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DRAW! (edited by MIKE MANLEY) is the professional “HOW-TO” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features in-depth INTERVIEWS and DEMOS from top pros on all aspects of graphic storytelling, as well as such skills as layout, penciling, inking, lettering, coloring, Photoshop techniques, plus web guides, tips, tricks, and a handy reference source—this magazine has it all!

NOTE: Some issues contain nudity for figure drawing instruction.

INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS.

Other issues available, & an ULTIMATE BUNDLE with all issues at HALF-PRICE!

DRAW! #24

DRAW! #25

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AVAILA

DRAW! #21

DRAW! #22

DRAW! #23

Urban Barbarian DAN PANOSIAN talks shop about his gritty, design-inspired work with editor MIKE MANLEY, DANNY FINGEROTH interviews “Billy Dogma” writer/artist DEAN HASPIEL, plus more of MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, product and art supply reviews

by JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

Interview with inker SCOTT WILLIAMS from his days at Marvel and Image to his work with JIM LEE, and PATRICK OLIFFE demos how he produces Spider-Girl, Mighty Samson, and digital comics. Also, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

PATRICK OLIFFE interview and demo, career of AL WILLIAMSON examined by ANGELO TORRES, BRET BLEVINS, MARK SCHULTZ, TOM YEATES, ALEX ROSS, RICK VEITCH, and others, MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS’ “Comic Art Bootcamp”, a “Rough Critique” of a newcomer’s work by BOB McLEOD, art supply reviews by “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS, and more!

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DRAW! #26

DRAW! #27

DRAW! #28

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!

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!

Top comics cover artist DAVE JOHNSON demos his creative process, STEPHEN SILVER shows how he designs characters for top animated series, plus new columnist JERRY ORDWAY presents “The Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the ORDWAY!”, “Crusty Critic” JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews art supplies, and hit “Comic Art Bootcamp” with Draw editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS!

FAREL DALRYMPLE shows how he produces Meathaus and Pop Gun War, director and storyboard/comics artist DAVE BULLOCK dissects his own work, columnist JERRY ORDWAY draws on his years of experience to show readers the Ord-way of creating comics, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

DRAW! #29

DRAW! #30

DRAW! #31

DRAW! #32

DAVE DORMAN demonstrates his painting techniques for sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book cover, LeSEAN THOMAS (character designer and co-director of The Boondocks and Black Dynamite: The Animated Series) gives advice on today’s animation industry, new columnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his working process, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

We focus the radar on Daredevil artist CHRIS SAMNEE (Agents of Atlas, Batman, Avengers, Captain America) with a how-to interview, comics veteran JACKSON GUICE (Captain America, Superman, Ruse, Thor) talks about his creative process and his new series Winter World, columnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his working process, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

How-to demos & interviews with Philadelphia artists JG JONES (52, Final Crisis, Wanted, Batman and Robin) and KHOI PHAM (The Mighty Avengers, The Astonishing SpiderMan, The Mighty World of Marvel), JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews of art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY demos the “ORD-way” or drawing, and Comic Art Bootcamp by MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS! JG Jones cover! Mature readers only.

Super-star DC penciler HOWARD PORTER demos his creative process, and JAMAL IGLE discusses everything from storyboarding to penciling as he gives a breakdown of his working methods. Plus there’s Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviewing art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY showing the Ord-Way of doing comics, and Comic Art Bootcamp lessons with BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

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THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & ILLUSTRATION WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM SPRING 2017, VOL. 1, #33 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Bill Sienkiewicz DRAW! Spring 2017, Vol. 1, No. 33 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 2017 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 ©2017 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

3

BILL SIENKIEWICZ

Mike Manley talks with the legendary artist about his anything-goes approach to comics and illustration

38

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

44

JEFFREY WATTS

69

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP

78

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

Jerry discusses story continuity from start to finish

Class is in session! Mike talks with the artist behind the Jeff Watts Atelier

This month’s installment: The importance of learning by physically doing

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: Pocket-sized sketchbooks

www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! SPRING 2017

1

H

-ING AHEAD

ello to you again, loyal Draw! reader—or maybe you are a new reader and this is your first issue. In either case, welcome aboard!

I’m very proud of this issue and have admired and wanted to interview both Bill and Jeff for a long time. The industries of comics, illustration, and animation are in constant flux. Heavy churning tosses all artists these days. Technology and globalization effect the artist at every level today, from the student to the seasoned pro, and both men stand out for their ability to remain at the top, but also for constantly training to stay at the top of their game.

I was thinking as I type this from my studio here in the gray and cold Philly winter, how both artists I interviewed for this issue live in sunny California—and how I’m very jealous of them this time of the year. I have admired Sienkiewicz’s work for a long time, and we even got to work together Drawing by Bret Blevins once in the beginning of my career on an issue of Marvel Fanfare on a Moon Knight story—issue #34 to be exact. You can see examples of that on my Drawman blog: www.drawman.blogspot.com.

I’ve long admired Jeffrey Watts’ work and his school and passion for teaching, and his fine art career as well. In fact, when I was considering going back to school in the mid-’90s, Jeff’s school was one that I seriously considered attending, and on cold winter days like today I still wish that maybe I had. With the high costs of art schools today, tuitions rising to unaffordable levels for many, Jeffrey’s atelier offers not only a great source of learning, but one that won’t break the bank.

Big thanks to my regular contributors, the iron men of comics, sans the armor: Bret, Jamar, and Jerry, as well and my solver of all things and the one who makes this mag look great, Eric. So get out there and draw something; its good salve for these troubling times, but also good for your wallet!

Best,

GET THE BEST OF

BEST OF DRAW! VOLUMES 1 & 3 Vol. 1 compiles tutorials, interviews, and demonstrations from DRAW! #1-2, by DAVE GIBBONS (layout and drawing on the computer), BRET BLEVINS (figure drawing), JERRY ORDWAY (detailing his working methods), KLAUS JANSON and RICARDO VILLAGRAN (inking techniques), GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY (on animation and Samurai Jack), STEVE CONLEY (creating web comics and cartoons), PHIL HESTER and ANDE PARKS (penciling and inking), and more! Cover

by BRET BLEVINS!

Vol. 3 compiles more of the best tutorials and interviews from DRAW! #5-7, including: Penciling by MIKE WIERINGO! Illustration by DAN BRERETON! Design

by PAUL RIVOCHE! Drawing Hands, Lighting the Figure, and Sketching by BRET BLEVINS! Cartooning by BILL WRAY! Inking by MIKE MANLEY! Comics & Animation by STEPHEN DeSTEFANO! Digital Illustration by CELIA CALLE and ALBERTO RUIZ! Caricature by ZACH TRENHOLM, and much more! Cover by DAN BRERETON!

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TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

2

DRAW! SPRING 2017

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

BILL SIENKIEWICZ

Interview conducted

by Mike Manley and transcribed

by Steven Tice

Comic Book Illustrator

DRAW!: So how goes it today? What are you working on today in your studio?

BILL SIENKIEWICZ: I’m working on some inks over my friend, Ian Dorian. I promised I would work on the series he’s doing. He’s a really terrific guy and a great friend of mine, and I’ve worked with him in the past, so I’m enjoying this. I’ve got other projects I’m working on that are taking up a lot of time, so this is one I’m sort of doing as I can take the time to do it.

DRAW!: What’s the series?

BILL: It’s called Law of Resistance. It hasn’t come out yet.

Jim Krueger is writing it. It’s an independent, not for one of the big companies. I’m not really sure how it’s all going to come together. I’m sort of the hired set of hands in terms of finishes, and unless it concerns me directly, at certain times I don’t really pay attention to all that. With the project I’m doing with Kelly Sue [DeConnick], we know it’s Image. And then I’m doing a bunch of covers and stuff for DC and Marvel, so I’m spinning a number of different plates.

DRAW!: Are you working on his originals? Are you doing blueline? Are you doing it digitally?

BILL: I’ve got his originals, so I’m working on those. And I’ll be doing some stuff over Denys Cowan again soon.

Mostly when I’m inking I prefer working over actual pencils.

Just as we’re talking, I’m realizing, oh my God, I’m doing a lot of different gigs. I’m working with Kevin Eastman on four pages a month of Turtles, and those I’m doing over blue-

lines. What I’m doing there is printing out his bluelines, and I’m inking them very, very large.

DRAW!: Larger than 11" x 17"?

BILL: Oh, yeah. Actually, the first ones, it would get up to around 18" x 24", because it allows for so much play with the line, so I can actually take a really thick pen—I usually use a chisel point more recently.

DRAW!: You mean like a Speedball lettering pen?

BILL: It’s called a Pilot Parallel Pen [a calligraphy pen]. It’s 6 mm wide, and when you turn it on it’s edge it’s a hairline.

It’s like ice skating on paper with ink—that’s the way it feels.

With Ian, I’m actually jumping from regular inking nib points and whatnot. It’s interesting working over different people.

When I’m working over Denys, I have a certain approach, and when I’m working over Kevin, I’ve got a whole other approach and things I’m trying to pull out of what he’s doing, and then inking over Ian, because Ian’s more of a sculptor— that’s primarily what he’s known for—his work has kind of a sculptural quality. I find that when I’m inking Denys, I’m inking a little bit more in terms of graphic shapes and patterns, which actually fits a little bit more with my own approach, my own sensibility. But with Ian, I’m actually getting into doing the anatomy. So it’s kind of an interesting array of styles that I’m working with.

DRAW!: Denys has a sort of Sergio Toppi influence with the textures. I usually use the 108 when I ink Bret Blevins or

DRAW! SPRING 2017

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Page 23 of Moon Knight #12 (left) inked with a Hunt #102 pen nib, and page 11 of New Mutants #29 (right) inked with a Gillott 1950.

Moon Knight, New Mutants © Marvel Characters, Inc.

somebody like that, but with Denys a stiffer pen seemed to fit that feeling.

BILL: Right.

DRAW!: What are some of your favorite pen nibs? Do you use the old 102 standard?

BILL: I use everything. I have a whole slew of pen nibs that I try. I mean, a lot of times I’ll take marker pens, the ones with the fiber tips, and I’ll open them up, even if they say they’re pigmented, and flush out the ink and fill them with India ink so they’re permanent and don’t wash away. So I’ll get into some periods with those, and I find that at a certain point I kind of max out on the feeling of the fiber point, and I want something that’s crisper, so I’ll go and I’ll work with a Gillott 1950. When I was working on New Mutants, I was working with that. I found that it was really good for crisp and angled lines, and it had a certain level of flexibility. But I use the 102, 107, 1950, 290, and 291. And then I’ve been using these Esterbrooks, as well.

DRAW!: I have a bunch of those that I bought off of eBay years ago. I had a whole box, and they’re like nails. The metal on those is really heavy-duty.

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DRAW! SPRING 2017

BILL: On some of them, yeah. I actually have the ones, it’s like 375 or something. I forget what the number is, but they’re pretty flexible. They’re a little bit more like the 290s. But I bend the very, very tip up so that it’s got a little bit of an angle to it, and it allows me to get thinner and thicker lines. I also use these Sailor pens from Japan, as well. So I’ve jumped from all different kinds of pens and brushes. Even working on one panel I’ll jump from one pen tool to another, because I want a thicker line for, say, the strokes in a woman’s black hair. If I’m doing a small figure in the background, I might use a 102 or a 659 Gillott—one of the thin ones. I think the 659 is pretty similar to the 102 except it’s a little bit more flexible.

But the 102, to me, is the standard. It’s the one I probably have used the most over the years. Between that and the 1950.

I think the 102 is what I used mostly on Moon Knight, and the 1950 was what I used most on New Mutants. My favorite tool right now is whatever I have in my hand, because I’m still always looking for the perfect tool.

DRAW!: [laughs] That’s one of the things I always found fun about inking other people’s stuff rather than inking my own stuff is that you would maybe use tools or approaches you wouldn’t necessarily use on your own work.

BILL: Mm-hmm!

DRAW!: You also do a lot of digital stuff. When you’re working on your Cintiq or whatever, did you create a bunch of pens or brushes to give you a variety…?

BILL: No, actually, I had a Cintiq for about a day and then I returned it. I love what people can do with Cintiqs, but I’m such an inveterate tinkerer that I need to get my hands dirty, and I need to feel that whatever line I make is put down on a surface that’s real. I very seldom do any drawing on my Intuos or my iPad. Most of what I use digital for is for putting big pieces together. I use a really good, slick animation bond, and I can rework a panel five different times—there’s no one true original. I’ll pick different parts of different panels I’m working on, and some of them will come together and they’re completely finished. In others, it’s like, I like the hand in that one, and I like the hair in that one, or the feet in that one, or the way that the line squiggled there. I try to get it all in as much as I can, because otherwise I’m scanning in 30 sheets for one panel. So I try to minimize that.

DRAW!: That’s the way guys like Austin Briggs used to work. They would do an underdrawing, and then they would put a sheet of acetate over top of that. Sickles supposedly did that, too. He would kind of rehearse a drawing, and then do the final…

BILL: Right. Certain drawings in my sketchbook will have a certain freedom, and I find that a lot of artists, their work will really tighten up in good ways and bad. By tightening up, they would get crisper and more refined, but also by tightening up it’s a little bit more anal, and I think it can lose some of the life. You mentioned Toppi early on. Even his sketchier stuff is still nailed. The same with, when you get to a certain level, Toth. I think Neal Adams, his storyboards and stuff that he does when he’s sort of “not locking things in” is really spectacular, and I’d love to see him do a comics job like that. There are aspects of Jordi Bernet and Toth in those looser sketches, but when he goes in, for some reason he feels he has to render everything up, and I sort of feel like he’s missing out on an interesting arrow in his quiver there. I find in my own work, that the rendering is not as interesting to me now. It’s only interesting to me if I’m creating a pattern. But the idea of turning a form and all of that other stuff that comics and superheroes, especially, are so predicated on, I mean, I understand anatomy well enough to know how to render a form, but at the same time there’s a part of me that just doesn’t want to do that. I’ve done it. I want to say more with less.

DRAW!: Neal was my god when I was younger, but your work went through that process where you nailed it, then you went from rendering more to design and pattern.

BILL: Yeah, that stuff interests me more than ever. It’s what keeps it fun for me. There’s nothing wrong with the other stuff in terms of doing it, and I feel like it’s important. I mean, I had a panel with Neal and we talked about that certain Zen aspect. I remember when I was studying anatomy and going to art school, and even on my own, I knew where all the muscles were, I knew what they were all named, I knew how they inserted and where they attached to the bones and stuff. And now I can’t remember half the names.

DRAW!: You know where it is, but…. The people I know who know all that stuff are the guys that teach anatomy all the time, because they’re constantly saying that this hooks into there. But also it seems to be fairly common that you’re more obsessed with that when you’re younger, and most guys tend to work towards being a little looser the longer that they work.

Because rendering, like you said, it’s fun, and there’s sort of a

Sketch © Bill Sienkiewicz

DRAW! SPRING 2017

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Zen aspect to it, but it can also be monotonous, too, because it becomes formulaic.

BILL: Oh, yeah. To me the whole concept of inking and finishing is a misnomer anyway. To me it’s all drawing.

DRAW!: Right. Because the best inkers of the old days were full-fledged artists. They were just maybe not as dynamic with layout or, like, Frank Giacoia was very good, but he was supposedly too slow to do monthly stuff. But the guy was a great inker on somebody like Kirby or Buscema.

BILL: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That’s totally the case. But what happens is you get into a whole thing of rendering a nose, and getting the highlight of that nose, and after a certain point it’s like, “Okay, I’ve rendered highlights on noses 15,000 times.

Maybe I’ve played that to death.” You can find these little tricks, and at a certain point it’s almost like, “Nah, I’m tired of the tricks.”

DRAW!: I’m doing the two strips, The Phantom and Judge Parker, and I feel like when I’m doing that, it’s almost like being an actor. I’m playing a role. The Phantom I think of as sort of a brush style because it’s from the ’30s. It’s been around 80 years now, and the readers expect there to be a

continuity. If I went in and completely changed it up, like he had veins on his costume and stuff, the people who have been reading it would go, “What is that? This is not what I want.”

So I feel like there’s a role that I am playing that I wouldn’t necessarily do on something else.

BILL: Oh, yeah, yeah. That I totally understand. When I inked Sal Buscema on Spider-Man, when they first approached me to do it, they asked if I could ink it like Scott Williams.

And this is after I’d not been doing as much comics stuff. I was doing more illustration/advertising stuff. So when they asked me if I wanted to do it, I was like, “Look, you’ve got the wrong guy for that. I’ll do it, but I’m going to see what Sal’s work says to me.” So I ended up inking it very, very bold and brushy. And Sal loved it. When I saw him—we hadn’t really met before. I had seen John [Buscema] a lot at the offices.

When I met Sal, we were at this show together, he came up and he gave me a big hug. It was actually some of the most fun I’ve ever had.

DRAW!: I inked him once on an issue of Spider-Man, and it was so much fun, partially because, whenever I’ve inked guys like him or Gil Kane, I felt like, “I’m really working in comics now. I’m inking Gil Kane.” [laughs] I thought it was interesting when you inked John Buscema on Wolverine, and then you guys did something else together after that, too.

BILL: Yeah, I did a Galactus thing with him. But the Wolverine job, man, I remember how much fun I had on that.

That’s still one of my favorite—I wish I had some pages from that, because I didn’t save anything. But, yeah, “The Gehenna Stone Affair,” I think it was called. I really loved it. I loved working over him, because he would put down very few lines, but whatever lines were there were just perfect.

DRAW!: I know. It looks amazingly simple, but you realize how much knowledge—it’s like the Nine Old Men from Disney know exactly where to put that line, how to indicate all that form and volume with, like, four lines on a leg.

BILL: Oh, it’s so true, so true. And I think a lot of guys get trapped into sort of repeating that rendering. The tendency to simplify seems ingrained, at least it is in most of the guys that I really admire. A lot of the flashy sort of rendering and everything else, at a certain point it feels like it becomes very surface, and I find the stuff that really gets me going is the stuff that’s underneath, the design. I mean, it’s great to have a great surface on something, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the step that drives me as crazy as some of the other stuff.

Detail of Bill inking John Buscema from Wolverine #10.

Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW! SPRING 2017

DRAW!: Having followed your career, it was obvious in the beginning that you turned a corner. You were also starting to do illustration, so you were bringing your other influences to what you were doing. Were you getting any resistance at the time from that at all, or were people like, “Yeah, this is cool!”

BILL: Well, the editors were cool with that, but Shooter used to bust my chops a lot. Jim and I got along great, but it wasn’t comics-centric in terms of the influence I was pulling from, so he would regularly bust my chops. Especially when I was

Bill’s inks (right) over John Buscema’s pencils (left) for Galactus: The Devourer #5, page 1.

Galactus, Silver Surfer © Marvel Characters, Inc.

doing a lot of the painted stuff. He’d say there’s a lot of artsyfartsy stuff, because the coloring I was trying to go for was more painterly colors and a little bit less full-on spectrum.

The Hulk’s green might be more of a grayish, sick green as opposed to lime green.

DRAW!: What do they say, “The grays are the soup of painting”? They hold painting together. Really great artists, their grays aren’t gray. They’re full of all kinds of great color.

BILL: Oh, yeah, they absolutely are. And, again, that whole thing about what defines good colors, everything has to be taken in context, so it’s what it’s next to.

DRAW!: When you were living in New York, were you studying at the Art Students League? Were you taking classes?

BILL: Yeah, I was taking some classes. I was taking more classes in Connecticut. I’d take some watercolor classes or painting classes with my friend Joe Chiodo when we both lived in Connecticut. But when I lived in New York, a lot of that was really going to museums, and doing life drawing—a lot of life drawing, a lot of painting. I mean, I would go to

museums and study, but most of what I was learning was kind of self-taught. I did go to art school, but at a certain point, all art is— DRAW!: Where did you go?

BILL: I went to school in Newark, the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. It was a four-story brownstone in Newark not too far from Rutgers’ campus. The art school was on the top floor, and then the rest of the building was a music and dance school. There was a lot of jazz, and amazing singers were there, dancers. Savion Glover was there. Melba Moore used to go there. So some of the teachers I had were not only painters, but were jazz guys. They played at Carnegie Hall and stuff like that, so I learned about jazz at the same time. We’d have our all-day painting class on Fridays, and we’d get some bottles of Old English 800—because, when you’re in Newark, you’re drinking Old English and smoking Kool cigarettes. I think they handed those to you when you got to the city limits. [Mike laughs] And then we would just paint and listen to music. Either we were listening to records or listening to what was coming up from the floors below.

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DRAW!: That must have been a fun and a transformative time for you.

BILL: Oh, it was absolutely that, because I grew up in farm country in northern Jersey, where the idea of music was polkas and Johnny Cash. And I love Johnny Cash, but at a certain point when you’re listening to country-and-western stuff… I mean, my grandparents would listen to Lawrence Welk, and of course, I wanted to shoot myself, you know? [Mike laughs] Growing up listening to rock-and-roll and then getting into jazz and blues was a real big culture shock for me.

DRAW!: I always have music. I’m either listening to NPR or something like that, or I’m listening to the music all day.

Usually I watch TV at night just as a change. Is listening to music a big part of your creative process?

BILL: Sometimes it really is. It depends on what I’m doing.

I may have something on in the background, like some podcasts or Vice TV—just something on in the background.

DRAW!: Something that makes you feel good.

BILL: If I’m writing, I usually have to have music or silence— nothing that’s really distracting. But if I’m inking or working on a painting, the finishing parts of the process, it’s like walking and chewing gum at the same time. That I can do. But when I’m working on something that requires intense concentration in terms of pacing, then I cannot breed distractions.

DRAW!: You said the other day that you’re a night owl. Do you find that you have more productive times of day? Do you have a strategy where you block out your time?

BILL: I find that, invariably, I usually get into the best groove about an hour or two before I’m ready to crash. When I was working on Elektra in New York at the studio with Denys Cowan and Michael Davis, I would spend the whole day going from bookstores, to the museum, to doing life drawing

Turnaround for Bill’s recent redesign of Elektra.

Elektra © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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at cafes. And I’d get to the studio and I’d vomit out, like, a page or two of Elektra, and I’d be spent, because it was sort of like all building up. I didn’t really luxuriate in any kind of fussiness. It just came out, and I was literally spent.

It depends on what I need to get done. There are days when my schedule is so crazy that I end up getting up at, say, two or three in the morning, and I can get into a good groove in the morning hours, because even though I’m a night owl, I actually like the morning when the sun’s coming up. I find that mentally I’m probably the keenest in the morning hours. Like, I’ll be working on the crossword or something, and I’ll find that any other time of the day, the answers might be elusive, but in the morning, if I’m up and it’s that golden time before everybody starts leaving for work and everything, I find that my acuity is spot-on. Things are a lot easier, and things just sort of come to me. It’s like having that mental palate cleansed so I can get into a groove. But at a certain point now, if I’m working on something and it’s a really tight deadline, I’ll just plug in until it’s done. And on the really, really tight crunches, I’ll get into a place where I don’t have time to make mistakes.

And it sounds kind of grandiose and sort of bizarre to say that, but I know enough about how to get a job to be professional quality, and if I want to experiment or play around, that’ll be on something else. Part of experimentation is that something could go south or sideways very quickly, and part of the fun and part of the problem is “How do I save this?” But there are certain points when I’m working on something that has to get done within a certain time frame where I’m just slashing in the blacks and going in with the pen and ink and rendering out, and deciding on the big, thematic scheme. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel at all.

DRAW!: I took a class with a guy, and he said what he would do is he’d get pretty close to the end of a painting, and then he would purposefully mess something up on the painting to force

himself to redefine some aspects of what he was doing, and maybe you end up coming up with a solution that you wouldn’t have if you had just worked straight ahead to the finish. But, yeah, doing that on something that’s due at 5:00 is probably not the best idea.

BILL: Well, yeah. I haven’t deliberately tried to mess a piece up, because pieces will go sideways all on their own, but if something’s a little too facile, I’ll end up feeling like I need to change it up, so I’ll throw a different speed pitch at it. And if it works, great. If not… There have been pieces that I’ve fought with and worked on to get them to finish, and hated them when they were done, and then came back later and loved them. And then there are other times I’ve been fighting with a piece and I realize that it’s not worth it to invest more time in it, and I’ll end up starting the piece over.

DRAW!: In fact, the first time I saw your original art was on my first trip to New York, going up to Marvel. I was staying with Bret [Blevins] in that house he was living at in Ridgefield, and he had a Conan piece that you had started to work on, a cover, I think, for Savage Sword, and you had gotten part of the way into it, and then it looked like you had abandoned it and had done something different.

BILL: That probably was the case. That wouldn’t be something out of the norm.

DRAW!: Those pieces probably allowed you to experiment in a way, too, doing a cover for Savage Sword or something at that time.

BILL: Oh, yeah. It was like being paid to go to art school, so I could try Bill’s painting for the cover for What If...? #43, featuring a Wyeth-esque sky.

Conan © Conan Properties International, LLC a whole bunch of different things. The cover I did for the What If? Conan with the gun, the back- of art school to go. I thought I was going to get, hopefully, a ground is very N.C. Wyeth on that one. It may not look it to pinup or some kind of education in terms of a critique, and other people, but it totally is screaming N.C. Wyeth to me, it just so happens I ended up getting a career out of it. So I with the way I painted the sky. Of course you know, being never did graduate, even though they’ve offered me to come influenced by Bob Peak and by so many of the great illustra- back and teach, and they gave me and a bunch of other people tors, it was a chance to really play with design. Because I these lifetime awards from the school. Which is kind of odd, actually really wanted to get into illustration, doing TV Guide because at the time I remember being in perpetual arguments covers and posters. And at the time was when everything with the administration because I wanted to take not just illusstarted going sideways, again, to be more photographic. tration or fine art, but I wanted to take advertising classes. You I’d always loved comics, and I told my father I wanted to had to pick a certain curriculum, and I wanted to mix it up. I do comics, and when I tried to get in, I still had another year wanted elements of advertising, and fine art, and illustration.

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DRAW!: One of the things that’s really changed with comics is illustration, and it’s really changed quite a bit. Editorial illustration is not really the same as when you came in.

There’s not as much of it as there used to be, and it seems like a lot of the people that are going into comics or illustration do both. There seems to be more opportunity to do what would be considered editorial illustration in comics or graphic novels, than in doing paperback covers. Outside of science fiction, you see almost no illustration. It’s mostly people taking a photograph and digitally enhancing it to sort of look like it was drawn by somebody, but it’s just a filter. It’s stock photos that are manipulated.

BILL: That’s one of the problems I have with a lot of the movie posters that are done now. I mean, I look at the Avengers posters; it’s all Photoshopped. Look at Drew Struzan’s stuff, who’s amazing—it’s hand-drawn. It’s so photographically rendered, and yet there’s something about the fact that he’s done it by hand that sets it apart from a lot of the stuff that you see, and I think it taps into what we need as human beings.

I think that most of those decisions seem to be based on economics rather than on artistic merit.

the playing field. A lot of those people would be a lot less brave if they had to reveal who they were.

DRAW!: I’ve dealt with some of that doing the comic strips.

On the King website, I’m a public figure, so I’m out there as me, but the people who come in and snark on you or make derisive comments— BILL: There’s a legacy to a lot of the stuff you’re doing.

You’re doing things that have been around. Do you get a lot of people who feel like you’re modifying what they remember?

I know I got a lot of crap for changing the mutants, because it was like I was destroying their childhood or something.

Forget the misogyny, which you can’t forget, but with Ghostbusters, a lot of people were just, “How can you do this to my childhood?”

DRAW!: Yeah. I think it depends upon your age. My dad read The Phantom as a kid, right? My dad’s in his 80s, and he was very excited when I was going to take over the strip.

DRAW!: The newest craze seems to be that they want to get rid of the traditional movie poster and do something made from pieces of the movie. It’s animated, not a static image, and the theaters are trying these things where it’s motion graphics or whatever.

BILL: As all the technologies merge, that’s probably not unreasonable to suspect it was going to happen, because it’s one way to capitalize on a technology, but to me I still love the idea of what you can do with a still image. At the same time, I totally understand the need to maximize or optimize whatever kind of approach they want to take, especially with movie sales and ticket sales kind of tanking. Even with Ghostbusters, the fact that they didn’t go for the Chinese market. So they’re trying everything to get people in the theaters.

DRAW!: Yeah, I was just reading that they couldn’t get into the Chinese market because it had supernatural stuff in it, so the Chinese said, “Well…”

BILL: Whatever heat they were taking, even with their plans about doing more sequels, I think that they completely changed on that. I haven’t seen it. I do know that Leslie got so much hate for her role. But it just shows how many troglodytes are out there.

DRAW!: [laughs] Well, that’s how the internet is now, just people hating on everything. It’s like the hate machine.

BILL: Hey, free speech is fine, but let’s level

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(above) A 1990 rough for a card illustration done in conjunction with Comedy Channel’s Rock Bottom Awards special, featuring Donald Trump in the center. (next page) The finished illustration.

Rock Bottom Awards © Viacom Media Networks.

I found out there were a lot of other people I know, teachers and people I know that read The Phantom. And some of the people that are into The Phantom are super into The Phantom.

They have clubs, and they know all the lore. There’s the other side, where people who have been reading Judge Parker for 45 years, and you take the teenage daughter who was, like, twelve years old for 20 years, and you make her 16, and it’s like, “Whoa, wait a minute! What are you doing?” It’s like Charlie Brown shaving or something. They can’t quite deal with it. You’re always stuck on something like that, because Peter Parker is 70 years old now, if you make it too realistic— BILL: Right, and every movie that they do he’s still in high school, you know? It’s still the origin.

DRAW!: Right. You’re going to have some people who hate change. They’re what I call the baby men. The baby men hate change. They want everything exactly the same as when they first read it, so it’s gotta be Avengers issue #101, and if you change anything, it doesn’t matter how good it is, that’s not

what they want. There’s always a double-edged sword with fandom. And I think that some fans feel very entitled because they actually love the New Mutants more than you do, Bill.

“You don’t really love them the way that I love them. I really love the New Mutants. And if you loved the New Mutants like me, you would serve me the same New Mutants every day.”

And what art form could actually do that and not go stagnant?

BILL: I see a lot of this with people who—like with Neal, especially. I’m probably more familiar with him because of my linkage with him in terms of his influence, but I see so many people who feel like his old stuff was better. And everybody’s style changes. You know, Neal doesn’t draw the way he used to, and he’d be the first one to admit it. The same thing with Toth. A lot of guys, they want to simplify to the point where it becomes abstract.

DRAW!: And the average fan is not sophisticated enough to understand that. They like rendering. I can understand on one hand, because I was a huge fan and very influenced by Neal, too, but every single artist changes. It’s just a part of your process. The one that really sort of sticks in my mind the most is Kirby, who had two or three careers, because he had the old Golden Age stuff, then he had his ’50s stuff, and then he had his ’60s to ’70s stuff, but it was always Kirby.

The way the business is, most people don’t have a 40-year, 50-year career, doing the same thing. I mean, that’s almost impossible.

BILL: After being on Moon Knight for 30 issues, I was ready to put a bullet in my head, you know?

So the fact that he did how many issues of Fantastic Four? Plus everything else.

DRAW!: A hundred-and-one?

BILL: Yeah, that’s a definitive run. Bandying about the word “definitive” is a whole different level of commitment when you’re talking between, like, a 70-issue variable. A lot of the younger guys I talk to, they’re ready to create their fragrance line more than actually getting into comics because they want to tell cool stories.

It’s a whole different beast. If you’re getting into comics for money, that’s not the reason to do it.

DRAW!: In the ’90s it could have been, but not now. I want to backtrack a little bit, because you were doing The New Mutants, and you were also doing illustrations, so you were bouncing back and forth between different worlds. And were they kind of cross-pollinating each other a little bit?

BILL: Right, right.

DRAW!: Would an agent hire you because they knew of what you were doing in comics, or were they not really aware of what you were doing in comics?

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a more standard thing, or at least it was in my case. Instead of, “I’m either going to do comics or illustration,” I felt like at a certain point I started to be able to blend the two of them so that comics could be illustration. It wasn’t like I was bringing up illustration at the beginning and then throwing that into the comics and upsetting people. [laughs] It became more of a viable way to go.

DRAW!: If you could have gone fully over to illustration, do you think you would have done that and left comics behind?

BILL: I probably would have done more of it, because certainly financially with illustration there’s a lot more there in terms of income.

You’re doing one piece of artwork and being able to make what I would normally make in three months. Those are great jobs. But also you were depending upon certain clients. The one positive thing about comics is that you kind of can do your own thing. You don’t have to do work from committee. Advertising is very different. And also film, where you’re dealing with likenesses, and making sure that the heads are not the same size unless they are equal billing stars, in which case they have to be, and the stars would get the final say, and likeness approval. It just becomes an entirely different political machine in that way.

I love comics so much. But one of the reasons I started to paint was that I realized I wanted to have another language skill, so to speak, to be able to say more than just with pen and ink, and really understand everything about art. So, although comics were the thing I fell in love with, I think I’m a bit like Bill Burr, a comedian who can act, but at the end of the day, I’ve got to get back on the stage.

Bill’s movie poster illustration for Unforgiven.

Unforgiven © Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.

BILL: I had a couple of different agents and reps over the years who knew of my work in comics, but I was really trying to aim for illustration. But the real change for me came when Harvey Kahn took me on. Harvey was Bob Peak’s agent, and, I think, Nick Gaetono and Bernie Fuchs and a couple of other folks—but he had a very small stable of guys. I ended up doing some movie posters for Europe because the American market was drying up completely. Unforgiven was probably the last American film I worked on where there was actual poster work involved.

Harvey was the person who brokered the deal that I did for the Hendrix book. It was like I was still doing comics, but it was a book project. The cross-pollination was becoming

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DRAW!: We used to have a broader range in style in comics up until the ’80s, when the styles kind of condensed, and then we went through the ’90s with Image, and that became the dominant style. And now comics have opened back up stylistically, I think. There’s not necessarily a house style anymore. I might be wrong, but it seems like at Marvel there was a little bit more openness to different styles than there was at DC. BILL: Yeah, I think so. I think you’re starting to see a lot more of the generation that was heavily manga-influenced coming in. You know, it’s a generational thing. Obviously, there was a whole slew of people who were influenced by Neal, and there was another school of guys who were influenced heavily by Jeff Jones, so there was a fine art aspect.

And we all kind of converged on comics. I’m sure there are a whole bunch of guys who were doing McFarlane and Liefeld.

DRAW!: And now that’s old. I mean, it’s hard to think about, but that’s 20-something years old now.

I teach a high school illustration class, and every year it’s interesting to see what the new students are into. Last year, the kids didn’t know who Mike Mignola is. They didn’t know what Calvin & Hobbes is, so you’ve tripped past the baby boomers, and the baby boomers’ kids.

BILL: Oh, yeah. I’m on Twitter, but I’m also on Facebook, which is, like, the old people’s technology.

DRAW!: Yeah, it’s funny how that is, right? [laughs] BILL: Yeah, it’s pretty surreal.

But there’re guys who don’t know who Kirby is. I talk to different inkers, and they don’t know who Dick Giordano is, or they don’t know who John Buscema is, or whatever.

So there is a generation that fades.

But if you really love the stuff, I mean, one of the things that got me was finding the people who influenced me, and then finding out who influenced them, and then finding Album cover art for hip-hop group EPMD’s 1990 record, Business as Usual. out who influenced their influences.

Business as Usual © Rush Associated Labels It’s like peeling back the layers.

But, you know, there’re new guys who are coming in— Or Noel Sickles doing six to eight pages of illustrations scatthere’s one illustrator I worked with at the Illustration Acad- tered throughout a story on, like, Mao’s doctor or something. emy named Jeffrey Alan Love, who is incredibly graphic, but still has a great sense of design. I think he’s doing some books DRAW!: How do you see your career now? I guess you and stuff, but it would be interesting to see him do some com- don’t really need an agent, probably, for comics, but do you ics, as well. But it’s nice to see people coming in and trying still have an agent for doing illustration?

BILL: Well, it’s interesting. One of the benefits of being new things. around as long as I have, and to whatever extent my name is DRAW!: I’m with you. I think you find the guy that influ- still on people’s lips and work is still in their inbox, I don’t enced the guy that influenced the guy that influenced the guy. really need to have an agent. For example, with a lot of the The first time I saw Stan Drake’s work, I thought, “When did album covers I’ve done, a lot of the hip-hop guys were comics Neal Adams do this stuff?” You can trace Neal back to Drake, fans. It’s interesting when you find how ubiquitous, in some and then Drake to Raymond, and Raymond a little bit into ways, comics are to a lot of people in terms of cultural impact.

Foster, and you can keep going all the way back to all the So that’s nice. And the idea of actually doing stuff more for different great pen-and-ink guys from the turn of the century. galleries is fun, too.

The one thing that makes working in comics the big home And we’re lucky now because they’re reprinting so much of that stuff. For a long time, it was impossible to find samples to come back to is the fact that you don’t need to have a large of Franklin Booth’s work unless you liked to hunt down old committee to produce them. You can just write them yourself, and that’s one of the things I’m actually in the process of doing. magazines.

BILL: I’m still doing a lot of that. I get old issues of Life maga- I’m dying to get back into my own creative juices again and zine and Look and things like that—the women’s magazines, do something entirely on my own, even though I’ve got plenty or the Saturday Evening Post. With a big deal issue they’d get, of other projects I’m doing, like with Kelly Sue DeConnick. like, Norman Rockwell to do the astronauts or something, or David Mack, Brian Michael Bendis, and I are talking about guys like Joe DeMers, David Passalacqua, and Mark English. doing a creator-owned thing. And Mark Millar, as well. I just

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realized, what I really need to do is try to impress upon the people who are working on cloning to hurry up. [Mike laughs] There’s a lot of stuff I want to do, you know?

DRAW!: The one thing about art is, De Gaulle was practically blind by the end of his life, but he still did fantastic work with color even though he couldn’t see in the center of his vision. You know, you don’t blow your knees out like in the NBA and suddenly you’re not able to work anymore.

BILL: It’s still kind of sad that we still need things like the Hero Initiative. You look at so many amazing talents like Gene Colan, there is no retirement plan for guys in comics or strips.

A 1985 illustration job.

S.A.N.S. © Karl Hansen

DRAW!: No, I think the guys who did the best were the guys who did the strips, because they made pretty good money.

Unless they had five wives or something, they could— BILL: When you mentioned Stan Drake, that was the case.

The difference between Mort Walker and Stan, I think Mort had a couple of spouses, but he certainly was doing well enough to be able to own Gutzon Borglum’s [the sculptor of Mt. Rushmore] house and studio, whereas I think Stan, when he was doing the Juliet Jones stuff, the romance strips kind of died out. Beetle Bailey was something that stood the test of time. Stan was doing Juliet Jones, and they finally came to him and asked him to do Blondie. When I was with the studio in Westport with Stan and Leonard [Starr] and Johnny Prentice, Johnny was still doing Rip Kirby, and Leonard at that time was doing Little Orphan Annie.

DRAW!: Percentage-wise, how much of what you do would you say is pure illustration versus comics, or does it really matter to you now? Does it just sort of all blur?

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BILL: Yeah, in a way it kind of blurs. I love comics. I’m really feeling the desire to bring illustration into comics, and it doesn’t feel like I’m trying to push against a headwind, because I feel like I’ve kind of got a little bit of the wind at my back, and it can really allow for a lot more expression, and narration, and storytelling. And I love that. But if I want to do single images for galleries, and finding a schematic theme for something I want to do, I can usually run with it. Right now I’m mostly doing comics stuff. I’ve gotten some illustration one-offs here and there, like some movie stuff for Criterion, which is a lot of fun. But even there, there’s kind of a narrative aspect to it. Even the late, great Darwyn Cooke was doing a lot of stuff for Criterion. What they’re good at is they use people from comics, but they find the illustration style that works well with the film.

DRAW!: And you were also talking about doing more fine art, or thinking about doing your own drawings with your own narrative in that?

BILL: Right, exactly. One of the things I’m trying to get done, I’m working with somebody and doing a large book of all my stuff, a big coffee-table book, the Book of Bill, so to speak. A lot of guys are doing these big books, but I always felt like I needed more work to come out first, and now I feel like I’ve got a good body of work for some kind of retrospective. But we want to do it kind of in a non-generic way. I’ve seen a lot of these large books, and there’s a certain kind of homogeneity that happens that I want to avoid, so I’m a little bit of a stickler when it comes to how much I want to push into that. I’ve turned down a lot of offers to do it because I know exactly what I want, and I know what I don’t want.

The series that I want to do for myself is actually kind of an anthology, because I like working in so many different styles. I want to do an anthology that’s all by one guy, but it looks like it’s done by, like, ten different guys. And maybe work with other writers—have them come in and do a two- or three-page story that I could illustrate in whatever particular style. I kind of want to just play.

DRAW!: Do you warm up on a daily basis? Do you sketch for a while and then jump into work? Or do you take time, like, “I’m gonna take a week and just screw around in the studio and do my own thing…” Because working on commercial stuff can drain you, too.

BILL: Yeah, there’s a little bit of that where I need to refresh and cleanse. With the film and some of the advertising stuff with the likenesses, I work really hard to nail likenesses, so I feel like I’ve got that as a chop, but at the same time I feel

like getting away from trying to have it look like somebody, and just get into really playing around with abstraction.

So I kind of have to break myself away from making something look realistic, because I can do that, but it’s like, “No, no, no, that’s not the point. It should not be realistic. It should be what it feels like.” So if I’m drawing from life, I’ll exaggerate quite a bit as I’m drawing.

It becomes almost more caricature I’m doing.

DRAW!: Would you say it’s an overriding aesthetic that you’re operating from not what it looks like, but what it feels like?

BILL: Yeah. When I was younger I wanted to be able to draw something that looked like it was supposed to. The technical aspects and academic qualities of drawing were, and still are, very important to me, but the more that I’ve done, I’ve found that what really interested me was what you could do with art that you couldn’t really do with academic work—really playing with figures and distortions that were—as Picasso said, “the truth through the lie”—really getting into what something felt like. If somebody was yelling, I wanted to be able to detach their lower jaw and really stretch it out so that it felt more like they were screaming. That’s one thing I feel like I’ve noticed a lot with the younger people who use photo reference, a lot of the photo reference is incredibly tepid.

DRAW!: There’s a trick to using it.

You’ve worked with guys like Stan and Leonard; they knew how to use a swipe. They knew where to juice it a little bit, so they could use the reference and then abandon it when there was Bill exaggerates the forced perspective for the cover of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up #6. something that didn’t look as sweet or Punisher, Spider-Man © Marvel Characters, Inc. sexy, like the shape of a hand or something, or when there was some distortion that came from the I was working with Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics photograph, that you accept because it’s a photograph, but as on some band stuff with SuperHeavy, and Mick Jagger was a drawing, it doesn’t look authentic. It doesn’t look right. part of that, with Joss Stone and Damian Marley. He gave me BILL: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You could take a photograph some photos and he wanted me to do some sketches and charof someone aiming a gun at the camera, and then you could acters, and I did a drawing of Mick that was very much spot draw it exact, and the hand will end up looking like a minia- on to the photo, and he looked like an old lady, you know? ture hand, because you have to really exaggerate the forced No insult intended, it was part of my poor drawing ability, perspective in the artwork, and I’ve found that you can really but I found when I started to Mort Drucker-ize him, when I push reference, and it will end up feeling more real than if you started to really exaggerate his features—and I’m not talking just draw it as is. about to the point of absurdity or the point of caricature; it still

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was a portrait—but when I pushed some of those elements, it looked a lot more like him.

DRAW!: Right, right. [John Singer] Sargent did that. He always slightly caricatured his portraits. There’s a gray one of this old Colonel Sanders-looking guy, and I remember seeing a photo of the guy he painted, and then the painting, and the painting was like a caricature. I mean, it was a fantastic painting, but he kind of caricatured the guy, and actually you got the feeling that it looked more like the person than the person, in a way. You’re right, all good portraiture has just a little bit of a caricature quality to it.

BILL: Oh, yeah. Alice Neel’s portraits, even something as grotesque as some of Francis Bacon’s stuff, you can really find a likeness in there. Speaking of Alice Neel, I think Picasso did a portrait of her, and they said that it didn’t look like her, and he said, “It will.” [Mike laughs] Which is a great statement.

But, yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. And that’s one of the reasons, in comics, the exaggeration is part of the mandate. It’s like, God, if you can’t distort in comics, then why do you even try?

DRAW!: For some reason I’ve gotten on a Kirby kick lately.

I have a lot of back issues of the Kirby Collector, and I was looking at his romance stories that he did that were not published. You could tell that, even though his work was very exaggerated, there were beautiful bits of real observation in his stylized drawings.

BILL: Oh, yeah!

DRAW!: I think most people just think of the pack of hot dog fingers, but if you actually look at his best work post’70, there’s a lot of beautiful exaggeration, but also beautiful observation. Even though his work was stylized, you could tell that he was a guy who was looking at the world around him to inject that into his stylized drawings.

BILL: Absolutely. Stan Drake would talk about playing golf with Robert Fawcett, and Robert Fawcett was, like, “Stan! How do you draw such beautiful women?” To have an illustrator who knew how to draw from observation still going nuts over somebody else’s interpretation of how to draw.

DRAW!: Stan Drake was using Polaroids, and [Alex] Raymond wanted to get more naturalism into his stuff, more of that quality, although the editor at King Features, supposedly, wasn’t a big fan of that. He liked the more classical way that Raymond drew. But Raymond was very interested in that. It’s funny to think how using Polaroids at that point was a revolutionary approach.

BILL: Every technology, I think, finds some way to be part of the process. Years ago when I was first starting out, I’d do a drawing, and then I’d turn on a copy machine and drag the image through as I was copying it, playing with it. Digital has sort of supplanted so much of what you can do with actual paint and line.

And I still love to be able to see what you can do with all of it, you know?

A 1983 Illustration for Connecticut Magazine.

Connecticut Magazine © Digital First Media

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DRAW!: Do you still use a copier at all?

BILL: Actually, I was just looking into getting one, because when I do certain drawings, if I do it too small and want to blow it up and lightbox it, I have to scan it in and then print it out. With a

Silent Screen Queen © Bill Sienkiewicz

copier it’s just, boom, done. To me, it’s whatever is fastest.

DRAW!: We talked about design, shape, rhythm. Does that also come with speed for you?

Do you have to be working at a certain velocity when you’re producing?

BILL: Well, my approach is fast anyway. The way I put down paint or a line is, I can slow down, but I find that I work at a pretty good clip. What I spend a lot more time on is the preparation—finding the image, and working out the sketches and the layout, or at least having an idea of the layout. But going into the actual production of a piece, I’m pretty fast. The only time I slow down is if I’m working on something like a watercolor, but even then I’ll work on several pieces at one time, because if I don’t have any patience for it to dry, I’ll just set it aside and I’ll jump on something else. It keeps the freshness going.

DRAW!: You’re not working as much with the airbrush now, right?

BILL: I’ve been using it a little bit, but I enjoy the hands-on.

Airbrush, for me, was kind of a unifier, so I ended up getting a lot of cans of tagging paint, graffiti paint, the spray cans. I was doing a lot of stuff with those for a while. I tend to work a little bit smaller with airbrushing, because you can lay down such a thin mist of color. But after a certain time, I was working just with paint and colored pencil or acrylic. I found that a lot of the stuff I could do with airbrush, I wouldn’t have to do. I started to be able to think ahead, and I ended up liking how the image looked without the airbrush. Like I said, when I’m working on a piece, I’ll jump from one thing to another, and sometimes I’ll

go, “You know what? I really feel like this piece should have airbrush.” Or it needs X, Y, or Z. I still let the piece decide.

DRAW!: I’m sort of surprised that you are not using the Cintiq. My buddy just loaned me his, because I want to get one but I wanted to try it out first.

BILL: What do you think about it?

DRAW!: I’m old school. I like having paper.

BILL: Yeah, same here.

DRAW!: You don’t have to back up paper. There are guys like Craig Mullins who do fantastic stuff with digital. But in 20 years something might happen, and all those tiffs and jpegs are not going to transfer. You can look at a Rembrandt painting that’s hundreds of years old, but what’s going to happen in hundreds of years if you produce some really great stuff, but it’s digital? Are we still going to be able to look at it? And I like having the original. My sense of taste and touch, the way my hand drags along a piece of paper… I’m sure you’re the same way.

BILL: I’m totally in that same school in terms of how it feels to me. And what you just mentioned in terms of loss of technology—I lost seven years of work that I had backed up digitally.

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Bill used elements from these sketches (left and above) in the final image for the cover of Batman: The Widening Gyre #4 (next page).

Batman, Joker © DC Comics

DRAW!: Really? Wow. BILL: Oh, yeah. I had a terabyte hard drive that went south, and all they could rescue were thumbnails. And the price started at $700 dollars just to even crack it open, so they did a preliminary report gratis, “Here’s the kind of stuff we can save.” They got some samples, and it ended up being all thumbnails. So what I would have had was a hard drive of nothing but 16KB images of everything I had lost, you know?

DRAW!: What do you do now?

BILL: I have a bunch of hard drives that I back things up on, but even the stuff I have on disc, CDs, a lot of those you have to be careful with because some of those degrade. There was a lot of stuff that I stored to magneto-optical drives—they were like a big floppy disc, you know? All the discs are fine, and the reader and recorder is fine, but there’s no interface. It has a SCSI interface, and the technology to convert a SCSI to USB, you don’t see that anymore.

DRAW!: So you have to have an old G4 or something that can still run it.

BILL: I used to have an old Mac that I didn’t upgrade because I had a dye sublimation printer, which was freaking expensive. It was a $30,000 dollar printer that I used to use for color proofing. It was Tektronix, and I think Tektronix was absorbed by Xerox, and they came out with these polymer-

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ized sticks of pigment that they would heat and get the same quality. But the color purity on a dye sub, you couldn’t even touch it with a laser printer or even an inkjet. But these things become incredibly large paperweights, you know?

DRAW!: Every ten years, you just end up with a big pile of junk. What kind of setup do you have?

BILL: Well, I’ve had a number of Mac towers over the years.

Now I have the new one that looks like a little wastebasket, the little black cylinder, but mostly what I’ve been working on for the last several years is a maxed-out 13" MacBook Pro. I have a whole bunch of extra storage drives. I have a couple of screens, a big scanner, a bunch of printers, but all of it is to make my work flow go faster. I’ve got a big lightbox as well.

I also have a digital projector, which I’ve used.

DRAW!: You don’t have your old Art-O-Graph? [laughs] BILL: I actually left that in Connecticut when I moved. I left a lot of stuff. I had one, but it was the old one that looked like a minivan. It was that big, bulky, boxy thing.

DRAW!: Yeah, I still have mine. I haven’t used it in years.

BILL: That plastic housing started to degrade like crazy.

That thing just became so brittle. At the studio with Stan and Leonard, they also had one. Stan would use it a lot, but he stopped using it when he got the copy machine and found that he could work a lot easier with a copier in making things different sizes. But any of those technologies work. Before I got

the large format printer, I would print out an image like puzzle pieces, and just tape it together and then lightbox it. All those technologies are just ways to get out of your own way.

DRAW!: When I was talking with Dave Dorman a couple of issues ago, he talked about being a traditional artist, and how he was getting some flak from the younger art directors because they were used to working with guys who were digital, or “tra-digital,” whatever you want to call it. Some people would think, “Well, I don’t want to hire you because you’re traditional, and it’ll take you longer than if you’re digital.” Do people assume that you’re digital, do you think?

BILL: It really depends. There are people who ask me if I’ve ever worked digitally at all. To me, digital is just a tool.

There were some pieces I did all-digital when I was doing some trading cards for DC, and I really enjoyed it. I thought, “I’ll never hand-draw again. I’m having too much fun with all the possibilities of digital without getting dirty.” But after about a year, after the newness wore off, I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. I miss getting dirty.”

DRAW!: [laughs] Right, you can’t use an actual crow’s quill on the digital tablet.

BILL: That’s right, exactly. And it always feels like there is this little bit of thickness of the glass where you’re not quite touching the exact point. There’s that distance that happens with a tablet.

It’s not like a pen point being on a piece of paper, where there’s only a couple of atoms’ difference to the surface.

DRAW!: Now you’ve moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. Life is very different in New York and L.A. Would you say that that’s had any effect on you artistically at all?

BILL: I can’t tell. Other people have said that they feel like my work has gone on to another level, which is actually nice to hear, but I don’t know exactly what that means. They say they mean it as a compliment, so I’ll take them at their word.

[Mike laughs] In some respects I feel like maybe location isn’t everything about it. It does factor in, but when I’m working at 3:00 a.m., it doesn’t really matter what’s outside—I’m inside.

I’m more of a studio guy, even though there’s beautiful light here, and if I’m outside bopping around, that’s great. But, like I said, if I’m working at whatever late hour, it doesn’t really matter whether—.

DRAW!: Or inside your head.

BILL: Exactly, yeah. A lot of what it comes down to is finding the environment. After Stan passed away, I had my own place in Stanford, where I moved because my girlfriend lived in Manhattan. I moved from Westport, where Stan’s studio was, to Stanford because it was the first stop on the express train. I would go into the city and spend time with her there, or she would come up, and it was the first stop on the train. And it was literally right on the water, which was really beautiful. I would meet people in the city, but because I traveled so often, I didn’t really have that many people I saw in Stanford at all. I mean, pretty much I kept to myself and just lived in my head. My residence was Seat 26-C in Jet Blue. That’s pretty much where I lived, you know? And I would also travel back and forth

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between Los Angeles and the East Coast. I would come out and sometimes I would spend six months in L.A., you know? I was literally dividing my time between one coast and the other, and after doing that for ten years, it just got to be too much.

DRAW!: For the rest of the day, are you going to be working on a project, or are you going to sketch?

BILL: As we’ve been talking I’ve actually been doing some background inking. I’m just walking and chewing gum at the same time, as I talked about. But I’m actually about to do some layouts for a hip-hop cover I’m doing for Marvel.

I wanted to start a watercolor, because I just need to do one.

And, let’s see, I’ve got another cover I’m working on for DC. And I’m also working on layouts for the new series I’m doing with Kelly Sue. So I’m just sort of bouncing from one thing to another today.

DRAW!: Do you like to have multiple things to bounce around to? Do you find that that works for you?

BILL: Yeah, because it keeps me from being frozen or locked up on a piece in terms of expectations. The real killer in terms of productivity is like that line from Barton Fink, “Taking an interest.” [Mike laughs] “What did you do?” “We took an interest!” You know? When I take an interest, I find that I have to be careful because I set up so many high expectations, and those are dashed repeatedly and often, and I should know by now. But I also find that if I go in and I just pace myself a little bit, then a piece will come together a lot faster. There’s a lot less Sturm und Drang, you know? For example, when I was inking the Kevin Eastman stuff, I was trying different pen points and working at different sizes, and everything sort of becomes an experiment. For a while I was working exact size, 1:1 for anything that was printed. I printed out his layouts literally so I could ink on an 8½" x 11" sheet. I think everything I do is trying to find the one way to work, and I should know, after 30 or 40 years, that my way of working is to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.

Bill’s initial sketch for the cover of Daredevil #7.

Daredevil, Elektra © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: You sound like Bret. He’s always trying to find some new little way of doing something. And maybe it’s just sort of a way of trying to give yourself mental freedom. Is what you’re experimenting with really that different, or do you just need to feel that it’s different?

BILL: Well, when I printed out the bluelines at 8½" x 11" and I blew them up to 18" x 24", you’re talking about a large size discrepancy. With one I’m getting out my .1 Micron pens, and I’m drawing a thin outline to try to nail down the figure and just getting in there with almost a magnifying glass, and then I’m looking at the same image printed out at 400% that size, and realizing I should go in there with a trowel and tighten things up.

DRAW!: Or, like, using your hand as opposed to using your arm.

BILL: Right, exactly. But I would actually go, “Okay, well, let me see how tight I can go, and how small I can go, and still get all the detail in there. Let me see how that feels.” One time I was in Paris visiting with my friend Rasheed, and I was talking about working the same size, and he said, “I want to show you something.” And I don’t remember who the artist was, but it was a beautifully drawn black-and-white Heavy Metal strip that, let’s just say it had elements of Moebius to it, all right? It wasn’t Moebius, but it had elements of that. And he went into his flat files and pulled out the original, and it was smaller than the printed strip. It was printed in the magazine up, like, 120%.

I loved the idea of knowing that if you take a 1" brush across a page that’s printed 100%, you know exactly what you’re getting. You don’t have to worry about how it’s going to close up [when it’s reduced for printing] or anything. And there’s something about it that I found really challenging. Half of Stray Toasters was done exact size, and that’s a size I’ve worked with that I’m very comfortable with, but there’s a part of me that automatically rejects it because it feels like I’ve done that before. I want to try something different. So when I work really large, I have a lot of fun with that. So I find I’ll start out, “For this panel I’m just going to draw everything 1:1,” because I keep thinking if I work at it and I really like it that this will be the way I’ll work for a while. And I will do that piece, and it’ll come out fine, and I’ll get bored with it by the end of the day and I’ll want to work really large. But when it comes time to compositing the whole job, what I’ve got is a number of panels done all different sizes. As I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to work, I’ve actually been working on the job, but I’ve been working on it at all different sizes and different levels of finish, and different mediums. And then I end up scanning all of that in, and, “Okay, I spent three

hours on this panel. I really went whole hog with it. I could jump into it on one of the larger images, but there’s something about this I really like, so let me scan that in and then drop that in.” Even on something that I think is just going to be an experimental thing, I’ll get into it because I have no expectations of it, and really, there’s some magic that happens.

DRAW!: I take it this is more when you’re inking. You can have a little bit of risk in it, because you figure, “Well, if I blow it, I’ll just print it out again.”

BILL: Oh, yeah. And there’s also a part of me that wants to almost make a mess, make a mistake, because I’m at that place currently where I hate everything I’m doing. I don’t like the way my lines are going down, I don’t like the way the brush strokes are going. I’m not getting the effect I want, or the values I want. So every line I’m putting down, I’m enjoying it, but I feel like, “Ugh, that’s such a bad line.” You know? [Mike laughs] And yet, at the end of the day I’ll go back to it and I’ll find something about it that has a little bit of a redeeming quality.

(left) Bill’s second sketch hits closer to the mark. (above) The final image for the cover of Daredevil #7.

Daredevil, Elektra © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: I think most artists who’ve been working for a long time must go through that, because I’ll have the same thing.

I’ll do something, the art’s good, but I don’t really love it.

And then the thing that you feel the least excited about, other people will go, “That’s great!” And then the thing you feel like, “Man, I really turned a corner,” and everybody’s, “Enh, yeah, it’s okay.”

ability to understand some of that graphic design. As a kid, I remember it, but I probably would have preferred it if John Romita had drawn it. Because to the average fan, if you put a lot of detail in, that’s good, because detail is good. If you use three lines to draw it, you start running against the taste of the average person. I mean, that’s always a problem with popular entertainment, because you don’t want to pander, but like I said, I feel like on the strips I sort of have to give people what they expect. If I change it up too much, the people who are artistic or have an artistic sensibility might be able to appreciate it, but then the other people will go kind of like, “What is that? That’s kind of weird-looking.”

BILL: You’re trampling on a history that people have invested in.

“Yeah, we’re going to do Mandrake the Magician, but we’re going to model him after Cumberbatch,” or something like that, as opposed to John Waters with that little, thin mustache.

DRAW!: Actually, modeling on John Waters would probably be pretty funny. [laughs] BILL: Actually, yeah! But a lot of the guys I talk to who are doing the strips, like Tom Yeates, and I think Gary Gianni is doing Prince Valiant now?

BILL: Yeah, well, there were pieces that I would do where I would really love a piece, and a lot of times, especially early on when I was doing the Moon Knight stuff, there were pages where I’d put my heart and soul into them, and I actually felt, “The audience is going to like this,” and I was right. Over the years, the more abstract I’ve become, the pieces that I’m happy about, other artists kind of go nuts over, but most readers won’t. My focus has changed about what has been the thing that drives me.

DRAW!: If I’m out painting, people will come up and go, “Oh, that looks real.” Because, to the average person, if it looks like a photograph, that means you did a good job. They’re not trying to insult you, but that’s their standard understanding of, if you’re going to paint a picture, it should look just like the thing that you’re looking at. And a lot of comics fans—I always use Toth as an example, because he was a guy that would do a Hot Wheels comic, which is for little kids. But it’s so sophisticated, in a way, that it’s beyond the eight-year-old’s

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DRAW!: No, Tom’s doing that now.

BILL: Tom’s doing Prince Valiant? Now, I forget, who’s doing— oh, Grindberg is doing Tarzan. But what’s great about what you’re doing and what those guys are doing is they’re finding the artists who have a foot in that, and a grasp of the heritage, of the beauty of draftsmanship, and what has come before. And I love that. And that’s one thing that I feel like a lot of the younger talent sort of has missed.

I mean, as much as I love seeing abstract work or something that’s pushing new boundaries, there was a period years ago when a lot of the collage stuff that I had started, and then there was a bunch of guys coming in who started running with that style, I ended up going back to school. Not literally going to school, but, “Okay, I’m going to really understand watercolor.

I’m really going to work on my anatomy.” It’s like a musician who’s in a band, and they’ve had hits, but yet he goes, “I really want to get better at guitar playing.” I realized that the more I knew about color and design and drawing and the basics, there’s no wrong way to go with that.

DRAW!: I always use a guy like Gene Colan as an example.

He’s a guy who knew perspective so well that he could distort

it, and then it became an expressive tool. You can tell a Gene Colan drawing by just looking at part of it—just part of it. To me, that’s real artistic power.

BILL: That’s totally what I feel about the whole idea of going back to school. It’s like knowing other languages. It gives you better ways to express yourself. If you know how a body works because you know how all the muscles fit, you can distort something and make it more convincing. It gives you another—I keep talking about arrows in your quiver, but it’s really what it gives you. It gives you another way to connect with people and get an image across, or storytelling— something that people will really respond to.

DRAW!: So how much drawing do you do for fun? What percentage of your week is you drawing for fun?

BILL: Well, you know, even though I say I’m hating everything I’m doing, there’s a bumper sticker that says, “A bad day of fishing is better than a good day at work,” you know?

To me, it’s always fishing. As much as I’m having a hard time, when I’m realizing I don’t like how something looks, that’s usually a good sign that some change is coming, that I’m still pushing. So, to answer your question about how much is fun time, every day is a fun time. But in terms of things I used to do a lot, I would sketch before I’d fall asleep. I would sketch, just making stuff up and seeing where the pen would go. I’d have no real idea of what was happening.

DRAW!: You’d just go into your brain.

BILL: Yeah, and it was really liberating. And I found that when I was doing more serious work as a gig, my sketchbooks got more playful. When I was doing goofier stuff, my sketchbooks got more painterly. So it was a way to sort of balance out the sides.

What I’m doing now is, I try to keep one for as many different actual jobs that are playing with different arenas. So I’ve got five or six different sketchbooks that I keep going at one time, and I just pick whichever one up. I used to keep them all in kind of chronological order, from start to finish, as kind of a historical document of progress, and now having so many different sketchbooks, I’m moving them across different ones.

But I was just doing some painted stuff for San Diego. I was working on the Hendrix images for Apple Records, the company that the Beatles formed. They do a lot of licensing now, and Alex Ross is doing the Beatles, I’m doing Jimi Hendrix, and I’ll probably be doing the Doors, as well—paintings that are going to be done as giclées—and at the same time I was also finishing up the Future Quest cover for DC. So I was doing painterly stuff, and I was also doing my version of Saturday morning car-

toons. What I used to do in my sketchbooks, I got a chance to actually do as a paying gig. If I play in my sketchbooks, that’s great, because that’s the place where there’s no pressure. But if I can bring that mindset to whatever job I’m working on and it’s not just simply about getting paid, if I can experiment on a job and do a certain technique, and then over on this job I can get in and do some painting, then no one job has to be the place where I’m trying to shoehorn in everything. I mean, I look at a lot of my earlier stuff and I realize a lot of the experimentation I was doing had a lot of dynamism, but I was throwing everything at it, and some of the things I probably should have dialed back about 30%, or I probably should have whispered here as opposed to shouting. Part of the maturity of growing is that you realize that there are times when you don’t need to put the entire bag of sugar into a cup of coffee.

DRAW!: You don’t need to give the piece diabetes, right? [laughs] BILL: Yeah! You can let a piece breathe a little bit, as opposed to shoveling stuff in there. My criteria used to be I didn’t want to give anybody the opportunity to ignore what I was doing.

I wanted people to either love it or hate it, you know? I still

Mark Twain from Bill’s sketchbooks.

Sketch © Bill Sienkiewicz

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© Bill Sienkiewicz

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DRAW!: You like to ink with a bunch of different tools. What is the weirdest thing you’ve tried to ink with or draw with, and the one that worked the best, and the one that was, like, “Whoa, that does not work.”

BILL: When I lived in Connecticut by the river, I would go out running or go down and feed the geese, and I would find feathers—big quills. I would bring them back and try cutting them down, and I found that they actually worked pretty well. I don’t have any of them now, but I felt like Ben Franklin or something. It was hysterical. Here I am going and looking online to find out how to carve an actual quill down into a working pen, you know?

The thing that worked the best, that’s a really good question, because at some point or another I find that if it makes a certain kind of mark, I’ll use it. I would use makeup sponges, and I found they were awesome to work with, especially for architecture.

DRAW!: Because they had a square…?

BILL: That square edge, yeah.

DRAW!: Now they make the cheap foam brushes. You can get little ones and do great stuff with that. What was the one that did not work at all?

BILL: I hate to ruin the question by adding the aspect of context, but I tried doing some paintings with this liquid ink. The chemical composition is very similar to regular magic markers, but these are opaque and they’re more like paint, and you can absolutely not dilute them with water. They end up turning into stringy ricotta. I’ve tried working on paintings where I’ve actually poured out different quantities of colors, and then started brushing it down, and then on autopilot I would dip my brush into water as opposed to using alcohol or something, and it was an absolute train wreck. I found myself going, “I may have to throw out my palette.” But what hit me was, maybe it’s my own mechanism, it turned into this gummy, stringy, almost like an adhesive. It literally gummed up the brush, and I found myself going, “Well, how can I make this work? How can I use this train wreck in a context where it really works?” I’ve had plenty of those situations.

As far as drawing implements designed to be used for a certain thing but yet, for me, they’re vastly overrated, those would be magic markers. [laughter] And I’m not talking about what you can do with them. Maybe it’s because they’re trying too hard to be a utilitarian tool. I’ve tried filling some with India ink and everything like that, and they could work really well, but at the same time there’s a part of me that, given an option to use

© Bill Sienkiewicz

tend to feel that way, but right now the loving and the hating part comes down to what you feel about your own stuff.

it or not, I’d rather work with something where I have no idea what’s going to happen, you know? I have some of the most expensive airbrushes, and yet I find that the one I use the most often is the single action Paasche. And it’s a real workhorse. So I walk the like between being a snob and an elitist in terms of utilities, and utensils, and supplies, and being a total working stiff. Whatever works and gets the job done is great. So it really depends on what hat I’m wearing that day.

DRAW!: Have you tried inking with inksticks?

BILL: Oh, yeah! I’ve actually inked with sticks. You need the reservoir to hold them. But, God, I’ve tried everything to find some way to make them work. I wish that Dr. Martin’s dyes were not fugitive, because I love the way that they go down. I love the way that you can lift up the color with bleach and get back to the white surface.

DRAW!: What kind of inks do you use?

BILL: Everything I try to use is light-fast now. And I’ve worked with oils over the years. Mostly what I use now is water-based, because I enjoy the plasticity of them. I was a big science lover—chemistry and physics—in high school, and I’ve found that a lot of the way I approach art supplies is not so much in terms of what the covalent bonds are or any of that stuff, but in terms of, if you’re working with plastics or polymers, what strengthens them, what are the things that break them down, and how can those kinds of things be utilized as a tool?

DRAW!: What about ballpoint and things like that?

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DRAW!: [laughs] What’s your favorite whiteout pen?

BILL: My standby is the Pentel Presto.

Although they have come out with a whole bunch of opaque pens that have actually worked very well.

DRAW!: What about fabric markers?

BILL: I’ve tried different fabric markers, but they don’t work as well as I would have thought.

DRAW!: The flow is not good?

BILL: I haven’t really thought about it.

That’s a good question. That might be something I should investigate more. © Bill Sienkiewicz

DRAW!: I see them when I go into an art store. They have all the different standard markers, and now they’re getting all these different kinds of fabric markers with what you would normally get in a spray can, but in a marker.

BILL: You mean like the paint markers?

BILL: I’ve done a lot of drawing in my sketchbooks in ink. I started with ink because I didn’t want to be able to erase in my sketchbooks. I wanted the mistakes to just sort of scream out at me. Ballpoint pens are really unsung heroes when you talk about utensils. What you can do with them is sometimes more amazing than what you can do with a marker. But it’s hard to say which tools are valid tools or not, or whether they’re just druthers. What works for one person might not work for another person in terms of the subjective preferences that we have as people. I’m looking around my studio here trying to figure out the one thing I used that was a complete and total train wreck. I know it has something to do with something that ended up igniting, so let’s just leave it at that.

DRAW!: [laughter] You combined the nitro and the glycerin and you shouldn’t have?

BILL: Yeah. But I’ve had plenty of things that worked out better than I anticipated, and I’ve had things that didn’t work out. The biggest thing I regret, and one of the most prevalent scenarios that has happened to me over the years, and I would think that I would have learned by now, is that I have spilled more coffee on inked pages. It’s literally like the page is three-quarters coffee stain brown, and I’m trying to go in with a whiteout pen and completely eliminate any shred of the brown tint. That’s like Rain Man stuff, you know?

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DRAW!: Yeah. Have you ever used them?

BILL: I’ve used them. I even bought a bunch of empty ones and mixed up my own color combinations, because I figured I would maybe use them at shows or something like that, or find a certain color that I like that I’m going to use for certain pieces, and put it on the shelf and come back to it, knowing that I’ve got that specific color, having a certain formula that I like. I’ve done that.

I have one of those Waterpiks. They actually make one that’s portable, as well. A lot of times with watercolor, once it dries you can scrub out the paint. So you can do a little bit of lifting out on the paper depending on the paper—not Yupo paper, which is a complete polymer paper where nothing sticks. But late at night on TV they would run these ads, the 3:00 a.m. things where they would show some kind of steam cleaning machine that had jets of water. I ended up buying this thing and using it in my studio—just pressing it and shooting all this steam at this watercolor I’m doing so I could lift up the pigment, as opposed to scrubbing it out—just letting the water do the job, you know? And I found that you can do that with the Waterpik too. You just get in there and let it hit. You’re not scrubbing it.

DRAW!: There’s no abrasion.

BILL: Yeah. My big thing is finding things that are not designed to be art supplies and making them into art supplies and seeing how they work. I end up having more fun with subverting other things and turning them into art supplies that are never intended to be art supplies. They have these

© Bill Sienkiewicz

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airbrush cleaners that you spend X amount of dollars on to dissolve the acrylic, and I found that nothing beats Formula 409, you know?

It’s all these little things that they keep trying to make people buy that you really don’t need.

DRAW!: You go to Home Depot or Lowe’s, and you buy your art bin there, and it’s really cheap. And if you go to the art store and buy the same art bin, which is probably not as good, it’s twice as expensive.

BILL: Exactly, exactly. I would go into Lowe’s or Home Depot and find a bunch of wiring stuff for fluorescent lighting. My father worked with television sets before plexiglass was in, so I would find these really great pieces of tempered glass and make my own lightbox. I would get a desk, and I would open up the drawer, and I’d put a fluorescent light in the drawer, and put my glass in. I ended up having this lightbox that was in a drawer, and you could shut the drawer. And I could actually keep other things in the drawer, as well, behind the lightbox.

DRAW!: You inked something with a chicken foot or something?

BILL: Well, yeah, I’ve tried a lot of different things, like the feather of a quill pen. They make great veins for weathering patterns. But the one thing about finding interesting tools like that is you have to be careful that they don’t become a gimmick. Like using salt on a watercolor painting—everything in moderation.

DRAW!: Have you ever made stamps for textures?

BILL: Oh, absolutely. I used to cut up old erasers. For Stray Toasters, I used to draw my stamps, and I would send them to stamp companies, and I would actually have them make patterns that I would use. Like, if I wanted to make a spatter pattern, rather than spatter with a brush, I would have a stamp with a spatter pattern.

DRAW!: I guess that saves time on cleanup, and putting on the masking fluid is always a hassle, depending upon the paper. Sometimes the Marvel and DC paper got kind of bad, and if you used the masking fluid, it would actually pull up some of the paper.

BILL: Right, absolutely. That’s the one thing, is finding the right quality of the utensils, and tools, and surfaces. They’ve improved a lot of stuff. The reason I’m getting a lot of my pen nibs on eBay and from vintage sources is because the new ones are crap, if they make them at all.

DRAW!: I’ve got some from Japan. They still make some decent stuff.

BILL: I get stuff from a site called JetPens that has a lot of good manga supplies. But I find that a lot of the quality pens, like the old Gillott 90s, are made from a different metal. Some of the stuff I buy now, I get a box of a dozen and maybe four of them are no good.

Sketch and finished art for the cover of The Mad Hatter #1.

Mad Hatter © DC Comics

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DRAW!: Al, Bret, and I used to order from this place—and I still have a bunch of 108s and 102s that I got there—and theirs were pretty good because they got the manufacturers to run the nibs through their process twice, so it tempered the metal better, like you would with a sword. But the nibs now, supposedly it’s the same metal, but it’s how they process the metal that’s the difference. With art supplies, every

time one company buys another, they decide, “Oh, well, we’re not going to do that anymore,” and it lowers the bar a little more on the quality.

BILL: Paper, especially. I have reams of Strathmore paper that I bought from my art supply dealer in Westport back in the ’80s. The sheets of paper are just amazing. I’ve got several hundred sheets of it, but I almost want to take one blank sheet and frame the sheet.

The sheet itself is a work of art. They don’t make it like that anymore. I almost don’t want to put anything on it.

DRAW!: Yeah, like the old Whatman board, and that old Marvel cover stock was great. I still have a bunch of that.

BILL: Yeah. Even the stuff the Kubert School sells, or the Strathmore 400 they sell with the bluelines? When I was inking over Neal on the Batman: Odyssey stuff, I would use a pen on that paper and it would just feather. It would just spread and feather, and then when I would erase, the top layer of paper, almost like a sheet of toilet paper or tissue paper, would come up. It was just this really horrible separation of the ply.

DRAW!: [Walt] Simonson supposedly wrote and talked to them, and they said that they went through some process where there was a bunch of material that was bad, and supposedly they were making it better again. I think it all comes down to their process and how much actual rag content is in the paper, because I buy the sheets for doing the strips, especially when they’re doing the Sunday strips a little bit bigger, I would buy the 400 or even the 500.

But I have some old 500 from about Finished inks for the cover of The Mad Hatter #1. ten years ago, and if you put them side Mad Hatter © DC Comics by side, I mean, I’m not Daredevil, but you can totally feel the difference.

BILL: Oh, not long. It was only about half a year. I was subBILL: Well, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s weird stituting for somebody who had to go on leave, so Joe called talking about process, things that you don’t really talk about, me up, and I was only a few hours away. I would drive there you just think about. You live in your own head. When I was a couple days a week. I enjoyed it. teaching at Kubert School, we’d talk to the students about what they should be doing or shouldn’t be doing, and it’s DRAW!: I’ve been teaching for about 15 years now. I do enjoy always dangerous when you “should” all over somebody, you it, and it does make you think about your process, because know? [Mike laughs] But I found out I would have to make helping someone else makes you think about what you do, and sure I was walking the walk and not just talking the talk. why you do it, and everybody’s trying to solve basically the same problems, but everybody’s coming at it with a different DRAW!: How long did you teach there? gait, a different level of ability, a different interest.

DRAW! SPRING 2017

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and stuff like that. And he came back to me and says, “I do not get this at all. This does nothing for me.” I mean, his figure work, and his drawing, his expressions, and everything else, are so rooted in animation and in figurative drawing and into an almost sculptural approach, you know what I mean?

Conan © Conan Properties International, LLC

DRAW!: It’s flesh.

BILL: Exactly, and I look at the human form as flesh, but at the same time, to me it’s part of the total design. It doesn’t resonate with me the same way. I look at what he does and I go, “I can’t do that.” [laughs] It’s so interesting to see what drives different people.

BILL: Well, a lot of artists will ask me, “Why are you inking so many other people’s stuff?” And I’ve found it’s like walking in somebody else’s shoes. It actually gives me a little bit of insight in terms of how to approach something.

DRAW!: Exactly. That was what was fun about inking somebody like Denys, because we work very differently. And I understand where he’s coming from, but that’s not necessarily where I would start, so you sort of meet in the middle.

BILL: Oh, well, you mentioned Bret. Bret and I would get together and talk about different art styles. He did a drawing for my birthday, and I’m a leg guy—I like women’s legs. So he drew this beautiful figure, and this woman, she’s 90% legs, y’know? And it was just so adorable and so sexy. But we would talk about how we approach different things, because he had a real quality of Frazetta. There are different schools. Even though I like to draw anatomy and everything else, I find that I really kind of love abstraction, and pattern, and shape. And then there’s a group of people who are really like the Frazetta guys, who are into anatomy and the figure as sort of the prime mover.

I gave Bret a book on Sergio Toppi, and I said, “Hey, check this out,” because we were talking about design and graphics

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DRAW!: Yeah, it’s true. He’s laying out Harley Quinn now, and even his layouts, the way he will do some little turn of the fat on the back of a girl’s arm or something.

That’s his whole thing is that his drawings have this beautiful sense of flesh. And Frazetta was like that. Frazetta had that beautiful sense of flesh in all his drawings.

BILL: Oh, yeah. There’s a sensuality to it, and an organic quality. And it’s almost like that stuff can’t really be taught. It’s like a kinesthetic response to how figures go together. It’s really weird. I remember looking at a lot of Syd Mead stuff, amazing technical stuff, but all of his people ended up looking like they were constructed out of unused car parts, you know?

DRAW!: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. It’s what you must respond to on a very basic level as an artist, even when you are a kid before you think of yourself as an artist—that’s what attracts you. In the very early part of my artistic development I was super-attracted to Chuck Jones, Mort Drucker— BILL: Oh, God, yeah.

DRAW!: —Jack Kirby, and then I found Neal Adams. I found Neal Adams and Jack Kirby sort of at the same time, because the little store down the street used to sell comics with the covers ripped off. So that created this weird thing, because they’re both so dynamic, but also sort of at the opposite end of the spectrum.

BILL: Well, yeah, you can’t get much more diametrically opposed, in some ways. I mean, they’re both dynamic, but in totally different arenas. Both are very much about strength and power, but, yeah, I totally understand.

DRAW!: It sort of makes you schizophrenic, because you like one thing, and then you like another thing, and then how do you process both of those influences? Because in some ways, to have the delicacy that Neal would have in some of his drawings, you have to sacrifice a certain kind of power. When Neal Adams would have somebody punch somebody, it wasn’t with that cosmic force that Jack Kirby would have somebody punched. I could see that there must have been some of that in you as well, right?

BILL: When you were just talking about the schizophrenia, after I got divorced, I went to therapy to make sure it never happened. I was talking about my art, and I couldn’t pick a style, y’know? And it was like, “Why am I always struggling and trying to find the right way?” I couldn’t make up my mind. I said, “I like so many things, and a lot of them are different,” exactly like what you’re saying. And the therapist said to me, “Don’t look at it as indecisiveness, not knowing what you want to do. Look at it as a level of versatility. You want to be able to try a lot of different things.” And that’s how I took the negative connotation, the punitive, self-critical assessment, and tried to turn it into a positive, and take some pressure off. Because most of the people I know who are artists, the good ones tend to suffer from a lot of abnegation, where they’re beating themselves up.

DRAW!: Look at what Rockwell did to himself, and look at N.C. Wyeth.

Towards the end of his career, he was convinced, “Oh, I’m not really Page 12 of Elektra: Assassin #8. a good painter. I’m an illustrator.

Elektra ©Marvel Characters, Inc. That’s not something to be proud of.”

And the paintings he was doing towards the end of his career DRAW!: I think one of the things about commercial art is were nowhere as powerful as his illustrations. that they want to typecast you, so if you’re Jack Davis, then BILL: Yeah, exactly. It’s like you start to deny what it is that you’re the Jack Davis guy, and if you’re Neal Adams, you’re makes your stuff really sing. But I think at the same time you the Neal Adams guy, and if you can do more than one thing, can kind of screw yourself into the ground by judging and that kind of confuses them. It used to be more that way in criticizing yourself. You end up doing yourself a great dis- comics. If you did funny stuff, then you were just a funny guy. service in terms of your own ability and your own growth. I If you did straight stuff, you were just a straight guy. remember talking to a student about that. You can turn off the BILL: Right. They used to joke, and they’d say I was like voices in your head.

Mikey in the old Life cereal commercial. “Give it to Mikey.

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© Bill Sienkiewicz

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Mixed media illustration for Avon Books’ 1998 edition of The Life and Times of Santa Claus.

Illustration © Avon Books

He’ll eat anything.” “Give it to Bill, he’ll do something really weird with it.”

DRAW!: Do you have a lot of your old stuff, or did you get rid of most of it?

BILL: No, I don’t have a whole lot of it. I’ve kept three or four pieces of mine, but most everything I’ve kind of gotten rid of. There are pieces I wish I did have. I wish I had kept at least one or two pages of everything I’ve worked on. Years ago, after Kevin [Eastman] hit it big with [Teenage Mutant Ninja] Turtles, he bought all the Elektra: Assassin pages.

And, of course over the years, it gets spread to the wind. Do you keep a lot of yours?

DRAW!: Yeah, actually, I have most of the stuff that I have done. I’ve sold very little of it, because one of the things I’ve realized is that, when I get to be 70 and something happens and I can’t work anymore….

BILL: That’s really smart. I look at Walt [Simonson].

DRAW!: Yeah, he must have everything, yeah.

BILL: If he were ever to sell it, especially with the market going up… I look at some stuff of mine that I remember what I sold it for, and when I look at what some of my stuff has gone for, I realize I can’t afford it. It adds a kind of surreal aspect to it.

DRAW!: I have old catalogs from the auction houses, and you look at what stuff was selling for in the ’80s, it was nothing compared to now.

BILL: And at the time, I remember going, “God, those prices are so high!” I have the original Funny Girl painting by Bob Peak, the movie poster piece, and I paid $1100 for it back in the early ’80s. And at that time, I actually got into a big argument with my wife. “Do you really want—?” “No, no, you don’t understand, I gotta have this.”

DRAW!: [laughs] And I’m sure now that thing would be worth maybe ten times that.

BILL: Yeah, and the thing is, I would never sell it. It’s the same thing with the Neal Adams piece I have. Even though he

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© Bill Sienkiewicz

did it in dyes—remember the Billy Jack cover he did where he’s kicking a guy in the throat?

DRAW!: Yeah! Is it fading now?

BILL: No! Because I have kept that in the flat file for 30 years. I don’t have it on the wall. I only pull it out when I have company over who want to see it. It’s in pristine shape. I mean, the colors are as vibrant as the day it was done.

DRAW!: Was the Bob Peak piece that you bought also so you could learn by looking at it?

BILL: Yeah, that, but also, I was a fan. I have a couple of Mark English pieces and a couple of Bernie Fuchs pieces, because I was a really big fan. There were other pieces I should have bought at the time that I didn’t. They were by artists who weren’t as much on my radar, but now I wish I had gotten them. There was a Meade Shaffer.

DRAW!: If you have $50,000, you can buy one of Cornwell’s best paintings. They’re not that expensive.

BILL: There were so many pieces I could have picked up of Cornwell, from his charcoals to some of his paintings, and they probably would have been in the same vicinity of how

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much the Peak cost. I looked at them and thought they were great, but at the time I was only into Peak and guys that had influenced my art school. Now I’m kicking myself. If I had only thought ahead a little bit.

DRAW!: Did you used to go up to Illustration House a lot and look at the stuff?

BILL: Yeah, back before they moved to New York, they were in Norwalk. They were only a town away, so I used to go there, and Walt [Reed, founder of Illustration House] was such a great fan of illustration, a really sweet man. Plus, he knew all the illustrators and cartoonists, so I would just go into his warehouse and there’d be stacks and stacks, paintings leaning up against boxes and against the walls, like, 30 paintings deep.

DRAW!: He was a great guy. About a year or two before he passed away, me and a bunch of buddies, they had never been there, so I took them up, and he would get very excited because you loved the stuff. He was bringing stuff up from the back and showing it to us. He had these great Haddon Sundblom paintings that were just fantastic.

BILL: Whenever we’d go there, it was like a school, like a trip back in time. And his love for everything was just so

ubiquitous. His passion was like having a conversation with somebody who gets it, you know?

DRAW!: Oh, yeah. I have a Cornwell study that I got from him. It was for one of the Fisher Body ads, but you can really learn from a guy’s studies like that. I’m sure it’s the same thing with the Peak stuff, because he was using pastels on top of oils, and the reproduction kind of hides that.

BILL: Well, this one, what gets me is it’s mounted on foam core, but if you look at the Barbara Streisand figure, she’s wearing a red earring, and the red earring, it shoots as a wine red to a bright red on the piece, but the original, all of those circular spheres, it’s like he went to Staples and got some pricing tags, you know, with the circles? And it’s actually a fluorescent red, fluorescent pink. So much of it is just his mixing of media.

DRAW!: So it was actually cut out and stuck on?

BILL: Yeah, and behind her on the bottom there’s a number of small design spheres—yellow, orange, green—those are all price tags.

DRAW!: That’s something you would never think of doing, I suppose.

BILL: The other part of the drawing is just gorgeous. You can see his underdrawing in pencil, and it’s so delicate. His color, it’s just, boom.

Everything on down to even the simple abstractions of the ellipses on her roller skates.

DRAW!: Yeah, I saw an exhibit of his purely by accident one day. It must have been the art gods steering me. I decided to go downtown in Philly, and the Art Institute has a gallery on Chestnut Street. I’m walking down and I look through the window and I go, “You know, that kind of looks like a Bob Peak drawing.” I go inside, and there was this exhibit of Bob Peak stuff, the Elvis cover from TV Guide— BILL: The black velvet cover.

DRAW!: Right, yeah. And then they had several originals to Apocalypse Now, including the one of Brando squeezing the…

BILL: Oh, the sponge?

DRAW!: Yeah. That was just so amazing in person. He had such a touch.

BILL: Yeah. When I worked with Harvey Kahn, Harvey had up on his walls a bunch of those unused pieces for Apocalypse Now, but behind Harvey’s desk was the original for Missouri Breaks, which was huge. Brando’s head had to be a least two feet high, and Nicholson’s head, it was just gorgeous.

Cover painting for Lone Wolf and Cub #18.

Lone Wolf and Cub © Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

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BILL: In Photoshop, if I have two layers and I want to line them up, I turn the top layer into a Difference layer, and it makes it look black when everything lines up, and any discrepancies show up as lines. You can see how close the piece is to actually being in complete sync in terms of how much of it is completely black, because the differences between the layers show up quite a bit. You can get down to the pixel with that.

DRAW!: Ah, okay. But you always end up with one corner being hot or cold compared to the other corner, when you rotate the piece.

BILL: Yeah, or one corner might be slightly out of focus. Doing the artwork is not the end of the piece. Scanning is just as much a part of the process of making an original as doing the art.

Packaging illustration for the Max Payne 3 video game.

Max Payne © Rockstar Games

DRAW!: I guess they must have had to shoot that with transparencies, because that would even be a problem today.

You don’t work any bigger than you scan, right?

BILL: No, actually, I work bigger. I’ll work on some pieces 20" x 30", but I’ve worked larger. I’ve worked 30" x 40", I’ve worked 5' x 5'. If I do a 20" x 30", I’ll put it on my big scanner, and then I’ll just turn the piece four times. I get overlapping portions, and I just assemble it in Photoshop.

DRAW!: But if it was bigger than that, is there a place in L.A. you would go to?

BILL: There have been a couple times where I’ve actually taken my scanner and just set it up on the floor with the top off just to scan the entire thing, myself. There have been pieces that have been 13 scans that I’ve put together.

DRAW!: How do you manage the sometimes subtle differences in the scans?

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DRAW!: Oh, yeah. That’s very, very true. It’s funny, to just even have the basic ability to work, you’ve got to have high speed internet, you’ve got to have your computer and your Photoshop.

When we started, you just had a piece of paper, a pencil, a brush. That’s all you needed. Now you’ve got to have all this other stuff.

BILL: Oh, yeah. That’s the price for being able to live anywhere. I mean, I’ve thought about, “Well, do I really need to be in L.A.? I could be in Boise with a spread.”

DRAW!: That’s true. Is there an advantage to you living in L.A. as far as the art community?

BILL: Oh, yeah, it’s great. I mean, it’s L.A., so the arts here are just amazing. There’s actually an exhibit of some of Guillermo del Toro’s private collection which I have not seen yet, but I definitely want to check it out.

DRAW!: Do you think that it works for you better as far as your career, because people know you’re in town?

BILL: Yeah, although with how much work I’m doing, I might as well be in Detroit, or in Boise, considering how much I actually get out. But, no, it’s great, because so many of my friends who do film and stuff, whenever they get into town, we can get together.

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THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY, AND THE

ORDWAY !

CONTINUITY by JERRY ORDWAY

Caricature by Rachel Ordway

I

’

ve been thinking about what to demo for you, dear readers, and have decided to show how I work when I am inking my own continuity. The process may break a few rules here and there, but I think it’s important to show that there is no one “right” way to draw.

We all develop our processes after trying to conform to the accepted ways, and I find many fellow professionals have veered from the path with a work method that suits them best. In my case, I work in different ways from time to time, out of a need to shake things up. Sometimes I will feel the need to draw tight prelims at a small size, scale them up to final art size, and ink or pencil. If you are drawing a complicated perspective-laden sequence, drawing small scale can make far away perspective points easier to manage, where they might be two feet off your paper at full size. It can also help when trying to coordinate a lot of overlapping characters, or elements to lay them out at a tiny size.

I recently completed a pencils-only comic project which was to be finished by the inker printing out and rendering on bluelines. I drew tight prelims, then enlarged and traced off super-clean pencils, to make the inker’s job easier. Had the actual art boards gone to the same inker, I would have penciled directly onto the paper, since construction lines are not as confusing in graphite as they might be in nonrepro blueline ink.

For the examples shown here, a page from a recent Semiautomagic story written by Alex DeCampi, my method is this:

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STEP 1: I execute a tiny thumbnail drawing (see previous page and left) to show the basic configuration of panels and layout, which I then refer to as I scribble on the actual art boards, and proceed to ink. This method is more of a free form adventure, and feels comparable to a tightrope walker working without a safety net below. I can scribble a loose structure for the whole page, or work panel to panel, from the top of the page down, or the bottom of the page up. It is a fair criticism to say you could make some big mistakes working like this, but I like the danger! Looking at my thumbnail, I can change angles, and play with the camera distance from the subject, but I know what has to happen on each page and each panel, so the mistakes are usually minor.

I am working from a full script, not a plot or outline, so I know I am dealing with six panels. The sketch is really a way for me to visualize the basic flow and composition without any extra detail.

I try to imagine balloon placement at this stage, since it is very important to compose a panel which leaves enough space for lettering, and almost as important, to lock down who speaks first if there is a back and forth conversation between characters. You can compose the most brilliant panel of art, but if the letterer can’t place dialogue on it, it’s a big problem. Don’t lose track of the fact that this is all about storytelling, not just pretty pictures!

STEP 2: The level of penciling here is as finished as I need before starting to ink. I pulled the camera back a little, but the composition matches my thumbnail.

STEP 3: I inked the main figure and most of the background elements with a Hunt #102 crow quill dip pen and Pelikan drawing ink. I saved inking the spruce tree for my brush, a #4 Rafael series 8404 Kolinsky, again using Pelikan ink.

Semiautomagic is ™ and © 2017 by Alex DeCampi and Jerry Ordway.

Art used with permission of the rights holders.

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STEP 4: A brush can allow you to pick out shapes in a tree, to render needles and branches in weighty slashes rather than drawing each individual needle or leaf, depending on the type of tree. I always try to pick out masses of black to make a picture read more clearly, as I did here, behind the leaf-less tree. Also seen here is the most basic of layout for panel two, which I do need to tighten up before inking. I like to choose the pose, and then search through my reference clippings for supporting pictures.

STEP 5: Having a folder of pictures clipped from hunting magazines and elsewhere is a great help, and I usually look in my files first before searching Google. What I needed was some reference on the hands holding a rifle or shotgun. I refined my sketch but did not trace the photo. I have nothing against tracing a photo, but 99% of the time I get more satisfaction using a photo to “inform” or fill-in details in my own drawing.

STEP 6: As before, the composition from thumbnail to inks show little change, except for giving my character a more hesitant two-handed pose rather than the one-handed shotgun pose. That supports the script better, as she is supposed to be surprised by the creature we will see in panel three. The tree mass here was roughed in with a Pitt brush pen, rather than my regular brush.

Semiautomagic is ™ and © 2017 by Alex DeCampi and Jerry Ordway.

Art used with permission of the rights holders.

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Semiautomagic is ™ and © 2017 by Alex DeCampi and Jerry Ordway.

STEP 7: This panel has some detailed branches with needles rather than impressionistic brush strokes, because the elements are closer to the “camera,” and I felt like I needed to draw them because I was already drawing leaves on the other plants in the panel foreground. This character is a cartoon fox, rather than a realistic animal.

The story is meant to evoke a Dr. Seuss book, so I looked at both his work, and an old Walter Foster book on animation by Preston Blair, which I have owned since I was 15 years old. My natural inclination is towards a more realistic drawing style, so I dip into the Blair book whenever I need to draw cartoon-style characters. I hope my fox shows a little of Dr. Seuss grafted onto a more structured body from Preston Blair.

These books are both invaluable to me and worth adding to your own library. How to Draw Trees by Frederick J. Garner keeps me from rendering trees that are boring. I refresh my skills by paging through it whenever I am drawing a comic with a lot of foliage and trees. I have retained enough to “fake” a tree here or there, but it helps to go back to the source occasionally to keep the drawing from becoming too generic.

STEP 8: With the third panel inked, I jumped into panel four. I think you can tell what is going on here based on the “acting” each character is doing. You have to “overact” in comics, where live action can offer more subtlety. I often think of how over-the-top silent film actors were, and also stage actors, and apply that to comic books.

Every move has to be “big” to have impact with a lot of hand gestures and mouths agape!

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STEP 9: The use of dramatic gesturing is evident in panel six. This panel is also the only panel to extend to the full bleed area. I try to avoid drawing two full-bleed pages in a row, and if I bleed a lower right-hand panel as I did here, I would avoid a bleed panel in the lower left of the next page, especially on facing pages. This could confuse the reader and interrupt the art flow. Always think about how pages will look side by side in the printed edition.

Semiautomagic is ™ and © 2017 by Alex DeCampi and Jerry Ordway.

Art used with permission of the rights holders.

STEP 10: The last panel is inked, and I kept the clothing folds bold, and not too complicated. I do the majority of this clothing stuff without reference. If I am stuck on something, I will put on a coat and pose in my mirror, for a quick study of the pattern in the folds. I’ve always strived to achieve a sort of “stylized reality” in my work, which requires me to understand patterns from reference, rather than just copying them. I will look at a photo for reference, if available, but my end goal is always clarity in storytelling as well as clarity in the drawing.

I enjoy the extra level of control I have by sending page files electronically, because I fine tune the scan of the art myself. If I draw a hand that is too large for a body, or eyes that are too far apart, I can do the corrections digitally. In the past, I would need to stop the drawing process and white out and redraw elements. It is so much better to edit in Photoshop. On faces especially, where you can’t quite pinpoint why it is off, you can make fixes and then undo them and try again. Every page of art we draw will have flaws, no matter how hard we try to make it perfect, but Photoshop is a great tool.

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Semiautomagic is ™ and © 2017 by Alex DeCampi and Jerry Ordway.

Art used with permission of the rights holders.

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JEFFREY WATTS THE WATTS ATELIER OF THE ARTS

Interview conducted

by Mike Manley and transcribed

by Sean Dulaney

JEFFREY WATTS: Hey, Mike! How are you doing?

DRAW!: Good, good! How are you?

JW: Hanging in there. Getting work done. Working on a new [George] Bridgman book—kind of a companion book to the Bridgman book that I’ve been working on forever to try to get out with our online program. It’s kind of to revamp the Bridgman book into cleaner [Frank] Reilly drawings, combined with Frazetta drawings, combined with photo reference of models in the poses of Bridgman, and all that kind of stuff. It’s one of those projects that is just swallowing me up on top of everything else.

DRAW!: I can imagine. That’s a book that’s really hard to decipher, because it’s his class drawings. It was one of the books you could always find in the library. Everybody looked like a Jim Starlin drawing.

JW: Yeah, yeah. My dad used to have it on the shelf, and I used to try to draw from it when I was in high school. It was great, but it needs a Bridgman Unabridged. It needs a book that tells you how to study from that thing, because it’s pretty hard.

That’s one of the things I used to do in our classes. I redrew all of his drawings, but also doing them in various techniques.

First I would do them in charcoal in our style—very clean. I’d

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clean up all his linework, take out all his scribbles, decipher which insertion lines were correct and which ones were necessary, and then I’d take Frazetta and look at poses that are very similar to the angles that are in the Bridgman book. Then I’d go to photos of muscle builders in similar poses. Between those three things, you will get a really good cross-reference of how to actually utilize that book. It worked really well in class, so I did it for an online program—it was about 40 hours total.

DRAW!: Now that’s 40 hours of you breaking down the Bridgman drawings?

JW: Yeah, me redrawing them. I took this model, Yoni, we have who is built almost identically to the guys in that book. He’s not steroided or anything, just a naturally big, bulky guy who looks just like those guys. I took him and shot him in all the poses, and then after I redrew the Bridgman drawings, we would draw from that reference and extrapolate what you were learning from Bridgman using an actual model, and then go to Frazetta and look how it was exaggerated to make it really fantastic.

DRAW!: Right, right. The story is that Frazetta copied that book in a weekend, and then he knew anatomy. That’s one of his legends.

JW: I know. He was such a character. [laughter] A long time ago at Comic-Con, he came out. I met him at my booth, and we talked for about an hour. I was doing a painting of one of his characters because I was trying to practice at the booth.

So we sat there and talked, and then I got his number. I called him and we talked again one time. And then I went out to meet with him and spent the whole day with him and Ellie. I spent, I don’t know, 15 hours with him right before he had that stroke, and I was just able to sit and talk to him about his life, his journey… everything. We were sitting out on his porch down in Boca Grande, Florida, and he had all these pieces just stacked around this little condo. I’d go in and grab one, come back out, and we’d sit and talk about it. It was one of the highlights of my career as an artist. Twenty years of doing Comic-Con was all worth it for just that one time where I got to make that connection. Once he had that stroke, he wasn’t that accessible to the public.

DRAW!: Was that his second stroke, or the one that made him draw with his left hand?

JW: I’m trying to think of the year, because it was a major stroke, and then I did see him two years later. He had moved back to be with his kids up in Pennsylvania. I went out with a bunch of our teachers and we did this road trip, and we saw him. By that time, Ellie was at the museum and he had an oxygen tank. He was dragging that thing around, but he came out. He couldn’t remember that much by that time, so it was kind of… I didn’t really want to see him after that first meeting I had with him, because I thought that was about as good as it was going to get. We sat and watched Night of the Hunter— DRAW!: Oh, that’s a great film. It’s the only film that Charles Laughton ever directed.

JW: Yeah! He was like a little kid watching that. He was 80, 75, or something like that, and it was as if he were five years old. But he was the sweetest guy ever. And I was worried about coming out to see him because when you meet your heroes like that, maybe they’re going to disappoint you. You’ve heard all these rumors about him being kind of a jerk or this or that…. He was just the sweetest guy. And he would’ve given me a painting if Ellie hadn’t been there. He’s just the most giving guy. She was the one who policed him and made sure he wasn’t doing anything he shouldn’t be doing.

DRAW!: I was friends with Al Williamson, and they were good buddies. Al was the same way. He was still like a teenager in many ways. He had a movie projector, and we’d have movie nights and watch old movies. [laughter] I think the guys of that generation, movies are really important to them.

JW: That’s what fed them. Frazetta and all those guys, they all thought like movie directors. I mean, all good comics guys do, but he had that staging ability like Hitchcock—the perfect timing, the perfect money shot, the perfect angle, the perfect distribution of weight. Everything was set up like that perfect key frame in a movie. I just loved his stuff. My dad was an illustra-

Jeff’s first meeting with Frank Frazetta at the San Diego Comic-Con. Photo © Jeffrey R. Watts

tor, and he’d be tearing up those Edgar Rice Burroughs books, recycling them and keeping the covers. We had this stack of Frazetta covers I’d sit and draw from when I was five. So growing up with those heroes, and getting to meet one and spend a day with him, it was freaky and weird, but what an opportunity.

He was one of my favorites of all time.

DRAW!: It’s weird now because there are students who are fans of fantasy art, which all comes out of him, and they have no idea who the guy is.

JW: Isn’t that crazy? I mean, you look at his book and you have [George] Lucas hanging out, and [Sylvester] Stallone…

DRAW!: I went to the IlluXCon and met Erik [Gist], your buddy and fellow teacher. I’d met him there a couple of times, but one of the things I really noticed last year when I was there, when you look at the guys who came pre-Star Wars, their artwork is much more individual than the stuff that’s coming out now. If you walked through the room, there were a lot of great artists there, but a lot of the stuff looks more similar than when Frazetta and [John] Berkey and those guys were doing it. You would never confuse a Berkey painting for a Vincent Di Fate painting.

JW: I totally agree. I think now everything is more accessible and it’s so incestuous. Everyone’s kind of stealing from everyone, and you’ve got a lot of digital guys who are kind of manipulating that way. Individual development just doesn’t happen as much it doesn’t seem like. Or it’s changing. I don’t know.

DRAW!: I’ve been following your school for several years.

When I was thinking about going back to school, yours was one of the places I looked at. I basically didn’t want to relocate to California.

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Jeff working one-on-one with a student during a live model figure drawing class.

Photo © The Watts Atelier of the Arts

JW: Oh, I know. That’s huge, because you’re East Coast, right?

DRAW!: I’m in Philly, yeah. But you’ve been doing the school for 20 years or so, right?

JW: It’s been almost 25 years now, yeah. I started it around ’92. I was 22 at the time.

DRAW!: How is what you’re teaching, your curriculum, being modified? Because the industry is very different than what it was 20 years ago. And the costs of schools, if I went back and redid what I just finished, going from being an undergrad to the MFA, it would cost me $200,000 now.

JW: And that’s how we came in. I wanted to do a correspondent course, like the Famous Artists course, before the internet was really kicking in. But it was so much work, and I was probably not quite ready. When I started the school, it was really out of necessity. I had come out of the California Art Institute, and Glen Orbik was my main teacher. I had a couple of other guys, Morgan Wesley and a couple of those guys, who taught some stuff….

DRAW!: Those guys are great. What people don’t realize now is, it was really hard then to find people who were teaching that kind of stuff.

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JW: Yeah. My dad was president of the Society of Illustrators when I was 18 years old, and he would bring down Drew Struzan, he brought down [Robert] Heindel, [Thomas] Blackshear…. He brought all these guys in to San Diego who were awesome, and I would go to dinner with them. I had just come out of wanting to have a professional cycling career, which is kind of a Hail Mary. I had injured myself pretty badly and had to go back and reassess. I always knew I would go into art, but I thought it would be a little later. My dad didn’t want me to go to Art Center. He thought it was too expensive and it had its heyday for that kind of training. I was just out of high school and I talked to Thomas Blackshear. Because he went to the Chicago Art Institute, I thought he would recommend that, but he said there was this little school in San Fernando Valley—he didn’t know the name of it—but it was producing the most amazing people he had ever seen. And so my dad calls some of his friends up and said, “Hey, do you know of this school?” And they said, “Yeah. There’s this old guy out in the San Fernando Valley.

It’s called the California Art Institute, and he’s teaching these old methods of drawing and painting.”

So I drove up with my dad on a Sunday, I was about 18 years old, and we went out to the middle of nowhere in Topanga Canyon. We get to this strip mall where there’s this tiny hole in the wall, and there’s this guy painting it, and it says “The California Art Institute.” And there’s this guy with this wild, freaking white hair with a big handlebar mustache… and it’s Fred [Fixler]. [laughter] So Fred takes us in, and he’s a master salesman. My dad knew within seconds of walking in the door, and so did I. In this tiny little hole in the wall, the walls were just lined with these phenomenal drawings. And they were all student drawings. I thought they were instructor drawings. They even would’ve blown me away if they were instructor drawings, but I was sold at that moment. I went back down to San Diego, got my stuff together, we went up and found an apartment with my mom, and then I moved up the next semester and Fred retired. He sold the school, and I didn’t know he was going to do that.

DRAW!: He didn’t say anything?

JW: No, which is fine, and it actually turned out for the better, because Fred was, from what I understand, a very intense kind of teacher. He had his favorites and I would have locked horns with him, I’m pretty sure, because I have a pretty strong personality. I think his type of teaching would have been really tough for me. But Glen… when I got there, Glen was kind of taking over for Fred and was keeping the school alive, and there were a couple of other guys who were really great there.

Morgan was still somewhat involved, and Greg Pro, and some other guys. I got mostly Glen and a couple of other guys.

I studied there two or three years. I was going to 15 classes a week, and I got really good really fast, and I started to really excel at that Reilly method. And then I dabbled in teaching when I was in my early 20s. They asked me to teach a little bit and I really wasn’t ready. I started working in the movie industry, doing storyboarding movie comps. Army of Dark-

A gesture painting by Jeff. This painting doubles as the cover to his Gesture Portraits DVD. Painting © Jeffrey R. Watts

ness was my first professional job. I did the comp all the way up to the finish of that. I was out of the country when they did the finish or I would have taken a whack at it, but I don’t think I was good enough to finish it to the level they wanted, so they got some guy from Art Center to do it. But I was kind of going into that vein of getting into maybe Dreamworks or Visual Development, and I was doing a lot of stuff. I started doing Heavy Metal covers. I was dabbling in everything, trying to get book cover reps…. I was just trying to find myself. I still kind of am to some degree. I think everybody is.

DRAW!: From watching your YouTube videos, a lot of things you say are things I would say to students. Do you kind of give them career counseling?

JW: Oh yeah! You know, we’ve got Erik doing book covers, and we’ve got Lucas Graciano doing stuff for Magic: The Gathering and Blizzard. We’ve got a lot of guys working in a lot of different industries. I work more in the fine arts. So does Meadow [Gist] and Ben Young. We’re doing heavy gallery stuff and shows, like Prix de West. So we’re always—mostly complaining—but we’re always in there talking about the business end of it and what’s happening.

DRAW!: That’s the soup of artists: complaining.

JW: You’ve got to have someone giving you the straight skinny on it and saying, “Hey, galleries are not the promised land, man. This is what they are going to do, and they aren’t concerned whether you’re having a good time and you’re growing or not. They just want to sell stuff quick, and they’re going to pigeonhole you into a corner, and try to get you to paint little kids on the beach or whatever they can sell quickly.” You just talk to them frankly about it, and that’s how you teach business. You know, as far as the business of it, just be phenomenal. But ultimately it’s just about digging your way through and finding little niches and avenues to find the pleasure that got you into it in the first place.

Erik was working in the video game industry doing concept work at a little startup, and then he wanted to be more of a painted illustrator, and he really didn’t know how he was going to do that. I gave him the opportunity to teach full-time for us. He became sort of my right-hand guy—he’s been here about 19 years now—and it bought him the time to build a portfolio of the horror stuff that he really wanted to do, which was such a crazy niche. When he said he was going to hang his hat on zombies and vampires back before

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(left) Erik Gist drawing from a live model with students watching him work, and (above) Meadow Gist painting from a live model while instructing students.

Photos © The Watts Atelier of the Arts

it was even in vogue, I was like, “That’s a hard row to hoe, man.” [laughter] But God bless him. He’s helped me and I’ve helped him. I’ve afforded him the opportunity to not have to take every crazy job that came down the pike, and that buffered him enough to be able to direct his energies to do what he’s really passionate about and find an avenue for it. But now he works a lot for Guillermo del Toro, and he does a lot of The Strain stuff. He’s doing what he really wants to be doing. He wants to do some of his own projects, like everybody does—passion projects.

So with him doing that, and then Lucas doing a lot of gaming stuff, mostly card art, and then you’ve got Ben Young who’s somewhere in between, and then you’ve got Meadow— my dad’s in there teaching, which is awesome. He’s coming in from 40 years of trench warfare craziness, working in everything from architectural rendering to you name it. He’s been doing these amazing compositional classes online, but also teaching them at the school, tying everything together that we’ve been teaching. He’s kind of the glue that brings together all the stuff that all of us do well, but that he teaches so well. And he’s kind of at the point in his life now where he’s in his 70s and he just doesn’t want to go storm the castle anymore. He was like, “I’m just going to lay it down,” and I’ve kind of given him this platform for him to lay down at the perfect time in his life where he’s still in great form and he’s still really enthusiastic, and it gives him an outlet to share that, which so many other people did not do in the past.

The online school is kind of my answer to figuring out what I am going to do when I close up the shop, because that trench warfare, daily grind of teaching and forging people from raw nothingness into working professionals, it’s just so difficult, and there are so few people who do it….

DRAW!: Are you saying that you are looking to close the school?

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JW: We don’t know yet. That’s the thing. It looks like it’s going to have another life with maybe Erik at the helm, and me kind of being the figurehead there, but not teaching as much as I used to. I still want a place to train. I love doing it.

But the online side is now up to 600–700 hours of content.

It’s going to be about 1,200 when we are done, and it’s going to be a full-fledged working atelier online. You could really go through that and probably come out the other side, like the Famous Artists course, being able to work without ever having to go into a classroom. Other than the loneliness and the difficulty of training on your own—that’s the biggest problem people have with it. But we now have built in forums, and mentoring and critiquing from me, Erik, Lucas, all these guys.

And we also have free critiquing at the base level, so people are getting input as they go through. We have these workbooks that could be published. I mean they’re crazy. Some of them are 80–100 pages long. That’s why I’m publishing the Bridgman book. That’ll probably be the legacy.

DRAW!: Your goal then is to keep the school small, kind of limited….

JW: Yeah.

DRAW!: You limit the class size anyway, right?

JW: Well, yeah. We only have 15 students maximum in a class. And I rode out that crazy economy that just almost killed everybody….

DRAW!: And we still haven’t recovered in the fine arts from that.

JW: No, no. I almost lost everything. The school almost collapsed. I was like, “Okay, this school has done phenomenally during the worst economy in history.” I mean, it has such an intimacy to it that people actually used it as way of getting through that period. I thought they would jump ship and go,

“Oh, God! I would rather go on vacation or eat or whatever, rather than go to class.” It didn’t do great, but it made it in a very admirable way. It showed me the true strength of what that school was, but we had to lay 15 to 18 years of groundwork before that. And our prices were incredibly reasonable, and they still are. I think we are probably the cheapest school I know of, of that caliber.

DRAW!: So if the economic downturn had happened earlier, you may not have been able to— JW: It may not have made it. But what I found was we were down to vapors.

Because that recession just kept going. It kept whittling everyone down, and people were dropping like flies. They either got hit in the beginning, in the middle, or the end.

We were towards the end. We were starting to say, “I don’t know if we can make it another year.” This was five years in.

We thought there would be a year, twoyear correction or something. And we had a lot of real estate that was hooked to the school. I had a building that was hooked to the school that we bought at a terrible time. So we were carrying a mortgage on that while losing tenants. It was just brutal. So I decided to try and do an online school, because I knew that’s where things were going, but no one wanted to do it. No one. The teachers weren’t really on board.

No one was really on board with it. So I kind of went into seclusion and said, “Okay.

I’m going to birth this thing on my own.”

I think I did 250 hours of content in, like, two years. I did about 15 hours a week. And One of Jeff’s live model figure drawing.

I wanted to lay down all these skill sets that Drawing © Jeffrey K. Watts I had built over so long that are now obscure, like inking with DRAW!: Well, it would certainly change it, because if you’re a quill and brush. going to get accreditation, you’ll have to teach other classes.

JW: Yeah. You can’t let someone take Head Drawing 15 DRAW!: Again, that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to times, because they’ll never graduate. You know, you’ve got to talk to you. You know, I’ve seen all your videos, and a lot of get them out of the school in four years. You basically say, “I’m the current schools aren’t giving people those old world hand going to give you a degree, so you can only take Head Drawing skills, which you can transfer to anything. one time.” In order to get intuitive with that knowledge and be JW: Yeah, really. And that’s the travesty. I get these kids in able to truly embrace the full depth of that knowledge, you’re now, and they’re from Art Center, they’re from RISD, from going to have to be with that guy every day for life. You’re SCAD. We’re kind of becoming a grad school. They come in going to have to take Head Drawing and Figure Drawing and and they’ve spent a couple hundred grand, and they’re really Quick Sketch ten times over five years to master those skill at about first year or second year of art school as far as skill sets. But in college, you’re going to get that class once, and development. They’re not where they need to be. then they’re going to say, “Sorry, you have to go to Drawing II. Our job is to take them and buff them out through repeti- We don’t care whether you’ve gotten good at it or not.” tion, and we’re cheap enough to where people can do that.

We looked at accreditation years ago and decided against it, DRAW!: I’ve been teaching, like I said, about 15 years now, because it would ruin our program. and sometimes I get kids in their third year, and their basic

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because my father was savvy enough to understand—and he left Art Center early. He never bothered graduating.

Detail shots of Jeff’s gesture painting, “Gypsy Spirit,” in progress.

Gypsy Spirit © Jeffrey R. Watts

skill set is so weak. They won’t let you repeat those classes, and no parent is going to let you retake Head Drawing for another $40,000 a year.

JW: Oh yeah, exactly. They’re hamstrung by their own bureaucracy and their own structure. It’s great if you want to be an engineer, or a surgeon, or whatever. That’s great. The structure of that educational system is fine for that. But if you look at just the arts, you cannot get a Master-quality person out of that kind of training.

DRAW!: Unless they are the one in a thousand people….

JW: Of course you’re going to get some anomaly which the university is going to claim came out of there, but they would have been good on a desert island. You’re going to get one Syd Mead, just a genetic phenom, if you’ve got billions of students.

There is a guy from Korea who can draw pretty much anything from memory. He has a photographic memory like Rain Man. He’s sort of a genius savant. You’re going to get one of those once in a while, but if you want to get consistent, quality people out working, I mean, our percentage of students who actually turned professional is at a high level—ten times higher than of boutique art schools. My opinions of teaching are so strong, because I’ve just seen so much and I’ve watched the collateral damage and the fallout, and I’ve been able to avoid it simply

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DRAW!: A lot of these schools end up becoming diploma mills. Because of the accreditation, they have to teach a certain way. But the way you’ve set your school up, it’s like the Academy used to be in Philly when Eakins and those people were there, long before all the accreditation stuff came in. You didn’t go there right out of high school usually. You did other stuff, then you went there. You might have to take Cast Drawing three or four years before Eakins said, “Okay. You’re good enough to go on to Life Drawing.” When you were finished there, you actually went to France. Then you went to another atelier in France and you studied with that guy until he gave you the recommendation to go to the big school. So you spent twelve years easy going to art school.

JW: Yeah, and I told people this. It’s a 12- to 15-year stint before you’re able to go for Pixar or DreamWorks and those guys. And it should be. I was at IlluXCon two or three years ago—Pat had me come out—and I was doing portfolio reviews. I was talking to some kid from, I think, San Francisco Art Academy, and the kid was unbelievable. He was so arrogant and entitled, and his skills just weren’t there. It was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” And he goes, “Well, these guys are fanatical out there and I just don’t want to work that hard.”

And I’m like, “Well, you’re going to be pumping gas then.”

Because the guys that are good are intensely driven. Many of them are OCD’ers; they’re grinders. They’re like any industry that when you get to the top echelon, you’ve got crazy, fanatical people. I’m not saying it’s healthy, and I’m not saying it’s always fun, but those are the people you compete with.

I was over in Russia a couple of years back with one of my students whose parents were Russian, and we went and toured around. We went through the Russian Academy….

DRAW!: I’ve heard that place is fantastic.

JW: Yeah, that quasi-militant style of training can produce some amazing talent. This style of training harkens back to the Soviet era of Communism. And you go over to China, it’s the same way.

DRAW!: That’s why figurative painting didn’t die. Communism was great for painting. Wasn’t great for living [laughter], but Communism was great for painting. If it hadn’t been for the Communists and the illustrators, all of that knowledge would have been beaten to death by the Modernists.

JW: Most of Europe lost its way when it comes to traditional training. You know that book, The Twilight of Painting, by R.H. Gammell? That’s a good one.

DRAW!: When I graduated from high school, I actually wanted to go to Art Center, which I think was $3,000 a year at the time. That was too expensive for my dad. One of my best students when I was teaching her in high school wanted to do concept art, and I said Art Center was the best school, but now it’s between $60,000 and $70,000 a year. By the time you’re

done, you’re spending $250,000.

And the thing is—and I try to explain this to the students—that industry is really brutal. And now it’s global.

JW: Yeah, it’s saturated with Chinese and Vietnamese artists.

DRAW!: Schools in Korea are turning out hundreds of people who will do this for practically nothing.

When you and I started, it was guys like your dad, guys in his generation. You knew who you were competing with. But globalization really changes the whole playing field.

JW: Jamie Jones and Craig Mullins, they’re old school guys who moved from the traditional to digital and are still able to kind of edge out people. But it’s not that far before you have just a truckload of them.

And it’s hard. I think there’s a lot of work out there, but it’s—I was talking to Erik the other day and he sees the writing on the wall with where his illustration career is going, and that’s why he came to me looking to possibly become the new director of Watts Atelier. I’m 46. By the time I’m 50, That might be the ideal time for the transition. I need to get into doing my fine art at the highest level I can. I trained to be in the Super Bowl, not sit on the sidelines.

DRAW!: And you want to do it before your eyes start going.

JW: Exactly! You never know “Gypsy Spirit,” one of Jeff’s more finished gesture portaits. what’s going to happen. In my Photos © The Watts Atelier of the Arts mind I said, “Okay, I’m going to do this online school, and I’m going to get this thing to be the sure it will probably deter some people. It’s a visual language best online school I can possibly make it and see if we can obviously, and so I think at some point we may look into get something happening here that’s really special.” I really some translation software. But that’s getting better and better. think we can. We’re well on our way. It’s such a new area that Google is doing some amazing stuff. I mean, pretty soon the you’re kind of dealing with infrastructure problems that don’t translation software is going to be phenomenal. It’s probably even have solutions. You’ve got streaming and server issues a matter of a couple of years off, so I’m not all that worried and all this crazy stuff that just…. about that at this point. What I’m worried about is producing the absolute best content while I can hold onto the skill sets, DRAW!: If you did this five years ago, it’d be even harder. because a lot of it is like Latin. They’re dead languages visuJW: Oh yeah. I mean, we’ve got people from Bangladesh, ally, but they are so beneficial to training that people aren’t from China, from all over who are taking the classes. But their really getting it. You know? If you learn Latin, you can break issue is either that their internet is weak or…. down the derivative of almost any word and understand its meaning. Even though it’s dead, it’s incredibly useful.

DRAW!: How do you deal with language issues?

JW: Luckily most of the world speaks English well enough DRAW!: You’re trying to have your basic courses where peoto where it hasn’t been that big of a problem. I mean, I’m ple learn how to use charcoal, ink, watercolor, oils, gouache….

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A gouache painting by Jeff’s father and fellow Atelier instructor, Robert Watts.

Ghostly Gallery © Robert Watts

JW: Well, we have a base program, right? And the base program is going to be about 750 hours. You have five phases of head drawing, five phases of figure drawing, two phases of fundamentals, two of anatomy, which will be the Bridgman.

Then you have five phases of head painting, five of figure painting, five phases of landscape painting, and five phases of still life painting. Each of those are 15 hours long, and each one kind of builds on the next. You start with monochrome, and then you go to the Zorn Palette, and then you go to full color, and you work your way up the palette chain. So it’s three different palettes you master.

DRAW!: Everybody struggles with perspective and the figure in perspective, or the figure in a composition.

JW: That’s why we have specialty classes: Foreshortening, Perspective I, Perspective II, Composition…. My dad has four Composition classes that deal with freehand perspective, Erik does fundamental perspective, 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-point perspective. We’ve got all that. We’ve got Color Theory, we’ve got Drapery—all of those are specialty classes. You have a curriculum for your core base, almost like your Bachelor’s program, and that’s 750 hours. That’s getting your core skill sets. And then on top of that, you have another 750 hours of specialty classes. Those are the ones you’re talking about. “How to put a figure into a composition.” “How to do a commission portrait painting.” “How to do complicated still life finishes.” “How to do narrative paintings.” “How to shoot photo shoots and splice them together into large western paintings.” “How to do card

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covers.” “How to do single image comics covers.” “How to do sequential storytelling.” We have over a hundred classes, and the base classes are the repetitious, quick sketch, 20-minute layins, features and facial expressions, head drawing extractions….

We walk you through this curriculum I designed over the last 25 years in our regular school, and now we’re putting it all online and buffing it out, polishing it off, and making it even more user friendly. Making it even better than it’s been at the school, because it has to be because people are learning from distance.

There’s a robust workbook that goes along with all of it, tons of reference. Basically we’re locking people in and spoon-feeding them. In a class at school, in order to retain the information, you’d have to see 50 demos. Now, you’d see the variety of 50 demos, but your visual memory would only retain— DRAW!: I didn’t go back to school until I was 45, so as an adult, I took my digital camera to class. When the teachers did demos, I would tape them. None of the other, younger students ever seemed to think about doing anything like that for the most part. By that point, my brain was the brain of a professional, so I’m looking at things in a different way, but…

JW: Well, at our school we don’t really allow video because we’ve got nude models and you’ve got legality issues. You just do not want people taping you when you are talking off the cuff and you’re cussin’ and saying things you shouldn’t be saying. [Mike laughs] You can take still pictures….

DRAW!: [yelling] “Jeffrey Watts said what?!”

JW: Yeah, and you never know what my dad will come up with. [laughter] In a classroom environment, you get the intimacy. You get the camaraderie. It has all these benefits, but you learn very slowly because you can only retain a certain percentage of what you see. And you’re usually watching it from some oblique angle that’s really odd, because there are 15 people huddled around one guy drawing.

process of doing a drawing. And everyone is in one group, so there’s no separation. Another thing that’s so beneficial about the atelier is that you have beginners next to total professionals. Everybody’s in the same group. Everybody can learn at as fast a pace as they can pick up the information. You don’t have the blind leading the blind, with all the beginners with the beginners and no one knows anything. You have me sitting next to Erik teaching. Or me taking the class.

DRAW!: At the Academy, my teacher Scott would set up the model, and then everyone would draw, and he would draw with you so you would see how he was working. Do you draw with the students?

JW: Sure. Every class, we do a demonstration for 25 minutes that’s phenomenal. They’re almost finished drawings because we’ve been doing it for so long. If it’s a head drawing class, we warm up with four five-minute sketches, and then the teacher sits down and executes a 25-minute demo. That’s every class! This is how Fred taught. Then we sit down, and everyone kind of comes around. Sometimes we have dual teaching. If we have a new teacher co-teaching with me, we both talk to each other. I’ll say something and he’ll listen, and when I’ll stop for a moment of rest, he’ll take over, building off of my conversation or starting another tangent on something that’s important. But we’ll do a 25-minute presentation, and that’s where everybody just watches you do your thing. You put your credibility on the line, and then after that, everyone starts their

DRAW!: You also learn by teaching.

JW: Oh yeah! A ton! Because the key is intuitive knowledge, and that’s the only reason I’m able to gab so much and be able to have something even remotely decent online or on YouTube. You have people asking abstract questions, while you’re trying to paint a gouache head. They’re asking some out-of-left-field question, and you’ve got to turn your brain onto its other hemisphere in order to answer while you’re painting a beautiful painting right in front of them. There are very few people who can do that. I had Calvin Liang, who is a great plein air painter, but he was watching me teach and he was like, “Ah, you must have two brains! How do you do that?” It’s just so hard, and I’m a right/left brainer luckily, like my dad is too. I can work fairly well from both hemispheres

(above) An instructional drapery study by Watts Atelier teacher, Erik Gist. (right) A long pose figure drawing by Jeff.

Drapery study © Erik Gist. Figure drawing © Jeffrey R. Watts.

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Jeff drawing alongside his students in a figure drawing class.

Photo © The Watts Atelier of the Arts

simultaneously, while a lot of artists are either completely on one side and almost non-existent on the other. But to find the teacher who can articulate and also talk maybe philosophically and keep your enthusiasm up….

DRAW!: You’re really good at that.

JW: Well, I appreciate that.

DRAW!: I’ve seen a lot of teachers, a lot of demos, and I think you and your dad are two of the best guys I’ve seen.

JW: Thanks. We do spend a lot of time honing that skill set.

DRAW!: I worked with Al Williamson for a while. My buddy Ricardo Villagran, who is an illustrator very much like your dad, could say, “Do this and this, that and that. Not this because of this, and not that because of that.” Al could not explain it to you in that verbal way, but if you watched him, you could learn. He was great at inking hair, but if you asked him, “How do you ink the hair with that 108 or the brushes?”

“Oh, I don’t know, sport. That’s tough.” [laughter] But, if you sat there and watched him, you saw how he held the pen. You saw which direction he inked with a brush—towards you, away. You know, all that stuff is very important in learning how to do the different kinds of lines. That’s the kind of stuff you get from the traditional skills that the kids who are learn-

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ing from the start on a digital tablet never get: the difference between a dry brush on a piece of Strathmore, hot press or cold press. It’s all glass. It all feels the same.

JW: Yeah. And you can’t undo anything [on paper], right? So if you mess up, you do the thing over. That’s where they really get clobbered. You have to think at such a complex layering level, even though Photoshop is a layering program, this is layering with no forgiveness. Once you mess up, you could be done for.

DRAW!: You ruined a $3 piece of paper. [laughter] JW: Yeah, and you’ve got to go do it over. What you’re hitting on is really interesting. When you do the online thing, the biggest problem is you put people to sleep if you don’t entertain them. I don’t care how good you are at demoing, if you don’t say anything and it’s a bunch of crickets, you’re going to lose half your audience almost instantaneously. It’s a matter of entertainment mixed with poignancy and insight.

DRAW!: It is, it is. When I first started teaching—you probably experienced the same thing—you’re trying to take all the information you have, this loaf of bread, and you’re trying to take the little duck, and say, “Little duck! Eat the whole loaf of bread!” [laughter] “What are you not eating this loaf of bread? Why are you so stupid, duck?” And then I would

come home, just completely exhausted, like I had run a thousand miles. And then I realized that if you can get the little duck to eat one piece of bread one week, if you get them next week, they might be able to eat two. But if you try to get the duck to eat the whole thing at once…. And then I realized, it sort of is like performing or acting in a way, and that’s why I admire you being able to do such good demos and things, while you’re talking a mile a minute, and the people in the room are making noise, because most artists really cannot do that. That’s a special skill. Most teachers cannot do that.

JW: Yeah, that’s an art in and of itself. And it was more that I knew that if I didn’t keep these guys entertained, I was going to lose them. If you’re teaching a gouache class or an inking class, four people can see you. Unless you have a digital camera shooting it up onto a screen, no one can see what you’re doing.

So you’d better be entertaining them verbally, or they’re just going to walk out or fall asleep or whatever.

people wanting to know how to do it, but colleges are so expensive. I almost went to the Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia, but what I was going back for was not only to become better as a painter, but I needed that piece of paper.

JW: Yeah, if you want to teach at a college level, you definitely need to jump through those hoops.

DRAW!: Or be famous.

JW: Yeah, but even with all my experience in teaching, I doubt I could get a job at a college. I mean, they wouldn’t let me. They used to let you, but they stopped doing that. A “tenyear professional” would be considered an honorary degree and you’d be able to teach, but I think they got a lot of flack for that.

DRAW!: I hope you don’t close the school, because I think— JW: No, I don’t think it will close. I think what will happen is Erik and a couple of other guys will start steering the ship more and take on more of the responsibility of running it. I’ll still have a position and I’ll end up coming in and meeting the kids and being what I used to be, which was more of a cheerleader. And I’ll be there drawing and painting and teaching through example, but probably not teaching six, seven, nine classes a week. I can’t do that anymore. Maybe one or two.

DRAW!: Yeah. That’s a lot of teaching.

JW: Yeah. I’ve done that for decades. I don’t think I’ve had a weekend off in—I mean, I teach every weekend. I’ve done that for 20 years now.

DRAW!: Now, you’ve been doing your school for 20, 25 years. In the last seven years or so, there’ve been a lot of other ateliers springing up. It seems to me what’s happening is the schools have lost their ability to teach what you guys are teaching, but there’s such a huge demand now from

Quick figure pose sketches by Jeff.

Sketches © Jeffrey R. Watts

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Painting © Jeffrey R. Watts

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(above and right) Two of Jeff’s 20-minute figure sketches.

Sketches © Jeffrey R. Watts

DRAW!: Is that a California thing?

JW: It might have been. Because I know that was going for a long time and they don’t do it anymore. But I think the whole atelier movement is really, like all art, a backlash to what’s not working. And that’s what’s beautiful about the United States, as flawed as it is—like every country and every system—it has the ability to right itself with the private sector a lot of times. So the private sector will pick up the slack if the government sector is not doing so hot. And in my opinion, we’ve kind of lost it with our educational system. It needs a complete revamping from the ground up in all areas. But art is particularly bad. Out of all of them, it’s probably the worst.

They’re getting rid of it. They’re not teaching it anymore in the high schools.

DRAW!: I had two different types of art classes in high school. I had a Commercial Art class, which would be vocational art. And then I had a Fine Art class. The Fine Art class… I learned nothing. And I battled with the teacher because I liked comics and animation, so I was a moron obviously. [laughter] But in my Commercial Art classes I learned to work a printer, photography, I learned to key line, paste-up, all that stuff. So by the time I was 15, I could go and get a job at a small ad agency.

JW: In fact, I always tell kids to go ahead and get your Graphic Design degree and build a website or do something that’s of use. But as far as the painting and drawing, I mean,

my football coach was teaching it and he couldn’t draw a straight line. It was like, “You’re a P.E. teacher. You go teach Art. We don’t have anyone else to teach that.” Now, they don’t even teach kids how to write cursive in the schools anymore.

DRAW!: Actually, my buddy Terry told me they are teaching it in his school. I think it was all that modernization, No Child Left Behind, or whatever. I had art classes and music classes all the way through school. From when I was a little kid all the way through. Most kids today probably don’t have that. They were trying to save the art classes at the local high school. What I always find ironic, every year I see guys in their helmets out in traffic raising money to play football. You never see anybody out in a beret, “We’re raising money….” [laughter] JW: With a palette in their hand. [laughter] Yeah. It’s something that they really beat out of you. At some point, they say, “Grow up and get a real job.” They encourage you when you’re little, because it’s something all little kids do. And then when you get older, they treat you like a red-headed stepchild.

It’s funny. They didn’t know what to do with me. I remember I flunked first grade because I would only draw, you know?

And they would threaten me. “You’ve got to do your math before you can go get the paper to draw,” and I’d just get the paper and go draw. And they came to my parents and said, “This kid won’t do anything but draw. He will not do English.

He will not do math. He doesn’t care.” And I wouldn’t. I was

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this little savant, kind of crazy kid. And my parents didn’t put me on Prozac or do anything crazy. They just said, “The kid is wired like his dad.” Later I went through and skipped sixth grade and became really academically inclined because I was kind of embarrassed to be the oldest kid in the class.

DRAW!: You’re shaving and everybody else is….

JW: Yeah. It was kind of like that. But then I did phenomenally in school. I mean, I had to study hard, but I went up to Calculus and all that crap. And then I realized at some point, I was always so naturally visually inclined. You know, give me an SAT on visual stuff and I’ll ace it. I’ll get a perfect score.

But this “Train B leaves Station A at 5:45 going towards….”

I just wasn’t interested. I just don’t think that way. At the end of the day, if you’re an engineer and you’ve got that type of mind, great. But if you’re an artist, or you’re visually inclined—which is actually who designs the whole planet.

Everything you enjoy, everything you drive, everything you wear, everything you watch. And we get no credit.

DRAW!: If it wasn’t for us, people would still be in caves.

JW: Oh, it’d be a joke. Laboring humanity would perish if not for the solitary dreamers. The visionaries. And we just get left in the dust. I have always been a proponent of trying to really educate the masses, the best I can in my own little way, as to the value of the visual artist. How are you going to starve if you’re good at something that everybody is going to have to use? The car design, the house design, the architecture, the clothes, the video games—everything. It’s some money guy making the money, but it’s all the guys who work for him that make it so he’s able to make the money. DreamWorks is going to pay you $100,000 a year and they’re going to make $100 million, or a billion or whatever. That’s fine. That’s the way it works.

DRAW!: A lot of the people who come to you are aiming to go into the visual….

JW: The entertainment industry, yeah.

DRAW!: But there’s a lot of downward pressure on prices now, right?

JW: Again, you look at it and, yes, it’s a competitive field.

So all the more reason you’d better get really good at these fundamental skills before you start picking up the tablet, before you start designing this stuff digitally. Erik makes more money on the back end selling his originals than he does on the job itself. Most of our guys make most of their money selling originals, and the work that they do is a pittance of what they make compared to what they sell their originals for afterwards, whether it’s on eBay or through auctions.

Because now you’ve got Patrick Wilshire and all these guys, and Frazetta just sold one of his pieces for over a million dollars at auction.

You’re seeing this fantasy-realism— DRAW!: It’s never been more popular.

JW: No, and it’s only going to get more so, because most of the really good guys are in that industry. I would say that comic artists and fantasy artists are some of the best, most talented guys I’ve ever run into. Some of the hardest working. I mean, they’re way better than a lot of the fine artists. Fine artists can be a little lax sometimes with their workflow.

Commercial guys just kill it when they go into fine art, usually, because they’re so disciplined.

They’re just workhorses. I have a huge amount of respect for that industry, and fantasy-realism is going to be one of the next big things coming up. And you’re starting to see some of the prices come up. Guys like Chris Rahn and those guys getting $18,000 for a painting.

Sketch © Jeffrey R. Watts

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DRAW!: You know, when [Norman] Rockwell sells for $50 million dollars, that changes everything.

JW: Yeah. I bought a [Dean] Cornwell years ago. A big one from one of his books, and it was not cheap, but that guy is so underappreciated.

DRAW!: Yeah, for $50,000 you can still get a Cornwell.

JW: You can get one of his best pieces for that. But I remember my dad showing me a Rockwell back in the ’70s that was $60,000.

He used to work for a guy who had one. It would go for two million dollars now, or more.

So, the illustrators are going to have their day, and they are already starting to. I mean, if I was at the con this year, Erik was telling me there were some Saul Tepper gouaches for sale for $500.

DRAW!: Really?!

JW: I would have snapped those up in a few seconds. But I wasn’t there. I was up in Iceland traipsing around.

DRAW!: Were you painting there?

JW: Yeah. I was doing gouache paintings in little plein airs, and getting reference. I’ve been thinking about getting back more to my roots, which when I originally got into fine arts, it was about travelling and painting my adventures; it was about seeing the world and then painting it. So I’m kind of moving back towards more of that, because I kind of got stuck in the western genre, and I’m really not a western painter. I mean, I paint kind of Painting © Jeffrey R. Watts [Nicolai] Fechin-y and western-type stuff, but No medium gets the love oil does as far as price point. But it’s hard to put me in that category of a “western painter.” it’s a shame. Even gouache—I’ve seen a couple of gouaches DRAW!: The other thing that made me click with you is that from famous Western painters where they went for $500,000 you are such a big Fechin fan. Tom Palmer, the Marvel art- or something at auction, but they were from guys that painted ist, turned me onto Fechin. I was a huge Cornwell fan, so he during a period of historical accuracy. You don’t normally see goes, “Oh! If you like Cornwell, you should go check out this a gouache go for that much, mostly because there are permaguy.” This was, like, 1991, before the internet. His work is nency issues involved with it. still pretty affordable too.

JW: You know what’s funny? He sold one for $10.5 million. DRAW!: Do you guys teach acrylic? Are you teaching digital?

There’s finally that astronomical awareness of his genius. JW: No, we don’t do any digital. Our guys are good at digital, But it took a long time. There are pieces that fluctuate, but but we don’t teach it. Some people will bring it into a sketch there are pieces now that are up in the millions or close to it. class, but no, we kind of stay away from it. If someone comes His prime stuff is really up there, but it took a while. And his in and says, “Hey, I want to use my tablet in this Illustration drawings—because he is one of the most phenomenal drafts- class that Erik’s teaching,” he’s fine with it. But we don’t push men of all time—are like $15,000, $20,000. They’re pretty it, we don’t teach it. It’s easy to learn Photoshop; it’s easy to learn these programs. They’re just applications. It’s not that affordable compared to the paintings. difficult. You can learn it at Palomar College or other commuDRAW!: It’s ironic that people just don’t appreciate drawing nity colleges. You can learn Photoshop, but they’re not going to teach you how to draw a good head or how to draw drapery. in the way that they do painting.

JW: And they never will. With watercolors it’s the same way.

It gets some love, but it’s never going to get the “oil love.” DRAW!: And no one can teach you imagination.

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people know your work, they’re not going to buy it. They don’t buy “triples” or “doubles.” In illustration, you can hit a double and still get paid. You can hit a triple and get paid. You don’t have to hit home runs every time, but in fine art, people won’t buy it.

DRAW!: In fine art, it’s really going through the gallery system, and that’s going through a real shift in taste. Old buyers are retiring. Because of the proliferation of cell phones, images are really cheap to people now.

JW: I was out at the Prix de West this year with Jeremy [Lipking] and all those guys. We try to do it as a family thing because my parents are both from Iowa. They like going back there, so I go with my wife and my dad and my mom every year, and we’ve done it for ten years now. This year, my wife was in school getting her Master’s in Spiritual Psychology, so she couldn’t go. And my mom didn’t want to go, so we made it a father/son trip. My dad and I are so close, so it’s just really special. And at that show you have Morgan [Weistling] in there, and you’ve got most of the best living contemporary, traditional painters: Scott Christensen, Matt Smith, Scott Burdick, Susan Lyon, Dan Gerhardt—all of those guys are in that show. It’s fun because it’s everyone in one room, and all the gallery owners are there, and all the collectors are there.

You can see there’s been a change occurring with the older collectors. Like you said, they’ve been dying off. Their sons and daughters don’t know if they want to keep collecting.

Some do. But it’s fueled 90% by oil and cattle money, and this year, oil is….

Quick figure sketches.

Sketches © Jeffrey R. Watts

JW: No, or cultivation of good design, or calligraphy, idealization of form—things that are [Alphonse] Muchatype design and [J.C.] Leyendecker, where you’re creating straights and curves and how to knit them together. All that stuff comes from, in my opinion, old principles. And we’ve had a few people give us beef about the “no digital” thing. If you want digital, go elsewhere. We’re not that school. I think people just know that. They go, “Cool. You’re that school that doesn’t do that.” And a lot of the guys that come are digital artists, or tattoo artists, that say, “I’ve got to get my skills better.” I’ve got a lot of tattoo guys who come in. We’ve got a lot of digital guys from Rockstar and places like that who always wanted to do their own comic, their own graphic novel, their own whatever, and they just want to learn how to paint.

DRAW!: I started in the comics and then I went into animation, and all the guys in animation wanted to do comics, and all the comics guys wanted to do animation. [laughter] Everybody wants to do the other thing.

JW: Oh, always. The Promised Land is always where you’re not. All these illustrators want to be fine artists, and you say, “Do you have any idea…?” I mean, in fine art, you paint a painting and you put it up for sale. If it’s not a home run and

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DRAW!: It’s gone!

JW: Yeah, it was a tough year. Many markets fluctuate, but that one has been solid for decades with some small lulls. I’ve been painting in that genre for quite a while, and I’m kind of at a loss for how to connect with it.

DRAW!: You don’t want to paint crying Indians? Come on.

JW: I know. [laughter] That’s why I’m kind of having a midlife crisis right now with my personal work. It’s like, “What am I doing?”

DRAW!: It’s hard. Because like I said, no one can teach you creativity. And there’s that point too, when you’re trapped doing something else, and you think, “Oh man, I can’t wait to just do my own thing.” And then, when the barn door swings open….

JW: You end up going, “What am I doing? I don’t even know how to be authentic. I don’t even know what that means.”

Next year I’m going to go to the same school my wife went to, and I’m going to do a couple of years of the Spiritual Psychology program just for my own authenticity and enrichment with my work so I can get back to what’s important to me. I just haven’t had a lot of time to work on myself and do some soul-searching and say, “Hey! What really is important to you? You’re technically really proficient. But is that what it’s all about?” Again, I’ve spent most of my life becoming a technician. I loved training. It’s really what I’m good at….

DRAW!: You’re a professional problem solver.

JW: Yeah! I love to teach. I love to share. It really is the most authentic thing I’ve done is the school. Someone asked, “What’s the most authentic part of your career so far?” and it’s my teaching. I mean, that’s where I really shine. It afforded me the opportunity to not have to pander and not have to pick a category to go into, because I always had the buffer of the school to support me. So when I went into fine art, it was just sort of playtime. It was, like, “I’ll just paint a little of this and a little of that.” They couldn’t pigeonhole me, and I didn’t need to be pigeonholed. I was, like, “I’m not going to paint what you guys what me to paint.”

And so I’ve always kind of been this defiant fine artist who really wasn’t able to be corralled, and they hate that.

DRAW!: It’s funny because commercial art wants to pigeonhole you. You’re Jack Davis, or you’re Frank Frazetta, and fine art is really just another form of commercial art.

JW: Yeah, it’s “commercial” fine art. I mean, call it what it is. If you have to sell for money, you’re going to be prostituting yourself. You’re going to be compromising your values and you’re going to be painting stuff that they want, that sells, if you need to. Many artists I talk to are grateful to be working artists, but I think they would like to explore more diverse subjects and styles, and although they are good enough, that is not what people want and expect from them.

Sketches © Jeffrey R. Watts

DRAW!: Do you get young illustrators who are coming to brush up their skill set?

JW: Yeah, we’re getting more and more of that, especially from other countries now. The online started feeding our traditional school at a high level, so every term now we have a couple of guys from Germany, a couple of guys from Poland, and a couple of guys from New Zealand coming in. A lot of Canadians, a lot of people from England. They’ll take the online course and say, “These guys are really great. I want to go there in person.” And so they’ll train online for part of a year, and then they’ll come in for ten weeks and take, like, 17 classes. Then they’ll go back and study online again.

DRAW!: When they come there, how do they manage that?

JW: They get a visitor visa and rent a little place through Airbnb usually, because we’re right by the beach in San

Diego, California. A lot of people are renting second rooms or garages converted into small apartments, so you really have no problem finding places to rent.

DRAW!: Is it a rolling enrollment kind of a thing, or do they have to come at a certain time of year?

JW: Our terms are three months long, so they’re exactly the amount of time they can come on a visa. They come in and take, basically, 17 classes, or do our Platinum Pass. They’ll take as many classes as they can handle and just saturate themselves for ten weeks, and then they’ll go back to wherever they’re from and usually continue their training from distance. They’ll go online and pick, say, Erik as their mentor, and they’ll do Skypes, or there’ll be back and forths or whatever.

I was working with a tattoo artist who is one of the best guys in Sweden. He’s about my age and was trying to get out

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Quick gesture sketches.

Sketches © Jeffrey R. Watts

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of that and get into something more fine art oriented.

I got a guy just recently who is up in Canada that I worked with for about a year—he was a conceptor— and he got so good with the online program that he actually lost his job. [laughter] He was actually starting to get so much flack from the guys at his work for how good he was getting. One guy said, “What are you eating for breakfast? I mean, what is going on?”

We were working together, just going back and forth, and he was just really hard working. But now he has an even better job. He got so much confidence, it was just amazing. He couldn’t believe it.

DRAW!: They were giving him the “Haterade”?

JW: Yeah, exactly. He had one of his directors taking credit for his work. He worked in concepting up at Entertainment Arts or something. He’s working out of Montreal, I think. But his progress was so amazing over that year that we worked together…. It blew him away. It blew me away. But it was proof you can definitely do it from distance. It’s not a problem at all.

It’s just a matter of hard work and being disciplined enough. And there’re not that many people who will be that, but I’m looking for the 500–1,000 people in the world who want to do that.

I’m not trying to make a program where I get 50,000 in for $20 a month, don’t do any critiquing, don’t have any curriculum. There are a couple of other schools like that online. They’re good, but they’re like, “Look how good I am. But I’m not going to get you there.” There has to be a flow to get you there. You can’t just put videos out there that are phenomenal to show how good you are, and then not have a curriculum flow to them. We have a step-by-step Drawing © Jeffrey R. Watts flow from basics to the most advanced, just like we do in our regular atelier. Again, you’ve got Head Drawing I, difference between the two, other than the loneliness and lack Head Drawing II, Head Drawing III, Head Drawing IV. Each of camaraderie that can sometimes happen from distance. But one progresses on the other. You start with drawing rhythm if you’re stuck in Fargo or Dubai, this is the best thing you’re grids and abstractions. You go up to drawing from mimicking going to get. I mean, it’s a godsend. If you can’t pick up and live model work from photos, to 20-minute head lay-ins, to move to San Diego, like, “I can’t do that. I’ve got kids,” well three-hour head drawings, to nine-hour graphite drawings. So then, you’re stuck. Do the online course. You’re going to have you’re sequentially getting more and more complicated in the to work and be lonely. It just is what it is. design, calligraphy, idealization… and, again, we’ve seen it But I get these people sometimes who just don’t want an work time and time again in the brick-and-mortar. answer. I’m giving them the best answer I can give them, and People will have to get themselves in some life drawing I’m giving it to them on a silver platter—information it took class at some point and start extrapolating information. But decades to learn. I don’t know if I’ve totally figured out this they have the ability to watch that lay-in from the best pos- really neat thing, or if it’s going to fall on deaf ears. The bigsible angle, as many times as it takes to get that information gest problem we have right now is we have an issue with our ingrained. Whatever it lacks in variety, it makes up for more servers. The people who run our site came out with a new so in repetition and continuity. And then you say, “Okay. Yes, video player. It’s causing problems with certain peoples’ sysyou’re going to have to think for yourself at some point any- tems, and we can’t figure out where the problem is coming way.” If you’re at our school, I can only go “yeah” so many from. It doesn’t seem to be always internet speed, and it’s times. At some point you’ve got to learn to think for yourself. only affecting a few people, but it’s a pain in the ass. And you And you’re going to have to leave the school at some point. lose 15–20 people from it. So you’ve got this stellar content, You’re going to be sitting at home by yourself, and you’d bet- some of the best out there, and everything’s perfect except the ter have learned to think for yourself. So I don’t see much internet player. It’s maddening, because you’ve got to migrate

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It’s fine with me. I’m not really looking to do that. I would do it, and I’m happy to do it, but I’ve got things I’ve got to do. So, yeah, I don’t do it as much, but at some point we may structure the school differently. We’ve been experimenting from Day 1, trying to figure out what price point would hit the sweet spot. If you’re in Spain, $199 a month is what you make in a month.

DRAW!: Or Vietnam.

JW: Yeah. For us, it doesn’t seem like that much, but for the rest of the world….

So there’s a sweet spot that we’re trying to figure out. Can we do more of an à la carte type thing where people can come in and take individual classes? But we don’t want to cannibalize what we’ve already created. So the next process will be to revamp and rethink how we structure the program and look at what’s successful in other business models. But statistics and running business model analyzation is not my forte, so I’ve got to find consultants and people who can walk me through the process of saying, “Okay, you’ve got a phenomenal product. One of the best out there. It’s working, but you’re missing the boat on this whole demographic.” So that’s where it is right now. We’re kind of revamping, Screen shots from one of Jeff’s Friday Night Live videos showing the progression of a massaging, but I’m continuing to progouache sketch painting. Check out the full episode on Jeff’s YouTube channel: www. duce content. My dad’s producing conyoutube.com/user/wattsatelier. tent. Erik, all these guys… we’ve got Friday Night Live © The Watts Atelier of the Arts quite a bit of content backed up in the 700 hours of video to another server and maybe have the same stream—100 hours or so. problem. It’s very hard to find a definitive answer for some of these cryptic technical problems that are happening, because DRAW!: Are you going to do some more of the Friday Night again, you have so many people. Some people are working on Lives? ten-year-old computers, you know?

JW: Yeah. I need to attack the whole YouTube/social media, but I haven’t had a chance to step back long enough to see DRAW!: That’s why, when you go to art school, one of the how I want to get that going. We have 40,000 people on things they do is they say, “You’re getting a new Mac, and our channel, but that’s nothing compared to what we should you’re getting all the new Adobe suites, because we’re not have for how good the content is. I mean, doing a three-hour going to have everybody coming in saying, ‘Well, I’ve got freebie every month… I was doing that for a while and it’s my mom’s old G4.’” [laughter] Actually, when my computer just a lot to do. And every time it’s stressful, and you’re crapped out last year, I had to use my 1994 G4. It still works. thinking, “I don’t want to be redundant. I want to do someYou can hardly surf the internet, but it works. But if you’ve thing simple.” So I don’t know if we’re going to do little got one guy on a Dell and another guy is on a Sony…. weekly quick tips where we give out a half an hour of bits of Are you limiting the amount of people who work with you information that are really cool and poignant, and then we personally? do three or four three-hour Friday Night Lives a year—but JW: I don’t. Normally I’m pretty expensive, so only the most not every month. That’s too much. And I want to do book serious students would opt for that. Because I just don’t really reviews. I want to do artist reviews. I want to talk about want a lot of people. At most I’d say I have three or four peo- things that are meaningful for me that have helped me, not ple at a time. I don’t have anyone I’m working with right now. just do demos all the time.

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DRAW!: I’ve always recommended your videos to my students, and tell them, “You guys are so lucky, because there are so many good demos of people painting online. I would have killed for that when I was 17.”

JW: I know! To see Glen or someone like that when you’re in high school….

I think kids are a little bit spoiled. I think they think they can get everything piecemeal, and some creative kids probably could, but I think there’s still value in structure and value in curriculum and value in flow and the expertise to know how to navigate the myriad of options out there. Because what we’re running into now, I think, is the information age, where you’re oversaturated with too much good stuff and you don’t know how to sift through it.

DRAW!: You don’t know how to curate what’s available.

JW: No, you’re just getting spoon-fed this amazing stimulus, but you don’t know how to get there. My goal with online is to give someone that guided tour through the process, and basically just be a great coach for them, and hope that there are enough people out there that appreciate that to keep it running.

And I think there is.

More screen shots from Jeff’s Friday Night Live video.

DRAW!: From your perspective, what Friday Night Live © The Watts Atelier of the Arts are the five most important things you try to impart to the student when they come in? to ten. We’ve also got these four edges—hard, soft, firm, and JW: When you first come in, it’s going to be a procedural lost. Then we’ve got to take shapes and assign them to the thing. You’ve got to learn to take the visual images and break things that we see in the world, whether it’s anatomy or somethem down into edge and value and shape and design and cal- thing else. And then we’re going to assign a value and an edge ligraphy. You’ve got edges and values that are pivotal. I think to those shapes to make them look three-dimensional on a flat when you do the hierarchy, edges are more pivotal than value, surface. So we’ve got to learn to do that. We’ve got to learn because you can get a beautiful drawing with one value with comparative measurement. We’ve got to learn a measuring great edge. And then you’ve got your values. Then you’ve got process that is basically very educated guessing. We’ve got to your shapes. The hierarchy is really teaching someone to see use plumb lines and angles, and we’re not going to do ‘sight as you’re putting a hand in place and you’re putting an eye size.’ We’re going to be using a trial and error method of trianin place. How do you put a hand and eye in place? You use gulating to look at negative/positive shapes. And we’re going another hand and an eye that’s better than yours. You borrow learning to navigate form through estimations of measureit, you rent it for a period of time until your hand and eye can ment—guessing.” do what that person has done. You’re training an eye through emulation, so you’re showing them. They’re trying. They’re DRAW!: Nobody uses sight size except in fine art. You’re going to do their drawing, and they’re going to fall short, and not going to use it. you’re going to show them why they’re falling short. You JW: Well, a lot of the ateliers now are training sight size, but say, “Look. Do this. Do that.” You also set up that hierarchy: I think the main reason for that is you can keep your students “We have basic components to this language that have to be in the program longer. I think it’s easier to lock them in, and understood. We have these things called values, and there are it’s more of a monetary reason. That’s how I see it. I don’t see basically ten of them. There are a lot more, but let’s simplify it as being very beneficial long-term for the student. Because

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Long pose figure drawing.

Drawing © Jeffrey R. Watts

we’ve had guys come in from Florence Academy, from some of these sight size schools, and they can’t do quick sketch. They can’t do invention very well. They can’t paint a 40-minute head painting. You give them five minutes with a figure and they’re like a deer in the headlights. They’re not going to do anything inside of a 50-hour effort. You’re going to starve to death as an artist doing 50-hour efforts, 100-hour efforts. You’re not going to be able to make a living. It would be very beneficial for the first year of any program, probably, to do sight size, and then quickly jump to comparative measurement and learning how to estimate your spacial relationships versus using a glorified gridding system. It’s hard to argue with some of the results through history that have been acquired through the sight size method, but in today’s fast-paced entertainment market where most people are going to end up working in reality….

DRAW!: You’re not doing a sight sized Captain America cover.

JW: No, that’s what I’m saying. You’ll be stuck in the mud if you put all of your eggs in that one basket. You’ll be stuck

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trying to be Jacob Collins doing a $50,000 nude figure, and only a handful of guys have made it to that level with that kind of mentality—they’re few and far between.

DRAW!: Anyone who’s doing a comic or any type of visual development can’t take ten hours to do anything. You’ve only got ten hours for the whole piece.

JW: Yeah, exactly. We were part of Art Renewal Center when it first came out, and we were one of the first ateliers that was fully accredited in their opinion. But they argued tooth and nail with me about our program being too illustrative. And I was thinking, “We’re not living in 1870. You’re screwed if you’re using these old methods where you’ve got to spend 200 hours. Go to DreamWorks and see if they’ll buy that.

DRAW!: “I’ve got to glaze my Kung Fu Panda.”

JW: [laughing] Exactly! I argued with them and rebutted, and they finally came around and said, “Yeah, we’ll accredit your whole program,” because at the beginning they were only going to put their seal of approval on a handful of classes. But we’ve been with them, I think, since they first started. They’ve been really good to us, and we’ve been really good to them.

But that was an interesting thing to go through, this process of trying to encourage people to understand that illustration is fine art and fine art is illustration.

There’s really not that much difference.

DRAW!: The difference really is that as a fine artist, I’m working for myself. As an illustrator, I’m working for Disney or Marvel or whomever.

JW: That’s really the only difference. And even when you’re working for yourself, you’re really working for a gallery. Your gallery is your art director. They’re telling you what’s going to be put on the wall and what’s going to sell. If it doesn’t, they won’t hang it. So you’re really still stuck with the same art directing problem either way.

DRAW!: And then they keep 50%.

JW: Exactly! So, it’s not even as good as illustration in that way. I’m really pragmatic about the whole thing. The romance is still there in me, but the romance of the profession is long gone.

DRAW!: Have you thought about teaching comics?

JW: You know, for a while we had Joe Chiodo teaching with me. I would do the single image stuff, and he would do the

continuity stuff. I got offered to do my own comic with CrossGen when they came out. I was going to do my own title, and I was going to pencil and ink it. I was a little reluctant, because I had enough respect for that industry that I don’t know if I could’ve handled it. I think I could’ve, but it just would’ve busted my ass. It would’ve just killed me.

I taught a little bit of storyboarding and different things. I did quite a bit of storyboarding when I first started. I just have a huge amount of respect for all the comics guys. I always have.

And I have so much respect for it, I doubt I would teach it. I just don’t think I would be the right guy to teach it. I teach aspects of it, some inking technique. We’ve got one guy, Doug, who took inking with me, like, six times. He works for Dark Horse now, and does storyboarding. But he’s one of the few guys I helped teach who went the comics route. It wouldn’t be a bad idea. I like it and would totally do it. We just didn’t have the guys around who were qualified to teach it, and I’m so picky now with who we have teaching.

DRAW!: [laughter] Well, if you ever need somebody to teach comics, I might know somebody.

JW: I know. You would be the man. I wish you were in town. I would have you in here teaching with us.

JW: I know. It’s all out in mystery land.

DRAW!: And people look at it as some sort of straightjacket to creativity, right?

JW: Yeah, they always have. And that’s usually the naysayers and the people that really don’t want to work that hard. It’s kind of like, “Weeelllll, that’s a lot of hard work, and I really want to be creative and that’s going to stifle my creativity.”

And they’ve always used that excuse. Abstract expressionists used that excuse against representational people.

DRAW!: It’s changing now because people are not going to spend $100,000 or $200,000 on an art education and not be able to do anything. You can’t make a living just off ideas. If you free yourself from knowledge, then somehow you’ll be more creative—I never really understood that.

JW: That’s a concept that’s just… odd.

DRAW!: You’re getting ready to start your Fall semester now?

DRAW!: My buddy Will Sentman and his wife Alina came by as they were heading to San Diego, and I was like, “Oh, you’ve got to see the Watts Atelier,” and you gave them a tour.

JW: Yeah, Yeah.

DRAW!: I think he’d like to go to your school. A lot of people like that I know, they went to school, but now they’re going back and taking extra classes to bone up.

JW: And we’re reasonable enough to where people can literally come in and take a few classes and have the camaraderie, get that juice they may be lacking on their own sometimes—just to give them a little push, a little kick in the butt. You come in and you have all these great people feeding off each other for about the cost of a gym membership.

DRAW!: The thing I think is really valuable about the atelier system, the way I put it to people is, if you’re going to learn how to cook, you can go to a school, and they’ll teach you to make soup. And once you can make a good basic soup, then you can make French onion or whatever. But if you don’t know how to make soup—if you don’t understand the concept of soup—it doesn’t matter what all those other soups are, because you’ll never be able to cook any of them.

Long pose figure drawing.

Drawing © Jeffrey R. Watts

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derful stuff in there. I just have to give you kudos and let you know how wonderful it is that you’ve done that.

(above) Watts Atelier students at work painting from a live model. (right) Jeff inspects his tools.

Photos © The Jeffrey Watts Atelier of the Arts

JW: We’re actually in the middle of our Summer semester. It’s a five-week term. A lot of people travel during the summer, so we trimmed it down to five weeks. The Fall, Winter, and Spring terms are all ten weeks long, so we do three ten-week terms with about four weeks off in between. And then in the summer we have a five-weeker.

DRAW!: And so you’ll end it this month?

JW: We’ll go through this month, and then we’ll have a little bit of a break, and then we start up the Fall term in late October. It runs through December 18 or December 20.

I love it. I know I’m always hemming and hawing about this and that, but I don’t know what I’d do without it. I really enjoy it. It’s been an honor to teach. And I’ve always loved your magazine, by the way. I just think it’s fantastic.

DRAW!: I appreciate it. It’s my version of what you’re doing.

JW: Exactly. And it just has so much good stuff in there.

Sometimes I’ll just grab them and take them into class. If I go into a sketchbook class, I’ll grab a bunch of them. I’ll go in and start digging through them and use it as an excuse to read the old articles and draw some of the stuff in there. It’s won-

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DRAW!: Well, I appreciate that.

I always say that the magazine is for the 17-year-old version of me.

JW: And how cool is that? That’s a lot of work. I know from trying to put together anything that I’ve done, it’s such hard work. Birthing the online school really did a number on me. I’ve never been burnt out like that. And I don’t burn out usually, but it was brutal. But it was a really necessary thing for me to reassess where I’m going with my art. I really want to be authentic with what I do and really felt like I had not been.

I’ve been a good technician but I had not really found the sweet spot that’s really, honestly me, and I need to do that.

DRAW!: And you might just have to make a lot of bad art to find it.

JW: I know. I pulled out of all my galleries, and I was in some great ones, but I pulled out of them to work on the online program, because I felt like that’s where I can leave a really good impression behind and something really meaningful. My art will be my art, and I may just paint it for myself, who knows?

I may not show in galleries again. I don’t know. But regardless, it would be nice to be in a position to not have to. And then I could just see what the five-year-old me wants to do, the real me. But I’ve got to get back to the real me first, and that’s going to take some digging around, and it’s going to be kind of uncomfortable. I’m just at a point in my life where I’m reassessing a lot of stuff.

DRAW!: Well, you’re mid-career if you think about it.

JW: Pretty normal, I think. So thanks again.

DRAW!: I’m glad you agreed to do it. I’ve been a big fan of your stuff and the school for years.

JW: Likewise.

POWER of PAPER

the

© DC Comics

onsequences. While teaching a recent class and helping a student struggle on an ambitious piece, I brought up consequences in regards to the creative process of executing the drawing they were engaged in, or any piece of art for that matter. The student was worried about the consequences of trying a certain technique which they had not tried before. But I told them it was fine to “mess it up,” and you have to risk that on any work. It’s a crucial step in an artist’s growth to be sure, to accept the fact that it might go great or it might go poorly; either way you will learn a lot. Learning from the ruined or bad piece of art sounds completely wrong to a young artist, but an older artist realizes how true that fact is.

That class led me to thinking about how this idea of consequences is such a vital part of making any artwork. All art is a result of many choices, the final piece is the result many decisions by the artist along the way, sometimes thousands of them, building up like sediment. The Italians even have a word for it, pentimento. It’s a term that describes a drawing or painting which shows the traces of previous work by the artist, showing where they have made changes on the work as they progressed.

We can sometimes learn as much or even more from our mistakes. I know I have. Mistakes and failure are as much a part of learning to draw or paint as falling and skinned knees are to learning to walk and eventually run. All young artists want to run with their heroes. Sometimes the false legs of the digital media can stunt or trip the young artist though.

The computer is becoming more and more dominant today as a tool, and a lot of great work is produced with it as a medium, just like oil or watercolor, etc. But I do see a downside in the digital ways of working for the younger develop-

Harley Quinn

C

by Mike Manley and Bret Blevins

ing artist. I feel it can have a weakening process on the core skills a young artist is forging for the battles ahead. I have seen how this can result in often a bad or weak drawing.

In this “Bootcamp” I want to concentrate on what I have often witnessed as a teacher and have often talked about with my fellow professionals (and many times with Bret over the phone). The digital wave has fully washed over the entire world, especially in the commercial fields. Every month it seems some new digital program or tablet, etc., is rolling out.

This is not an anti-digital rant, but I feel the commercial world and schools often push the tech onto young artists before their foundations are solidly set. Drawing is thinking, and the tech can get in the way.

You can’t deny the fact we all need to use and master the various programs and digital tools to stay afloat in the choppy waters of commercial art. As an example, when I started storyboarding in the late ’90s, it was an all-paper process. The last show I actively boarded on was Secret Saturdays, and that was all done on paper. Now if I did storyboards I’d need to use Storyboard Pro and a Cintiq.

I have stood as a teacher and witnessed the consequences, the weakening effect of digital platforms in the development of a young artist’s drawing skills. There is a seductive aspect

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Judge Parker, July 3, 2016.

This was the first totally digital Sunday strip I did using Clip Studio Paint.

It probably took me 30% longer to do this since I was learning the program’s interface as I worked along.

I was also working on a Wacom Bamboo and not a Cintiq, so I was relying a lot on muscle memory to get my strokes down.

Judge Parker © North America Syndicate, Inc.

to using the digital mediums that is undeniable, but the student is not often aware of how this might effect their growth curve. I have seen a student do a nice drawing on paper but do the same drawing on a computer with far less skill and beauty.

I have yet to see the opposite: a young artist do a better drawing on the screen than on paper.

One of the things I have come to learn after being a teacher and professional for very long time is how important the design and developmental stage (thinking) of the young artist is. I also say this as a person who was self-taught and who saw the errors in my process as a young artist which I had to overcome. Those consequences, good or bad, made me grow.

The biggest issues I have witnessed as a teacher while observing my students struggle to draw something on their Wacom or Cintiq are: 1) All drawing involves risk, and that risk works on a number of levels on the artist’s development. A drawing is a series of thoughts expressed through the skill set of the artist. So drawing is a chain or a flow of interconnected thoughts that result in the final work, and the consequence of the artist’s ability and experience. Command+Z is not always a good thing here.

2) The young artist’s process, when building and solving a problem by drawing, is interrupted by the digital interface of the program and the computer. The brain/hand connection becomes much more of a series of stops and starts.

When I watch a student working on their tablets, I have often observed a student draw a line and then immediately hit “Command+Z”—undo that same line—because they’re not happy with it. They may repeat that step a dozen times while trying to get the line they want.

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3) But is the end result the line they want, or is the line that they settle for, and is the student even aware of how this process affects their thinking?

The business world pushes tech on artists at an increasingly frantic pace, and schools try and keep up in their training of students to prepare them to jump into the global workforce.

This, of course, affects everyone working in any of the commercial mediums, like comics and illustration, but even in fine art. There is just no way to escape the tech. But there is, I feel, a smarter way to learn how to embrace the digital process which does not disrupt the vital beginning of the younger artist’s core skills that they will build their careers on.

I know more than one artist who has lost work due to the fact that they didn’t work digitally, or because it was perceived that they didn’t work digitally by a young art director with a limited knowledge of the history of the art form. The fact is that you cannot escape using media, nor should you refuse to either use it or embrace it. What I’m talking about here is more about when and how you should use it and embrace it in your process, particularly in your growth process as a young artist still developing your skill set.

Recently I have taken much more of a digital plunge myself, since I am doing both Judge Parker and now the Phantom comic strips and the amount of original art is stacking up. Often both strips require the use of reference, or what they used to call swipe (which involved using photos and other sources being projected and traced down to later ink).

Up until I stopped doing monthly comic books in the late ’90s I used to my overhead Art-O-Graph projector all the time, but now using Clip Studio Paint I can take the same reference that I would have to project and instead import it onto a layer in Manga Studio and ink it there. It’s faster and easier

Judge Parker, August 7, 2016. This Sunday was traditionally penciled by me and inked by Bret to help me on a tight deadline. Bret also used Clip Studio Paint, the biggest difference is he has a Cintiq. Bret also has a set of brushes he likes, while I am still figuring out which ones I like.

Judge Parker © North America Syndicate, Inc.

as I’m able to manipulate the source material a lot more, and the tools that Manga Studio has—like automatically drawing straight lines or drawing curved lines—help quite a bit.

But still there is always that delay in learning and adapting to the limits with the interface of that program or other programs like Photoshop. It’s a push, pull, give, gain scenario, and I do find that it is more wearing on me to work digitally all day than it is to work with the traditional tools of pen, pencil, paper, and ink. I’m still faster with traditional tools at this point, but maybe one day, with continued practice, I’ll be almost as fast digitally.

Another drawback when working digitally, especially on something that as large as a comic book page, is that you cannot see the whole image most the time that you’re working on it. The screen is too small to show the whole image when you are working on a computer, unlike having the entire physical page in front of you on your drawing board.

When working digitally you tend to be zoomed in on a much smaller area of the art, and so your relationship to the piece as a whole is not a constant as it is when you’re working in traditional media. This affects many decisions that you make in regards to the whole piece. Line weight, eye direction, the spotting of blacks, etc., are better judged when looking at a piece as a whole. When working on a color page or one of the comic strips or a painting, I am constantly zooming in and out to judge the section I am currently working on against the entire piece.

The interruption due to the interface of the software to manipulate the image you are working on interrupts or handicaps the development of the young artist’s muscle memory, and this is a very big issue. How you hold and use your tools and the way you develop the precision of your line, the delivery of your thoughts from your brain down through your arm

and hand with practice, cannot be equaled by a computer program. The feedback I get from my marker versus a dip pen on a smooth surface versus a rough paper surface, the drag of a brush to get a drybrush affect, etc., can only be approximated by the choice of tools and settings the programmer of the particular program understands. The software is getting better, but the surface of a plastic tablet will always feel the same, as opposed to the variety of surfaces I work on in the real world.

I know the difference, but a young student developing their core skills may not know it nearly as well, and that work flow of change—zoom in, zoom out, slide over, slide down—is not a natural way of working, but an adaptive way of working. That has a consequence. It is a way we have to learn to work with the computer, but it is not the natural way you will learn to work with traditional media. As a result I see, with many young artists who have good and growing traditional skill sets, a stunting effect as they jump on the digital side of the tracks.

The risk involved in all artistic creation is very important.

Every drawing, every piece, is a combination of hundreds or maybe even thousands of decisions, some good, some bad.

Before I stopped playing sports in high school, I practiced four to five days a week to play football or to wrestle. When we then played a game that lasted approximately one hour against the opposing team, the coach’s hope was that all that practice had to turned into skills—into instinct! That’s exactly what happens with drawing, inking, painting, etc. You cannot overestimate the results of practice when it comes to its affect on the drilling in of those traditional skills which should be a fundamental part of all young artists. After all, in comics, animation, and illustration, you are entering a competitive, challenging, and highly competitive occupation. And the old saying that practice makes perfect really is true.

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Judge Parker daily: Because of the nature of this strips, I did this all-digital. This helped with the diner interior.

I drew that separately and the figures in each panel on different layers. I found an okay picture of an old diner and another of some state policemen, and pasted them together. This gave me scale for the other figures, and for the waitress in the second panel, which I also drew on a separate layer.

Judge Parker © North America Syndicate, Inc.

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The painting on the left is a very quick digital painting I did on my laptop the first night of last year’s Baltimore Comic-Con from my hotel window on the 11th floor. The sun was starting to set when I got back to my room, so I had maybe 30–45 minutes on this as the light was going fast. I was relying so much on my traditional painting skills and muscle memory as I used Photoshop and my Wacom, because I was looking at the view and often not at the tablet as I painted. Getting the size of the brush right, the opacity of the digital paint, and the scale of which I was zoomed in on the picture was a challenge. The painting on the right of the 53rd Street Pier on the Delaware in South Philly was painted a few weeks before in plein air when my group, The Philadelphia Plein Air Painters, was invited to paint the historic pier and habitat. This was done in about three hours or so in oil, and this experience I carried with me to the digital realm in the left-hand painting.

Another important fact is that becoming too dependent on software before having a really strong traditional skill set can lead to a real problem: you might get really good at a program that they suddenly discontinue! Software comes and goes, and often you are left struggling to find a way of reproducing the effect you want in another program. I started out working essentially like my comic-artist heroes did back in the 1930s and the ’40s. Comic book production didn’t change very much until the ’90s when computers came into the process. I worked just like Jack Kirby and Al Williamson, with paper, pencils, brushes, and pens, and that was about it—no scanners, Photoshop blue lines, or internet. I have adapted along with the demands of the job. In my own work process, I seek to enter a flow, a near trance-like state, where I flow along unfettered by anything other than my instincts, my guts. It’s hard to get into that flow when you’re fighting with a new program to make the marks you want.

Drawing is a mysterious and sometimes magical process, yet it’s also a practical one. It has to be dependable yet nuanced and inventive, a vehicle for any job. Drawing must always be in service to the task at hand. When an artist draws, they are (consciously or unconsciously) analyzing, breaking things down, and understanding the subject, and that information is being recorded and committed to memory. Comics is a job that requires drawing from stored information, the more you draw something, like the human figure, the better you understand it. Anything that interrupts that process—any program that the artist becomes too dependent on—risks holes in the foundation. I believe the best path in practice is having the strongest traditional skill set in foundation that then can be employed and adapted across any of the constantly, rapidly changing platforms the artist will need to utilize.

These storyboards are from New Frontier, one of the last jobs I did that was drawn on paper. If I went back now I’d have to get Storyboard Pro and wave bye-bye to the paper and pencils.

DC: The New Frontier © DC Comics and Warner Bros. Animation

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D

igital art tools use complex algorithms to simulate the visual effects obtained by traditional, hand-manipulated, tactile, wet or dry materials applied to various surfaces. In most cases, the less accurate these simulations are, the less appealing the results, at least to a sensitive eye. We can assume that is why so much effort has been made by program developers over the last several decades to hide the evidence of the machine as much as possible, and today the mimicry capabilities of programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter, Sketchbook Pro, Manga/Clip Studio, and others are undeniably remarkable. The technical requirements of publishing and video production have also changed to accommodate or, increasingly, dictate the widespread use of this digital art-making technology.

The purpose of this article is not to condemn digital tools or the art produced with them, but to contrast the rewards and possibilities of traditional methods, in the context of both the creation process and the resulting artwork. I have produced thousands upon thousands of entirely digital images, using Photoshop, Manga/Clip Studio, Sketchbook Pro, and Storyboard Pro, and for many years have scanned physical artwork and prepped it for digital delivery to a publisher or studio. These methods will always be a “new” world for me though, as per-

sonal computers of any kind were not available until I was an adult, and I bought my first one at the age of 36, after 15 years as a full-time professional artist. In those early digital years the only art program I had was Photoshop 3 (!), and my large Apple 8100 tower had a total hard drive capacity of, I believe, 20 GB. In other words, a fraction of the workspace available in a small thumb drive today—and no touch screen Cintiq technology.

I did a few crude all-digital illustrations then, but mostly I used the computer for coloring or adding simple bitmap digital effects to line art that was drawn on paper and scanned into the program. I drew a few digital storyboards circa 1999/2000 using an early Intuos Wacom tablet, working on layers over a scanned base image of the printed storyboard paper, but the inability to rotate the image easily made the drawing process very difficult, and I continued storyboarding on paper until purchasing a Cintiq and Storyboard Pro in 2009.

I mention all this to assure you that I am not a grouchy old traditionalist who resents the digital tools—far from it—but my formative years working exclusively with paper, canvas, and in some cases collage, often for reproduction on newsprint using the now obsolete letterpress printing technology, has shaped my experience in ways that a young artist who has worked primarily or exclusively with digital tools does not share.

Storyboards for the Ben 10 episode, “Vreedlemania,” drawn digitally in Storyboard Pro. Ben 10 © Cartoon Network

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One of the basic differences is the element of risk—digital means are endlessly forgiving. Depending on the computing power available, countless backtracking, deleting every unwanted mark made until the right one is found (or the quest abandoned) is a virtually limitless possibility. On first consideration this seems wonderful—but in my experience this is not always so. Learning to achieve impressive results using only traditional tools, by slow and diligent trial and error, persevering through the clumsy years of frequent failure that requires, teaches an artist a level of hand/eye coordination, precise physical skill, and acute aesthetic judgement obtainable in no other way. As long as “ Command+Z” is available to you, the pressure to be deft and sure every time you touch your drawing is removed.

As a result, working exclusively with digital means there is a strong tendency for technical skill to plateau early, once a functional, acceptable level of proficiency has been reached. In addition, the limitations of the programs encourage a monotony of effect that gives so much digital art a bland, almost uniform surface character. Manipulating physical drawing or painting tools—pencils, chalk, ink, dip pens, brushes, various rough or smooth surfaces of paper or canvas, wood, metal—all demand risk, skill, and a degree of mastery and courage that working digitally does not. This inspires a kind of excitement, sometimes exhilaration, that I have never felt while seeing my work develop on the other side of a lit glass screen. This ebullience is no small enticement—tactile interaction is a basic human need, and variety of tactile sensation adds a quality that is not possible with the unchanging feel of plastic against glass found when using a digital tablet.

The other and obviously most important difference is the character of the finished artwork. The digital process has many technical advantages: the above mentioned ease of making alterations, the speed and ease of achieving any mechanical effect, straight lines, geometric shapes, guidelines, measurements, resizing, reversing, flipping, adjusting size, etc. I doubt anyone would wish to forgo those labor saving tools.

But those tools are inherently mathematically perfect, and often invite a coldness into the artwork.

Which brings me to what I consider the main advantage traditional means have over digital—the unavoidable presence of the human touch that comes with the variety and visible record of the hand and eye in physical interaction with weight, surface, gravity, hardness, softness, roughness, smoothness, moisture, dryness, and many other bold or subtle artifacts left by manipulating the physical materials. Your human skill— and limitations—inform the character of the finished work in a manner that requires far more time and effort to simulate (or attempt to) using digital means. Granted, these distinctions are not important to everyone, but they do exist, and there are many rewards to be found in the soiling of your hands with graphite, the variety of tactile contact with drawing tools and surfaces, the smell of ink or paint, the sensuous flow of water or oil through a brush, the rhythm of working around the image while waiting for wet passages to dry… all these elements layer into the process and inherently add a spice of

Traditionally drawn pencils for an issue of Harley Quinn.

Harley Quinn © DC Comics

warmth that digital tools are hard pressed to imitate.

There is also great satisfaction in the simplicity of traditional tools. Magic is possible with a cheap pencil or crayon on the shoddiest paper and sufficient light, without electricity, fading battery life, space for several devices connected by tangles of cords, magnetic fields, the light and color distortion of working on a lit screen as opposed to the natural perceptions of your eyes…. I find it refreshing to the spirit.

I also find that the digital process requires much more effort and time to approximate effects I can attain quickly and easily, almost unconsciously, using traditional means, most particularly in line drawings. The limitless delicacy of touch and pressure possible with the physical manipulation of pencil, chalk, pen, or brush, often surprise me with unexpected expression, either of force, movement, grace, beauty, or subtlety of arc or shape. Digital drawing always feels limiting to me in comparison—the mark making is distanced by the intervention of the dead, hard flat screen and the unresponsive plastic tip of the stylus. There is no pull or drag that informs a response, only the smooth glide of plastic and glass transmitting the artificially contrived thick-and-thin/density-or-transparency calculated by the algorithms.

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Wreck-It Ralph © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Of course the intended results, use and character of a given project dictate the best means for achieving your goals, and often digital methods are the most suitable. I and most other artists in our field find them necessary and in many cases indispensable, but a solid foundation in the skills required to create with physical materials will inform digital work in countless ways—the reverse is not always the case. There is no “Command+Z “ when drawing with a pen or brush full of ink!

I’ve assembled examples from a variety of projects, executed digitally, traditionally, or in some cases both. I think the differences in effect, particularly in the character of the mark making, are obvious. I enjoy the advantages of both methods—I’ve had great fun working on a screen, just as I have on an easel or drawing board—but I’ll end with one last difference that I haven’t mentioned yet. Traditional art making produces a physical, unique piece of crafted hardware—something that exists in an original palpable form beyond lighted pixels. I’ve already lived through the fading of several digital formats into obsolescence (anyone reading remember floppy discs, Syquest, Zip or Jazz drives?). Paper, ink, and paint last a long time, and aren’t constrained by an OS or model of computer—all you need are eyes.

See you next time, Mike & Bret

Harley Quinn © DC Comics

TRADITIONAL

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DIGITAL

Digitally drawn pencils for Harley Quinn #3, each step of process shown here was drawn on a separate layer of the same file.

Harley Quinn © DC Comics

Catwoman © DC Comics

MIX OF TRADITIONAL AND DIGITAL

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UNDER REVIEW

H

THE POCKET SKETCHBOOK RETURNETH!

ello again to all and sundry! It is your friendly neigh- phone, it is a lot easier to jot a note down, but I’m just as borhood Crusty Critic, who is back from art war, your quick to forget something because I’d rather draw it than type tired soldier-at-art-arms, here again to write you let- it—input is as important to capturing an idea as is the idea ters from the front lines. And as you know, my letters aren’t itself—so for me, the phone is out. I need something immea profession of my longdiate, and nothing beats lost longing for my dearthat than good old analog: paper and a writing tool. est Millicent. It’s a war Oh, what a time we report on what this Crusty live in! If you recall some Colonel has witnessed during art reconnaissance. of my earlier entries on pocket-sized sketchbooks, My mission is clear, dear such as the JAWNS wallet/ DRAW! readers—to find notebook, this issue I have the art supplies, tools, and two different companies hacks that will bring vicbringing different ideas to tory at your art table. No the table, both solid and supplies, no surrender!

Ask any cartoonist, notable. doodler, animator, or This issue, your Crusty illustrator what they use to Compatriot has received record creative musings, samples from two places: scribbles, or scrawls on, One, a young company and you’ll get a ton of difwho wants to give the gift ferent answers. Some like Jamar’s Crusty Collection of pocket sketchbook’s. of art and storytelling to to keep notes on a project young people, and another in very nice and expensive bound books, for ease in finding that wants to make sure you have everything you need to things when needed. Others reach for whatever is nearest, like create from the hip! the back of the cable bill envelope. Myself, I’ve had an ongoTHE “CRUSTY CRITIQUE” ing love affair with pocket notebooks.

SYSTEM The accessibility of having something so close at hand (or at back pocket) makes it hard to pass up. How many of us These product reviews will be judged under my trusty ‘Beret’ have a lightning bolt of an idea and then forget it because we scale from one beret (not worth the time/money/effort) to five berets (a Crusty Success! Buy it immediately or buy as much didn’t write it down?

Now, living in an age where almost everyone has a cell- as you can carry). Let’s get to it!

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STORY SUPPLY CO. LINE OF POCKET NOTEBOOKS AND SPECIAL ARTISTS EDITIONS http://storysupplyco.com Available online and through retailers Best store/place to buy: company website WHAT IS IT? A young company out of scenic York, Pennsylvania, Story Supply Co. are creating high-quality notebooks and papers that rival anything you’ve seen on the stands. Striking hot with their first “Pocket Staple” line of 3.5" x 5.5" notebooks, Story Supply Co. are doing great things. One great selling pitch: for every set of books they sell, the company will donate a story supply kit to a kid “with a story to tell”.

WHAT DOES IT DO? The SSC notebooks are primarily for note-taking and markmaking. The Pocket Staple series is in the same aesthetic column as Field Notes, designed to hold up to constant use and fit in a pocket.

A very cool project they’ve taken on recently is development of a “working artist” series, a limited-edition special-cover variant with a specially-made cover by noted illustrators. Their first edition is by mega-talented friend of this Crusty Critic and of comics, Mike Hawthorne! If you’re a long time reader of the magazine, I interviewed Mike way back in issue #12. Since that time, Mike has gone on to kick in the doors of the comic book world, most recently becoming the main penciler on Marvel’s Deadpool. What a high note on which to begin the line.

Hawthorne’s edition comes in a two-pack, giving you “War” and “Peace” wraparound covers with some drawing tips on the inside front and back covers. Recently, I discovered that another Crusty pick, JetPens.com, is currently selling the Hawthorne Working Artist sketchbooks at their online store [www.jetpens.com].

WHAT DOES IT COST? The Pocket Staple set of sketchbooks, which come in a run of three will set you back $10, while the Hawthorne edition two-pack is $14. Story Supply Co. has other items on sale at their webstore. I suggest you surf on over and check them out.

DOES IT WORK? Both the Pocket Staple and Working Artist books use 70# Cougar Natural Smooth paper (the same paper featured in the Pocket Staple Notebook) and hold up to pencil, ink, and marker well, with little bleed-through.

WHO IS IT FOR? Any cartoonist worth her salt would do well to pick up a few sets of Story Supply Co. books.

CRUSTY SCORE

A solid product, sold at a great price-point by a company with a good heart gets this critic’s Crusty vote! A must-have!

(top) Story Supply Co.’s very nice pack-out: three sketchbooks, a belly band, and a sticker. (middle) The “War” variant of the first Working Artist Series edition, featuring cover art from Mike Hawthorne. (bottom) The Working Artist and Pocket Staple editions side by side.

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SKETCH WALLET

http://sketchwallet.com Available online Best store/price to buy: company website WHAT IS IT? This brilliant wallet-with-a-sketchbook idea was realized via Kickstarter in 2015, and is slowly picking up steam. As a backer of said Kickstarter, for my pledge I received a very sturdy embossed/engraved display box and a three-card pocket sketch wallet, along with a branded Field Notes-styled sketchbook and a refill pack of three extra books.

WHAT DOES IT DO? Attempting to solve the problem of having too many things on your person, the sketch wallet combines your everyday carry wallet with a tried and true back pocket sketchbook. What sets this apart from other things that have been Crusty Critiqued, this bad boy is built with quality. It’s a nice leather wallet that could easily pass as a “real” wallet—a nice bonus to a beautiful idea.

WHAT DOES IT COST? Something of a nail-biter, locking down a sketch wallet will set you back $68. That’s a tough piece of steak to swallow, but if you’re looking for something that will last, this may be for you. A three-pack of extra sketchbooks is a reasonable $12.

This Crusty Critic’s Kickstarter load-out: premier embossed case, sketch wallet, DOES IT WORK? three notebook inserts, “Inky Dude” mascot sticker, and branded pencil.

As a wallet, it’s passable with two card wells WHO IS IT FOR? and a pocket for money (as well as a small space for a short pencil), and the sketchbook is nice with an option of either For the jotter with a bit of cash to spare, or one who takes sketchlined or blank paper, both of which take pencil, ink, and ing seriously and wants something they can get a commitment from, the Sketch Wallet may be what the doctor ordered. marker well.

CRUSTY SCORE

I love this product, and jumped on the Kickstarter sight unseen, but I knocked down a beret because of the price.

This critic, beyond being crusty, is also frugal when necessary. The $68 price tag of the wallet is choke-worthy, but well worth it if you’re looking for the last pocket sketchbook system you’ll need… until the next thing comes along!

Supple leather, plus nice hand-stitching, makes this wallet look great in the pocket.

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That’s it for my product reviews for this issue. I’d love to hear what you think! As always, with everything I review, YMMV­—Your Mileage May Vary. What didn’t work for me, you may love, so tell me about it!

I’m on Twitter @jamarnicholas.

Until next time, stay Crusty!

URGENT WARNING FOR OUR READERS! DON’T MISS YOUR FAVORITE MAGS! We are experiencing huge demand for our recent magazines. Case in point: Back Issue #88 & #89 and Alter Ego #141 are already completely SOLD OUT, with other issues about to run out.

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BACK ISSUE #96

HERO-A-GO-GO!

CAMPY COMIC BOOKS, CRIMEFIGHTERS, & CULTURE OF THE SWINGING SIXTIES MICHAEL EURY looks at comics’ CAMP AGE,

when spies liked their wars cold and their women warm, and TV’s Batman shook a mean cape!

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BACK ISSUE #97

ALTER EGO #147

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ALTER EGO #149

Giant-size Fawcett Collectors of America special with Golden/Silver Age writer OTTO BINDER’s personal script records and illos from his greatest series! Intros by P.C. HAMERLINCK and BILL SCHELLY, art by BECK, SIMON & KIRBY, SWAN, SCHAFFENBERGER, AVISON, BORING, MOONEY, PLASTINO, and others! Plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and an unpublished C.C. BECK cover!

Relive JOE PETRILAK’s All-Time Classic NY Comic Book Convention—the greatest Golden & Silver Age con ever assembled!

Panels, art and photos featuring INFANTINO, KUBERT, 3 SCHWARTZES, NODELL, HASEN, GIELLA, CUIDERA, BOLTINOFF, BUSCEMA, AYERS, SINNOTT, [MARIE] SEVERIN, GOULART, THOMAS, and a host of others!

Plus FCA, GILBERT, SCHELLY, and RUSS RAINBOLT’s amazing 60-foot comics mural!

Showcases GIL KANE, with an incisive and free-wheeling interview conducted in the 1990s by DANIEL HERMAN for his 2001 book Gil Kane: The Art of the Comics— plus other surprise features centered around the artistic co-creator of the Silver Age Green Lantern and The Atom! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and BILL SCHELLY! Green Lantern cover by KANE and GIELLA!

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BACK ISSUE #98

BACK ISSUE #99

BRICKJOURNAL #45

“Marvel Fanfare Issue!” Behind the scenes of the ‘80s anthology series with AL MILGROM, interviews and art by ARTHUR ADAMS, CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAVE COCKRUM, STEVE ENGLEHART, MICHAEL GOLDEN, ROGER McKENZIE, FRANK MILLER, DOUG MOENCH, ANN NOCENTI, GEORGE PÉREZ, MARSHALL ROGERS, PAUL SMITH, KEN STEACY, CHARLES VESS, and more! Cover by SANDY PLUNKETT and GLENN WHITMORE.

“Bird People!” Hawkman in the Bronze Age, JIM STARLIN’s Superman/Hawkgirl team-up, TIM TRUMAN’s Hawkworld, Hawk and Dove, Penguin history, Blue Falcon & Dynomutt, Condorman, and CHUCK DIXON and SCOTT McDANIEL’s Nightwing. With GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, GREG GULER, RICHARD HOWELL, TONY ISABELLA, KARL KESEL, ROB LIEFELD, DENNY O’NEIL, and others! Cover by GEORGE PÉREZ.

“DC in the ‘80s!” From the experimental to the fan faves: Behind-the-scenes looks at SECRET ORIGINS, ACTION COMICS WEEKLY, DC CHALLENGE, THRILLER, ELECTRIC WARRIOR, and SUN DEVILS. Featuring JIM BAIKIE, MARK EVANIER, DAN JURGENS, DOUG MOENCH, MARTIN PASKO, TREVOR VON EEDEN, and others!

Featuring a mind-numbing Nightwing cover

by ROMEO TANGHAL!

“BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES’ 25th ANNIVERSARY!” Looks back at the influential cartoon series. Plus: episode guide, Harley Quinn history, DC’s Batman Adventures and Animated Universe comic books, and tribute to artist MIKE PAROBECK. Featuring KEVIN ALTIERI, RICK BURCHETT, PAUL DINI, GERARD JONES, MARTIN PASKO, DAN RIBA, TY TEMPLETON, BRUCE TIMM, and others! BRUCE TIMM cover!

FEMALE LEGO BUILDERS! US Architectural builder ANURADHA PEHRSON, British Microscale builder FERNANDA RIMINI, US Bionicle builder BREANN SLEDGE, and Norwegian Town builder BRIGITTE JONSGARD discuss their work and inspirations!

Plus: Minifigure customizing from JARED K. BURKS’, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, & more!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR #14 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #15 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #16

KIRBY COLLECTOR #70

KIRBY COLLECTOR #71

Comprehensive KELLEY JONES interview, from early years as Marvel inker to presentday greatness at DC depicting BATMAN, DEADMAN, and SWAMP THING (chockful of rarely-seen artwork)! Plus WILL MURRAY examines the nefarious legacy of Batman co-creator BOB KANE in an investigation into tragic ghosts and rapacious greed. We also look at RAINA TELGEMEIER and her magnificent army of devotees, and more!

Celebrating 30 years of artist’s artist MARK SCHULTZ, creator of the CADILLACS AND DINOSAURS franchise, with a featurelength, career-spanning interview conducted in Mark’s Pennsylvanian home, examining the early years of struggle, success with Kitchen Sink Press, and hitting it big with a Saturday morning cartoon series. Includes rarely-seen art and fascinating photos from Mark’s amazing and award-winning career.

A look at 75 years of Archie Comics’ characters and titles, from Archie and his pals ‘n gals to the mighty MLJ heroes of yesteryear and today’s “Dark Circle”! Also: Careerspanning interviews with The Fox’s DEAN HASPIEL and Kevin Keller’s cartoonist DAN PARENT, who both jam on our exclusive cover depicting a face-off between humor and heroes. Plus our usual features, including the hilarious FRED HEMBECK!

KIRBY: ALPHA! Looks at the beginnings of Kirby’s greatest concepts, and how he looked back in time and to the future for the origins of ideas like DEVIL DINOSAUR, FOREVER PEOPLE, 2001, ETERNALS, KAMANDI, OMAC, and more! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 WonderCon Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more!

Cover inked by MIKE ROYER!

KIRBY: OMEGA! Looks at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by WALTER SIMONSON!

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

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Spring 2017

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Summer 2017

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Ships Spring 2017

REED CRANDALL Illustrator of the Comics

From the 1940s to the ’70s, REED CRANDALL brought a unique and masterful style to American comic art. Using an illustrator’s approach on everything he touched, Crandall gained a reputation as the “artist’s artist” through his skillful interpretations of Golden Age super-heroes DOLL MAN, THE RAY, and BLACKHAWK (his signature character); horror and sci-fi for the legendary EC COMICS line; Warren Publishing’s CREEPY, EERIE, and BLAZING COMBAT; the THUNDER AGENTS and EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS characters; and even FLASH GORDON for King Features. Comic art historian ROGER HILL has compiled a complete and extensive history of Crandall’s life and career, from his early years and major successes, through his tragic decline and passing in 1982. This FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER includes NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOS, a wealth of RARE AND UNPUBLISHED ARTWORK, and over EIGHTY THOUSAND WORDS of insight into one of the true illustrators of the comics.

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

(256-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $49.95 • (Digital Edition) $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-077-9 • SHIPS JULY 2017!

Celebrate JACK KIRBY’s 100th birthday!

THE PARTY STARTS HERE!

TWOMORROWS and the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine celebrate JACK KIRBY’S 100th BIRTHDAY in style with the release of KIRBY100, a full-color visual holiday for the King of comics! It features an all-star line-up of 100 COMICS PROS who critique key images from Kirby’s 50-year career, admiring his page layouts, dramatics, and storytelling skills, and lovingly reminiscing about their favorite characters and stories. Featured are BRUCE TIMM, ALEX ROSS, WALTER SIMONSON, JOHN BYRNE, JOE SINNOTT, STEVE RUDE, ADAM HUGHES, WENDY PINI, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE GIBBONS, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and dozens more of the top names in comics. Their essays serve to honor Jack’s place in comics history, and prove (as if there’s any doubt) that KIRBY IS KING! This double-length book is edited by JOHN MORROW and JON B. COOKE, with a Kirby cover inked by MIKE ROYER. (The Limited Hardcover Edition includes 16 bonus color pages of Kirby’s 1960s Deities concept drawings)

PRINTED IN CHINA

(224-page Full-Color Trade Paperback) $34.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-078-6 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 (240-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER with 16 bonus pages) $45.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-079-3

SHIPS AUGUST 2017!

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com