Draw #27

#27

WINTER 2014 $8.95 IN THE US

Dave Johnson THE IRREVERENT REVEREND PREACHES ON COVER DESIGN

TOP T OP AN ANIMATION CHARACTER DESIGNER

stephen silver ste REGULAR COLUMNISTS REGUL

JERR ORDWAY & JERRY J AMA NICHOLAS JAMAR

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82658 27764

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PLUS! M PLUS! MIKE MANLEY AND B BRET BLEVINS’

DIGITAL

NS DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional EDITIO BLE A “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and IL AVA NLY animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS FOR O 5 and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic $3.9 storytelling, as well as such DRAW! #8 skills as layout, penciling, inking, Interview & demo by MATT HALEY, lettering, coloring, Photoshop techTOM BANCROFT & ROB CORLEY niques, plus web guides, tips, tricks, on character design, “Drawing In Adobe Illustrator” by ALBERTO and a handy reference source—this RUIZ, “Draping The Human Figure” magazine has it all!

by BRET BLEVINS, a new COMICS International Spotlight on NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for SECTION, JOSÉ LOUIS AGREDA, and more! purposes of figure drawing.

(96-page magazine) $5.95 INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS. (Digital Edition) $3.95

DRAW! #12

DRAW! #13

DRAW! #14

DRAW! #9

DRAW! #10

DRAW! #11

WRITE NOW #8 crossover! MIKE MANLEY & DANNY FINGEROTH create a comic from script to print, BANCROFT & CORLEY on bringing characters to life, Adobe Illustrator with ALBERTO RUIZ, Noel Sickles’ work examined, PvP’s SCOTT KURTZ, art supply reviews, and more!

RON GARNEY interview & demo, GRAHAM NOLAN on creating newspaper strips, TODD KLEIN and others discuss lettering, “Draping The Human Figure, Part Two” by BRET BLEVINS, ALBERTO RUIZ on Adobe Illustrator, interview with MARK McKENNA, links, and more!

STEVE RUDE on comics & drawing, ROQUE BALLESTEROS on Flash animation, JIM BORGMAN on his daily comic strip Zits, BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY on “Drawing On Life”, Adobe Illustrator tips with ALBERTO RUIZ, links, a color section and more! New RUDE cover!

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DRAW! #15

DRAW! #16

DRAW! #17

KYLE BAKER on merging traditional and digital art, MIKE HAWTHORNE on his work, “Making Perspective Work For You” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, Photoshop techniques with ALBERTO RUIZ, THE VENTURE BROTHERS, links, and more! New BAKER cover!

Demo of painting methods by ALEX HORLEY, interview and demo by COLLEEN COOVER, a look behindthe-scenes on Adult Swim’s MINORITEAM, regular features on drawing by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, links, color section and more!

In-depth interviews and demos with DOUG MAHNKE, OVI NEDELCU (Pigtale, WB Animation), STEVE PURCELL (Sam and Max), MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on “Using Black to Power up Your Pages”, product reviews, and more!

Covers major schools offering comic art as part of their curriculum, in an ultimate overview of collegiate-level comic art classes! Plus, a “how-to” demo/interview with BILL REINHOLD, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ COMIC ART BOOTCAMP series, and more!

In-depth interview with HOWARD CHAYKIN, behind the drawing board and animation desk with JAY STEPHENS, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on HOW TO USE REFERENCE and WORKING FROM PHOTOS (by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY), and more!

Interview and tutorial with Scott Pilgrim’s BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY on how he creates the acclaimed series, learn how B.P.R.D.’s GUY DAVIS creates his series, more Comic Art Bootcamp: Learning from The Great Cartoonists by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY, reviews, and more!

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DRAW! #18

DRAW! #19

DRAW! #20

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

DRAW! #23

Interview & demo by R.M. GUERA, Cartoon Network’s JAMES TUCKER on the hit show “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” plus product reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and Comic Book Boot Camp’s “Anatomy: Part 2” by BRET BLEVINS and MIKE MANLEY!

DOUG BRAITHWAITE demo and interview, DANNY FINGEROTH’s new feature on writer/artists with R. SIKORYAK, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer’s work, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and tool tech, COMIC ART BOOTCAMP on penciling & more!

WALTER SIMONSON interview and demo, BOB McLEOD critiques a newcomer, DANNY FINGEROTH spotlights AL JAFFEE, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS offer “Comic Art Bootcamp” lessons, and more!

DAN PANOSIAN talks shop with MIKE MANLEY, DEAN HASPIEL interview by DANNY FINGEROTH, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, critique of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Inker SCOTT WILLIAMS discusses his work, FRANK MILLER interview, MILLER and KLAUS JANSON show their working processes, MANLEY & BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, critique of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

PATRICK OLIFFE interview/demo, AL WILLIAMSON’s work examined

by TORRES, BLEVINS, SCHULTZ, YEATES, ROSS, VEITCH, and others, MANLEY & BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, critique of a newcomer

by BOB McLEOD, supply reviews

by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

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DRAW! #24

DRAW! #25

DRAW! #26

GLEN ORBIK demos how he creates his painted noir paperback and comic covers, ROBERT VALLEY discusses animating “The Beatles: Rock Band” music video and Tron: Uprising, plus Comic Art Bootcamp on “Dramatic Lighting” with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies, BOB McCLOUD gives a Rough Critique of a newcomer’s work, and more!

LEE WEEKS (Daredevil, Incredible Hulk) gives insight into the artform, YILDIRAY ÇINAR (Noble Causes, Fury of the Firestorms) interview and demo, inker JOE RUBINSTEIN shows how he works, “Comic Art Bootcamp” with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, “Rough Critique” of a newcomer by BOB McLEOD, “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies and software! Mature readers only.

JOE JUSKO shows how he creates his amazing fantasy art, JAMAR NICHOLAS interviews artist JIMM RUGG (Street Angel, Afrodisiac, The P.L.A.I.N. Janes and Janes in Love, One Model Nation, and The Guild), new regular contributor JERRY ORDWAY on his behind-the-scenes working process, Comic Art Bootcamp with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, reviews of artist materials, and more!

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THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM WINTER 2014 VOL. 1, No. 27 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Dave Johnson DRAW! Winter 2014, Vol. 1, No. 27 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing.

Michael Manley, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher.

Editorial address: DRAW! Magazine, c/o Michael Manley, 430 Spruce Ave., Upper Darby, PA 19082.

Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614.

DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2014 by their respective contributors. Views expressed here by contributors and interviewees are not necessarily those of Action Planet, Inc., TwoMorrows Publishing, or its editors.

Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing accept no responsibility for unsolicited submissions.

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, or historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied.

This entire issue is ©2014 Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. ISSN 1932-6882.

Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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DAVE JOHNSON

Mike Manley interviews the Eisner Award-winning cover artist about Drinking and Drawing

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RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

36

Stephen Silver

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Silver linings sketchbook

60

Comic Art Bootcamp

78

The crusty Critic

Da Ordster delves into designing dynamic figures

The acclaimed character designer discusses his many artistic endeavors

A Stephen Silver gallery

In this installment: Foreshortening: The Stacking Principle

If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,

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Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade.

This month: The artist’s travel kit

www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! WINTER 2014

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-ING AHEAD

s I write this, Old Man Winter is beating the windows of my house in an early winter storm, but hopefully by the time you read this we’ll be seeing the end of winter and signs of spring, as well as signs of my impending gradation from PAFA with my Master’s Degree in Painting. There has been a lot of juggling these last few issues of DRAW! between grad school, commercial work, and teaching. I’d like to thanks the feature artists of this issue, Dave Johnson, who is a whirlwind and man-about-town, and Stephen Silver, another whirlwind whose new school might be open by the time this issue comes out. As always, a tip of my hat to Jerry, Jamar, Bret, John, and, of course, a double tip to my main man, Eric, for getting this whole thing together and out to you.

On top of everything else, I also had a few speaking engagements this fall. I participated for the first time in the now worldwide 24-Hour Comic Book Day this year. I also went out to give a presentation and talk at PCAD (Pennsylvania College of Art and Design) out in Lancaster, Penn.

I had a great time with the students and teachers at PCAD, including Chairman and Associate Professor of Illustration, Communication Arts Robert Hochgertel, who invited me out for the event. I had fun working and hanging with old comic buddies Mike Hawthorne and Bob McLeod who both teach at the school.

We spent the night and into the next day working along with the students as they worked on their 24-hour comics. I spent the time talking and giving feedback and even chipping in and inking on several of the students’ pages along the way.

We also chatted with several other schools throughout the world, from California to South Korea, who were also all working on their 24-hour comics.

And I was honored to be invited to participate in the World Builder talk Jamar gave at Arcadia University where he works. The talk opened a show of his work that runs through February in their new gallery facility. You can watch it on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ4VEviAcpY. So, till Spring Break, keep warm and go Draw! something,

NEXT ISSUE IN MAY! DRAW! #28 (80 pages, now in its new full-color format, $8.95 print/$3.95 digital), the professional “how-to” magazine on comics and animation, gets Delusional with FAREL DALRYMPLE! Dalrymple (Meathaus, Society of Illustrators Gold Medal) discusses the process behind his work and the upcoming second volume of his highly anticipated Pop Gun War. Then, from Beware the Batman, to the Clone Wars and Transformers Prime, Draw! interviews top storyboard artist, director, and comics artist Dave Bullock! Bullock discusses his animation work and comic covers for DC and Valiant, and his upcoming comic project, The SAVAGE BLADE of KING RONOK! Plus: Jerry Ordway’s “The Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the Ordway,” Jamar Nicholas’ “The Crusty Critic,” and Mike Manley and Bret Blevins’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”!

Edited by Mike Manley.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: Four issues US: $30 Standard, $40 First Class, $11.80 Digital Only Outside the US: Canada: $43, Elsewhere: $54 Surface, $78 Airmail SUBSCRIBE NOW At: www.twomorrows.com

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Dave

SPILLS

HIS GUTS

interview conducted by

Mike Manley

and transcribed by

Eric Nolen-Weathington DRAW! WINTER 2014

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DRAW!: You’re about to fly out for the New York Comic Con. I guess this is an opportunity to go by the offices or see people you don’t normally see. Do you do business at the cons?

DAVE JOHNSON: I do mainly what everybody does: sit down and draw a lot, sign a lot of autographs, shake hands, and then party. If you’re in this business a certain amount, people find you. You don’t have to press flesh as much as you used to.

That’s the good thing about being in comics as opposed to regular illustration. When I first got out of art school, I was planning on being an editorial and advertising illustrator, but then I looked at how much you have to self-promote for the rest of your career.

DRAW!: Unless you have an agent.

DJ: I guess that’s true, but all I saw were the people I knew, and they were constantly having to make new flyers and mail them out. I was like, “Oh God.” Honestly, I never really thought it was possible to become a comic book artist. I don’t know why. I just thought you had to be blessed in some shape or form. [laughter] DRAW!: You had to be born a Romita or something? [laughter]

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100 Bullets © Brian Azz

arello and DC Comics

ave Johnson is one of the premiere cover artists in the comic book industry—his run on 100 Bullets earned him an Eisner. He’s also had a formidable career in animation. Ben 10, anyone? Now settle into your pew and take in the Reverend’s sermon.

DJ: I don’t know. It just didn’t seem like it would ever be a possibility.

DRAW!: Did you originally want to be a comic book artist, and then you settled on illustration?

DJ: Once I got into art school, it just seemed to be more of an option. I could see that you did this work and you got money.

I didn’t know anything about how comics were run. It wasn’t until after I dropped out of art school that I was lucky enough to hear about this studio that was starting up, which ended up being Gaijin. I wasn’t working anywhere. I had done some sample pages, but nothing that great. I did everything in my power to worm my way in there.

DRAW!: Where did you go to school?

DJ: I went to Art Institute of Atlanta not long after high school. I was too young. I’ve been a slow developer. I didn’t even get really serious about art until I was about 25. I learned a little bit, but honestly, some of those art schools aren’t really art schools. They say you’ve got to submit a portfolio, but all they really want to know is if you can pay the tuition.

DRAW!: So it was one of those for-profit art schools?

DJ: Oh, yeah. It was just a terrible school. Most of the teachers were not capable of getting a job themselves, or they were so old they were now retired and were teaching antiquated techniques. Even as a dumb young artist, I could see the writing on the wall. I was like, “Why are we learning this? They have computers for this now.” I remember one guy was teaching us Rubylith cutting for two-color printing. [laughter] DRAW!: Nobody does that anymore!

DJ: Low-rent people were still doing it, but the computer was coming really fast.

DRAW!: What year was this?

DJ: Probably ’87, ’88. I graduated in ’84, but I kind of goofed around. I might have been younger—maybe ’85, ’86.

DRAW!: That was the end of the stat camera era.

DJ: Yeah, stat cameras. They were still doing Letratype and all that kind of stuff.

The other problem with the Art Institute was instead of figuring out a career goal for each individual artist and giving them classes that would take them down that road—I stayed there for a year, and I looked at the second-year and it was filled with Copy Writing and things like that. “I want to be an artist. I don’t want to learn how to write copy for soap.” It just seemed like a waste of my money and time. And since I was paying for it myself, I just dropped out for a while, got a job in a bar, and worked in a bar for two-and-a-half years. I didn’t even pick up a pencil.

DRAW!: When you went into college thinking, “I want to do editorial illustration,” did you have a path of self-instruction?

DJ: I was gearing towards the cartoony editorial stuff. I wasn’t very good at it. I was approaching it like a lot of people do, where instead of learning how to draw and then becoming a cartoonist, I said, “Well, I’ll just become a cartoonist,” [Mike laughs] without understanding how difficult that is to do it right.

I’ve seen quite a few comic book artists who try to do cartoony stuff, and I’m like, “Oh, you just don’t get it. You’re just drawing big feet and big hands.” There’s a whole language you have to study.

DRAW!: Who were some of the artists you were looking at?

DJ: One of my favorites back then, and I still think he’s an amazing artist today, was a guy named Bill Mayer. He was fantastic. He did stuff with scratchboard that just blew me away, but that was just one aspect. He could paint. He could draw. I was looking at a bunch of different advertising illustrators.

DRAW!: Were you reading books? How were you getting your information?

DJ: The illustrator annuals were my main source. This was before the Internet, so unless you were like Howard Chaykin where you voraciously bought magazines and created files— and you had to have the money to buy that stuff. It was tough.

Deadpool cover sketches.

Deadpool © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: You had to be a hunter/gatherer.

DJ: Exactly. And it was hard to justify spending five bucks on a magazine just to get two illustrations out of it. So I would save up for those illustration catalogs.

I wish maybe I’d studied more instead of partying more, but at the same time, I had a great time. [laughter] DRAW!: Did you change from thinking about illustration to thinking about comics when you found out about the Gaijin guys, or were you thinking about that before?

DJ: Well, I was always buying comics, and I would goof around with them from time to time. But, yeah, when I saw those guys and how young they were, and they were doing it, I thought, “Maybe it is possible. Maybe I can make this happen.”

I was still working in the nightclub. You have to understand, I grew up as the shyest kid in the world in middle school and high school. I got out and I wasn’t much better.

A recent Batman commission drawing.

Batman © DC Comics

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It wasn’t until I got a job at the nightclub that it forced me to learn how to talk to people and be sociable. It taught me some real life skills that have paid off well in my career. I know a lot of artists who are talented but don’t know how to communicate. They don’t know how to make the kind of friends who will keep them in work. They kind of sit back and hope the editors will find them. I feel like as much as I’ve gotten work because of what I’m capable of, I’ve also gotten work based on the fact that I’ve made friends and real connections.

DRAW!: That’s one of the things that came up several times at the 24-Hour Comic Book Day at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design. I was out there with Mike Hawthorne and Bob McLeod, and they were talking with Mike Oeming over Skype during the process, and that’s something that came up over and over again, how important it is to network. Once you’re in, that’s usually how you get jobs. You have a friend at one company, then they leave and go to another company, so it’s really important to network with people.

DJ: Yeah, and just make friends with people. Some of my friends have benefitted from being my friend. If a job comes down that either I don’t want to do or I feel I’m not right for, I’ll say, “You should call this guy up.” I have no problem sending work to my friends. And sometimes they’re not even close friends, they’re just people I’ve hung out with at cons and I’ve enjoyed their company. “Yeah, you should give them work.” It’s good to do that.

DRAW!: Did you think that you would do continuity, or was it your aim in the beginning to do covers?

DJ: Once I got into it, I figured that covers were hard to get, so I concentrated on trying to get interior work. But at the same time, covers kept falling into my lap.

Honestly, I’ve had a really lucky career. I didn’t have to sweat it out in the trenches of horrible publishers that were only there to rip you off and string you along. I sort of went from obscurity to DC, and that is directly because I was in Gaijin Studios.

Joe Phillips helped me get one of my first jobs at DC, which was on The Web—part of the Impact line that tanked fairly quickly.

They offered him a gig on this comic, and he was like, “Ugh, that’s such a horrible comic.” But he told them, “Hey, how about I do half and Dave does half, and if you like what he does, he can do the next issue?”— because they wanted two issues.

Before I got to the studio, I was not hirable by DC or Marvel, but once I got in there for a couple of months, I soaked up

as much knowledge as I could from Brian Stelfreeze and Adam Hughes and Joe Phillips and all those guys.

Whatever I could learn, I tried to learn, and it paid off. It wasn’t long before I did a Wonder Woman Annual, where I did half the work and Joe did the other half, and then they offered me a series. Bing, bang, boom, I was on my own series.

DRAW!: You mostly do covers now. When you started doing more covers, were you being inspired by the approach of other people who did covers?

DJ: No. Honestly, how I got into doing more covers than anything was that Superman: Red Son destroyed me. It was one of those cases where the more you learn, the slower you get. What used to be good enough stops being good enough. It got to the point where it was taking me so long to finish a page, just because of my own self-doubt and constant agonizing over every aspect of it, I realized I could make more money working at McDonald’s than doing comics. [Mike laughs] I went through a dark time. I got out of Georgia, moved to North Carolina, and messed around there for a year. I was heavily in debt. Mark Chiarello gave me some Detective Comics covers to do, then I got the 100 Bullets gig, and that was keeping A recent Red Son Superman and Wonder Woman commission drawing. me afloat definitely. But then Bruce Superman, Wonder Woman © DC Comics Timm and Glen Murakami—they had been egging me on to come out and work for them on Bat- DJ: No. I had to learn some of the –isms that they were doman Beyond. I was just at the end of my rope in North Carolina, ing. It’s not quite the same thing, but once I started learning, I and I didn’t want to move back to Georgia. I needed a real job. picked it up fairly quickly. And Bruce and Glen would come to I needed to get myself out of debt. I never thought I would me to do vehicles. I think they liked my sense of design, so ocever love living in California, and that’s what had kept me from casionally Bruce would say, “Hey, why don’t you take a crack taking them up on their offer, but I was in between a rock and at this character?” I slowly learned what they were looking for a hard place. I was like, “You know, I can go out and be in ani- and the whole Bruce Timm style of character design. mation.” It was a pretty easy transition from comics to doing backgrounds for a boys’ action show.

DRAW!: Were you doing 100 Bullets at the same time?

DJ: Yeah, I would do comic book covers at night and on the DRAW!: It’s funny, because we both ended up doing back- weekends, and sometimes at work. [chuckles] Having two jobs, grounds on that. I started with them on Superman, and then I got out of debt fairly quickly and started saving money. And I I jumped over to backgrounds and stayed there for a while started developing my style as a cover artist during that time, and before moving off and doing other stuff. But comics is such people started responding to it and wanting me to do more covers. a great training ground, because you have to do so many difI worked in animation for over ten years on and off. For alferent things well. For a guy like you, it’s not like drawing most ten years, I went from one gig to another pretty quickly. backgrounds is an impossible task.

There was not a whole lot of downtime.

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Dave’s pitch art for a Spider-Man animated series.

All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: After Batman Beyond, what did you work on?

DJ: It’s funny, I was only out there for six months and the show was cancelled. I was like, “Oh, crap. I just moved out here.”

But it turned out Stan Lee Media was going at the time, and my buddy Dana Moreshead, who used to work at Marvel in creative services, was working over there, and he snapped me up literally the next day. I was laid off on Friday and had a job on Monday.

I got to the company, and it took about a day to look around to see, “There’s no way this company is going to survive.” [laughter] Little did I know that it wasn’t supposed to survive.

It was all a scam to keep the stock inflated so Peter Paul and Steve Mitchell could get rich and screw a bunch of people.

But going into it, I was like, “Hey, their checks are cashing, and I’m having a good time,” so I didn’t really care.

DRAW!: Except for Striperella. That was really hot. [laughter] DJ: Yeah, right. Sure. But most investors didn’t know that.

They thought he was going to create another billion-dollar franchise. I was like, “Well, that isn’t going to happen, but I’m glad to take your money.”

DRAW!: It’s better than unemployment.

DJ: Yeah, and it was fun. The stuff we were doing was kind of stupid. I was looking at it like, “How is this relevant?” They were doing some of the most insanely stupid stuff. They were trying to get theme parks made for characters that nobody had even heard of yet. Just because Stan Lee’s name was on it didn’t mean anything. The whole thing was about smoke and mirrors.

People who don’t know anything about comics, but see— at the time Spider-Man was going gangbusters and was making all this money. All they could see was, “Stan Lee created that, so we need to be in the Stan Lee business,” not realizing that everything Stan Lee created after he left Marvel, no one has ever heard of again.

DRAW!: —and they won’t listen to what people tell them about comics. They end up blowing all their money.

DJ: Well, again, I think Peter Paul, the guy who started Stan Lee Media, knew deep down that it was bull, and his plan was to keep the balloon inflated long enough to where he was legally allowed to sell his stock, which, of course, he got for nothing because he created the company. He was buying stock under dummy corporations and all this stuff. He’s now in federal prison. Stan’s lucky he’s not in prison. He got lucky.

If he had been tied more to Peter Paul and Steve Mitchell, and the wrong judge was looking at it, they could easily have gone after Stan too, because he benefitted. He profited from the company. It was crazy.

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DRAW!: I did one job for them. It was a character and some type of comic strip thing. But what happened at that company has happened at so many companies, where someone thinks because they have money, they can be the next Marvel Comics. I’ve been involved with a couple of things like that where they basically blew up on the launch pad, because the person doesn’t really understand comics— DJ: Or fans.

But while I was working there, Bruce and Glen had started Justice League. I was at Stan Lee Media for about eight months. When the crap hit the fan and the company imploded, it was a Friday. On Monday I had a job on Justice League. [laughter] And from Justice League, I went to Justice League Unlimited, and I got to redesign a lot of stuff, like the Javelin and the Watchtower. I was doing a lot more design work beyond just backgrounds, so that was fun.

While I was working on Justice League Unlimited, I got the offer to be the art director and main designer of Ben 10. That was a level-up, so I took it, and I worked on Ben 10 for two seasons.

DRAW!: And it’s still going. I was talking to Bret Blevins the other day, and he’d just turned in another board.

DJ: Yeah, it’s one of those juggernauts. It’s not like I had any leverage to get a better deal from the get-go, but I look back on it and think, “Man, I designed all these toys, and the look for a show I get no equity in.”

DRAW!: I thought you had a little piece or something.

DJ: No, it’s he who pitches the show who ends up with all of that. What Man of Action pitched and what ended up on screen were

two different things, but it didn’t matter, because they were the ones who pitched Ben 10. They get to reap the rewards.

From what I understand, they made such a terrible deal, it’s not like any of them are getting rich off of it, so there’s that.

But it came down to things like, the toys would be produced, and I would see them in the executive producer’s office. I would say, “Hey, you think I could maybe get some of the toys that are sculpted exactly from my drawings?” They were like, “Well, you know where Target is. They sell them at Target.”

[Mike laughs] And I was like, “Wow, thanks. I’m so glad I did all that work.” It was that kind of stuff that turned me off from ever putting my heart and soul into a project I’m not going to get any equity out of. I think the reason people do it, and the reason I did it even though I knew going in it was a bad deal, is I was hoping that if the show was a success, I would get a shot at my own show, but it never worked out that way.

DRAW!: Did you pitch?

DJ: Yeah, I pitched, but for one reason or another, it just never happened. That’s the thing about animation. It’s getting harder and harder to get your own thing on the air. Most of the networks either want to own it outright or they just want new versions

Production art for the Venture Brothers episode, “From the Ladle to the Grave: The Story of Shallow Gravy.”

Venture Brothers © Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

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of properties they already own, and they’re trying to exploit the last bit of blood out of it. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, but it’s hard. It’s hard to a) get a show to where it ends up on the air, and b) if it does get to air, good luck owning any significant piece of it.

DRAW!: I went through that development hell myself with Bill Wray. We pitched something at Nickelodeon, and it was three years of back and forth. And you get married to somebody in development. You give them a great recipe, and they want you to change the formula. Okay, you change your formula, and you go, “This tastes horrible!” They show it to their boss, and the boss says, “This is the worst tasting thing I’ve had in my entire life!” And, of course, the guy in development isn’t taking any of the blame for anything.

DJ: It’s a rough business. You have to be in the right place at the right time, know the right people, and/or have a property that they want to begin with. From what I understand, Ben 10 was in development for three years before I even stepped in. What I remember of the original pitch, it was basically Dial H for Hero.

Ben would turn his watch, and he would turn into ten different human superheroes. Over the course of development—which wasn’t even done by Man of Action; it was other people who were thrown on it—it turned from human superheroes to aliens.

Basically, they wasted all the development money for those three years, and they said, “Well, we’re going to put it on the air. We need to find somebody to just make it happen,” and I got tapped.

When I came on, they told me, “You’re out of time, you’re out of money. Here’s the show. You need to make it happen visually.” I was like, “Whaaaat?” I literally started from scratch. They wouldn’t even show me the old development until much later.

DRAW!: They wouldn’t show you the old bible for the show?

DJ: The only thing I got was the written stuff—the character names and powers, what they wanted them to do. We started from scratch. That’s why seeing toys based on my designs and the fact I’ve never gotten one freebie from any of it, it was kind of a kick in the gut. It makes you a little leery about

Pitch art for a proposed He-Man cartoon.

He-Man © Mattel

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ever trusting anybody. “Oh, we’re going to scratch your back. You’ll be taken care of.” “Why don’t you just pay me now?”

DRAW!: I call what the work you do for these people a dead check. Even though comics is not a great business, if a book does well, you’ll get some kind of royalty.

They might get 99 cents out of the dollar, and you only get a penny, but at least you get that penny. In animation, you board all these shows, they collect them on DVDs, and you don’t even get a copy of the DVD. I tell my students that if I was coming along now, I would be trying a Kickstarter or YouTube. It’s great to work for the major companies to get exposure and experience, but if you work for Walt Disney, it’s always going to say Walt Disney. It’s never going to say your name.

DJ: Yeah. It was fine being a cog when I worked at Warner Bros. because that was Bruce’s thing, and I had no problem with that. When I worked on Ben 10, yeah, I wanted my name on there bigger, because I designed most of the stuff. It’s not like I did everything though, so it was hard to get credit for the exact work that I did.

I think that’s why I’ve always stayed with comics, because it gave me an outlet where I could say, “This is all me.” That’s why I learned how to ink myself, color myself, because I want to be able to go, “Boom! Johnson. The buck stops here. Right or wrong, good or bad, this is all me.”

Dave’s inks and finished color for the cover of 100 Bullets #57.

100 Bullets © Brian Azzarello and DC Comics

DRAW!: That’s the main difference. One person can do a comic, but animation is always done by committee. It’s the nature of the beast. If you’re the producer, you’ll get your name on it. When I started doing animation, Kids’ WB would run the credits at the end fullscreen. Then they would start running the credits really squeezed, and they’d go by very quickly. My dad would say, “Man, they don’t give the people on the show very much credit, do they?” [laughter] DJ: Yeah, you’ve got to get your name on the front end of the show, or you’re basically screwed.

DRAW!: While you worked on Ben 10, you were still doing covers. Where did you go from there?

DJ: I went back to WB. I worked on Legion for a little bit. I think I did some work in between, but then I got a job working with Joaquim Dos Santos on a G.I. Joe web series called G.I. Joe: Resolute that Warren Ellis wrote.

DRAW!: Who was that for?

DJ: That was for Hasbro, but the studio that got the job was a tiny animation studio called Titmouse over in Hollywood. After that I stayed there for quite a while working on whatever came up. I worked on an episode of Metalocalypse doing some backgrounds. I was jumping all around. A lot of it was development for things that never came to fruition.

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Two cover roughs for Abe Sapien: The Devil Does Not Jest #1, and the finished cover.

Abe Sapien © Mike Mignola

They did a Black Panther motion comic for BET. They expanded the story, and they needed artwork for that and for fight scenes, so I got hired to come in and try to draw like Romita [Jr.]. It sounds like it would be easy, but once I got into it, he and Klaus Janson were doing things my brain can’t comprehend. [laughter] I tried my best, but I got to the point where I said, “I’ve just got to draw the best I can,” because trying to draw like them, it looked so awful my pride was starting to get in the way. Not that his style is awful, but my version of his style was just really bad.

I worked on a Vin Diesel development thing. It was kind of a funny gig. He wanted to do a live-action Hannibal the Conqueror movie. He wanted to direct it, and he wanted $300 million. At one point Hollywood was giving him a positive reaction, so he took that and signed a deal with BET to do Hannibal the TV show as an animated series, so I got hired on to that. Then Hollywood wised up and said, “We’re not going to give Vin Diesel $300 million to direct a period film. What, are you crazy?” [laughter] So all his attention he’d been giving the movie shifted over to the animation project.

But, unfortunately, deep down, he didn’t want an animated show. He wanted an animatic that he could then take back to Hollywood and say, “See? This is what I’m thinking.” He immediately made us hire this guy named Sylvain, who is a Hollywood developer—a Moebius wannabe.

DRAW!: Yeah, I know his work. I met him a couple of times in San Diego actually.

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DJ: He comes in and knows nothing about animation. He starts talking all this Hollywood double-speak, which I can’t stand. The way they talk sometimes just drives me crazy. I’m an A to B equals C guy. They never want to commit to anything. They never want to be direct, because they’ve learned that you never know what’s the right or wrong way to go. If you don’t say anything directly, you can never be accused of saying anything. You can always deny.

He was giving us designs that were unsustainable in animation. I kept trying to push them towards something that animators in Korea could easily understand and replicate where it wouldn’t be jumping all over the place style-wise.

And, of course, all the designs Sylvain did, Vin loved, and all the designs I did, he hated because they looked too much like animation. [Mike laughs] It took me forever to figure out that

he didn’t want an animated show. He wanted scratchy unanmatable stuff that in his mind he could take back to Hollywood to show, “This is what I want to do,” which is a real shame, because we started off with kind of period stuff, but I started trying to make each character look really distinctive but yet cohesive and not completely out of place. What I came up with, I was really happy with. I was like, “Man, I can see these things as toys that kids would actually buy.” But at every turn it was not scratchy enough, not crappy enough.

I just looked at Sylvain as a waste of my time. He was getting paid probably three times more than anyone else working on the show, and not doing squat. Maybe he’s a nice guy, but I was rubbed the wrong way from the first hour that I met him. He came in saying, “I want to see colors I could eat.” What does that even mean? [Mike laughs] “Do you want this to be an ice cream shop?

I don’t know what that means.” Ugggghhh. It was so annoying.

i-

DRAW!: I suppose that’s why working in comics is gratifying.

DJ: Yeah, and you get to work with editors that you like and who start to trust you, and you’re not jumping through a million hoops.

I’ve been lucky that a lot of the editors I’ve worked with, we talk about what the issue needs, and then I give them one sketch. I say, “This is the coolest thing I can come up with. If it doesn’t hit the mark, we can go back to the drawing board,” as opposed to the editor style of saying, “I want you to give me 15 thumbnails with 15 different ideas. I don’t have time for that. I tend to think about a cover for a week, and all these designs go through my head, and then I land on the one that makes the most sense, and that’s what I put down.

DRAW!: You might do several, but you’ll only send them one?

DJ: Yeah, and a lot of them are only in my head. That’s how I work.

I tend to sit back in my chair and design them in my head until I go, “A works, but I can make B happen. That’s something I can do.”

I have limited skills in certain areas, and I tend to design covers that don’t put me into situations I can’t get out of. Like if I have to paint too much, or I have to do scenes with a lot of depth—those aren’t my strong points. So I tend to keep things more simple and more graphic, and that’s kind of where my style has gone. It’s more about impact than what I call story panel covers, where it looks like something yanked out of the comic. I’m trying to do posters.

I’m trying to give you impact.

Abe Sapien © Mike

Mignola

DRAW!: So you think of a comic book cover as something like a movie poster?

DJ: As much as I can, yeah. With a first issue, you might want to throw a lot of info down to give you a sense of what the book is going to be about. With later issues I’m working so far in advance, I don’t get a lot of information. Even if I wanted to throw a lot of crap on the cover, if I don’t know what’s in the book, how am I going to draw it?

DRAW!: Do you have any rules or approaches you apply to help you with something like that?

DJ: I try to look for touchstones and imagery from the book itself. Like, with 100 Bullets, when I started the job, I had not only the full script, but I had full pencils and full inks

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Cover roughs for B.P.R.D.— Hell on Earth: Russia #3, and the finished cover, which combines elements from multiple sketches.

B.P.R.D. © Mike Mignola

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Cover rough and finished color for the cover of B.P.R.D.: 1948 #1. Dave tried to get Hellboy in, but removed him in the end.

B.P.R.D. © Mike Mignola

for the entire issue, so I had plenty to pull from. As we know, as time goes on, the deadlines catch up, and because they want these things so far in advance, it got to the point where Brian hadn’t even written the issue yet. But luckily a lot of the characters had been designed, so I would call him and ask him, “What kind of vibe do you want with this issue?” Sometimes, if there was nothing there, I always had the symbol of The Trust families, or Agent Graves, or the briefcase—there were all these things I could go back to that would make a powerful image that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with what was going on in that particular issue. That saved our bacon a lot, the fact we had that kind of imagery to pull from. There’s nothing worse than being on a book that is lacking that, because then you’re like, “There’s nothing I can hold onto.”

DRAW!: Have you had that happen?

DJ: Oh, yeah, many times—usually on new books. I remember recently when I was doing B.P.R.D. covers—when B.P.R.D. started, it had all these great iconic looking characters. You had a guy with a scar going from his mouth all the way up to his ear, and you could see his teeth. You had Abe Sapien and Roger. By the time I got on it, it was all these human characters and Johann.

DRAW!: You wanted somebody who was a robot or a mutant or something.

DJ: Somebody I could latch onto every issue. It got very hard to find those touchstones. It was a challenge. It was almost impossible at times. I would just agonize over those things.

And then you add on the Mike Mignola factor and having him in the back of your head, and the way he designs covers. He can put little frogs in there and it makes sense. [Mike laughs] I can’t do that. It’s his universe. “I’m just gonna draw this,” and you’re like, “All right. That works for me.” But I would do that, and it would be like, “I’m not doing the right thing.”

DRAW!: When you think back over the history of comics, do you have people you look to that you think are great cover artists, or do you mix them in with people who are great poster artists…?

DJ: Early on I started that big pot of gumbo. I think a lot of comic book artists make the mistake of referencing only other comic book art when there’s a whole universe of other art and artists out there who should have influence on them, but they’re not even looking. So, yeah, my cover work definitely got better the more ingredients outside of comics I mixed into the pot. But growing up I would buy a book just for the cover

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Dave’s pencils, inks (next page), and finished color for the variant cover of Thor: God of Thunder #14.

The Destroyer, Thor © Marvel Characters, Inc.

and rip it off. I had those little 8½" x 11½" slipcase binders, and I just started collecting.

because I couldn’t figure out how to make it work for me. I was definitely trying to find guys I could at least try to emulate.

DRAW!: Whose covers would you buy?

DJ: When I was a little kid, my mom made me throw my comics away. In my early teens I got back into them again because I was playing with Micronauts. I remember going to the store one day, and there was Micronauts #4 or #5. I was like, “Holy crap! I’ve got to get this!” and I became almost instantly a Michael Golden fan. At the same time, I started buying those Marvel three-packs, and they had the Keith Pollard FFs in the 200s with Joe Sinnott inking, and I got into Fantastic Four, and eventually I discovered John Byrne and X-Men, and by then I was pretty much hooked.

But as far as ripping off covers, Mike Golden was number one. I used to try to find back issues. I was hunting down his artwork wherever I could find it, looking through price guides to see what he drew and trying to find it. Later on I looked for Mike Mignola, Neal Adams, guys like that.

It’s funny, guys like Bill Sienkiewicz were so far out of my realm, I couldn’t even figure out how he was doing half the stuff he was doing. I didn’t bother collecting that as much,

DRAW!: I can definitely see a Golden connection. I got to ink him on an issue of Birds of Prey, and that was actually a very hard job. Because his work is so beautiful and perfect, I don’t feel it leaves you any room for interpretation. When I met him, he said it was one of his three favorite ink jobs, “but I wish you’d made it look more like Mike Manley.” And I go, “But it’s got to look like Michael Golden!”

DJ: Mignola told me a story about being inked by Kevin Nowlan—or maybe it was Kevin who told me. Mike wanted Kevin to change stuff, but Kevin loved Mike’s stuff so much that he didn’t want to change a thing. It was this Mutual Admiration Society thing going on, and neither got exactly what they wanted, I guess—but it still turned out great.

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DRAW!: Who did you look at outside of comics?

DJ: I’m terrible with the names, but Saul Bass, a lot of the Russian propaganda artists, a lot of the American propaganda artists from World War II, the Public Works artists—the really strong graphic, very simple, monolithic style just really appealed to me.

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DRAW!: Were you ever into Rockwell Kent and people like that?

DJ: What did he do?

DRAW!: He was a painter, and he also did a lot of lithographs and book illustrations. He did Moby-Dick. He was very graphic, and very deco in a way.

DJ: The name’s not familiar, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t looked at a ton of his work. [chuckles] Another big influence of mine is a guy named Herbert Paus. Albert Dorne is a big favorite. My dad actually ordered those Famous Artist courses.

DRAW!: Oh really? Was your dad trying to be an artist?

DJ: Well, when he was younger, but growing up in Oklahoma, you didn’t see anyone making a living as an artist. He said, “Well, I’ve got to make a living,” and he went in a different direction. But he handed those books down to me.

I’ll make a confession: I’ve never been one for studying art or practicing. I practice while I’m getting paid. I don’t even necessarily like to draw. It’s a painful process for me. I kind of wish I’d gotten more out of those books than I did, but I think I definitely learned something from them. I even own one of

Dorne’s illustrations that I grew up looking at all the time, the Veterans Day parade celebration.

DRAW!: The inking on that is fantastic.

DJ: Yeah! I saw it at Illustration House and almost dropped my jaw. I just turned around and there it was. “Is this for sale?” “Yeah.” And it wasn’t that much. I just happened to be in New York, and it just fell into my lap.

DRAW!: It was calling you, Dave.

DJ: I’ve got it up on my wall, and I look at it almost every day. But I was even influenced by sculptors—Paul Manship—the posters of Robert McGinnis, all that stuff. I look at everything. If it’s got value to it in some way, shape, or form, I’m going to at least admire it and maybe put it in my memory bank. It might come out somewhere down the road without me even thinking about it.

DRAW!: You don’t keep sketchbooks, or anything like that?

DJ: No. Honestly, if it’s not for a gig or a convention, I don’t sit around and draw unless I’m at Drink and Draw, and then I’m just drawing dumb stuff. Imagine how powerful I’d be if I actually gave a damn. [laughter]

A Nick Fury piece and an unused cover sketch for Fury Max #4, both showing Dave’s illustration influences.

The Destroyer, Thor © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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I remember reading about Frazetta, and he’d do as little as possible so he could go out and play baseball and do something else, and I kind of feel the same way. Believe me, I’m not comparing myself to Frazetta in any way, shape, or form, but I’m not one of those guys who likes to work hard. Sitting all alone in your house drawing is not my idea of fun.

DRAW!: Animation is a collaborative process, so most people who work in animation work in a studio. It’s a more social occupation than being a cartoonist, which is very often sitting alone in a room ten, twelve hours a day.

DJ: I had a blast working in animation. You can ask anybody who worked with me. A lot of times I was the instigator/activity director.

I was always coming up with crazy games.

Some of them even took off and became company-wide games. I was looking to have fun and do dumb things. I remember one time me and another guy built blow guns, and we were shooting push pins though them at people and into walls.

I’m trying to have fun in life. I’m trying not to take things too seriously. That’s one of the reasons I started Drink and Draw, was to get me and some of my friends out of the house on a regular basis and sit around and shoot the breeze, and if we came back with some drawings, awesome.

DRAW!: Does drinking have to be part of the drawing?

DJ: No, no. And believe me, it’s very rare that I’ll get drunk at one of these things. Three beers over the course of three hours, that’s not really drinking. That’s just having a beer.

No, it’s always been more about going out and having a dedicated time to hang out with your friends.

I kind of knew Dan Panosian and Jeff Johnson via comics, but I wasn’t close friends with them. They just seemed like really great guys, and it was my calculated effort to become friends with them.

DRAW!: And now Drink and Draw has grown.

DJ: Oh, it’s global now. We hear about chapters all over the world, which is gratifying. I feel like if I’ve done anything in life, I can say I created Drink and Draw. It’s given pleasure to a lot of people who otherwise would have just be sitting home alone.

A Vampirella commission and a Supergirl convention sketch.

Supergirl © DC Comics.

Vampirella © Harris Comics.

DRAW!: Do you have official chapters in other cities?

DJ: Oh yeah. Some are strong, and some are not so strong. Some pop up and may not last very long. New York has a pretty good one. They’ve got a good graphic logo, and they meet regularly, and they have a good group of artists who meet. But I think ours is one of the strongest, because it’s the original one.

We’ve got real luminaries who come in from time to time. Bob Layton is a regular. I grew up looking at his Iron Man comics, and I can now count him as a good friend.

The benefit from starting it has been great. It’s gotten us some free trips to places, and we’ve got two books that wouldn’t exist without it. And, honestly, it’s made me a

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Batgirl © DC Comics.

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A sketch and finished color for Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes II #5.

Avengers © Marvel Characters, Inc.

better artist. Just the fact that I’m sitting down, and I’m loosened up because a) it doesn’t mean anything, and b) I’ve got a beer or two in me, I started developing newer styles for myself that I then brought to my professional work. Like, I started inking in a jagged line style. I don’t use it all the time, but it’s something that came from Drink and Draw.

DRAW!: Are you traditional, tradigital? What’s your technical process like?

DJ: I don’t paint very much at all. I still do it from time to time, but once I learned computer coloring, it just became a no-brainer—just the fact that you can make changes and alter things, it takes some of the fear factor out.

But inking-wise, I still like something to hold onto. I know Manga Pro and Manga Studio can give you some great effects, but there’s something to be said about holding on to the piece of paper afterwards. I want to say you can’t put a value on that, but you actually can. [laughs] I look at these digital inkers now and think, “I guess you just don’t like money.” If it means you can get more done quicker, that I get.

I’m sure it’s speeding up a lot of people.

DRAW!: I always debate that. I don’t think there’s any way I could actually be faster digitally than I am traditionally.

There’s an interface to software and things I have to adjust, and I don’t have to do that with a pen and a brush.

DJ: I get it, but at the same time there are things you can do, like zooming in and inking smaller things better. A lot of times I’ll ink traditionally, and then go in and clean up areas I just couldn’t ink that well because there was too tiny a detail.

DRAW!: So you do a combination where you might do something traditionally and then do some additional work on the computer once you scan it in?

DJ: Yeah, but mostly it’s just cleaning up some lines. I used to hate using White-Out, and I still kind of do. I used to be such an “art collector,” that a lot of times while I was inking

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(above) Sketches for what would appear on the front of a fold-out cover for Shadowman #0. (left) Pencils and partial inks for the fold-out cover for Shadowman #0. (next page) Finished inks for the fold-out cover for Shadowman #0.

Shadowman © Valiant Entertainment LLC

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something, I’d be thinking in terms of the art collecting side.

If I made a screw-up, instead of whiting it out, I’d keep inking over it to fix it with more ink. [Mike laughs] I know. That’s just how I think.

DRAW!: You’re a perfectionist in that way.

DJ: Yeah. I like seeing a page with very little White-Out on it. But I think it’s killed my speed. I see other guys fly through stuff. “Oops, you screwed up,” they’d put down a big dollop of White-Out and re-ink it. That’s just not me. I’ve actually thrown away pieces that were halfway done because I screwed up a little bit. “Nah, I’ve got to start over.”

DRAW!: Terry Austin’s originals have this very perfect appearance. Then you look at other people, like Neal Adams, and it’s not perfect. Even Joe Sinnott, who you’d think would look perfect, his originals look very organic. They’re not this dead Charles Burns kind of thing. They’ve very lush.

Are you working in Photoshop, Painter…?

DJ: Yeah, I predominantly use Photoshop. I’m trying to learn ArtRage. I’ve used it in the past for backgrounds.

DRAW!: ArtRage? What is that?

DJ: It’s a painting program you can download for free. You can get a better version if you pay. It’s an RGB type program, and it’s really good at moving paint around. It makes it feel like real paint. Another weird thing about it is that if you put a color photo into it, it will treat the color photo like it’s wet paint, so that’s pretty interesting.

Dan Panosian is using it to color John Tiffany, his European album comic that just came out. He’s really become a master at using ArtRage. His style is so organic and tight-but-rough to begin with, and he’s using ArtRage in the same way. He’s not worried about staying in the lines. It’s more about getting the feel down than agonizing over making everything perfect, and it really does give it an adult feel that his stuff color-wise didn’t have before. I don’t know what it is about the program, but he’s picking these amazingly subtle colors that have so much more going on than when he was using straight Photoshop colors.

It’s one of those things where the right guy has the right tool, and he’s making it sing. I just get hyper-frustrated with it, but eventually I’m going to try to master it, because I really like the effect he’s getting.

DRAW!: I think the fact that Adobe is forcing everyone to go to the cloud is going to cause other companies to come up

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with other programs, which is a good thing. It’s better to have five or six really good programs to choose from than one.

DJ: Yeah, I’m not really keen on paying a subscription. It’s a little ridiculous, but it is what it is.

I want to put my pen where I want my pen to be. I mean, I can’t draw very well on the Cintiq. Once again, there’s kind of a weird technology disconnect. It’s hard for me to even imagine inking on it, but it’s great for doing color work.

DRAW!: Do you work on a Cintiq or a Wacom?

DJ: Yeah, a Cintiq. That’s another game changer for me. I was never a big fan of the pen dislocation factor of a Wacom tablet.

DRAW!: Is it because it doesn’t feel like a natural surface to draw on because it’s so slippery?

DJ: When I draw, I’m spinning the paper constantly. Even though I can tilt and twist my Cintiq, it’s not the same. And I do the same thing when I’m inking. When I see guys who tape the page down, and they still get all the different strokes they do—that is just not me. I could never do that. I need to spin the page like crazy.

Pin-up illo of 100 Bullets’ Megan Dietrich.

100 Bullets © Brian Azzarello and DC Comics

DRAW!: Yeah, I spin the page too. It’s funny, because I was showing some students something last week, and I was like, “Oh, well you just spin the page,” and they were like, “What?” I could see them thinking, “No, you put the paper down and you just ink.” [Mike laughs] DJ: Yeah, that makes no sense.

I used to be a lot tighter. I wanted to be like Mike Golden.

It wasn’t until things like Drink and Draw forced me to open up and go with things that maybe weren’t as tight, but overall they felt tight. Like you said, with Joe Sinnott—you look at his stuff and it has a nice organic feel to it that still feels confident.

DRAW!: You always felt that way about his stuff, or Giordano, or Giacoia. There was a sense of confidence there, and that’s a big factor in being able to produce a large body of work, is actually being confident about your work. If you’re not confident about what you do, it makes the whole thing look like a sweaty mess.

DJ: And I’m still at that stage. Occasionally I’ll do something that just happens, and it’s immediate, and it works out, but with almost everything that I do there’s a whole lot of gutwrenching pain.

Once again, that’s why I don’t do it for fun. I have absolutely no desire to go to life drawing. Even there are naked women there, I’m still thinking, “This feels like work.” That’s what I love about Drink and Draw: there are no rules.

You draw whatever you want. You go to life drawing, and you have to draw that model, and you’re kind of being judged by everyone else who’s drawing the same model. If I’m at Drink and Draw, and I’m drawing something that’s never been seen before, who’s to say it’s wrong? I don’t know. I feel like I’ve gotten this far in my career without studying every day, so why fix it if it ain’t broke?

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Sputchick © Dave Johnson

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DRAW!: What are you working on now?

DJ: I’m finishing up Brother Lono. It’s only eight issues. I finished up the covers for Kiss Me Satan, which is a fiveissue Dark Horse project that just started coming out. And I’ve started doing covers—I’m about to start on the fifth one—for a new Vertigo book called Coffin Hill. That’s about it for covers right now. I’m trying to get a Batman: Black & White story done, which is going to be like pulling teeth for me.

DRAW!: Why is that?

DJ: I’m doing interiors, and that series has so many great examples of artwork, I’m already psyching myself out about it. “Am I going to do a good enough job?” you know? But I wrote the story, and Jimmy Palmiotti is going to script it for me, so hopefully it won’t suck. [Mike laughs] DRAW!: How many covers would you say you do on average per month?

DJ: It varies. There was a time when I was doing six titles a month, maybe seven, but now I’m only doing one or two, so it’s not too bad.

DRAW!: And the average time it takes you to produce a cover is about the same?

DJ: No, it changes every cover. I’ve literally done a cover in 15 minutes, and I’ve taken three weeks on a cover, so you never know.

I just did a Brother Lono cover that was painted in Photoshop. I did a sketch on paper, scanned it, put that sketch on a layer, and created the rest of the art in Photoshop. The whole thing went gangbusters fast. I started at 10 a.m. and was probably done by 6 p.m., and that was with a decent lunch. Some things come great, and some things take until the last minute when the editor is screaming at me that I finally get something out.

DRAW!: I guess that keeps it interesting.

If it was all easy, it would get boring, I suppose.

DJ: Yeah, and I’m always trying new things, and instead of trying them on my own time in sketchbooks or whatever, a lot of the new things I’ve tried in comics artwise, I’ve done with no net, actually on the book. So if there are covers out there that are kind of off, that’s one of the reasons why. I went for something, and I failed miserably. But it makes it exciting, and bottom line it’s just comic book covers.

They come and they go. They’re out that month, and then they usually disappear into obscurity. It’s not the end of the world.

Working layout for a 100 Bullets: Brother Lono cover.

100 Bullets © Brian Azzarello and DC Comics

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DRAW!: Have you ever thought about trying to put out a compilation book?

DJ: Every once in a while there’s talk of that at DC of doing either a 100 Bullets cover book or a Dave Johnson cover book like the Adam Hughes cover book. Personally I’d rather have a Dave Johnson book, because then I could cut out the weaker 100 Bullets covers and

Sketch ideas for the cover of Coffin Hill #1.

Coffin Hill © Caitlin Kittredge and Miranda Paniagua.

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only put in the stuff that still holds up as opposed to the ones that I cringe looking at. But whether or not that’ll ever happen, I have no idea. I’m not Adam Hughes. I don’t have the same fan base. I’m sure they’re looking at dollars and cents as opposed to whether it’s a viable thing to do. And to be honest, I’m a terrible self-promoter.

DRAW!: I see you on Facebook.

DJ: Yeah, I know, but I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t give a crap if I ever get nominated for anything ever again. The opinions I really care about—guys like Jim Steranko and Howard Chaykin— they’ve given me thumbs up on my past work, and I count them as friends now. How can you get any better validation than from the guys who are at the top of the game?

DRAW!: When your hero gives you the nod, that’s what you want.

You want your work to be at that level.

DJ: Yeah. And, honestly, that filled me up. Everyone has that void inside that craves recognition or adulation. Mine got filled up by two of the greatest artists out there. What else do you need?

From sketch to finished cover—the final 100 Bullets trade paperback.

100 Bullets © Brian Azzarello and DC Comics

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The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The

OrdWay !

Drawing Dynamic Figures with Power (Girl) by Jerry Ordway

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ell, here I am, back again, with another short demo. but I have always scribbled. After 30-plus years of working In my previous “how-to” I tried to show what goes professionally in comics, I still work this way with the freedom into a complicated scene with dozens of characters. of knowing I can put a mass of grey lines down that no one In the example I have for you this issue, I will go over will see except me (and now you). On this one, I erased and some basics for a much simpler scene featuring two charac- scribbled some more until I saw something there in all the lines. ters. Many of you with some experience at drawing may think The next step is to use a fine tip marker (Pilot Fineliner) to ink/ there isn’t enough to say on such a simple composition, and refine the drawing, pulling the form out of the tangle of pencil well, maybe you’re right. This is my space after all, so I will lines. Small changes happen at this stage, such as extending proceed to show you the “Ord-way” to do it. both arms on Power Girl, to make the pose more dynamic.

Once again, this is a custom piece, or commission.

The client wanted two characters which I had drawn in the 1980s, Power Girl and the Huntress, who appeared in a comic I co-created with Roy Thomas and Mike Machlan, called Infinity Inc., for DC Comics. He didn’t specify any setting or action, but I didn’t want to draw them just standing back to back, posing. I wanted them in some action.

I knew this would eventually fill an 11" x 17" sheet of Strathmore kid (rough) finish drawing paper, but I wanted to start on a scrap piece of copy paper by scribbling in pencil to get the composition I liked. Some people roughJerry’s reference for the commission. sketch in blocks, or forms, Infinity Inc. © DC Comics

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Jerry using his Pilot Fineliner fine-tip marker to pick out the figures from amidst all his scribbling, and the resulting figure of Power Girl.

Huntress, Power Girl © DC Comics

A side note: In reading an article like this, it can leave the whole thing over. It happens. Try to get the layout where you impression that this is all rote, that you just start at point A and want it before proceeding to the next stage!

If you collect photo reference, pull that out, even if the proceed without a hitch until you get to Z, but in most cases this is a false impression. Much of drawing can be a technical skill, pose doesn’t match what you want. Small details in real life but the process is creative, and fraught with perils and anxiet- can better inform your drawing. If you don’t have an attracies. When I was growing up, I can remember showing my art to tive model handy, (and who does?) using collected pictures someone, an adult, who told me that a true artist could draw a torn from magazines, organized in file folders, can always perfect circle freehand! Then a few years later I heard that Jack help! I have clipped and saved diving shots, swimming shots, Kirby would start drawing in a corner of the blank paper and fill etc., from sports magazines in a file called “Flying Poses.” I the entire page without any sketching or underdrawing. Holy save more clippings than I will ever use, but they are good to cow, how do you measure up to that? The answer, of course, is look through and get ideas from. You could do this with Interthat with practice you will be able to draw a circle, or a straight net images saved to your hard drive as well. line, freehand. It won’t be perfect. And Jack Kirby may have gotten to a stage, after many years of drawing, where he knew so clearly what he wanted, that he could map it all out in pencil without a layout.

The trick to any of this is to forge ahead, and not let things you hear intimidate you.

Nothing is easy, and anything you draw will require effort. Pencils have erasers, and you’ll use your share of them! I think an artist sees an version of what he or she wants to draw, clearly, in their head. The hard part is in transmitting it from brain to paper. Very rarely do I capture the drawing as well as it looks in my mind’s eye.

At any stage of the construction, I might be compelled to erase and start over. In some cases where the layout “fought” me, and I forged ahead anyway, I would get to the Images from Jerry’s photo reference files inform his take on the figure poses. finished inked stage and have to start the Infinity, Inc. © DC Comics

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With my marker preliminary drawing inked in, I erase the pencil and then scale it up on my copy machine to 200 percent. You could do this in your computer, and print it out on a wide format printer in non-repro blue to ink, but with a custom drawing, I don’t like that blueline to show. Remember, the client will want a nice clean drawing for display.

With the 11" x 17" photocopy underneath my art paper, I refine the sketch on my lightbox in pencil. The advantage of working this way is that it allows me to move the copy paper around underneath, to correct proportions on the drawing while I trace, or reposition things. For example, I tilted Power Girl at the torso for the finished pencils here. (above) Jerry goes old school and uses a copy machine to increase the size of his preliminary drawing by 200 percent. (below) Jerry working on the light box. Notice that the clean sheet of paper he is transferring the sketch to is at an angle to the photocopy—one of the advantages of working with a light box. (right) Jerry’s final pencils for the commission.

Huntress, Power Girl © DC Comics

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Now comes my favorite part—the inking! Using a Hunt #102 crow quill tip and Pelikan drawing ink, I outline and further refine from the pencil stage. Inking is never about tracing, but about enhancing the pencil drawing. Things can look good in the grey of pencil and lacking in the black ink if you reproduce the same lines.

Many people don’t use “feathering” anymore to soften a black line, or simulate tones in line form. I do, mainly because I love it. There’s a long tradition of “feathering “ in comic book work from the days when color was applied in Armed with his trusty Hunt #102 crow quill pen tip, Jerry begins inking. flat tones with no modelPower Girl © DC Comics ing. Now that color can be fully painted, the need for extra lines in black is unneces- either a brushpen (Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen B) or a brush sary. Heck, the need for ink lines is unnecessary, with a good (#3 Raphael 8404 Kolinsky sable) dipped in ink to heavy up color artist. But I like the look of black outlines and render- some lines to give the drawing visual punch. This is a necessary step, to squint at the drawing, which blurs all that lineing nonetheless.

I inked all of the organic lines freehand with the dip pen, work and informs you where you need more black or beefed and then tackle the straight lines by tilting my inking triangle up outlines. In this case, I filled in areas of each character’s (it has a double edge to prevent ink from running underneath) capes to help pop the figures out. All that is left is to sign the and running the crow quill along it. The same effect is done drawing and scan it for my files.

If you are on a fixed deadline, you have to learn when to more easily with a marker, or technical pen, but I like to flex the quill to vary the line weight to give straight lines some let go of an image. If an editor is anxiously waiting on you, then you accept that the piece is as good as you can make it in character, or imperfections. the time allowed. If no one is breathing down your neck, give the art another look on your computer monitor. You may see where detail is lost, or where it needs thicker lines to separate planes. That is often my last pass—to look at the reduced scan onscreen to see if the contrasts are sharp and it is readable.

With any drawing, whether a cover, a page of continuity, or a commission, these last stages are important.

Next time, I will finally demo how I take a comic page from script to finished art. See ya then!

Jerry employs his triangle to help with inking the straight lines.

When all of the linework is done, I wait for any ink to dry, and then erase the pencil lines with my preferred kneaded eraser (Faber-Castell Knetgummi Art Eraser #127020) which leaves no gritty residue like other brands. You don’t have to brush or sweep anything off the paper, which I appreciate.

With the cleaned board, I then fill in black areas, and use

Jerry Ordway is a penciler, inker, writer, and painter of comic books and graphic novels, primarily for DC Comics and Marvel Comics. He is best known for his work on Superman, Power of Shazam!, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Fantastic Four, and The Avengers. His children, Rachel (see the title logo caricature) and Tommy (see the caricature at right), seem to be following a similar path.

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Huntress, Power Girl © DC Comics

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Huntress, Power Girl © DC Comics

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The Many Faces of

steven silver Artwork © Stephen Silver

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ou’ve seen his work even if you don’t now his name. (Though if you don’t know his name by now, you really need to get out more!) Stephen Silver is one of the most in-demand character designers in Hollywood today. He’s worked for such shows as Kim Possible, Danny Phantom, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks: The Animated Series. But he’s so much more than just a character designer. He’s a caricaturist, a storyboard artist, an author, a book publisher… he even has his own app! These days he’s also a teacher and lecturer, and just wait ’til you read what he has to say.

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Interview conducted by Mike Manley and transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington DRAW!: One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you is because you wear so many hats. You do a lot of different things, and you’re very entrepreneurial in that regard. A lot of times people who do character design just wear one hat.

STEPHEN SILVER: Definitely. I think a lot of it came from when I was young. I was on my own from when I was 18, and I feel like I had no choice.

DRAW!: You had no choice in terms of being very adaptable as a freelancer?

SS: Yep. I had no schooling or anything. I had no college, so for me it was like, “If I don’t do this, where else am I going to go?” I knew of animation studios, but I didn’t know it was really a profession, having no one to tell me that. So I was having to really adapt, and that’s why I had to keep doing different things.

DRAW!: You emigrated from Britain?

SS: Yeah, I came out when I was about ten years old. We all moved to San Diego. That’s why San Diego Comic-Con always feels like home. [laughs] DRAW!: You started out basically as a caricaturist working at the theme parks.

SS: I went through high school and was going to go to college, because that’s what my parents wanted. That’s what you do if you want to be anything, but I just didn’t have it in me. I ended up meeting someone who said, “Hey, they’re looking for caricature artists at Sea World.” “Oh, I’ll go apply for that.”

So I went in and applied for the job. I had never really done caricatures except in high school, but they needed to staff up artists, so they said, “Hey, we’ll train you. Come on in.” So that’s really where it started.

DRAW!: How old were you then?

SS: At that time I was 18, almost 19 years old.

DRAW!: How did they go about training you? You must have had some kind of portfolio for them to hire you, right?

SS: I didn’t. I was so green, I didn’t even know what a portfolio was. I had no guidance before that point. There was no one to tell me, “Hey, you need to put together a portfolio, and this is the structure. You need a résumé.” I was just going by the seat of my pants, so I just had a plastic bag and I threw some drawings in of caricatures I had done and some life drawings—anything I had. I showed up with this plastic bag with my 8½" x 11" drawings in it, and that was it. [laughter] It was an outside company. Sea World had hired a contractor who did caricatures, and they were the guys who hired me. They were artists, and they looked at my stuff and said, “Yeah, we think you can do it.” Again, my stuff wasn’t too polished at all, but they said, “We’ll show you some techniques, and we’ll show you

Artwork © Stephen Silver

what you need to do.” I just sat and really watched the guy who’d hired me draw caricatures all the time. I was soaking in all the information. Really, it was the best sort of schooling I could ever have had—one, just observing this guy, and two, being thrown out there to the wolves and doing it for eight to ten hours a day.

I was learning on the spot, trying to figure it out. You had people get up and walk away who hated their caricature, people who wouldn’t pay, people who would rip it up—everything. [Mike laughs] But what it did was give me a thick skin.

A lot of artists can be sensitive. If someone critiques their work, they don’t want to hear it and try to defend it. But I built up a thick skin to where I could take rejection very easily, so I had no fear.

DRAW!: On the job watching the other artists, did they say, “Here’s the theory of how you can play with shapes,” or—.

SS: Yes, they did. They had a little class they had put together, and said, “Draw from the eyes, then draw the nose, and start to think about these philosophies,” which came from this guy named Steve Fassen, who really started the whole theme park caricature thing many, many years ago. He had many artists work through him, and they all figured out techniques, and a lot of these guys ended up starting their own caricature concession stands, and then they trained artists.

And that’s what I thought I wanted to do. I was going into that business myself where I was going to start opening up theme park operations and hiring artists, because I got to that point where I knew how to manage it, I knew how to draw, I knew how to train people. It was pretty fun.

DRAW!: It’s an interesting discussion also, because I’m sure you’ve seen that art school is so expensive now. You have a lot people actually advising people that you need the skill, but you don’t need to go to art school. You

don’t need to go through the traditional path of incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt. You didn’t do that.

Your student debt is pretty minimal. [laughs] SS: Yeah, absolutely nothing. I’ve never had a student loan in my life. And I really agree with that. A lot of these schools are big businesses. They draw in kids, take their money, and spit them out. And I’m of the firm belief that your portfolio is your diploma. It doesn’t matter what school you go to—I don’t care if you went to Cal Arts or anywhere—it all comes down to how well you can draw.

And it’s always been that way, even with the old illustrators of the past. All they had was the black resource books the art directors had on their desks. Each artist—some of them were represented by agents, some not—had one page with their artwork, their name, and their phone number, and that was it. This was before email. And the art director would make the decision based on the level of quality of their work and say, “This is good stuff. I’m going to hire this guy.”

It still holds true today. Even though the system is outdated, it’s still the same thing. You go apply at an animation studio or any job anywhere, all anyone cares about is how well you can draw. I’ve seen a lot of portfolios from art students, and I can pull some stuff out and say, “Oh boy, you didn’t go there, did

Artwork © Stephen Silver

you?” and I can tell they did. They’re four years graduated, and their work is just horrific. “What did you learn while you were there?”

It’s horrible, and it frustrates me a lot. It’s part of the reason I’ve decided to open up my own brick-and-mortar school here in L.A., because I can teach you in eight weeks what you can learn in four years, and give you the tools. It’s all about self-improvement. The artist really has to be the one to put in the effort, because their effort is going to determine their outcome. It’s not the art school.

DRAW!: I agree. That’s something I say all the time. I just had our beginning of the semester, and I tell them every year, “The person who has the most to do with whether you succeed or fail as an artist is you. It isn’t anybody else.”

So, like I said, I was very interested in talking to you, because you’re doing the school. The other character designers I know—or you think back in the day of Alex Toth—fall somewhere within the gearworks of the studio, and don’t tend to be as entrepreneurial. If you worked at Hanna-Barbera, they had the same three or four guys design everything. They had Ed Benedict, Alex Toth, and the guy who designed Scooby Doo, Iwao Takamoto.

The business has changed quite a bit in the last ten years, even in the last five years, as far as the structures of the studios and farming things out overseas. That’s why I was interested in the fact that you self-publish books, you have an iPhone app… most guys don’t do that. They’re like, “I’ll get in at Disney and swing the axe until they can’t use me anymore.”

SS: Yeah, and to me that’s a stressful sort of path. I don’t think it’s personally as rewarding. I just wanted to do so many different things, and quite honestly I would get bored very easily. I can’t just do the same thing all the time. To keep my excitement, I need to come up with new ideas and be creative, and that’s part of the whole creative process for me. I can’t do the routine thing. I get so much more enjoyment and fulfillment from creating my own things, owning my own things, and just teaching.

And you’re right, the model is changing in many ways, and I don’t want to keep doing work-for-hire, piecemeal stuff where you get your little bit of money to design, and then someone else owns the franchise, and you’re creating everything for them, and you’re just waiting for that next job, and hopefully that next job will come. It’s always chasing other people’s ideas, and for me that’s why it was important to keep trying other things. I realized we live in the greatest time ever, where if I want to create an app, I can do it. If I want to publish my own book, I can do it. That’s what’s exciting to me, and that’s why I do it.

DRAW!: So you’ve never had the desire to immerse yourself deep somewhere like Pixar?

SS: No, no. I would go insane after a while, because I know the reality of the whole production process. I know a lot of people who are embedded in that, from Dreamworks to Pixar, and they’re not that happy. They’ve got the title, and if that fulfills

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(above and right) Hulkamania never looked better. (below) Stephen gets barbaric. © Stephen Silver

them, saying, “I work here,” and if that works for them, that’s great. But I know the crunch time, the amount of work that is required—honestly, a lot of these guys don’t have a life. I don’t know if the sacrifice is really worth it just to be able to say, “Oh, I work at this place,” and that’s what make you unique? I don’t know.

I don’t want that. I don’t want to have to work that amount of hours for other people all the time. I mean, I did it. I had to do it. It was very important, and I’m glad I did, but I realized, “You know, this isn’t as fulfilling. I want to create my own hours. I want to do what I want, when I want. I want to watch my kids grow up. I want to be there in the middle of the afternoon when my daughter has a ballet performance.”

I guess that’s what every individual has to find out for themself—what is it that makes them excited? I tried it. I was at Sony Feature Animation, and I tried it, but it was stressful.

DRAW!: Stressful in that you were flying under one flag for a while, or the office politics, or—?

SS: It was all of that. You’re just working for them always wondering what was going to happen next. Everyone in the studio is in that position where, “This is great! I’m working on this project, but what’s going to happen six months from now when it’s over?” It sucks that you can’t just be present and focus on the task at hand. And you have those deadlines you have to meet, and there are expectations. For some people, it works for them.

When I do workshops and things, I ask people, “Do you see yourself as a Walt Disney, or do you see yourself as a Disney employee?” Not that there’s anything wrong with being a Disney employee. It’s a beautiful thing. But the point is, do you see yourself as someone who needs to be told where to go and what to do, and just show up and do what’s required of you and go home, or are you the sort of person who wants to create your own brand? Can you identify that within yourself? Because I think someone who is entrepreneurial is miserable in a desk job and working in that sort of environment, and vice versa. Identifying which type of person you are will make for a grander life.

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Artwork © Stephen Silver

DRAW!: Working in-house, did you find at first, “Oh, this is really cool,” and then it changed because of the way the ship was run.

SS: Exactly. I had to go through that experience to really realize, “I’m not this type of person. I’m really more of a guy that needs to do stuff on my own.” That’s why it’s important to experience it, and take the jobs you may not end up being so happy with, just to learn if you enjoy it, because sometimes you’ll never know until you try it. You might get into a job and find, “I really do dig this. I feel comfortable here.” And some people find it very stressful to create their own thing.

“You mean I have to do this on my own?” That is very scary for a lot of people, that fear of the unknown. “How am I going to pick up business?” There are constant questions, and it’s very stressful for a lot of people.

DRAW!: How did you go from the theme park into doing animation?

SS: I always realized I didn’t have many contacts. I didn’t make connections in art school, so I had to find some outside source.

I would learn about different art groups and clubs that would meet maybe once a month. One I joined was the Southern California Cartoonists Society, which met once a month, and they

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usually had a guest speaker come in. That was a great way for me to meet other professional working cartoonists, learn about what they did, and hear their stories. And every time someone would come in to speak, I would bring in my portfolio.

I met some guy who was a storyboard artist on a show called Freakazoid at Warner Brothers. He said, “You’ve got some potential. Keep in contact.” I didn’t really think about it, and it wasn’t until about a year later that I thought, “I’m going to get in contact with that guy again and see if I can show him my portfolio and get some feedback.” So I contacted him and he said, “Come on up to the studio.”

I went up to Warner Brothers and showed him my work, and he said, “You know what? They’re actually looking for a character designer on a show called Histeria. They just laid off one of their character designers, and they need another one. Let me take your portfolio to them.” He took me upstairs, we dropped it off—the director wasn’t there. I got a call a couple of days later. They liked my stuff and wanted me to take a test. So I went back to L.A., and they wanted me to design a few different characters in the style of the show. I submitted that, and the rest is history.

I was back in San Diego, and I got a call from the line producer. She said, “We liked your test, and we’d love to

offer you a job.” I was like, “Ooh, this is crazy!” At the end I was about to hang up.

I said, “Okay, I’ll be there next week.” She said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t you want to know how much you’re going to make?” “Oh man! Sure.” I didn’t even care. I was just like, “Oh man! I’m going to be a Warner Brothers animation artist!” It was very exciting, and that’s how I got my foot in the door.

From there I kept working at my skill, trying to get better at drawing. I was drawing in my sketchbook at lunchtime. I was taking some life drawing classes on the side. I was even taking some character design classes on the side.

DRAW!: Where were you taking these classes?

SS: There was a place called The Associates in Art. It’s long closed now, but it was a private school where you paid for different workshops. They were eight-, nine-week courses, so that was great.

DRAW!: So you had your day job, but you were going to the art gym on the side.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. And I was still doing caricatures on the side. I was living in L.A. and driving back to San Diego every weekend because people would hire me to do private parties. I was doing bar mitzvahs and weddings and trade shows on the side.

When I was doing caricatures at the theme parks, I’d started my own company called Silvertoons, where I was starting to do freelance work—caricatures and cartoons. Even though I was working at Warner Brothers, I still had that job. That was great, because not only was it bringing in extra income, but it was part of that entrepreneurial drive where I had to keep getting business. And then I kept seeing people getting laid off in the industry and everyone panicking all the time. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!

What’s going on?” “Don’t get too comfortable in your chair, man. These jobs don’t last forever.” I was like, “Thank God I’m doing my other stuff.”

That’s what made me realize I’ve got to keep doing my own stuff. You might only be on a job for six months to a few years.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, if you’re on The Simpsons, it might be 23 years. But the reality is, you’re not on that job forever, and I kept seeing people scramble when it came to layoff time. The panic! They’re selling their stuff on eBay. They’re selling their crew jacket. They’re selling their Emmys. People

Pages from Stephen’s Character Design Shuffle app.

Character Design Shuffle © Stephen Silver

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were doing whatever they could to make money when they got laid off, hoping there would be another job. I wasn’t going to live like that. I said, “What else could I do?”

That’s when I started to get into the book publishing.

I thought, “This might be cool. I would sort of like to do a book. But nobody is approaching me about doing a book, so I guess I should do it on my own.” I’ve always gone into things with a naivety. I’ll just try it to see what happens.

I published my first book, and it went really well, and I thought, “Wow! Interesting,” so I did another one and another one. And as technology was changing, I started to move into the app world. “What are these apps all about?” That’s how I’ve always been. I just try things and see what happens. And I’ve failed at a lot of things I’ve tried.

DRAW!: What would be something you’ve failed at that you would change how you approached it or not done it at all?

SS: Sometimes it’s just getting into partnerships with certain people that just don’t work out. One of the things I tried, I was in Italy, and I met this great Italian artist who made puppets— these really cool things called Morbid Zoombies. They were really freaky looking zombie stuffed animals. They were so cool, and so different, and so unique, I asked her, “Listen, would you be interested in trying to bring these to the United States?” She was just selling them at street fairs. “I think there could be a market for this in the States. Zombies are very popular.”

So I brought a few of them back and we tried to build up the name, get a trademark for it. I started approaching all these manufacturing companies, and it was so hard. Not only the cost, but I thought it would be like book printing, where I’d pay four dollars to get one made and retail it for another price. But getting into toy design is a whole ’nother beast—knowing the restrictions, and dealing with how the Zoombies were made was a choking hazard, and so on. I dumped a lot of money in getting the trademark and creating a web site, and I got the biggest toy distributor involved, but I realized at the end of the day that we both were going to end up making about three cents on each one, and it just didn’t make practical sense to continue.

I exhausted every avenue, and I learned a lot along the way. When I say I failed, in a sense I never really fail, because I learn so much with each thing I get involved in, which is always a benefit. It helps me for the next venture.

A page from Stephen’s PoseBook: A Fundamental Guide for Artistic Development app.

PoseBook © Stephen Silver

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DRAW!: Do you think that because you’re doing all these other things that the people you work for look at you differently?

SS: There was a case when I was working at Nickelodeon. They didn’t like the fact that I was asking for all this time off. I was going in treating it as, “I’m just working here. I’ve got my own business, and you guys are kind of secondary.” They didn’t really like that, but that was my mindset. “I really work for me, but I’m happy to be working here, because it’s animation and character design,” but they didn’t like the fact that I

was doing all this other stuff on the side. They didn’t really want me there, and that almost led to the end of one of the jobs I worked on there.

I was working on Penguins of Madagascar at the time, and it got to the point where they only needed one designer per show. They said, “Listen, we can’t justify keeping you around,” but they were getting irritated that I kept asking for days off because I was doing seminars here and workshops there.

DRAW!: You were freelancing while being on staff.

SS: Exactly. They weren’t too keen on that, even though there was nothing in my contract that said I couldn’t.

They want you in the seat working for them and not doing anything else. That’s their expectation.

DRAW!: You worked on Kim Possible and Clerks and Danny Phantom. Are you working on anything now?

SS: No. I still get contacted by the studios, though. I find myself a lot of times doing development work— stuff that never sees the light of day. The whole of last year I was working on Fairly Odd Parents for Nickelodeon, but I was doing it all from home. I’ve done a lot of commercial work in Australia and England. So I still do character design quite often if it sounds like a cool project, but a lot of times I find myself turning down a lot of work because I just don’t want to do it. “This doesn’t sound that fun to me.

I don’t want to create and develop this potential franchise for $3,000, $5,000.”

DRAW!: They’re giving you a buy-out, I suppose.

SS: Exactly, but it’s never for a large amount of money. They’re going to try to get it for as little as they can.

Doing commercials and things like that, it’s usually a one-time thing. They’re not turning those things into huge franchises. But with the major animation studios, they want to own everything.

I’m getting more involved in licensing now. I’ve worked out a few licensing deals with people where there are residuals and royalties. I like that more. I like coming up with an idea, designing it, and then knowing that it will potentially make me money long-term. It’s not just a one-time deal. Those are

the kinds of deals I’m looking to make now. Otherwise, I’ve worked with some smaller studios where I’ve charged a large amount of money based on the fact that I’m developing their franchise, and I’ll let them know that, and they can walk away.

If you want to be in this sort of situation, you have to be willing to walk away. That’s the biggest thing. If you’re willing to walk away, often times they’ll come back if they really believe in you and want your artwork. I’ve walked away from a lot of projects because they didn’t want to pay.

It’s not about being greedy in any shape of form.

It’s about the fact that these companies are going to benefit and take advantage of the artists where they can. I stand with the artist not being taken advantage of.

DRAW!: I agree. If you create Spongebob for them, they’re going to make a billion dollars off of it, but they’ll only pay you five bucks for designing him.

SS: Exactly. Even Disney Interactive and places like that, they want you to design these franchises, but they’ll pay you nothing for the apps. “We need you to design an aardvark, because we’re creating this game with a crocodile. Our budget is $1,500.” “Excuse me?” Then all of a sudden it turns into a multi-million dollar franchise.

A lot of people need the money, and they do it anyway. You just need to become more aware, more educated, and try to protect yourself and work out the best deal you can.

We need to be what I like to call art doctors. When you go to the doctor’s office, it’s because you’ve got a problem—a toothache, an earache. Even if you go to that Artwork © doctor for five minutes, he’s charging Stephen Silver your insurance $160 an hour or whatever he charges. He’s always going to get paid to fix your problem. Artists need to realize we’re art doctors. People come to us because they have a problem. They need a design, a comic book cover, whatever it may be. They’ve got a problem they can’t solve on their own. They need you. Whether you take five minutes to do it or 20 hours to do it, you need to be compensated for that. A lot of people will come to you and say, “Hey, man, can you do this for free? It’ll be great exposure.”

[Mike laughs] It’s crazy!

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(above and next page) Quick life drawing studies of various time limits, focusing on shapes and structure.

Artwork © Stephen Silver

I’ve educated myself through the years, I’ve gained a lot of experience, I’ve dealt with a lot of people, and now I just want to share that and try to let as many artists know as I can that it’s possible, so that artists can make good livings and find the path they want to take in life.

DRAW!: What are some of the design philosophies that you’ve carried through even the early days in the theme parks? Are there some general principles that you adhere to or work with every day?

SS: For me it’s always been about shapes. I’m always thinking about clarity and keeping my drawings open and clear.

Don’t get things bunched up. Let your drawings breathe. I use a lot of positive space and negative space in my designs, and I see a lot of times with designers that everything gets cluttered and compact, and there’s no real silhouette.

Construction is key. You have to have that foundation before you build up your shapes. It’s like when you’re building a house. You’re not going to buy all the chotchkies and drapes and furniture before you put in the foundation. Build a foundation, get the general shapes, and then start to add all the details afterwards instead of that high school way of drawing, where you render things to death when it’s not even thought out properly.

DRAW!: Because people tend to equate rendering with being good.

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SS: Exactly. Whereas we know that is not the reality.

DRAW!: You’ve talked about drawing from observation. The only way as artists we get it in our head is to actually draw it.

It’s interesting to see your life drawings and your lunchtime drawings. I take it you still keep that up?

SS: Yeah, I’m still doing it whenever I can. When I was at the studios, I would go all the time at lunch, but now that I’m at home, and I’m in the boondocks a bit, I don’t really get the opportunity to draw in my sketchbook as much. But anytime I’m travelling, and I travel a lot, I always have my sketchbook, and I’m maintaining that. And even when I’m not drawing, I’m still observing. I see people and go, “Wow, they’re interesting,” and I store it in my memory bank and it comes out in drawings.

I still go to life drawing. I try to go once a week. I think that’s essential, and that’s where a lot of my real freedom is. I love doing life drawing. There are no restrictions, no rules, no clients—it’s just you and the medium.

DRAW!: What’s your favorite medium for life drawing?

SS: It’s funny. I love using Prismacolor pencils—just a black Prismacolor or something. The reality is I have a bunch of different types of paper, and I have about seven or eight different art boxes—one of them is a pastel set, one is a charcoal set, one is a Prismacolor set—and I just grab anything. I don’t really

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have that specific one I choose over another, and I think that was a huge part of my growth was the experimentation where I tried everything. I just grab it, try it, and see what happens.

DRAW!: Do you get together with a regular group of people?

SS: It’s a group about 40 minutes from where I live. It’s really just a group of retired people. It’s not associated with any school. It’s just a group of people who want to draw. There are only about ten people who show up each week. We usually do some short poses—up to about 20 minutes is the longest pose we do. You pay $15 when you show up, and that’s it.

DRAW!: How do you feel about a paperless studio? Do you work on a Cintiq? If you’re in the studio and they decide to go paperless, you get trained to use those programs, but if you’re freelance you have the extra pressure on you to use the right programs. I haven’t done boards in a couple of years, so if I was going to board now, I’d have to go out and buy Storyboard Pro, because that’s what everyone is using. Do you have the same issues doing character design?

SS: No. It’s funny, I was working at Nickelodeon when the Cintiq first came out, and they started bringing them into

Stephen’s life drawings range from caricature…

Artwork © Stephen Silver

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the studio. I just got used to it, and I bought a Cintiq right away. I love Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop, and I have my animation desk in my studio. I go between doing traditional sometimes and using the computer, but I find I’m using the computer a lot for production work. It makes more sense because it’s easy to make changes. But when I’m working on my personal stuff, I prefer to work in my sketchbook, just so I have the original.

DRAW!: How do you see globalization affecting what you do, because now they can hire someone in Timbuktu to design for them?

SS: I definitely see it going towards that route. The jobs will become more scarce. With things going overseas, you’ve seen how that’s affected some of the major studios from Reel FX to DreamWorks—the layoffs. I think if you’ve just been trained to do computer animation, you’re in trouble. If that’s all you do, you’re in trouble, because they can get it done for a lot less overseas. DreamWorks is building a huge facility in China. I don’t know if they’re finished with it, but 10,000 artists or more are being trained how to do all of this. Those jobs are starting to fall to the wayside.

As long as there are kids on this planet, there are going to be cartoons. The Saturday morning cartoons and the animated features and the video games are never going to go away.

They make too much money. It’s big business. But the actual art jobs themselves, even storyboard artists—right now a lot of the Eastern culture can’t quite latch onto the American sensibilities, but they’re learning how.

There are a lot of supervisors going over there training them.

DRAW!: And we export our culture, so a lot of those kids are watching the same things we are.

SS: Exactly. They’re growing up knowing about the Marvel characters, and knowing about American stories and how they work, so it’s going to become easier. Ten years from now, the kids watching this stuff will be getting these jobs, and they’re going to get it.

Then you see things like what happened recently with Planes, the Pixar movie. That was going to go straight to DVD, but they decided to turn it into a movie, and they did it for $50 million, which is nothing. Most movies are costing $200 million, and they’re saying, “We had success.” I think it did okay at the box office, but with these movies they don’t even care about the box office as much as the merchandising.

…To illustrative…

Artwork © Stephen Silver

That’s where the longevity is. So, “$200 million or $50 million.

Hey, $50 million sounds pretty good.” Plus it looked good, and the majority of it was done overseas.

That’s why I’m a firm believer in entrepreneurship and building your own brand and creating something where you can deal directly with the consumer. The consumer is the one with all the control. They’re the one who makes the choice whether they want to buy this drawing or that drawing, this book or that book, this T-shirt or that T-shirt. It doesn’t matter where they get it. And more stuff is going online. I can get whatever I want online, and I can go directly to the artist I like.

You see things like Kickstarter, where you get funding from people who like what you do. It’s the same way that Yelp works.

Nike can’t tell me they have the greatest shoe anymore. I’m going to go on Yelp, and someone is going to say, “I love this specific brand,” and it becomes word of mouth. When you talk about how great you are, no one listens to that. They don’t trust it. Whenever you’re going to buy a product, you go to Amazon and read the reviews. If more than ten percent of the reviews say the product sucks and broke after the first week, you won’t buy it.

But if all those reviews say, “This is great. I love it,” you’ll buy it.

This is why I think it’s important for artists to start getting into that creative mindset, no matter what it is. Whether it’s through teaching or book publishing, whatever it might be,

working directly with someone who wants to be associated with you is the future.

DRAW!: You were talking in the beginning about your virtual school, and now you’re opening a brick-and-mortar school?

SS: Yeah, I’m opening my own brick-and-mortar school because I feel there’s something very special missing with the one-on-one interaction. There’s nothing greater than working with someone one-on-one. “I’m having trouble drawing the side of that nose. Can you help me?” And, boom, you can help them straight away. There’s something special about that live teaching. As you know as a teacher too, there’s something great about that, which is why I want to do this.

All I really want to do now is teach. Honestly, if I never get hired to do character design for a company again… I just want to share. I’ve gained a lot of knowledge and experience over the years, and there’s a feeling of excitement and passion that pours out of me when I teach. I just feel like, “This is what life is all about. This is fun.”

DRAW!: You also reaffirm your own principles when you teach. And the thing about teaching is that you get people from all different levels and different angles, so it’s never exactly the same.

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SS: For sure. It’s never the same. And that’s what’s exciting too. You’re always working with someone else’s level, someone else’s style, because you don’t want to create clones. This one may be very illustrative. This one may be very cartoony.

So it’s always a challenge, which is very fun.

Also, watching the students’ reactions to it and watching them grow and seeing something click with them. And I want to teach the business of art. I think that’s huge, and that’s missing in a lot of schools. I want to teach people, and depending on where they’re at, tell them how to find their path.

Everyone has their own journey, but everyone needs to find

what that path is going to be, and I get excited about that. I get excited about trying to steer someone in the right direction and saying, “Consider this route. Try going in that direction and see what happens.”

DRAW!: I agree. And one of the primary thrusts of the magazine is talking about the business side of the business. The classic stories of the old days are guys getting screwed over, making bad business decisions and not having a lawyer. Bob Kane did better than Siegel and Shuster because he had a lawyer. It sounds like Kane didn’t invent or perfect most of the great stuff we associate with Batman, but his name is still on it and he still got money and screen credit. Some artists just aren’t good businessmen.

SS: A lot of times you need that agent, and you have to identify that about yourself. “This is just not me. I’m too right-brained. I really need an agent to help balance that.” It’s all about the balance.

But you’re right, so many of those oldtimers got screwed. So many of them died broke. It’s sad what they went through. Animation today is a young man’s industry. You don’t see too many old-timers in the studios.

DRAW!: I suppose not. I made a very conscious decision myself when I started working for Warner Brothers. I was on staff, but from home. I thought about moving to L.A. I actually priced houses. Then I decided I did not want to go and work in a studio and deal with office politics and all that stuff. All the work I’ve done on staff was freelance. I’m sure if I’d moved to L.A.—a lot of the guys I started with on Superman have gone off and become directors and moved their way up to become producers. If that was the path I’d been interested in, then that was the path I should have walked, but I was never interested in that.

SS: That’s the thing you have to identify. If you’re lucky enough to know that—some guys end up in that path and go, “Dang!”

DRAW!: You get trapped.

SS: Someone said there are two types of animation artists: Those trying to get into the industry and those trying to get out. [Mike laughs]

…To cartoony…

Artwork © Stephen Silver

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DRAW!: There are so many guys I know in comics and animation, and the guys in comics want to do animation, and the guys in animation want to do comics. I’m sure you’ve seen that. Once they’re in, they decide they really want to do something else.

SS: Making that decision on my end, like you made on your end, “I just want to do my own stuff. This is what I do know. I need to do my own thing.” By working at home, I can say, “Today I’m going to work on this. Tomorrow I’m going to try acrylic painting.” That’s the beauty of not being restricted to sitting at a desk at someone’s studio working eight, ten hours a day, working weekends, and all that.

DRAW!: One of the things that turned me off after a while of boarding was that certain studios would abuse you as a freelancer by not giving you the work on time, not giving you everything you need to do your board, and then expecting these changes, and suddenly you’re doing twice the work of someone in the studio. It was ridiculous. If Kickstarter had existed back when you started at Disney, would you have even gone to work for Disney, or would you have tried to do your own thing right from the beginning?

SS: I think I still would have wanted the experience. There’s nothing that can replace the experience I had by being in the studios. I was a lot younger, and that’s the path I think anyone should take: learn and be an apprentice and work for other people, gain knowledge, and then go out on your own. That’s what the real journey of life is to me.

At first you need that nurturing. You need that in order to grow, and once you start to get your legs, you don’t need as much attention anymore. So I don’t think I would have gone the self-publishing route at the very beginning. I did want to work for the studios. I did want to work at Disney, but I also got to that point where I realized it was time to move on. Now I can train people and teach them and give them the opportunity to get in the door and make their paths.

DRAW!: Have you had any success with previous students going on to make their way in the industry?

SS: Absolutely, quite a few. I have a couple of former students at Pixar, a few over at DreamWorks. One of my students later went to Cal Arts and got a student Academy Award. Students have contacted me from different parts of the world saying, “I just wanted to let you know I took your course, and I just got hired at this studio.” They keep me updated and in the loop, and that’s really rewarding because that’s the goal.

Some people who study with me, of course, do nothing.

Again, it’s their effort that determines the outcome. If they’re not willing to continually practice and put in the time, how can they get anywhere?

…To highly stylized.

Artwork © Stephen Silver

DRAW!: Or if they’re thin-skinned and can’t take rejection.

SS: Exactly. There are plenty of people who give up because they keep getting rejected. But that’s why I like the new business model of you creating your own brand. And everyone needs an artist for something. There are so many opportunities out there. They’re around every corner if you want them.

You just have to focus on it.

DRAW!: When will the school open?

SS: I was hoping to have it open by August, but now I’m pushing it to January. The biggest dilemma I’m facing is parking.

I’ve been rejected about five different times by a few different cities. I find the perfect space, and I go to the city to try to get the usage variance—again, this is all a learning lesson. I can tell anyone now how to lease a building. If anyone wants to learn how to lease or buy a building, I can tell you what to do through all of my trials and errors. [laughter] But this is very important to me, so I won’t give up. [Ed.—Update! The Silver Drawing Academy now has a home in Sun Valley, Calif., and is now

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Artwork © Stephen Silver

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Artwork © Stephen Silver

accepting enrollment. For more information visit their website: www.silverdrawingacademy.com.]

DRAW!: So you find a building you like, but the city won’t let you have enough parking?

SS: Exactly. I’m only allowed so many spaces per thousand square feet of space. They say, “In order to do what you want to do, you need to have 28 parking spots.” They don’t count street parking. If there’s a parking lot, they don’t count that. There are a lot of restrictions that go into it. Even though I’m only going to operate during the evenings, they still give me a lot of grief.

DRAW!: It seems like they’re shooting themselves in the foot. They could have another business, which is better for them.

SS: Exactly, and what’s so amazing to me is there are all these businesses that are closing their doors, all these empty buildings up for lease. You think you’d want to bring revenue into the city. I’m going to be a taxpayer, and I’m going to bring art to the city, but they don’t think like that. It’s all by the book.

“This is what the code says. You’ve got to have this many parking spots.” But I’ll be looking at more properties tomorrow. The persistence will pay off in time.

I’ll just be taking 25 students at a time just a couple nights a week, and then I’ll do some weekend workshops.

DRAW!: And you’ll teach all the classes yourself?

SS: Yeah, I’m going to teach them myself. Sometimes I’ll get some other instructors for the weekend workshops, but I’ll teach the classes myself.

DRAW!: Are you going to keep up the online side?

SS: I’ll still do that. I love teaching online. I just want to teach live and do workshops as well. I’ve been traveling around the globe doing lectures and workshops. I was just in Marceline, Missouri, where Disney grew up. They’ve got a museum, so I was out there doing a talk. Next month I’m going back to Italy for a few days to give a talk at a school there. In a couple of weeks I’ll be in L.A. giving a talk to a bunch of Japanese students. Teaching is my main focus now.

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Silver Linings sketchbook A Stephen Silver gallery

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Captain 3-D © The Joe Simon Estate and the Jack Kirby Estate.

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oreshortening is an element or condition of perspective that creates a distortion of an object as it comes forward towards your eye. As the object or part of the figure (arm, leg, etc.) comes forward, it appears to be “shortened.” The depth of the object that is coming toward your eye appears shorter than the distance across the object, or its width.

It’s something that happens in almost every view of the figure, especially dynamic views of the figure that move away from or forward toward our POV in perspective.

In superhero comics, it’s a condition of the dramatic and dynamic figure poses that push or play with the perspective and camera angle to create dynamic figure poses.

In life drawing and figure drawing there is almost always some arm, or leg, or even torso, that is in an angle that creates foreshortening for the artist. This often creates an drawing problem for the artist that trips them up unless careful observation is applied. One of the key problems lies in the artist drawing not what they “see,” but what they “know.” This creates a battle in the mind of the artist and can cause drawing issues and mistakes. By this I mean the artist makes an error by drawing the foreshortened part of the body at the length it would be in the non-foreshortened view (the length or proportion they know the body part to be in a non-foreshortened view).

This is more common in life drawing than in figures drawn from imagination or invention, like in comics or animation, but the ability to draw the arm, leg, etc., of a drawn figure in a convincingly foreshortened view will help make the figure both convincing and dynamic.

There is usually some part of the figure that is foreshortened in every view of the figure. This can be an arm, or leg, but we deal with this in dynamic views of the head as well.

In the figure that jumps away or toward the camera, there is always some foreshortening, and many, many artists use this as a tool and play it up to make the figures and angles dramatic and dynamic. With some artists, like Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, and Gene Colan, this dynamic play of perspective and foreshortening is a hallmark of their work.

Once grasped and understood, concepts like foreshortening can be great assets in an artist’s stable of skills to use in making their work more dynamic and interesting. In action scenes or superhero figures, foreshortening is one of the principle ways to make the figure pop, jump, or leap off the twodimensional plane of the comic page.

There are a few approaches an artist can take to help break down and deal with the issue of foreshortening that can help solve this tricky problem:

Breaking the figure down into separate forms

The best way to start is to break the figure down into its simplest and biggest basic forms: the head, chest, and torso. By keeping the forms simple and geometric at this stage, it’s easier to see them in perspective and deal with the foreshortening of any part of the body.

(above and bottom left) In these sketches Mike demonstrates the stacking principle when drawing an arm. (below) Bret puts the principle into action in this Batman: Shadow of the Bat page.

Batman © DC Comics

Stacking

Next, you can stack the parts of the figure that are foreshortened. Build the figure by stacking the forms on top of each other toward you or forward in perspective.

It is important here to not get caught up in the details of anatomy yet, but to stay with the concepts of the bigger masses or forms. In the process of stacking, often some parts may be partially hidden, obscured, or blocked behind the closest part of the figure as it comes forward toward the eye.

In this page (at right), penciled by Bret and inked by me, you can see how in almost every panel Bret is pushing the perspective and creating a great foreshortening on some of the figures due to the way he places the camera. The first panel is a great example of stacking the forms first, and drawing specific anatomy second.

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On this page (at right), also by Bret and inked by me, there is even a greater use of foreshortening in the last three panels, but especially in the second panel on the gun and the student’s face. Shot choice and where you place the camera can really push the dramatics of a scene, because you can put the reader’s eye in a place in would not normally be.

The Crash Test Dummy, or the Artist Mannequin A great aid in drawing the foreshortened view is to use the artist mannequin. This allows you to not only position the figure in the pose you desire, but to also turn it and observe the foreshortening happen as you turn the figure or pose it.

The Camera

Batman © DC Comics

Another good aid in capturing dynamic angles and foreshortening is the camera. The camera will help in creating dynamic angles and capturing light, shadows, and details, but it also come with its own issues in how it distorts perspective compared to how our eye sees things.

There are no hard and fast rules here, as many artists use the camera as a great aid and tool, but without solid volumetric drawing and understanding of the figure, the use of the camera will not help solve the issue of perspective or give the artist the real knowledge they are after. It is also a good idea to shoot multiple views of the figure whenever possible to help really understand what is happening to the figure in a particular view.

In review Stack the chest and pelvis as simple forms.

As the body tilts forward towards the artist’s eye, the forms shorten, especially in the middle of the body.

Drawing through the forms will help build or stack them in perspective.

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In this “Lobo” layout for the first issue of Weird Worlds, where we start off the story in a dramatic splash of the dead Czarnian, I wanted to choose a dramatic and low angle that would push the perspective and the drama of the scene, and that of course meant that the view would give me real dramatic foreshortening. Here is a good example of the “stacking” principle at work, as I drew Lobo’s left leg in a extremely foreshortened view. To do this I drew in Lobo’s torso on the ground plane, and then drew his thigh, then his lower leg, and then the foot, sketching and building as the leg came forward. I played around and adjusted things until it “felt right.”

Lobo © DC Comics

I worked lightly, and you can still see some of the sketching in of the leg as I searched for and adjusted the forms in perspective. To build a solid figure, you should draw through the forms in a sculptural way. I goosed this pose a bit to give this a dramatic perspective.

The use of a camera would not give me the same effect here. This is where an artist’s eye is superior to that of an optical lens.

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Often referred to as the “Michaelangelo of comics,” the late John Buscema here shows us why he earned this moniker in this dramatic splash from his signature run on Wolverine.

The dramatic lighting, as well as the foreshortening on Wolverine’s figure, especially his right leg and hand, give the figure a real weight. Compare the weight of his figure to that of the girl in his arm. You can really feel the weight of those adamantium bones of his compared to that of the girl.

Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.

In this page from a fill-in issue I drew a few years back, there is an extreme foreshortening of Superman’s figure in the first panel. Again, here is an example of the stacking of the figure to build it in perspective. Even though there are parts of the figure turned at such a foreshortened view that they are no longer visible, they are still there, and I need to build them into my drawing. Almost every single figure on this page has some foreshortening.

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Superman © DC Comics

In this next page from Superman/Batman, again there is dramatic perspective in every panel, so there is a lot of foreshortening in these figures as a result. I again employed the drawing-through and stacking principles here, and you can still see evidence of my underdrawing, including the orthogonal guidelines for the perspective.

Superman © DC Comics

Another page of aerial views with flying figures means perspective and foreshortening. One of the rules I have always used to help me with foreshortening is the idea that the more something is turned directly toward you, the less you see of the middle of it. In the case of an arm, you see the hand and forearm, since the forearms, especially on heroes, are pretty big, but you might not see the middle of the arm, or the biceps, but you will see the chest.

A good exercise is to stand in from of a mirror and raise your arm directly toward you. Move it side to side, etc., and notice which parts tend to get blocked or hidden.

Solar © Random House, Inc.

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neal adams

This Brave and the Bold page by Neal Adams was drawn just a short time before the X-Men page below, and Adams is employing some of the perspective and foreshortening ideas here, especially using the low camera angle which creates monumental figures and dramatic angles, but at Marvel he developed even more as a stylist and really cut loose.

By the time Adams started working for Marvel, he was in full artist stride from his days on the Ben Casey newspaper strip and his first run at DC on “Batman” and “Deadman.” This X-Men page shows Adams was really pushing the page designs, as well as choosing superdramatic angles on his figures which created dramatic perspectives and foreshortening.

I always viewed this as his way of trying to create work at Marvel that was equal to the work of Jack Kirby, John Buscema, and Gil Kane. Adams twists and breaks the rules of true perspective to dramatic effect here— again stressing the old and proven adage that rules are made to be broken—but first know the rules!

Batman © DC Comics X-Men © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Gil Kane was one of the most dramatic figure artists of all time. This promo piece for his Star Hawks newspaper strip features all the hallmarks of his dynamic figure work with a highly stylized knowledge of anatomy which he pushes and expresses through a dynamic use of perspective and foreshortening.

Star Hawks © NEA, Inc.

Jack Kirby was for me the greatest cartoonist ever and one of the best artists of the 20th century. His work was a tour de force of creativity and fantastic drawing. Every panel here has a dynamic perspectival quality to it. Everything is distorted in a fantastic way on what is just an average page. This is the hallmark of a great artist when he can bend, break, or invent any rule in his process of creating art. The foreshortening in each figure, but especially in the last two panels, adds to the dramatic spooky quality of the page.

The Demon © DC

Comics

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Dexter’s Laboratory © Cartoon Network

These same rules or ideas can be applied to any style of drawing or cartooning, even something as extreme as this page I drew on Dexter’s Lab. The same stacking principle was used to push the perspective to a crazy, dramatic effect.

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Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.

On this page from Wolverine penciled

by Doug Braithwaite, there is a lot of realistic drawing and rendering, as well as dynamic perspective which creates foreshortening as a result. Every single figure on this page has some part in foreshortening, and this adds a great sense of realistic and dynamic space that projects the figures forward or back, giving a great sense of depth that creates great drama.

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Cinder & Ashe © DC Comics

José Luis García-López is one of the greatest artists and pencilers of the past 40 years in comics. He does everything great, and this pages shows just how well he does it. Great, clear staging on the figures, and fantastic use of perspective and foreshortening that gives not only a sense of drama and activates the entire page, but gives a great sense of realism and grace, though he is pushing the camera around.

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This is the most instructive drawing about “live” sight accuracy and the frequent need to ignore literal, known fact to make the drawing “feel” more visually accurate. The only difference between the two is a slight enlargement of her extended left arm. The first drawing is literally correct in terms of size, but the enlarged arm and hand conveys a more convincing sense of depth.

This is a case of drawing what you see instead of what you know.

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This is a chart of the “stacking” conception of simplifying what you see into flat patterns of receding depth, numbered here from 1 to 9. Squinting one eye closed helps a great deal with this technique. Temporarily losing 3-D perception helps you to accurately measure the shape and dimensions of each “flattened piece” and arrange them correctly to create a convincing sense of overlapping forms. Then return to using both eyes to render subtleties of edges, textures, details of forms, etc.

I did this drawing of a model’s steeply foreshortened feet as a demonstration of foreshortening in an art class. In the chart you can see how I “reimagined” the forms as a “stack” of approximate planes that were either facing my eye, or receding away (indicated in gray).

After this overall simplification of shapes felt accurate, I could concentrate on carefully drawing each form of this complicated view.

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This pose called for a very gentle, subtle indication of foreshortening. You can see in the charts how delicate the shifting angles are as the figure recedes from my vantage point at an oblique rather than dramatic angle.

Batman © DC Comics

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Supergirl © DC Comics

Hawkgirl © DC Comics

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Supergirl © DC Comics

Wonder Woman © DC Comics

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A forced perspective view such as this, useful for adding drama, almost always requires exaggerated foreshortening, shown most obviously here in the Scarecrow’s arms and hands.

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Joker, Scarecrow, Two-Face © DC Comics

X-Men © Marvel Characters, Inc.

In this pan, the car goes through various stages of foreshortening as it approaches the camera and then recedes from it.

Batman Beyond © DC Comics

The first and last panels here use foreshortening to heighten the drama of the storytelling, especially the last scene, shown from the clown’s point of view. Placing the viewer in the clown’s position adds intensity to the threatening Bruce Wayne.

Batman © DC Comics

The dramatically exaggerated foreshortening here is used to create suspense. Even without knowing the context of the narrative, this extreme angle tells the viewer something unpleasant is likely to happen when Batman lifts that Scarecrow head. Look how large Batman’s hands are compared to his head!

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UNDER REVIEW CASE SENSITIVE

S

o you’ve finally made it. Or if you made it a long time PRISMACOLOR PREMIER 24-SET ago, here you are again. At the big con, at the exhibitor’s ART MARKERS AND TRAVEL booth or table. With the masses lined up to your right, CASE (w/ extra 6-marker set of and they all want sketches. They all want color commissions. brush/fine nibbed art markers) All you have to craft these masterpieces with is a sloppy pile of art supplies… ah! What are you gonna WHAT IS IT? do about that? Do you have a loose bag of My column this time is more a review of an random markers you’ve cobbled together organizational system than just the tools included. from years in the trenches? Looseys from I’ve been a long-time user of Prismacolor Art your table-mate from last year’s show Markers, and anyone who’s ever been to my studio who let some warm grey 70-percents roll can attest that there are markers everywhere. I reunder the table out of his memory and ceived, maybe 15 years ago, the big momma Prisinto your possession? Have you ever cut macolor marker set with over 250 markers, and your hand digging around in a scrap heap after the modular stacking system that came in the of art supplies? Is this you? box collapsed, the markers became free agents in Welcome, all and sundry. I return to my space, hiding and living all over the place. As the pages of DRAW! with a stylish and much as I try to contain them, they get away from sly flourish of my cape, and speed lines me. The older version of the Prismas, literally got to boot. I am your Crusty Critic, your away from me—and that’s something that I will czar of cartooning supplies, the Zephyr remark on as an improvement to the new models. of Zip-a-tone, the Irredeemable IdentiAs I’ve exhibited at comic book conventions fier of India Inks. And I am here to help the past season, I’ve found myself paring down get you past that 4:00 a.m. hallucinaon my travel rig, just for the simple case of not tion during a deadline all-night bender. wanting to carry a bunch of unneeded supplies (Your Crusty Critic once swore he saw with me, and am guilty of having a plastic shoean opossum run across his desk—alas, box full of markers, pencils, white-out correction there was no opossum.) I am on your YOU’RE SO FINE: This case comes pre-loaded with 24 pens, waterbrushes loaded with ink, and a very, side, o’ bleary-eyed reader! usable dual-ended markers in very random clutch of markers that I just scooped So back to our scenario—you are at colors you’ll probably use more up from the drawers of my studio and tossed in the comic book convention, and you need than once. This set comes with a to keep your supplies orderly and within chisel-tip, and on the other size, the box. Even more recently, I wind up taking the same box filled with the same supplies I wish I arm’s reach. What’s your play? a fine-tip which is a lot thicker than the old Prismacolor Fines. had edited after the last show.

In this entry, I review:

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Props: The Prismacolor case transforms into different positions for ease of use.

“Man, I really wish I had a yellow. All of my sketches were done in a peachy eggshell….”

But during a recent trip to my favorite Philly haunt, Allegheny Art Company in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I found myself face-to-face with my new commission savior, this pretty great marker carrying case loaded with 24 crisp Prismacolor dual-tipped markers. You know how it is, my Crusty Compatriots—yeah, I don’t really need more markers, but this set was too sweet to pass up, especially with a small box of six extra markers sticky-glued to the front of the case, this set with a different nib set up, so you wouldn’t get doubles (although that’s not the worst thing in the world). Let’s discuss, shall we?

WHAT IS IT SUPPOSED TO DO?

The appeal of this case and marker set, for this Crusty Critiquer, was to find a product that I could easily compile and transport a marker set for use outside of the studio. The case is sturdy and made out of a textured black Neoprene type material which looks like it could withstand a drop into water, but I wouldn’t attempt it, and the inside feels like cardboard sections with elastic loops that have been stitched into ‘pockets’ to hold your markers firmly in place. Also, two grommets are punched into the top of the case with a carrying line attached, and also a handy little loop to hang your marker case up if necessary.

The magic of the case is its ability to fold back and present your markers as a display. By opening up the case, folding it back, and pulling taut a drawstring that runs through the middle of the case, you can then stand up the product, giving you easy access to your markers. Great for me, as I have the habit

of taking the tools out of their cases and then losing them on the table as I’m working. The empty, waiting loops make this critic want to return them to their home—who wants an open loop? Plus, seeing that empty spot makes you quickly realize a marker is missing.

This isn’t new technology, but it’s efficient, and efficiency is key in a travel component.

DOES IT WORK?

Pretty simple and to the point, the Prismacolor case opens and stays open, though it’s not the smoothest transition from carrying case to desktop display, as the folding and drawstring mechanic isn’t the most fluid. Not sure how or if I’d want to see this improve, but it does affect my ultimate “beret” count.

The rope strap is pretty flimsy, and I wouldn’t recommend carrying the case around like a lunch box anyway, but this Crusty Critic won’t tell you how to live your life!

The skimpy strap used to carry the case is not necessary and pretty flimsy, to boot.

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HOW MUCH DID IT COST?

Sold for a little under $100, the price is reasonable for the amount of markers you get and the longevity of a Prismacolor brand drawing tool. As stated earlier, I have markers that are 15 years old, and they’re still good to go. Prismacolor is worth the price. Just from the make of the case, I can’t see this making it that long.

marker to lay down large areas of color, so the brush tip feels like a bit more “work” for the end result. The color is fast and low odor (which makes this Critic harken for the days of yesteryear when design markers would make his beret stem stand up on end after smelling one with the cap off!)

Prisma is always a great choice, and the selection is always nice. I always feel like I can find the color I need for a job.

This 24-pen set has a nice range of 23 colors, and the black marker of course.

I almost would love to see a set like this with no black. Marker segregation?

SUMMARY

DIFF’RENT STROKES: The brush-style nib on the new Prisma is lush and lays down a nice line with rich color. The fine nib is passable. Easy to forget.

At a price-point of just under $100, this set is for the busy professional or priceminded pro-to-be—a great set that you can zip up and stash in your bag that makes you look like a million bucks when you whip it out at a board meeting, trade show, or in art class, not a chintzy chump. The range of colors and the bonus box set of an extra six markers helps make this set a nice buy. Even if you have markers coming out of your ears, it’s always nice to have a “travel set” for when you need to get work done.

The final verdict: Prismacolor Premiere 24-Set Art Markers and Travel Case:

As always, a lot of love and thanks goes out to my Art Angels at Allegheny Art Company, whom you can always find at www.alleghenyart.com and on FaceTHE CHUNKY WEDGE: This critic’s nib of choice is the wedge. Offering a nice varying line book. There’s a huge set of Copics I’m depending on angle and grip, it’s a top choice. The fine nib side isn’t amazing. eyeing up next….

And while you’re tooling around on the Internet, stop by MAKING ITS MARK Twitter and check me out @jamarnicholas. I love talking The new marker sets deliver the same quality you have come about supplies and process, so let me know what’s on your to expect from Prismacolor, nothing earth-shatteringly new to mind! I’m going to go pack for my next comic con—maybe report, and I do have lined up for the near future a head-to- I’ll see you there.

Until next time, stay Crusty! head against Copic brand markers, but for now, this review will give a passing grade to the new packaging and design of the markers, which now have a jutting plastic “shark’s fin” on each cap, which is to prevent the marker from rolling off your table—a very annoying practice of cylindrical art supplies, which I have to congratulate Copic on solving by creating flat, more rectangular shaped markers that don’t roll at all.

Something to consider, Prisma!

In any event, my mark-making test gave passing reviews to both the chisel-nib and brush style, with the chisel edging out the latter just for the variety of uses you can get from it versus the brush style. You’re usually using a moderately sized

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #3 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #4

NEAL ADAMS vigorously responds to critics of his BATMAN: ODYSSEY mini-series in an in-depth interview! Plus: SEAN HOWE on his hit book MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY; MARK WAID interview, part one; Harbinger writer JOSHUA DYSART; Part Two of our LES DANIELS remembrance; a new ADAMS cover, and more!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Now shipping!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #5

RUSS HEATH career-spanning interview, essay on Heath’s work by S.C. RINGGENBERG (and Heath art gallery), MORT TODD on working with STEVE DITKO, a profile of alt cartoonist DAN GOLDMAN, part two of our MARK WAID interview, DENYS COWAN on his DJANGO series, VIC BLOOM and THE SECRET ORIGIN OF ARCHIE ANDREWS, HEMBECK, new KEVIN NOWLAN cover!

DENIS KITCHEN close-up—from cartoonist, publisher, author, and art agent, to his friendships with HARVEY KURTZMAN, R. CRUMB, WILL EISNER, and many others!

Plus we examine the supreme artistry of JOHN ROMITA, JR., BILL EVERETT’s final splash, the nefarious backroom dealings of STOLEN COMIC BOOK ART, and ascend THE GODS OF MT. OLYMPUS (a ‘70s gem

by ACHZIGER, STATON and WORKMAN)!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Feb. 2014

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships May 2014

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #6: SWAMPMEN! (2014’s double-size Summer Special) SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up Swamp Thing, ManThing, The Heap, Lurker of the Swamp, It, Bog Beast, Marvin the Dead Thing and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou, with a stunning line-up of interviews: WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, BRUNNER, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, CONWAY, MAYERIK, ORLANDO, PASKO, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, YEATES, BERGER, SANTOS, USLAN, KALUTA, THOMAS, and many others. New FRANK CHO cover! Ships Aug. 2014 (192-page trade paperback with COLOR) $17.95 • (Digital Edition) $8.95

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TwoMorrows. A New Day For Comics Fans!

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