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The Professional “How-To” Magazine on Comics, Cartooning and Animation

#31

FALL 2015 $8.95 IN THE US

J.G. JONES

KHOI PHAM PLUS! REGULAR COLUMNIST

JERRY ORDWAY AND MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

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WANTED: COVER ARTIST

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM FALL 2015, VOL. 1, #31 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • J.G. Jones DRAW! Fall 2015, Vol. 1, No. 31 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 2015 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 ©2015 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.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

J.G. JONES

Mike Manley interviews the artist about doing creator-owned work versus work-for-hire

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

Khoi pham

comic art bootcamp

The crusty Critic

Capturing the picture in the mind’s eye

The defiant artist reflects on the many changes he’s made in his life, career, and art.

This month’s installment: 20 steps to improve your art and career

PLEASE READ THIS: This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our website or Apps. If you downloaded it from another website or torrent, go ahead and read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal download, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, please pay for them so we can keep producing ones like this. Our digital editions should ONLY be downloaded within our Apps and at

Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade. This month: The Crusty One goes to Japan!

www.twomorrows.com

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J. G. Jones WANTED ARTIST

rom Final Crisis and Wanted to Before Watchmen, J.G. Jones has worked in the big leagues on big books for a long timeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but now Jones turns his brush to his most personal work to date, Strange Fruit. Draw! catches up with Jones from his Philadelphia home as he works on his new series with writer Mark Waid. Interviewed by Mike Manley and transcribed by Jon Knutson

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A wraparound incentive cover for Strange Fruit #1. Strange Fruit © Jeffrey Jones and Mark Waid

DRAW!: What are you working on right now? J.G. JONES: Oh, God. [laughter] I am fully enmeshed in Strange Fruit right now. It’s pretty all-consuming. DRAW!: Since you’re going out and doing full illustrations, what are the stages that you go through when you start it? JGJ: Yeah, it’s a fully painted comic, so I’ve collected and continue to collect tons of reference material. Because it’s a period piece, it requires a lot of preparation before I even begin. I can’t draw something as simple as a room without knowing what’s in that room. I go through a lot of my reference stuff, and do the traditional thing of breaking down the script page by page, panel by panel, and then decide what I need for that page, and kind of collect everything together. I also have some models who I work with for the regular characters in the book. DRAW!: What about for the cars? Did you buy tin toys or models of the cars so you could get them at different angles? JGJ: No, that never really looks right. It looks kind of wonky, so I don’t have any toy cars. But my father was always into old cars. When I was a kid, he was always rebuilding and restor-

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ing some old car or other. He and I actually bought a ‘32 Ford Model A a few years back for him to tinker with, so my dad’s really knowledgeable about all the old vehicles that I use in the book. And then there’s the Internet, which is a great resource. DRAW!: I suppose you can probably type in “1930 Model A Ford Door” and somebody has 30 pictures of the door. JGJ: Oh, yeah, especially on the auction sites. Because they are selling the cars, there will be pictures from the undercarriage to the roof, inside and out… it’s pretty great. I have used some of my dad’s old pictures along the way, because he’s had them from different cars that he’s owned over the years. It’s kind of in my blood, the old car stuff. I grew up with it. DRAW!: Well, I’m sure that helps a lot. There’s a lot of work that goes into trying to make things authentic. JGJ: Absolutely. DRAW!: You’re from the South. I forget exactly where you said you were from. JGJ: Louisiana, out in the sticks.

DRAW!: If you’re drawing that environment, you can probably rely a lot on memory and feeling, too. JGJ: Oh, sure. It was very rural where I grew up. A lot of the stuff was still Depression-era. Some of the houses and barns were very old and had been around for a while. When I was a kid, my grandfather would still plow his garden with a mule. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see how things were in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and that rural landscape was in my head when I decided to do this. DRAW!: When I shared Al Williamson’s studio, I lived in Holmesdale in Northern Pennsylvania near Scranton, and it’s like a time capsule up there. There’re so many little towns and cities, and buildings that literally looked like you walked through a time warp back into the early part of the last century. JGJ: A lot of Pennsylvania’s that way when you get outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. DRAW!: I think one of the things that kept it that way was there used to be trains that went up to Scranton, and you could take trains from Scranton into New York or from Holmesdale to New York, and then they stopped that at some point, and I think because they stopped that, they stopped time in a way. So I would go to these places like Galliley, Pennsylvania, little towns along the border, and all you would have to do is make it black and white! [laughs]

How much time do you spend each issue, before you start drawing, actually doing the research? I imagine you don’t want a process where you’re like, “Oh, I’ve got 30 pages where I don’t know what this car looks like.” You don’t want to have holes in your process because of your reference. JGJ: I generally have so much stuff already, and I kind of have in my head where it is. I have a dynamic file for the book, divided up into cars, buildings, farms, all this time period stuff. The first place I go to is that file. If I can’t find exactly what I’m looking for, then I go to the Internet. I try to break down a particular sequence, and focus on an entire scene all at once, and if we’re going to connect to that scene later, I just do all the work on the one scene so I have all the material I need. But I try not to have an entire book all mapped out ahead of time, because then it gets boring for me. I generally end up eating my lunch and doing any online research I need at the same time, I’ll be goofing around looking for, I don’t know, a newspaper office or something I need to draw, a teletype machine…. I mean, you don’t think about it, when you have to draw, what kind of things they had in 1927 in a newspaper office. DRAW!: I remember those series of illustrations Rockwell did, “Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Doctor,” and then “Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Newspaper,” and you’re really doing the same thing. You have to, to make it authentic,

J.G. does his thumbnails in a 8.5” x 11” sketchbook, and often works through several different layouts for each page. All characters © DC Comics

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DRAW!: Well, you’re using that now, right? JGJ: Oh, yeah! DRAW!: Your old shack technique is coming in handy now! JGJ: This nice man is trying to teach me how to do nice, bucolic scenes of nature, and I’m doing barbarians cutting monsters in half, and babes with their assets hanging out of diaphanous scarves used as loin cloths. [laughter] Mr. Casso was probably looking at me and thinking, “I’m not really sure what to make of this, but hey, your technique’s pretty good, kid!” DRAW!: [laughs] Yeah, and it’s funny, now that would never be an issue. I tell that to people all the time, how different it is now, growing up and wanting to be a comic book artist or an illustrator, because that stuff is common core now in art education. If you wanted to paint a barbarian or Conan or something, everybody knows who Conan is, so that wouldn’t be like, “Oh, that’s weird! Why are you painting demons? Are you possessed?” [laughter] JGJ: My neighbor had me paint a giant Conan figure on the hood of his ‘68 Mustang, and that was the highlight of my career back in high school. DRAW!: I guess that’s one step up from painting on the side of a van. You have it on the hood of a car. JGJ: Oh, yeah, on the hood of a muscle car? Hell, yeah! [laughs] Good times. DRAW!: So you were thinking originally of being a comic book artist, or a fantasy illustrator, but then you decided to go to fine art school. Did you sort of figure, “Well, I’ll do that later,” or did you just figure you’d go in a different direction? JGJ: I really just changed my direction for a while. It was coming from the small town and finally getting to go to college, so it was kind of a big deal to me. I was trying on new hats, getting exposed to new things, as happens with a lot of people exposed to new ideas like that. DRAW!: I think it’s interesting that that’s what you wanted, or that’s what you were thinking, and then you kind of put that aside, and you went and did the fine art thing, but then you went back to your first love. JGJ: I think I needed to see what the fine arts was all about. But when I got to New York, and saw what it really was…. At first you have this idea that everybody in fine art is in a

Another of J.G.’s design sketches of Red Volcano. Red Volcano © DC Comics

big club, and we’re all pals or something. But you find out everyone is super-competitive. They all hate each other, and would stab each other in the eye to get a show. [laughter] So many people were so nasty. Finally, it was like, “This is not the club I want to be in.” DRAW!: Commercial art might be cutthroat, but it’s basically much more directly competitive, like, “I need to get this job,” or, “My rate is higher,” or, “My rate is lower.” But, at

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DRAW!: I know some guys, like John Byrne, I guess that’s a big thing for them, is to do that kind of stuff. JGJ: Yeah, well, that’s their entertainment. My life is too short, and the world is too interesting. There’s so much other stuff I can spend my time on. DRAW!: I think it’s really interesting that you like to read nonfiction, which informs your fiction. I find that I’m the same way myself. I didn’t like history in high school, or maybe I just didn’t like it because of the way they taught it, but I actually find I like history now. I also like nonfiction now, and I think that if you’re creating fiction based upon nothing but other fiction, there’s no real root in what you’re creating. JGJ: I agree, yeah.

saw his stuff, I was like, “How was he doing this?” It seemed like he was doing magic drawing! The color didn’t look like anybody else’s color, and then later, I learned how he did the grayscale, and then he did the coloring on the different layers. Were you into Jeff Jones or Wrightson or any of those guys? JGJ: Oh, sure. All those guys. I had that Studio book that came out back in the day. We already talked about Frazetta and the Hildebrants, Whelan, and those guys. I probably liked everybody, just looking at everything.

DRAW!: It’s the same if you make your art up out of looking at other people’s art, then you’re really nothing but a Frankenstein of other people’s -isms. And you’re usually a more severe version of their -isms. JGJ: You get these kids that come to you with their portfolio, and they’ve learned to draw by looking at other comic book art. It’s like, “You need to just learn to draw before you try comics.” DRAW!: Well, I was probably one of those kids. JGJ: Oh, I was, too. DRAW!: I was lucky enough that my grandfather gave me a Loomis book when I was eleven or so, Fun with a Pencil. I was exposed to other stuff, but everybody wants to emulate their art heroes. Who were your top five guys when you were 15, and thinking about being in comics? JGJ: Oh, let’s see… I loved Ross Andru. I loved Corben a lot, that early stuff he was doing in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. DRAW!: Are you talking about the stuff he was doing before Neverwhere? Like the stuff that he was doing in Slow Death? JGJ: Yeah, anything I could get hold of that said “Corben” on it. DRAW!: His stuff looked like nobody else’s stuff. I remember when I first

A Scarlet Witch painting for the cover of Avengers #70. Scarlet Witch © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The

OrdWay ! CAPTURING THE PICTURE IN THE MIND’S EYE by Jerry Ordway

’ve been thinking about comic book covers and the sketches that are produced for either editorial approval, or as a precursor to the finished art. Over the years, I have done quite a few cover ideas for many editors, with the process and the politics changing a bit over time. When I got into comics at the start of the 1980s, I was not assigned to covers, as I was still pretty new, and covers at that time were prime assignments that paid a higher rate. These were most often assigned to “name” artists, mostly living in proximity to the editorial offices in New York City. For practical reasons, they could meet with an editor, and either sketch out something right there for approval, or pick up a design drawn by a staff artist to finish and return. This changed a bit at DC when artist Ed Hannigan was hired to design almost all of the DC covers. Many printed DC comics from the early 1980s until 1985 were designed by Ed and drawn by others, no longer limiting where an artist lived, or if they worked through the mail as I did. I worked from a few of his cover designs, and while they were always great compositions, I generally had problems with them. I mean to say, my artistic instincts were such that I rebelled against working from them. If I was hired to ink from one of these, I would have tightened them up and put my ink lines to good purpose. But to draw from one, I just struggled to adapt my method of figure drawing, point of view, and approach to someone else’s idea. I started in comics as an inker, and was constantly trying to get penciling work and also cover assignments. After a while I wore down Len Wein, the All-Star Squadron editor. He assigned me penciling and inking on a cover for the AllStar Squadron Annual #1, providing me with an Ed Hannigan sketch. I struggled mightily with it, but with some corrections, finished, and then produced a color marker guide

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Jerry’s first pass at All-Star Squadron Annual #1, working from Ed Hannigan’s sketch. All-Star Squadron © DC Comics

Jerryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sketch for the cover of Crisis on Multiple Earths Vol. 2 (left), his preliminary pencils (below), a false start on the tones for the painting (below), and the finished painting (next page). All characters ÂŠ DC Comics

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Defying the Odds

Khoi Pham Abandoning the law profession, in his early 30s Khoi Pham completely changed directions in his life and career and worked to become a professional artist. And he beat the odds. He made a name for himself in the comic book industry. But it wasn’t always easy…

Interviewed by Mike Manley and transcribed by Jon Knutson

DRAW!: I think one of the most interesting things about your life, and I remember you mentioned it briefly when we met at the Wizard World Con, is that you were a lawyer before you became a full-time cartoonist. Khoi Pham: Yes, that’s what I did. Although I always dreamed of drawing for a living, it was always just that—a dream. So I repressed those crazy ideas and ended up going to law school and practicing law for a few years. I got myself into a miserable marriage and died slowly. The American Dream, right? I kept drawing as a hobby, though. But one day I noticed a comic shop in my neighborhood, Tyred Tyger Comics was its name, and that childhood dream was rekindled. I think you live in that area, right? DRAW!: Yes, and I’ve been to the comic store you went to on Burmont Road? KP: Yeah. It’s called Effin Comics now. DRAW!: It’s funny we’ve been to the same store locally. Which college did you go to for law? KP: I went to UPenn Law School.

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DRAW!: At what point do you think, “Well, I’m studying law,” which is a pretty intensive field to study, you had to be really hitting the books to pass the bar, but when were you starting to think, “Oh, well, maybe I want to be a comic book artist”? KP: Well, like I said, the law really… wasn’t my life. My parents set me up for that. It really wasn’t for me. DRAW!: So this was something your parents wanted. They were pushing you to be a professional? KP: Exactly. The job, the brain-dead Vietnamese wife, the whole thing. I started working a few years with the law, and even earned my MBA in an attempt to get out of that life. Little did I know that comics would be the thing to save me. So the day that I walked into the comic store? The store guys were meeting to discuss setting up for Wizard World Philadelphia. Now at that time, I didn’t know that there were comic book conventions outside of San Diego. I thought San Diego was the only one. So the realization that there were conventions everywhere, one in Philadelphia, completely blew my mind. I felt like my mind was finally waking up.

DRAW!: How old were you? This was the early 2000s? KP: 2003, 2004, so I was already 30 years old at that point. I started late. So that was my very first comic convention. Before the show, we talked about selling sketches, which seemed really weird to me because nobody in the group was published. I stayed up all night the day before and did a bunch of sketches on comic backing boards. I brought them to the show and charged $5. In the first half-hour, two people scooped up everything. For the rest of the con, I charged $15. DRAW!: You were doing more at the show as it went on? KP: Yeah, and it felt really weird. But also pretty cool. Besides the sketching, though, this was my introduction to the con portfolio review. I think I had a few months leading up to the show, so I spent much of that doing up some samples. I think I still have them. But yeah, Marvel portfolio review. I met with Stephanie Moore, who was an editor with Marvel at the time. DRAW!: Was this at the show, or after the show? KP: It was at the show. I think this was the last time Marvel had an official presence at Wizard World. I think they were thinking about relaunching the Epic line. Anyhow, I met with Stephanie, who was very helpful, and you know how it goes, nothing came from it right away. Some time goes by, and I email Stephanie with updated samples and let her know I’m still interested. She passes it on to C.B. Cebulski, who emails me. I send him more samples, and then wait some more.

night, drawing them getting caught and beat up by superheroes. As a matter of fact, during my first year law school orientation, sitting among Yale grads, Columbia grads, Harvard grads, we were asked to fill out a questionnaire, and one of the questions was, “Who is your favorite lawyer?” Some folks wrote down Thurgood Marshall, others put Sandra Day O’Connor… I scribbled down “Matt Murdock,” and passed it in. [laughter] As you can see, law was not my future. At least not the real kind. DRAW!: You were in your early 30s when you went to the Wizard show. At what point before that did you actually start practicing? How did you train yourself to get to that stage? KP: I kind of scribbled and drew my whole life. I never went to art school, I’ve never taken an art class, and I’m sure it shows. But what happened was, when I showed my portfolio to Stephanie, she commented that the way I drew faces needed work. As an artist, as a kid, that’s the first thing you focus on, faces, so it was a bit of shock. I saw what she meant, but I was surprised that I missed it myself, and at how I failed

DRAW!: So you showed your stuff to Stephanie Moore, and she showed it to C.B. Cebulski, and then he contacted you, and then you were waiting for your date on the corner, and nobody shows up? KP: Yeah, but I figure there are only so many books, so I understood. So I’d email him a few more times and send in more samples. Several months go by. But that was cool. I had a day job. I wasn’t in any hurry. At that time, I switched from doing contract law to working for the Public Defender’s Office in West Chester. It paid less, but the quality of life was way better. I actually had free time to draw. I essentially worked when the courthouse was open and left when it closed. DRAW!: It was more of a nine-to-five job? KP: Exactly, so that—and getting divorced and remarried to the right person—was definitely what I needed. It was kind of complementary: by day, defending criminals, and by

A recent commission piece of the Hulk. Hulk © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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to develop in that particular area. That was a real eye-opener for me. I was encouraged to keep drawing, but I knew I had some work to do. I told myself, “I’m going to basically not draw for months,” knowing I didn’t have the education. I was going to have to teach myself how to do this correctly. For the first month, I bought Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and I got Countdown to Wednesdays, the Top Cow DVD, in which Marc Sylvestri says, “If you’re 30 years old and trying to break in, forget about it!” [laughter] DRAW!: You didn’t take it back to the store and ask for a refund right away? KP: Right? But fast forward several years later, I’m drawing Cyber Force at Top Cow with Marc, so that cracks me up.

DRAW!: I actually think that’s an important point, because age is a factor, but only, I think, in the fact that usually as you get older, your life becomes more complicated. But I know plenty of people who started late, as I’m sure you do too, who have second careers well past 30! KP: Yeah, exactly. But starting at that age, I really wanted to make it count. So I went to the store, and I bought a bunch of books after doing my research on who the hot artists were at the time. I grew up on John Romita Jr., Paul Smith, Art Adams, Walt Simonson—those guys. I stopped reading when Image became popular. I loved the artwork, but felt like I had outgrown the stories. Anyhow, I grew up with an old school sensibility. So I told myself, “I can’t draw like Barry WindsorSmith, because people aren’t buying that stuff these days, or at least that’s not what the current trend is.” So I soaked up artwork by Leinil Yu, Olivier Coipel, Steve McNiven… I rediscovered Travis Charest, who by that time had evolved into an art phenomenon—amazing stuff. I really studied up on these newer guys, teaching myself how to draw in that certain style, and I think that’s what got me in. I worked really hard to kind of fuse these newer styles together, but you can’t really shake your old sensibilities. I still found elements of John Romita Jr., Art Adams, Walt Simonson, Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, and so many others seeping into my work. So I began with a very deliberately market focusoriented approach to my art—not very artsy. Because of that, I was always uncomfortable being called an artist. I was more comfortable with being a professional illustrator. DRAW!: You did almost the same thing you would do in a legal case where you had a period of discovery, where you would do all that research, and you’re trying to find the holes to build your case. You basically built your case for doing comics, saying, “Who are the current top artists?” and you very logically studied it in a way you would’ve studied some discipline for law. KP: Yeah, that’s right. Did my due diligence and read up on case law to come up with a winning strategy. Exactly.

A quick digital warm-up sketch. Thanos © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: And that has nothing to do necessarily with physical age, but it probably has something to do with maturity, where maybe if you’d been 15 years younger, you may not have applied that clarity to win your case. You wanted to change from being a lawyer to being a professional cartoonist, so you took a very logical path to do that, which, if you think about it, is what everyone should do anyway.

Khoi’s inks for a variant cover of Deadpool Vs. Thanos #1, based on Jim Starlin’s cover for Thanos Quest #1. Deadpool, Thanos © Marvel Characters, Inc.

How did your parents feel about that? Were they like, “Oh my God! My successful son, you’re a lawyer! What are you doing?” [laughter] KP: They were pretty skeptical. They were hoping that it was just a phase. They still hope it’s a phase, I think. They try to fake support. They do stuff like, “Have you heard of Dilbert? Why don’t you create a Dilbert?” DRAW!: If you say you do comics, it’s very common for people north of 40 to say, “Oh, what newspaper do you work for?” Peanuts, Dilbert, Batman, The Simpsons—it’s all the same thing to them. I mean, if you had created a Dilbert, you would be very rich right now. KP: Yeah, exactly! At least you have a newspaper strip! DRAW!: Yeah, but Judge Parker doesn’t make anywhere near the licensing money Dilbert does. You won’t find any Judge Parker material in Bed Bath & Beyond. KP: I suppose. DRAW!: Backing up a little bit, you were looking at artists who were popular. It’s one thing to say, “Okay, these are the

top people, or the people that I think are top that I like,” but what was your specific training regimen? You had a regular day job. How did you spend your free time? Did you say, “I’m just going to draw arms today”? KP: I believe in practicing. To me, drawing is about observation. So I would spend my entire day observing the shape of a car, observing walls, observing rafters, observing the most menial boring things. That to me is the hardest part. The drawing is easy. If I see it, I can draw it. That part has never been a difficulty for me. For me, it’s “What do I see?” For me, the training wasn’t really the eye to hand… that took a

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little practice, but not that big a deal. I felt like I needed to understand what I was actually seeing: shapes, lights, shadows, proportions to other elements. During that time, I spent a lot of time observing things, observing faces, observing shapes, observing shadows. I needed to populate my mind with all these images, and then go home and practice. This included observing other artists’ work, their lines, their interpretation of the world that they saw. What happened was, after a few years of just trying to absorb the world and absorbing how other people do things, I started to realize it was a frustrating way to approach art. It wasn’t fulfilling for me. I needed a different approach. Of course, this is after several years of telling people this exact advice. I remember telling my wife Heather, “I’m really unhappy with this stuff. I’m unhappy with my work. I go online and other people are disliking it, and I’m just not happy.” And she basically said, “How

would you like to draw?” I said, “If I draw my way, it takes me about five seconds. It doesn’t feel like I’ve earned anything! People like it, but if I draw really detailed, I feel like I’ve earned my paycheck.” So, this was a real difficult time for me to learn to become an artist, as opposed to an illustrator. I realized that, for me to get any fulfillment out of my work, as well as my life, I needed to learn to be a true artist. I started to understand art as a way to communicate me. But what is my message? What am I trying to communicate? To me, that’s art, whether it’s drawing, or music, or speech, or acting, or whatever, it’s a person being able to effectively communicate a message. So I really started to process that a little bit more, and said, “I’m going to focus on communicating the message the way I would communicate it, the way I would draw it, whether other people like it or not.” That’s how I’m doing it today. Does it change from time to time? Yes, but so do I as a person.

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TO MAKE YOUR ART

WORK

20 BETTER S T AND YOUR CAREER E P S

very spring at the end of the school year I receive many emails, Facebook messages, etc., from graduating students and young arts asking about the next step in the journey of being a professional artist. Sometimes they even send along emails with their art attached (more about that later). Recently I spoke to a class of graduating Illustration students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia on the final day of their spring semester as they ate pizza and pondered their futures as artists leaving the safe harbor of academia, headed out into the choppy and stormy waters of freelance, armed with slick new portfolios of their work. I brought along samples of my recent work as well as a sampling of animation, comic, illustration, and storyboard work from the past decade or so. I was invited by Al Gury who teaches the class and is the head of the painting department at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where I went to school. As I answered questions and talked about my work and my journey as an artist, I found I gave mostly the same advice that I give to all young artists I meet starting out, advice I used myself when I started out. When I started my climb up Art Mountain in my quest to be a pro, the times were a lot harsher. I wasn’t as fortunate as students are now. There are so many resources available now that I would have died to have. The enormous development of online access to the “how-to” environment we have today is really amazing— “Trax Rover” was a comic story I took to show as samples at the Chicago Con in the early ‘80s, which showed both my storytelling and my skills there are even online college-level courses on with cartoony work, as well as with environments and mechanical elements. comics and cartooning. YouTube alone is filled My Batman samples I took along got me nowhere, but this work led to me with hundred and hundreds of demos by artists working at DC and eventually Marvel on Transformers. doing everything from coloring to digital inking, Trax Rover © Mike Manley plein air painting, character design, etc. But accessing all of that knowledge is no guarantee of work and practice and to take those steps to your goal. You reaching your goal. I have learned, like so many others strug- really have to be in love with the whole process, because you gling with the huge debt of student loans, that school is not will be disappointed, challenged, and knocked down while a guarantee of anything but debt, and even the best teacher working, and you have to get back up and get back on the can’t make you a star. In the end it’s all up to you to do the horse as they say.

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After talking it over with Bret, we’ve come up with a list of 20 steps that you can take to really help you keep on track as you move toward your goal:

2. Draw like it’s the keystone for your career. Drawing is the foundation of it all in art, just about anything man has made probably started with a drawing. In art it’s the root from which everything sprouts—from sketching to painting, sculpture, you name it. It is certainly the backbone and the strength of my career. It has allowed both Bret and myself the ability to move from genre to genre, style to style, and industry to industry. Drawing is thinking. Drawing is analyzing. You can draw for pleasure and you can draw to learn, but as a professional, drawing is the key to solving the problems of the job or assignment at hand. The process of making a film, a comic, or an illustration, becomes visualized from taking a script and drawing. The drawings might be just thumbnails, but through a process of successive drawings, eventually those thumbnails evolve into the finished product, a rich visual feast, regardless of the media or medium. Drawing passes through all domains: traditional, digital, tra-digital, and whatever new media there will be in the future. 3. Always have a portfolio ready. This means your portfolio must be ready to send at a moment’s notice, so you should have folder of you work, broken down

Step 1: Be a detective. Who publishes work you like, or that is similar to work you do? How many animation companies are in New York? L.A.? What jobs are they hiring for, and who or what is the way you submit your work? All of this is vital information to know. You go to jobs; jobs don’t come to you. You need names and contacts, addresses and where to send the work. Call people on the phone if possible and ask for the appropriate people at each company—the art director, Human Resources, etc. You have to be like a detective: who, where, why, what, how? A simple walk through Barnes and Noble should give you a huge list of publishers to contact. If you see something you like, write down the publisher and contacts—author, art director, etc.—and call them up and ask about submissions. With the web it’s even easier to contact companies today, even if you have to go through a robot receptionist.

into the various categories or subjects and zipped or stuffed in a file size that will be easy for the person you are sending the work to receive and open. One folder might be for environments, another for inking, coloring, vehicles, or character design, etc. Have a business card. 4. Social Media: Websites, Tumblrs, portfolio sites. You should have as big a social media footprint as you can. Have them all, and keep them updated and full of your best work. It’s so easy to just send people a link to see your work. However, if your site is dead, abandoned… full of work from months, even years ago that won’t make a good impression, or doesn’t show what your are capable of now…? Keep your social media feed fresh

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with new work. Post a piece of work and talk about your process as you finished the piece and solved that problem. People love to look behind the curtain and read about your process. 5. Network. Use social media to constantly wave the flag of you. Self-promote, and don’t be shy about it. You have to constantly keep people’s attention in today’s overstimulated world. I know so many great artists who could do better if they just Facebooked.

That same skill set that first got me work served me well in the ‘80s while working for Western Publishing on a host of coloring and activity books like this Tiny Toons cover. I never liked the show, but I did many books like this, including for Barbie. Tiny Toons © Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc. Barbie © Mattel.

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6. Don’t stop. One of the biggest mistakes so many students make is to take a break after the school semester ends or after graduation. They lose the white hot energy and forge of ideas and momentum they have built up. This is a big mistake, as it is often hard to get the boiler heated up again. I never stop training as an artist, and continue to push my technical skills as well as my intellectual aspect of the work. It’s a tough balancing act at times because jobs can be very demanding with deadlines which are always forcing me to seek shortcuts or ways of making the deadline that don’t always serve the artistic/esthetic side. But the benefit of work is momentum, and momentum leads to better work through application—better known sometimes as the “daily grind.” That grind in my 20s was a very important part of my career, as I improved as a working artist the most in that decade.

UNDER REVIEW

BIG IN JAPAN!

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DRAW! FALL 2015