around the house, but there’s nothing I keep specifically for drawing sunsets or old barns or portraits of my kids and things like that. Every once in a while, the mood will take me and I’ll do stuff like that, but there just doesn’t seem like a lot of time for that stuff. There’s just too much work to be done.

GATCHAMAN: BRERETON—This piece might have worked better for me if I’d played with the value more, there needs to be more push and pull in the art so that some of the montage elements don’t conflict with others for dominance. The only thing that saves it is the varying sizes of the figures. At the same time, it has a crazy anime feel to it that I kind of get from watching the shows the card is based on, so its not a total disaster.

DRAW!: Well, it’s not odd that you’re saying that, because I find that most of the artists that I interview for DRAW! seem to say the same thing: there was a time that they used to do a lot of drawing and sketching for its own sake, and that now that they’re so busy, they don’t have the time to do it. They would like to do it, but they draw rarely, they sketch rarely outside of the demands of the daily need to meet the commercial deadline. Most of their sketching goes towards their work, and when they’re not working, if they have a family, they’re usually trying to spend time with their families.

DEVIL DINOSAUR, MOON BOY ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

DB: Exactly. That’s exactly right. I have three kids, I’m a single parent, I’m raising the kids by myself. I don’t have a lot of time to do much else other than work and have a social life and be with the kids. So I divide the bulk of my time up between working, my kids, my family and my girlfriend. And with my other family and some of my friends. Going to conventions is very good for me because the bulk of my friends are people I’m going to see at shows. Whether they’re people in the industry, people who are related to the industry.... I’m good friends with quite a few art collectors. I used to think it was weird that guys in comics I knew had so few friends outside of the comics circle, but now I understand more why. Because when I started out, most of my friends were people that I had worked with or gone to school with, they weren’t involved in comics. And now I would say the bulk of my friends are people who are in the business. It’s because it’s where I’m at, it’s where I go, the people that I meet.

DRAW!: You’re not down spending your time hanging at the local bars or something.

DB: No, I don’t go to the bars. And my people I went to art school with or people from my old job at the movie theater back in 1988 or whatever, or ’89, they’re off doing their thing. So it’s my family, it’s people I know in comics, it’s my kids.

Even my girl, I met her at a show. So that’s just how it works out. Now, I’m not

DEVIL DINOSAUR: BRERETON—Convention sketches, as most artists who attend comic books shows will attest, cover the gamut from familiar characters to things you wouldn’t in a million years expect to be asked to do. It’s always a pleasure to get a request for the more relatively obscure stuff, like Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy. This piece was done in colored pencil and some marker, if I’m not mistaken. I tried to give the T-Rex that vivid expressionistic feel, something Kirby was a genius at—not exactly anatomically correct, but altogether alive, if you know what I mean.

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DRAW!: Except on Internet message boards. [laughs] DB: Oh, I’m just saying overall, in general. I’m generalizing like crazy. But a lot of the guys I know... one thing I’ve noticed, it’s like instant friendship sometimes. I think it’s when you like someone else’s work and they like your work. Like when I met Phil Noto. I really loved Phil’s stuff. It turns out Phil’s a fan of my stuff. We became instant buddies. And it’s not like Phil and I have every single thing in common on the planet. We have a lot of stuff in common, we have just enough stuff in common to keep interest in each other. But we never would have found that out unless we liked each other’s work first. I’ve really noticed this thing where if someone likes your work, it’s like you’re an instant member of the club.

was a junior, it was my third year of art school, and I was in Vince Perez’s drawing and illustration class.

DRAW!: And what college was this?

DB: The California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. That’s where I went for two-and-a-half years. The next year-and-a-half I was at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, and that’s where I did my four years of art school.

When I was in Vince’s class one afternoon, we were doing a critique, we had all our work up on the board. Mike Mignola and Steve Purcell walked in. I didn’t know who they were, but they were coming in to visit the teacher and said that they were all former students. They came in, they saw the stuff, and Vince said, “Oh, these two guys do comics. Danny, you should talk to these guys who do comics.” And he introduced them to me. Basically, the teacher said, “Here, take this guy under your wing.” And they didn’t exactly take me under their wing as much as crush me ©2008 DAN BRERETON

complaining, it’s fine. It’s good to have common interests and things like that, and I’ve made some very good friendships with people in the business. I think the comic book industry has... mostly I’ve noticed with professionals who draw, I think, more than anything else, some of the best people I’ve ever met. Artists, writers... there’s a lot of great writers out there, there’s a lot of great publishers and editors and people who I consider great friends, but the majority of artists I know are like... they’re the knights of the industry, in a way. They’re sort of the Knights of the Round Table.

Most of us have very similar kinds of temperaments, and they’re fairly honest, hard-working individuals. They’re very intelligent and creative. And they all seem to get along pretty well with each other.

DAN BRERETON

DRAW!: You’ve already broken the ice, really.

DB: Yeah, you’ve broken the ice. And it’s weird because, how strange to base a friendship or whether you like someone on whether or not your taste happens to coincide with what they do. ’Cause I’ve noticed something really strange, is that when they don’t like what you do, they don’t want to be friends with you.

DRAW!: Well, the hardest thing is if you meet a person, and you don’t particularly like their work, but you like them as a person. That makes it much more difficult.

DB: Yeah. I know people like that, that are friendly to me and they like me as a person, but they’re never going to hire me. There are editors who I get along with just fine, but they’re not going to call me for a job. I just know they don’t like my work. They’ve either told me, or other people told me, or it’s become obvious. You meet an editor a dozen times and have a nice conversation, yet they never call you for a job, they never seem interested. I’ve had that happen with other artists, other writers, publishers. And it’s kind of strange, because you’re so used to this whole, “I like your work, you’re accepted” thing, that when it goes in the opposite direction, it kind of hits you hard. It’s just a cruel reality of life. That’s what life is really like. It would be great if we were all in some big club together and we run into each other on the street, “Hey, I like your work, let’s be friends.” [Mike laughs] It’s just bizarre.

BREAKING IN DRAW!: Right. To get back to a little bit about your career. You started working on the Black Terror. Was that your first big gig?

DB: Yeah. I met Steve Purcell and Mike Mignola in one of my classrooms in 1986, ’87... wait, or was that... it was ’88. I think I

ABOVE: Nude study. BRERETON—This study was done with a terra cotta prismacolor—a sketch for a collector named David, who has commissioned several nudes and pin-up style pieces from me over the years. I liked the way this one came out. Convention sketches, whether they are done at the show or in the hotel room at a show, aren’t always inspired pieces—it’s difficult to do my best work “on the road” outside the studio, but when I do something I think is successful, most collectors are very gracious and will send me a scan of the piece.

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under their wing. A couple of afternoons at Mike’s place and at Steve’s place hanging out with them, being browbeaten by them, sitting me down at the table saying, “Okay, draw an old woman carrying groceries! You can draw a better hand than that! It’s not always going to be super-heroes!”

DRAW!: So it was “tough love,” then?

DB: There was no love. But it was tough, and it was instructional and helpful. But, no, there’s never been any love. To this day, I can’t tell if Mike Mignola even likes me. [Mike laughs] But those guys were really instrumental in getting me jump-started into a career, because I found stuff out that I wouldn’t have found out otherwise. They were both living in the Bay Area at the time. They said, “Are you going to go to Wonder Con?” I said, “What’s that?” “It’s a comic book convention. You should go and show your work, do some samples.” My first comic book sample pages I ever did were done because Mike had suggested it. So I did them, and I brought them to his house, and he critiqued the hell out of them.

Very helpful, very helpful. He was very brutally honest, and that was very helpful to me. My problem was that I was like, “Wow! These guys are so cool!” I wanted to be best friends with them. They wouldn’t have anything to do with me. [laughter] I met Arthur Adams through them.

And the first time I went to a comic book convention was in 1984, where I had a meeting with Deni Sim at the time. I was hoping she would publish this comic I had drawn called Storm Knight. I was maybe a year out of high school. And she said, “You know, I would suggest that you self-publish.” And I said, “Okay.” So I kind of looked into that and then just realized that I sucked, and went to art school instead. So this was my second convention, Wonder Con in ’88. I brought my samples and I showed them to Mark Gruenwald, I showed them to Fred Burke at Eclipse. They had good things to say. Sam Kieth was just starting on Sandman at the time, and I showed my work to him. He was very friendly; he was very nice. He goes, “You’re good enough to be working now.

You just need to work a couple of things out and you could get hired.”

And that’s when he introduced me to Fred Burke at Eclipse. And Fred liked some of the stuff that he saw, and they gave me my first penciling job, this little back-up story that Kurt Busiek wrote. And Kurt was just starting out, so no one really knew who he was. And after I did that, Richard Howell inked it. Nothing against Rich, but he was just the wrong guy to ink me. After I did that, Eclipse basically didn’t have any interest in hiring me again. They were, to quote Fred, “slightly unimpressed.”

DRAW!: [laughs] Oh, geez.

DB: Yeah. So I was kind of depressed about that. I went to San Diego Comic-Con that year, a couple of months later. I wasn’t going to get any work there.

DRAW!: Now, were you showing pencil work, or were you showing— DB: Pencil work, stuff that had been inked by other people like the one job. And I showed painted stuff, too, from school. But nothing where you could look at the painted stuff and go, “Okay, we’ll give this guy a painted cover.” You know what I mean?

DRAW!: So you were doing fantasy paintings or what?

DB: Yeah, stuff from art school. Stuff that was me trying to plug what I like to do into an assignment from school. So it was obvious that I liked the kind of stuff that was comics-related but that I lacked the experience to do a painted comic book cover. So I kind of twiddled my thumbs around San 234 THE BEST OF DRAW!

ABOVE: Ultimate Team-Up layouts. BRERETON—My layouts done here at about 5" x 7", are a very shoot-from-the-hip affair.

Quick—about movement and composition—and usually, incomprehensible to others, nevertheless invaluable to me.

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SPIDER-MAN, BLADE ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

LEFT: Inked Ultimate Team-Up page.

BRERETON—This Spider-Man job was one of the first inking jobs I did in a long time. I was asked not to include washes of grey tones, and they wouldn’t let me paint it in full color for whatever reason, so I was left to rely on line and spot blacks. It was a struggle at first, because I’m not used to inking as a process. It helped to read the Dick Giordano article in DRAW! #3, believe it or not, and afterward, I picked up some tips. Never be afraid to consult a fellow artist. I’ve since learned little tips here and there from friends who ink well. I tend to get by on a lot of blacks in my inks, but I’m fine with that because that’s the kind of feel I wanted with this story—oppressive, lots of shadows. I have a new appreciation for the concept of leaving areas unfinished for the colorists—something I don’t think twice about when I’m painting, obviously.

BELOW: Working from photos.

BRERETON—I find that working from life, whether its captured in photographs are when one has a model sitting (something that I almost never have happen) is crucial to working in a loose style. The subject will end up possessing the effect of being both realistic and existing in the mind of the artist simultaneously. That’s the idea for me, anyway. I get really excited when I’m shooting reference—it inspires me—I’m lighting and posing models and objects. I see light patterns I could never have conceived on my own.

Ideas begin to form, atmosphere comes into play. For me, shadows describe at least 75% more than line can in my work. And it works because of the reference I shoot. It’s too easy for me to noodle and have too much detail—it may not show in my work, but I really do try to economize. Maybe someday I’ll learn how to do it the way Toth does.

LEFT: Ultimate Team-Up pencils. BRERETON— After I scribble out the layouts or thumbnails, I usually shoot reference for lighting, figure perspective, and accuracy in anatomy. Then I pencil. When I pencil, I tend to think in terms of lighting, shapes and composition, rather than describing form with line. I tend to approach drawing and painting from the same POV of being aware of lighting and form and value. If your painting is working in color, odds are, it will translate well into black-and-white most of the time. And a drawing that is strong in light and shadow relies less on color to get it through.

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Diego, and some of us ran into Dave McKean, George Pratt, Kent Williams. They were all at San Diego, in the Artists Alley, showing their work. Dave McKean had just done Violent Cases, he was working on Black Orchid, so he had some original pages there. George Pratt was working on Enemy Ace, he had some pages there. And Kent Williams had just done Blood, and he had some pages there for sale.

I remember looking at these, and I was completely mesmerized. I was just blown away, and I thought, “This is what I want to do. I want to do it like this. I can’t ink. I’m not a penciler. This is the way I want to do comics.” These guys were really good. I remember asking Kent Williams, “Do you do all the panels on one page?” He goes, “Yeah.” I ask, “Well, what if you make a mistake? What if one panel gets screwed up?” He goes, “You just work on it and fix it.” I go, “What if you can’t fix it?” He goes, “Then you just have to live with it.” You talk to the other guy and he says, “Well, you just do a patch.”

“What’s that?” “You just take the shape of that panel and you redo it and just put it over the top.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” It boggled my mind that they did all that work on one page.

DRAW!: So up until that point, you had not thought about trying to paint comics, you were just trying to do it the traditional way?

DB: Well, because I didn’t have the foggiest clue how those guys did that stuff. Because I had seen Blood, I had seen Bill Sienkiewicz’s stuff on Elektra: Assassin. I thought that stuff was beautiful. I had no idea what they were doing or how they were doing it. And I sure as hell didn’t think I was good enough to do that stuff. So I saw their work, I was totally inspired, but I was totally depressed. I went home the next day. John Estes and Bill Koeb and I were sharing a room. He went down to the convention. I said, “I’ll meet you down there.” I got a plane, I got an early flight home. I left them a note and I went home. I was so depressed.

DRAW!: Wow. DB: “What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.” So I go home. It was a bad scene. So I go back to school the next semester and I’m in this illustration class with Kazu Sano, a very highly regarded illustrator. He does movie posters, book covers, things like that. He did the Return of the Jedi movie poster, the montage with Luke and Leia and all that stuff on it. I took his class in illustration. He gave us a semester project which was, “Do whatever you want. Just work on it every weekend. I want you to do something by the end of the semester, some big project.” So I thought, “Hmm. Maybe I will do a painted comic book story.” Now, going back to my first two conventions I’d been to, Fred Burke at Eclipse had talked about how Beau Smith, who was the sales guy at Eclipse at the time, wanted to revamp the Black Terror, this Golden Age character. They showed me samples of the original character. I’d actually done some Black Terror drawings that Fred liked, but Eclipse wasn’t going to hire me because they didn’t think I could pencil worth a damn. But Beau liked the stuff that I was doing, Fred liked my designs on the character and they liked my color stuff, but nothing was happening. So I thought, hey, what I’ll do is I’ll take this Black Terror character that I revamped and I will do a seven-page story with him. And I didn’t tell Eclipse or anyone I was doing it. I just did it on my own. I could just as well have done a Batman story, but for some reason I did the Black Terror thing. I don’t know, maybe in the back of my mind I was thinking that I might show it to them, but I really wasn’t planning on doing it. I just 236 THE BEST OF DRAW!

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ILLUSTRATION LEFT: Ultimate Team-Up. BRERETON—There are often several ways a page can be designed.

Sometimes there’s only one good way to describe the action and you might have to do several takes to get it right, but it’s crucial to ending up with a good page. I tried very hard to get a “Marvel feel,” but my style insisted on creeping in. I prefer fewer panels per page, and had I written this sequence myself, would have had fewer panels. But it’s good to be challenged—to find the simplest way to tell the story—and it forces me to be more inventive.

DAN BRERETON

wanted to try it. So I got my friends together and I started shooting some reference of them fighting each other. I came up with some dopey idea of the Black Terror fighting a vampire. And then I started painting the pages one at a time in my spare time, on the weekends. And I’d bring them into class and my classmates would gather around and look at them and go, “Oooooh... how are you doing this? And what’s this for?” My teacher thought it was really cool and he encouraged me. I just started working on these things and I was having fun doing them, and they were coming out pretty good.

DRAW!: Was he giving you any technical feedback on the technique or painting or anything?

DB: I was doing acrylics. I was painting in acrylics and I was painting in watercolor. I wasn’t doing any pen and ink stuff, I would just paint and paint and paint on these things until they looked good. So there was this build-up of acrylic, layers of acrylic.

There were some where I was using watercolor and acrylic. I was using everything at my disposal—all the stuff I was learning in school, all the things that were working for me. And I spent so much time on the first couple of pages, I spent so much time on them. If they had been an actual job, I would have lost money on them. They just took so long to do. But they looked pretty good.

SPIDER-MAN, BLADE ™ AND ©2008 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

LEFT: Ultimate Team-Up. BRERETON— Super-heroes are pure opera, which I learned from reading Marvel comics as a kid, I suppose. Silver Surfer and the Fantastic Four were just a few of the comics I loved—and the larger-than-life staging, exaggerated drama and action of those comics have found their way into the way I tend to treat super-hero tableaus. It’s Jack Kirby, it’s John Buscema and Gene Colan, really. I seem to be reaching for them at the same time I’m reaching for the samurai westerns.

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DRAW!: So what did you do once you had the pages finished?

DB: I had about five or six pages done by Christmas. Over Christmas break, I got in touch with Fred and I showed them to him. He was in Oakland at the time, so I went over to his apartment and I laid these boards out. They were done on Bainbridge and Strathmore illustration paper. Heavy board, about 12" x 18" size. And he was blown away. He goes, “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to do this before?” “I dunno, I just did it for school.”

So he went to Forestville to visit Cat Yronwode and Dean Mullaney at Eclipse the following weekend. They called Fred on Monday or Tuesday and said they want this book “done yesterday.” “You’re hired, and they want it done, and that’s it.

Congratulations, they’re doing a Black Terror book, three 48page issues.” All of a sudden I was a comic book artist.

DRAW!: Did it seem sort of daunting, that amount of work to do?

DB: No. I was completely overjoyed, because they were going to pay me $75 a page or something? $125? I was in heaven. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was I going to get to do what I wanted to do, they were going to pay me for every page. [laughter]

DRAW!: You were an instant pariah, huh?

DB: I was a pariah, I was the black sheep. We did this spring illustration show for the juniors that year—I wasn’t yet a senior because I transferred from the other school, even though it was my fourth year of school that year—and I remember, I didn’t get one piece in the show. I had friends that had ten or twelve pieces in the show. I had a friend who got scholarships and awards for the stuff he had in the show. I didn’t rate one piece. And I was one of the better artists at that school; I was in the top 10%. Not one piece in the show. The teachers just looked at me with these hang-dog expressions, like “we’re really sorry.” And I’m like, “Why? How?” And they’re like, “Well, y’know, I think the show is supposed to reflect what the school is trying to accomplish with its students, getting them ready to do commercial jobs. Your stuff is a lot of fantasy stuff, and the things that you chose to put in there were things that reflect your tastes rather than what the school wants to show off.” And I was like, “eff that!” [Mike laughs] “This is what I want to do, this is my best stuff.” They were like, “Well, how about that painting of the homeless guy that you did? That was really nice, why didn’t you put that in there?” I said, “Because I did it in an hour before class. I found a picture of a homeless guy in a paper, I projected the photo, and then I painted it, an hour before class. And that’s why I didn’t turn it in, because it’s not my best work.” They said, “Well, it was a nice piece and you should have put it in there.”

JUSTICE LEAGUE ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

DRAW!: Hopefully you make a little bit more money a page now! [laughs]

DB: At the time I knew nothing about artists not getting paid for work. The first time I ever heard about that, I thought, “That’s ludicrous! They should be sued, they should be paying you!”

Overnight I was a comic book artist, and I was still in school, still doing these pages, still showing them to people in school, but this time, now, I was hired. I was working on a book. And I was never less accepted at my school, in my illustration department, than at that point in time, when I was doing a comic and I knew I was going to be a comic book guy. I felt like the whole department was just against me.

DRAW!: So, the school wanted to control you.

ABOVE: A panel from Legends of the World’s Finest. BRERETON—I find myself wanting to paint a certain size, I dislike working on small figures, and because of it, I am likely to cram them in, like in this composition. It really needs to breathe more as a painting and could benefit from more open space, but the story and the space one has to tell it in demands that I sometimes bring the “camera” closer to the subjects.

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DB: They editorialized me. They were teaching me a lesson. I felt like they were trying to teach me a lesson by omitting everything, obliterating me from their showing. And that’s when the school became the instant enemy to me after that.

I was like, “I’m just gonna mark time, I’m gonna get out of here. I don’t need a Bachelor of Arts degree in illustration.

Why do I need that? Who’s going to hire me because I have a degree? I have a portfolio, I’m working in comics, I don’t need these guys. As soon as I’m done with this

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ABOVE: Pencils and final painting for White Wolf Games. BRERETON—I get asked to do ensemble compositions for role playing games, such as this image for White Wolf Games. They like me to pack a lot of characters on the cover—and it’s fun. You can sort of let go, not worry so much about staging and storytelling, and let the characters just be. These sorts of jobs can be intoxicating—pure character design. I love ’em.

semester, I’m out of here. I accomplished what I came to do.”

And that’s what happened, I got out of school.

The first issue of the Black Terror came out at the end of that year—that was ’89. And I remember sending Barbara Bradley, the Dean of Illustration, a copy of the first issue with a note that said “Thank you for everything. this is what I was working on when I was still in school, and I hope you like it. I would like to go back to school at some point.” A sort of thank you. I didn’t want to have hard feelings, because I learned a lot at the Academy—it wasn’t all bad. A week later she called and left a message on my answering machine, which is completely unheard of. Barbara Bradley was like the anti-comic book woman. The only comic book artist that she would even bother looking at or she would give any props to was Bill Sienkiewicz.

I remember trying to show her Kevin Nowlan’s work, and all she would look at is the way it was colored by the colorist.

[Mike laughs] “No, no, but look at the line drawing, look at his drawing!” and she’s huffing and snorting, “Look at the colors, they’re just all over the place, they don’t work at all.” When it came to championing comics, there was no getting through to this woman. She’s the illustrator who designed the Dole Pineapple Kids in the ’50s. That was her claim to fame. The little hula kids with the cherubic faces? She’s a great artist. No

DAN BRERETON

©2008 WHITE WOLF GAMES

ILLUSTRATION

affinity for comics whatsoever. So I get this answering machine message from her in which she talks for about five minutes about how great this book is and how wonderful it is, I don’t need to go back to school, I have made it, she’s completely impressed. She never heard any of this stuff before then. I heard that they had the comic up in their hallway hanging from a string for like a week, so everyone could see it. “I saw your book at the school.” And it wasn’t much longer after that that they started teaching “graphic novel” classes at the school.

Kieron Dwyer taught there and I think Bill Koeb too.

DRAW!: So they drive you out of town on a rail— DB: Out of town on a rail, and then I become a hero, because here I am working in comics. And the funny thing was, the year after that, most of the guys that I knew from my class, who were studying Illustration—which means you were doing a lot of painting—got jobs in comics the next year. Miran Kim, who was one of the darlings of the department—deservedly so, because she did these great paintings—she started doing the X-Files stuff.

Years later, the guy who was the total darling favorite of the school, and a really talented artist, was back living in Hawaii somewhere. He was considered the next Bob Peak, the next Drew Struzan. They flooded him with awards scholarships and accolades, and he was very talented. He went back to Hawaii and didn’t do anything.

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DRAW!: So after the Black Terror, did you start thinking of doing your own thing?

DB: Well, Psycho was a creator-owned gig, so that was a really great way to break into comics, because there I was working for DC, a big corporation, but they didn’t have their hooks into us, editorially speaking, because the Psycho was our creation. So Mike Carlin said, “Look, it’s not my character, it’s not DC’s character, it’s your character, so you guys call the shots.” So we had a lot of freedom. Very hands-off. But at the same time, I learned a lot from working with him. He’s a great editor. I’m really glad he’s gone back to editing. So after that, I was really not bitten by the creator-owned bug at this time. I had just gotten into comics and I really wanted to do super-heroes. I wanted to do their characters. I wanted to do Batman, and I wanted to do X-Men, Wolverine and Punisher and stuff like that. My next project after The Psycho was I had agreed to do this Clive Barker adaptation of a short story called “Dread,” which turned out to be one of the most boring jobs of my life, because the writer, who was so in love with Clive Barker and his work, tried to put every word of the story into the adaptation.

DB: Well, I was working on the Black Terror when I met Jim Hudnall at Wonder Con the second year I’d done the show, so this would have been Wonder Con ’89. Jim comes up and says, “I’m doing this series for DC. It’s a creator-owned series called Psycho, and we’re looking for an artist—we haven’t got one yet—and I really like your stuff. Can I show them your samples?” So I said sure.

A week later I get a call from Mike Carlin at DC Comics telling me that they want me to do The Psycho, they really like my work.

Mike’s saying, “Hey, Andy Helfer is in the office. He wants you to do a Justice League graphic novel.” Then Mike turns to Helfer and barks, “He doesn’t want to do a Justice League graphic novel! Shut up and leave him alone!” Then to me, “We want you to DRAW!: Which you can’t do. do lots of stuff for us, but we want DB: It was the most boring you to do the Psycho thing first. Get comic book adaptation ever this out of the way done. Pure drudgery. You and you can do a can’t do that. No, I didn’t Superman book.” realize it at the time, but one I was very excitof the things I learned was that that’s not ed. It turns out how you adapt something. So I spent Mike Mignola had eight months on that book, and it been in the offices that was a nightmare because it was afternoon, because he’d just bad comic storytelling. There moved to New York at that was very little action going on in time, and had seen my samthe story. And then when the ples, and went, “Wow! book came out, they covered up What is this stuff? This all the artwork I did with captions. stuff is great! Who’s work is this? ‘Brereton’? Who’s DRAW!: !: So you must have felt really this guy?” And then all of good about that. a sudden, to quote Mike, POLYCHROME ™ AND “Bong! It hits me who it is! We used to ©2008 DAN BRERETON DB: Well, here’s the thing that made me make fun of this guy!” And I remember feel really good. I was a month into doing there was a time after that, he came back to visit his family. It that book when someone from Marvel called me and offered me was around Thanksgiving vacation and he called me and wanted a Punisher/Wolverine graphic novel. And I said, “Oh my God, I to come by my place. I was living in Oakland at the time. He can’t do that because I just signed a contract to do a book for stopped by, and I was living right across the street from our old Eclipse. Sorry, I can’t do it.”[Mike laughs] Can you imagine? school, CCAC and I remember looking out the window and seeCan you imagine that I was in a place where I thought I was ing a kid hauling his portfolio to class. And I said, “Look at that. being a professional, so I just... instead of just quitting the book, Look at that poor guy hauling his portfolio to class, trying to and taking this awesome project— [laughter] make it.” And he goes, “Yeah, but don’t make fun of that guy, because you never know when he’s gonna turn up.” [Mike laughs] DRAW!: Which is what people would do today!

DRAW!: So you started doing the work for DC and these other companies, but when did you start thinking of doing your own characters, like the Nocturnals?

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DB: I would do that today in a second! But I would have a good reason to do it, because the editor said, the wolverine book would have been a license to print money. And it would have

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done a lot better things for my career to do that Wolverine book than it would have done doing the Clive Barker book. Even though the Clive Barker book sold well, it didn’t recommend me as a guy who you want to hire to do a Punisher book. They brought in Clive Barker like he was going to save comics. All he did was show comics it would have helped if they’d wanted to do good comics instead of bad adaptations, and drag them into the sludge.

DRAW!: It just didn’t really lend itself to being a comic book.

GRENDEL ™ AND ©2008 MATT WAGNER

DB: So when I was done with the Clive Barker book.... You know, they’d offered me the Punisher/Wolverine book when I started The Psycho a year before “Dread.” And I said, “No, I’ve got this book I’m doing for DC,” and they said, “Oh, come on, you don’t have to do that book. Do this book.” And I said no. So when I started in on the Clive Barker book, they called me again and said, “Do you still want to do this book?” I wailed at them, “You have such horrible timing!” After “Dread” I told Mike Carlin I wanted to do a Batman book, to help get over the last book. Mike said, “The only way you can do a Batman book with me is if you put Superman in it.” So we did. That was Legends of the World’s Finest. I got to work with Walt Simonson, which was great. It helped me get excited about comics again.

WORK SCHEDULE AND STUDIO SET UP DRAW!: What is your typical work day like?

DB: I get up around 3 p.m., when my kids get home from school, answer email for about nine hours (it seems like), make dinner, hang with the kids, chat with my girl on the phone for a few hours, then hit the drawing board. I start with whatever penciling I need to do for any given jobs I’m juggling at the time, or if I have a painting on the board, I start in on it. Some nights I write when I need to; I tend to set aside an entire night to write. They don’t always go together; they are different mindsets to me. I usually work past dawn, till the kids are heading off to school, then when I’m done or feel I’m too pooped to go on, I hit the hay, usually by 8:00 a.m. It works for me.

I can’t really work during the day, and I’ve been on this schedule for 16 years, ever since I left school to work in comics full time. There are too many distractions for me during the day, and I’d already trained myself to be more creative at night after pulling all-nighters in school. It took some getting used to living like that, mostly for friends and family—they didn’t want to accept it. I think they thought I was sleeping in.... In reality, I probably get less sleep than they do in a week.

DRAW!: What’s your studio set-up like?

DB: It’s a good sized room in the house. I have a drawing board/easel my dad and I made out of a rug making table (which

GRENDEL: BRERETON—This job was computer colored with red and it came out looking gorgeous.

Matt Wagner wrote the script in a way that left room to do these vignetted images instead of separate panels, and I loved the way the story flowed in that regard. The reference I shot in one afternoon with my girlfriend’s niece, Cynthia, created a personal connection for me that often translates into better work in the end. The pictures I arranged inspired the finished pieces. When you are composing photos, remember that part of the drawing happens at this point—your arranging, lighting, posing—all of this ends up affecting the drawing and composition.

is a table with no top, kind of a table frame) and scraps of particle board and wood from the garage. I’ve worked on this makeshift table all my career. It has an incline to it that’s perfect for drawing and painting. Less than 45%, I’d say, to the left—I’m left-handed—is a level surface that holds paints, brushes, boom box, CDs, comics and whatever else I can pile on there, and to my right is a bookshelf flush with the edge where I have reference books, art books and a small TV. I can watch TV or listen to the radio. I prefer to listen to Howard Stern, taped that morning—the show keeps me company but doesn’t distract me. I need part of my brain to be entertained while I’m working. Some THE BEST OF DRAW! 241

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nights you just don’t feel like working and it’s good to have some entertainment to get you in the chair. I also need that form of interaction, and I’ve found over the years of trying music, TV, movies, etc., that talk radio is a good working companion for burning the midnight oil. My walls are plastered with movie posters and art prints by Gil Elvgren, Frazetta, Jordi Bernet, Dave Stevens, Phil Hale, Buscema, Colan, old comics and pulp mag covers, an Alex Ross Spider-Man poster and a Star Wars poster on the ceiling. I need the visual stimulation, I guess.

I have my computer on a table next to the drawing board. I don’t use the computer much for making art, but I do scan the pieces and “tweak” them afterwards. I’m pretty ignorant of Photoshop, but I know enough to punch things up and put them on disc. I’m kind of reluctant to learn to use it so well that it replaces the drawing board. I don’t use my Wacom tablet at all, I just use the mouse. It sounds archaic, but it works. I’ll never get tired of actually painting—the feel of the brush and paint on the paper, the pencil on the board, the tink-tink-tink sound the brush makes in the water jar. Those are just as much a part of the process as anything else. The rest of the studio is flat files for storing art, bookshelves, toys, statues, Shogun Warriors, Godzillas, family photos....

DRAW!: Do you handle all the business yourself, things like shipping your posters, prints and maintaining your web site?

DB: Pretty much. I mean, I don’t employ anyone, my kids help out sometimes, but mostly it’s my show. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to worry about being a promotion machine so much and just work. Nothing saps your strength more creatively, than running your business. I really just want to draw and paint and create, make stuff. But the other has gotten to be integral. If I had someone running the biz end I’d probably be a lot more prolific, like in the first half of my career. As for the web site, Gregor Hutton, my friend in Edinborough, Scotland, maintains my web site. He does an awesome job.

DRAW!: How effective or important is your web business? Do you generate a good amount of sales and work from it?

DB: It’s important to have a web presence, it exposed the work in a way I couldn’t do otherwise. It generates work, commissions, sales of merchandise and art, but mostly it’s a place for fans to see what’s going on and get a fix of the work in between projects coming out. It’s pretty crucial these days, especially when you are doing creator-owned projects. You want your characters to have a life outside the pages of the books, and fans need that too, I think.

DRAW!: Being an entrepreneur, running your own business as a freelance illustrator, where do you spend most of your time?

DB: At the computer. I’ve managed to make a long afternoon of phone calls a thing of the past. I think I spend too much time answering e-mail. I tend to answer everything I get, which sometimes I think isn’t a great idea. I find I have less time to paint and draw than I used to, that’s for sure. But I guess it’s a tradeoff, because communication is so important in business. A lot of what we do now used to be done at cons, and still is, but the Internet has augmented it. It’s so great that anyone who needs to, can get hold of me (okay, well, maybe it’s not always so great).

My greatest wish in my career is to be painting as much as I can, to write stories, create characters, so when I can actually sit down and do this, I’m in heaven.

DRAW!: You are really developing a brand of sorts, branding yourself with properties like The Nocturnals. Is this a goal of yours, something you set out to do?

GIANT KILLER ™ AND ©2008 DAN BRERETON

DB: Not at first, but it’s more of a conscious effort now. I feel like I have these properties and characters, and I’ve put so much work into breathing life into them, I want them to work for me. I want to expand the audience as much as I can. And I do have an eye toward seeing properties like Giant Killer and Nocturnals move out of comics and into other media. Comics will always be the wellspring for me, and I always want to do comics, paint, draw, write, but it’s a dream to see them reach more people than read comics. On the other hand, I want to see the comic readership in general expand. It’s a wonderful medium and it’s undersold, overhyped and misunderstood. It deserves better consideration than its getting from inside and outside the art form.

ABOVE: From Giant Killer.

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DRAW!: Do you have a type of work or genre you prefer?

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DB: I don’t know that I prefer a genre, because I feel the most comfortable when I’m sort of juggling them. The work that gives me the most joy in comics is drawing—sitting down and doodling up new stuff, coming up with something new that’s mine. I love working on other people’s characters, but to create something that wasn’t there before is exciting, whether it’s a new story for existing characters, or something out of whole cloth. There ís an energy that’s released or something when you create something new. I feel it every time I come up with a character that didn’t exist before.... But, it’s weird, they never feelnew, they feel discovered. My dream projects now consist of doing a crime book and combining the characters from Nocturnals with Giant Killer into a single story.

DB: I start with my little thumbnail roughs, and then I torture the people who are kind enough to model for me by trying to get them to do the impossible poses in my roughs. It makes people crazy. I hear things like, “The human body can’t do that!” and, “But I wouldn’t normally claw my fingers up like this!” I try to get the reference I shoot as close to the internal vision as I can.

I’ve contrasted how I work to Alex Ross. Alex is a master of conforming imagination and what’s in his head to reality—the end result is his painted world looks more real than our own. It is idealized, sure, but rarely past the limits of the real world. For me it’s kind of the opposite. I feel the real world and the reference I collect from it is the jumping off point to getting what ís in my head down on paper. To make reality conform to the vision or world in my head. My inner world is a comic book place, a larger than, darker than, more fantastic than life place.

But there are still days when I wish I could paint more like Alex, and he has confessed the same to me; he would like to get looser, and I want to get tighter.

DRAW!: Do you pose and take the photos yourself?

DB: I rarely pose, but sometimes it happens. I’m in a restaurant scene in an issue of Birds of Prey I’m doing. Friends and family tend to make up the bulk of the models I use. Once in a while I’ll meet someone who expresses an interest in modeling for me, and that’s worked out well, too. Some people really get into it, and they love seeing themselves in a comic. Others have done it so much that they are totally impatient and bored with the whole thing—until they see themselves in a book. I use an old Canon T50 from the ’80s. Its just the totally wrong camera for anyone else to use- its not manual, it doesn’t have a light meter, but its perfect for what I do.

I don’t use a flash and I light everything any way I can. I have a pair of photographic lights that are falling apart along with the camera. Once I find something that works for me it dies hard.

BIRDS OF PREY ™ AND ©2008 DC COMICS

TECHNICAL SIDE BAR: TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES DRAW!: I know you use photos in reference for your work, but one of the things I always liked about your work, is that you are not a slave to them. You can get trapped by a photo, become trapped by only what the camera sees. But you don’t let the camera freeze dry your work, sap the dynamics, shapes, etc. Do you draw from the photos and do studies, to incorporate what you want from them, like lighting or drapery etc.? Work them into your style so to speak?

ABOVE: Birds of Prey. BRERETON: I was lucky enough to make a sort of transition with the Birds of Prey stories I’m illustrating from painting to drawing by using grey washes to create values. It’s an interesting way to work and I’m curious how the colorists will handle the art. I’m trying to keep the white of the paper more than in a regular painting. The “Grendel” story helped in that regard, though it was more of a painted story, whereas the BOP stuff is inks and washes in watercolor and inks. Blocking in shadow shapes is crucial here as in painting.

DRAW!: Can you list the materials you use, or favorite ones, i.e., pens, paper, watercolors, etc.?

DB: I use whatever watercolor brushes I can that aren’t too expensive, I tend to stay away from actual sable, unless I’m using them to ink something. I tend to be hard on my tools and brushes don’t last at all.

PAINTING DB: Here is a cross-section of some brushes I’m currently using.

I start by taping the board (500 series Strathmore two-ply bristol) down with white paper tape, making sure the board isn’t going to come up during painting. Then I use a big brush to lay on a light wash of color over the whole painting—a Liquitex #1 Kolinsky sable. I usually lay it on and let it dry over the course of a day— THE BEST OF DRAW! 243

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the paper tightens, dries flat. Sometimes I’m in the mindset to paint, sometimes I’m not after a long session of drawing. Next I lay in the middle darks with a smaller brush (#8 Winsor & Newton series 233 Synthetic Sable) until the light pattern becomes visible from blocking out the shadows and darks. I try to work on the background while I’m working the figures, with an eye toward tackling the faces of the figures where applicable.

Some artists feel the eyes and faces are like doing the dessert last, but I don’t feel comfortable with painting characters and figures until I’ve established them as characters. When I like the way their faces look, I’m more anxious about painting their figures and the surroundings. It sounds a little childish maybe, but it works. Laying in a painting in stages according to glazes of color, shadow and detail can be nerve-wracking when you haven’t established a solid personality behind them. You basically use the same brush until you can’t do anymore with it, then move to a smaller size. I work back and forth, from the #4 Winsor & Newton to a #2, #0, or #1. When I need to an opaque white I use acrylic gesso. It can be worked over and it can be mixed with watercolors as well for a pastel effect. I use Winsor & Newton, Holbein, and Cotman brand watercolors in tubes, on 25” x 12” palates. The surface of the drawing board is a cut piece of Plexiglas—they are easily replaced when they get to scratched up or painted up and they are easy to clean. I have a ton of clippings of art and pictures underneath mine (more visual stimulation).

©2008 DAN BRERETON

INKING When I ink, I use sable brushes, Artworks brand Super Black India ink (I don’t think its really India ink), and sometimes a Rotring Sketch pen—they have cartridges of ink that are not waterproof, so I don’t use them that often. Sometimes, I use a

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waterproof marker, a Sakura Pigma brush marker, and Micron tip. Tomm Coker told me he uses them exclusively to ink and the look is awesome, but he says you’ve got to beat the pen up and go through a ton of them on a job. I also use Hunt Crowquill nibs, but I don’t use them much. I prefer inking with a brush when possible. If I can get away with it, I’ll approach inking like painting or illustration—using gray and black watercolor with the ink, colored pencil, etc. I’m not a technician when it comes to inking. I’m always looking for new ways of making things work. But when it comes to watercolor, I use the same paint, the same paper and brushes. I use a Berol mechanical drawing pencil with a 2H lead or non-photo blue leads, depending on the job.

Sometimes I draw in colored pencil. I find the Colerase pencils are good for sketching. And of course, it can’t be discounted that a regular ballpoint pen can be a great drawing, inking, or sketching tool as well.

COLOR I tend to use watercolor in ways most people wouldn’t think it should or could be used—laying on the pigment thick, for instance is a no-no with some watercolorists, but it’s perfectly acceptable with illustrators. I am asked a lot by people how I get the darks so dark. When I tell them “less water, more paint” they shake their heads like they already knew that—I mean, it’s simple right? But it’s not. I mean, you have to build up those layers of darks with more than just solid black. Black is not the absence of color as some think, it’s the presence of all color.

That’s why the darkness at night can seem to vibrate—the eye is constantly discerning and trying to separate out color, and you end up seeing this thing we call “black,” but it’s really all color.

So you want to put as much color in your blacks and shadows as you can. Even artists who primarily work in black-&-white, when they are excellent at what they do, allow for spots of color to show through their shadow areas.

LEFT: BRERETON—I tend to “hatch” my way through sketches and drawings. I have a frenetic hand and I think the sketcher in me gets control a lot of the time. There’s this tendency to want to get it all down on paper, and I try to concentrate on what’s important and let the rest of it go to hatching. This comes from the part of me that is used to letting the big shapes and less important parts of the composition go because I know I’ll go back and resolve them in the painting stage. So you get a drawing like the one above—the important stuff is all there, but its not overly detailed and loose.

Part of me is a little put off by painting a drawing that’s too detailed.

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NOCTURNALS ™ AND ©2008 DAN BRERETON

ILLUSTRATION

Color is laid over them to create the illusion of color showing through darks, as in life and any good painting. The worst thing an artist can do is pick one dark color (like purple) as the designated shadow color, and use it alone. One thing you learn from painting from life or from color reference you shoot from life, is that shadows hold the most color. I can’t stress this enough.

Another area in working in color that’s really important is that the colors “sing” together.

The palette in a painting can have three colors, or 30, but they have to harmonize. It’s not the colors you use, or the lack of color, it’s how you use them in relation to each other. They have to fit together on the painting like a formula. And in fact, there are color formulas, the simplest of which is “cool shadow, warm light” and the reverse thereof—having bright color in a predominant field of muted or “supportive” color (this is used constantly in coloring and painting comics these days to good effect). There are painters who use the supportive color formula almost exclusively, and it works, but it’s not the only way. Look at a J.C. Leyendecker or Dean Cornwell painting and you’ll see color used in abundance, while an N.C. Wyeth or Maxfield Parrish and you’ll see color used sparingly but to great effect. I’ve tried to strike a balance in painting, but mostly I get labeled as being too colorful, not controlled enough, when in actuality, I’m constantly monitoring what the color on my painting is up to and whether or not the colors are working together. It’s a tough call because everyone sees it a little differently. Some people like to use limited color, some prefer to mute everything down to an analogous range and save the bright color for accent or focus, and others tend to paint more intuitively, using color as freely as they want,

ABOVE: BRERETON—Another example of a two-page spread in a sketchbook. Can you see how I kind of added the drawing on the left side of the spread as an afterthought? I try to take advantage of any excuse to draw the Nocturnals. Every time I draw them now, it’s a potential piece that could be used down the line. It’s probably seems a little joyless, but any chance to draw my characters is a joy, so why not make them all count?

letting the color tell them when things are working or not. But these approaches are governed by a single thought, and that is to convey mood, to guide the eye where it needs to go in a composition, and to come across with some kind of internal feeling of comfort from the color. Barron Storey tells students that a good palette looks like a meal you’d want to dig into, whether it’s blueberry cobbler, a garden salad and a steak, or spaghetti and meat balls. The colors work together in a way to cause a positive sensation the way a well prepared dish works on us the same way.

Recently, I did a Nocturnals story and used a limited color palette and relied less on painting and more on the drawing. I worked smaller—10” x15”—and it came out really nicely and took much less time. I may have found a new way to work for a while. It’s encouraging to know I can move along more rapidly on a story. Sometimes the absence of color can be freeing. I especially like working in gray tones at times, because I can concentrate on value and design. I have a hard time, though, leaving values out entirely in black-&-white work. it probably comes from 20 years of painting. I managed to do it in the Spider-Man job last year and I liked the results, but it was a tough transition!

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DESIGNING

LIGHT and S H A D O W

By Paul Rivoche his time out, I have chosen to outline a few thoughts about how I approach lighting a design drawing, illustrated by various animation background renderings.

My aim is to discuss some of the thinking process behind the choices which were made, not to prescribe an ironclad step-bystep procedure. As with other areas of art, the topic is so large that it’s only possible to put down some central ideas—in other words, to outline various interesting areas for further investigation. Regarding my comments and diagrams, I assume that the reader will have some basic understanding of perspective theory and the geometry of forms, because these underly many of my statements.

T

ARTISTIC LIGHTING VS. NATURAL LIGHT AND SHADOW In the real world around us, light and shadow behave according to inflexible laws. For example, a given geometric form—let’s say a cube—repeatedly lit from the same angle and with the same intensity, will cast the same exact shadow every time the experiment is attempted.

The rules of light will not change according to the day of the week, but instead act with utter predictability. One can verify this for oneself by observation. This is the natural world which is recorded in candid photography, such as news photos—nothing is arranged or altered, but is all there as nature allows it to unfold.

In contrast to this is what could be termed “artistic lighting.” Just as “artistic anatomy” is different than the anatomy which a medical student would study, so too does the lighting which an artist uses differ from the raw light and shadow seen around us or in spontaneous photos. The artist’s advantage is to be able to “edit” the elements of his picture carefully, to arrange and manipulate light and shadow to suit a given artistic purpose, while still remaining obedient to the rules of light and shadow. The artist strives to reveal or “explain” form to the viewer 246 THE BEST OF DRAW!

and direct the viewer’s eye, not simply to record raw data as it happens to unfold in nature.

An artist has limited means at his disposal, yet wishes maximum results. His transmission device is a flat piece of paper and a relatively narrow range of tones. If he slavishly records everything everything he sees, unaltered, whether the source is in front of him or in a photo, he soon discovers that some sort of editing is required, that the paper has a two-dimensional lan-

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guage of its own that must be taken into account. He discovers that the more marks he makes, the more he tries to copy every nuance of light and shadow, often the less form is described—paradoxically, form can get lost in the confusion and complexity. Some alteration is required, some editing, to cut through the clutter. You could term the results of this editing process “artistic lighting.” It is a process of clearly revealing three-dimensional form by careful placement of light source(s), manipulation of highlights, halftones, core shadows, reflected light, and cast shadows, and also the removal of extraneous and distracting information.

Similarly, if an artist seeks to capture an internal vision seen in imagination (as opposed to drawing from an external model or photograph), and describe it clearly and convincingly to the viewer, he also soon realizes the need to understand the rules of light and shadow and the language of describing form on paper.

Without a convincing play of light and shadow across his invented forms, the viewer’s eye will probably not “suspend disbelief ”—will not accept the artist’s invention as real or possible. If the artist wantonly ignore how shadows really fall, stubbornly calling any excess “style,” conviction will be lacking because even at a subconscious level, people know what rings true and what does not.

But, if you study and understand as much as possible about these rules of light and shadow, then when you invent lighting and arrange it for artistic purpose, it will have the conviction of reality behind, a flavoring of truth. Fortunately, the “rules” of light and shadow are not impossibly complicated. In the real world, when regarding multiple cross-combinations of light sources and cast shadows, there can be an appearance of great complexity; but behind all this are simpler basics repeated many times. When you have a working understanding of these basics, you are free—you are no longer fettered to a model or a photo, although those can undoubtedly be helpful. You are free to experiment, to arrange your light and shadow deliberately and with awareness, striving to find the solution which will best express your artistic vision.

In the accompanying diagrams, I am concentrating first on the more technical side of how light falls. In a subsequent installment I will deal with the more artistic aspects of employing light and shadow, such as using light to create mood, arranging light and LEFT: ALIEN COURTHOUSE—This was a development rough sketch done for a key scene in a Justice League episode. The setting was a vast alien courthouse under a dome, with an accused person on trial, a prosecutor on a floating pod, a giant viewscreen with alien judges, and an audience of aliens ringing the whole scene. Including all these elements in one angle was a juggling act, so to simplify things I used a surrounding “frame” of aliens. I varied the lighting on them, with one alien in total silhouette, and the rest with increasing lighting as we go upwards. This gave the viewer some information, but also kept some mystery by not showing them completely clearly.

And rather than showing thousands of aliens at once, which would be impossible, I chose to show only these foreground eight up close, and suggested the rest in the far distance by using specks. These foreground ones “explained” the distant ones. For the lighting in the arena, I chose to use a harsh toplight, to create a feeling like a blinding noontime sun—the accused has nowhere to hide. The cast shadow below the accused’s floating pod gave a height indication, with just a little softening at the edges to give a touch of realism. The screen unit where the judges are seen was rim-lit from behind and below, to create an ominous mood.

PAUL RIVOCHE

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

DRAWING AND DESIGN

HOSPITAL DOORWAY: Lighting effects can sometimes be very complicated and “interactive,” with multiple light sources influencing each other, and sometimes extremely simple, depending on the mood you wish to create. This scene took place at sunset, which dictated some of my choices.

Sunset light is at a low angle of course, and I decided that it would be a bright sunset, not overcast. The window which is the light source is not seen, being behind the door, but its light bounces around a lot inside the room and then passes through the small window in the door. This in turn creates a bright reflective “flare” on the underside of the door frame, floods the left hand wall, and even reflects faintly onto the floor. The left-side wall light in turn flares on the reflective metal surface of the door handle. There is even a soft bounce light on the ceiling.

shadow for a focal point, etc. But the first goal is to have a solid base in the real world, before getting into the editing process. The artist must have a working sense of the boundaries of believability, or else he may unwittingly violate them and create visual impossibilities. A sense of these boundaries can be gained by accessing reliable reference.

Once you start looking for it there are many sources of information about light and shadow, which will reward close study.

First and foremost is the world around us. Once you grasp the basic principles behind how shadows fall, for example, it can be quite fascinating to study any given lighting you see around you, and analyze why and how the shadows and tones display themselves as they do. It is easy and very useful to make small aids to study, which simplify the analysis of light and shadow and make the variables easier to control: for example, one can get ordinary index cards, or similar rigid white pieces of card or thick paper.

Under a point light source, you can turn the cards at different angles, experimenting with casting shadows on each other and on a paper cylinder, cube, etc. You can make a shadow box to simulate the interior of a room with a window: simply set up four “walls” of paper around a “floor,” and in one of the walls cut out windows of whatever design you wish. Then shine a small light source in the window, moving it around, and studying the way shadows play across the planes of your miniature “room.” None of these small experiments are difficult or timeconsuming; and you soon discover they are worth the effort invested, because they largely eliminate frustrating guesswork when it comes to placement of light and shadow.

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These are some of the more “technical” factors/variables which are considered in setting up lighting on a design:

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

• Time of day (if natural light) = angle + intensity of light • Type of light source, whether natural or artificial: is it point source or diffuse?

• Number of light sources, position • Relative placement and distances of light source(s), objects of composition, surfaces on which shadows are cast, etc.

• Type of materials/surfaces: shiny, smooth, textured • Any other atmospheric conditions: smoke, mist, rain, fog, etc.

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

HALL OF JUSTICE: A brightly-lit scene, which meant that there would be a lot of reflected light bouncing around acting as secondary light sources.

On buildings covered by the cast shadows from other buildings—for example, the building at the left of the image—the roof received less bounce light and thus ended up a quite dark tone, which made it look dramatic. It’s fascinating trying to image various interactive lighting effects such as these. All the while, in addition to trying to accurately predict where shadows would fall, the artistic effect must be kept in mind. To give one example: in this scene I had to make sure to balance the dark masses created on the left and right on the tops of the buildings. Whatever tones were dictated by the laws of light had to be modified by the artistic need to make sure the blacks in the image did not end up unbalanced by having too much on one side or the other.

FACTORY COMPUTER ROOM: This pan shifted from the top lit computer area at left, arriving at a second focal point showing a mysterious room on a lower level. The challenge was to design an interesting lighting effect that would create the appropriate dark mood, while being careful not to go so dark that key details were lost.

I visualized the area at left as being lit from an off-camera light somewhere up above, creating a soft pool of light. This can be seen on the desks and the floor, reflecting more or less brightly according to the shininess of the surface material it is hitting. Beyond the reach of this weak pool of light, surfaces quickly go to black: for example, the back of the computer and the sides of the keyboard, or the group of pipes in the lower right corner.

The distant factory and walls scaled off into pure black, with only a little reflected light bouncing from the floor hitting the undersides of the girders. The grid window at left was kept weak as a light source, only showing its influence under the girders and reflecting of the side of the nearest giant cylinder. At the right, the lower room was given a very bright light source, which created natural interest by implying that activity was taking place there, that it was being used.

The bright light silhouetted the grid window and wall, creating a strong contrast to draw the eye. This lower light source tied into the upper level on the middle set of large pipes, acting as a low-angle light source. This created the slight black shadow on the bottom of the pipes, which is the cast shadow of the edge of the “deck” falling on the pipes.

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BELOW: CITY PAN—In this scene, the lighting treatment had to indicate that it took place in the afternoon. That dictated certain choices. For example, the overall light was from the upper left, showing that the sun was still up in the sky, but not vertical as it would be at noon. To show that the light was still bright, the contrast was kept strong between the front and side faces of the buildings. However, the fact it is afternoon is shown by having the cast shadows of buildings visible on the more distant ones, by having the tone on the ground plane taper away as if a lower angle light was hitting it, and by suggesting a few more diffuse cast shadows playing over the buildings, such as on the distant buildings at the extreme right of the image.

©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

ABOVE: MAXIMA’S CHAMBER—This interior pan design drawing had two major focal areas, the stairway at the right and the elevated pool at left center. Diffused spotlights were placed to create a soft atmosphere, highlighting these two areas of importance. The scheme was to have high angle lighting, which tapered off quickly into moodier shadow areas just beyond the spotlight edges. Cast shadows on the draperies were used to define their volumes and relative placements in space, with reflected light on their undersides to keep them from feeling too heavy. Careful management of tone allowed the two stairway areas to be silhouetted, making for more drama as characters moved up and down them. Emphasis was placed on contrasting stone and metal surfaces. The bright highlights from the stoneimbedded technology gave some relief from the darker tones which predominated.

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©2008 WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

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The Best of DRAW!, Volume Three compiles material from the sold-out issues #5, #6 and #7 of DRAW!, the professional “How-To” magazine on comics and cartooning, with previously uncollected material from issues #3 and #4! Featured here are tutorials by, and interviews with, the top artists in the comics industry: MIKE WIERINGO (penciling), BRET BLEVINS (drawing hands, sketching, and using shadow and light), DAN BRERETON (painting and illustration), CELIA CALLE and ALBERTO RUIZ (digital illustration), BILL WRAY (cartooning and painting), PAUL RIVOCHE (drawing and design), ZACH TRENHOLM (caricature), STEPHEN DESTEFANO (comics and animation), and more! Each artist presents their work step-by-step, so you can see it progress to finished form, learning valuable tips and tricks along the way. See how the pros do it, and learn from the best, as editor MIKE MANLEY assembles this wealth of information for both beginning and experienced artists!

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ART © 2008 DAN BRERETON.

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STEP-BY-STEP LESSONS & INTERVIEWS BY TOP PROS IN COMICS, CARTOONING, & ANIMATION!