Draw! #34 by TwoMorrows Publishing

I AM #34

Winter 2018 $8.95 US

The Professional “How-To” Magazine on Comics, Illustration & Animation

GREG HILDEBRANDT

Guardians of the Galaxy TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

LEGENDARY FANTASY/ SCI-FI ILLUSTRATOR

REGULAR COLUMNISTS

JERRY ORDWAY & JAMAR NICHOLAS

BRAD WALKER

MAKING A SPLASH WITH AQUAMAN

Plus MIKE MANLEY & BRET BLEVINS’ 1

82658 00118

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! #25

DRAW! #26

DIEDGITIIOTANSL BLE

AVAILA

DRAW! #22

DRAW! #23

DRAW! #24

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!

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!

(84-page magazine with COLOR) $7.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95

DRAW! #27

DRAW! #28

DRAW! #29

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.

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.

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

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

DRAW! #30

DRAW! #31

DRAW! #32

DRAW! #33

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 Spider-Man, 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.

Interview and demo by Electra: Assassin and Stray Toasters superstar BILL SIENKIEWICZ, a look at THE WATTS ATELIER OF THE ARTS (one of the best training grounds for students to gain the skills they need to get the jobs they want), JERRY ORDWAY shows the Ord-Way of drawing, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY take you to Comic Art Bootcamp.

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

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail:

store@twomorrows.com

Order at twomorrows.com

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WINTER 2018, VOL. 1, #34 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Greg Hildebrandt DRAW! WINTER 2018, Vol. 1, No. 34 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by Two-Morrows 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 2018 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 ©2018 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.

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

GREG HILDEBRANDT Mike Manley interviews the artist about Tolkein, Star Wars, pin-ups, and more!

36 42 65

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

Jerry shows you how to “massage the collage”!

BRAD WALKER

Mike dives into a deep conversation with the Aquaman artist extraordinaire.

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP This month’s installment: Tips from the Pros!

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

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade. This month: Wacom MobileStudio Pro.

www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! WINTER 2018

-ING AHEAD

am so jazzed about this issue of DRAW! Oh, sure, I’m proud of every issue, but I’ve wanted to do an interview with Greg Hildebrandt ever since I meet him a few years back at Illuxcon. We had such a great conversation about art and craft that first time we met, and I have been a fan of him and his late brother Tim’s work since I was a teenager. They are giants and have been for decades, and that not only speaks to the quality of the work, but the passion Greg still has for each new illustration. I even still have my original Star Wars poster by them which hung in my studio at school for years. I still hope to get Greg to sign it the next time I see him. I’d especially like to thank Jean Scrocco, Greg’s manager and agent, for helping me with setting up the interview and getting me the art. And here’s a tip of the hat to all my friends who gave some pointers for this issue’s Comic Art Bootcamp. I do know a lot of talented, smart artists! I’d also like to think Brad Walker for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk to DRAW! Besides being one of the best artists working today, he’s also a super dog owner. Big thanks as always to my regular contributors, Jamar, Jerry, and Bret, and to Eric and John for getting this issue out to China and back to you. Happy Holidays and draw yourself straight into a New Year!

Drawing by Bret Blevins

Next Issue: Summer 2018! DRAW! #35 (80 FULL-COLOR pages, $8.95), the professional “how-to” magazine on comics and animation brings it to you again. This time we travel from King’s Landing and the Mother of all Dragons to Middle Earth, the distant galaxy of Star Wars, and all worlds in between. DRAW! goes in-depth with multiple award-winning (Hugo, Society of Illustrators, World Fantasy, Spectrum Gold) fantasy and sci-fi illustrator and fine artist, DONATO GIANCOLA. Then we take to the wild blue yonder with ace artist GEORGE PRATT (Enemy Ace: War Idyll, Batman: Harvest Breed)—a comic book artist, illustrator, fine artist, and teacher with a long and illustrious career. Plus we’ll have our regular lineup of columnists on hand: Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS, JERRY ORDWAY (demonstrating the “ORD-way” of drawing), and DRAW! editor MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS with another installment of “Comic Art Bootcamp”. So join us on another epic quest in the never-ending search for artistic knowledge! May contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; suggested for Mature Readers.

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

#35

Spring 2018 $8.95 in the US

sci-fi/fantasy illustRatoR

donATo GIAnColA ace painteR & comic aRtist

GeorGe PrATT

plus! RegulaR columnist

Jerry ordwAy and mike manley and BRet Blevins’

DRAW 35-Cover.indd 1

TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.

11/10/17 1:04 AM

Single issues: $8.95 US • Digital Editions: $4.95

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

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

GREG HILDEBRANDT

Making Art for the People DRAW!: Are you still painting your giant Kingpin? GREG HILDEBRANDT: Kingpin giving Daredevil a wallop, yep. DRAW!: Is that a cover or a commission? GH: It’s a cover for Marvel—one of their variant covers. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff for them over the last year or more. I must have done 20 covers for them now. DRAW!: You did a series of trading cards for them back in the day. GH: Yeah, that was with my brother back in the ’90s. That was 1994, I think. There were 150 cards in the first set, then we did a bunch of partial sets, posters, covers—tons of stuff. Then I dropped off from that and went on to do other stuff. But now I’m back, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s the first time I’m doing it without my brother. DRAW!: Is that different for you? How is your workflow

different? Would he lay out stuff, or would you lay out stuff? GH: Yeah, it’s a different gig. There wasn’t one specific thing that one of us did over the other. It depended on who was doing what at any given time. One of us would start a layout for one image, and the other would start a layout for another image. Tim preferred me to do more of the rough layouts. He enjoyed doing the finished painting more than starting from scratch, even though he did do that. I was always the one who was more enthusiastic about that, as I am now. DRAW!: I noticed your original is gigantic. I’m used to seeing the typical 11" x 17", but yours can’t be scanned. You have to get that shot, right? GH: No, we can scan it. Jean’s [Scrocco, Greg’s art rep] been working with a guy for years. He can scan a 60' painting. DRAW!: Wow! How does he do that? GH: I don’t know. I’ve never been there, but he’s got a great big scanner. He’ll scan the painting in sections and then

DRAW! WINTER 2018

GH: Exactly. So I like to paint big. N. C. Wyeth painted large for all of his illustrations, and I guess I took a cue from that. DRAW!: I was just out at the Brandywine a few weeks back with some students. And there was the World War I show at the Academy up until last month. There was this huge 20' painting by John Singer Sargent there. GH: Whoa! DRAW!: What was really impressive about that painting, besides just the massive scale of it, was that the calligraphy of his brushstroke was very similar to his smaller paintings. He was somehow able to recreate that at a massive scale. GH: He worked at that. He worked for that painfully broad look, and if he wasn’t getting it, he’d scrape it all off and start again. It didn’t just happen. It looks very spontaneous, but it’s extremely studied. DRAW!: It was the same with Nicolai Fechin. His work looks like he did it in five minutes, like it was done in great haste. But that was the illusion—that it was done with this verve and gusto—that they worked hard to create. GH: And that always surprised me. As far as line treatment goes, you look at Al Hirschfeld’s work, that sweeping, beautiful art deco linework, it’s done with a scratchy crow quill pen, slowly building it up. It isn’t just a “whoosh” of a brush, like I thought it was. No, it was scratched out and built up slowly. The final sketch for a variant cover of Marvel’s Old Man Logan #5. Old Man Logan © Marvel Characters, Inc.

assemble it. I’m not sure how he does it, but you can give him anything, and he does a fantastic job. Jean doesn’t trust it to only a digital file, so she has that scan sent off to someone who makes an 8" x 10" sheet of film out of it. When that proverbial asteroid goes by and everything goes down, we’ll still have all my artwork on film. [laughter] DRAW!: You’ll be able to trade your film negatives for hamburgers. [laughter] GH: Exactly. But I like painting big because the movements are bigger, as opposed to small and picky. I work all kinds of ways, but when it comes to these kinds of things, I like a bigger, broader approach, which happens when you paint bigger. It’s just an automatic. Your brushstrokes are larger, and you have a tendency to be more physical with it and painterly, for lack of a better term. I don’t paint super-tight; it’s kind of loose. This is almost four times up from the size it will be reproduced. Once it’s reduced, it will get tightened up. Joe Kubert always said that your artwork should always been blown up huge from your original or reduced huge from your original. It looks really neat when you blow up a sketch and you can see the pencil work increased in size. DRAW!: I think that’s very true. That’s what the pop artists realized: When you take a Jack Kirby panel or a Russ Heath panel, and you blow it up 5000%, it looks really awesome.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

DRAW!: That’s something I’ve come to learn studying painters like Sargent and [Anders] Zorn and Fechin, and their influence on people like Andrew Loomis, who then influenced you and me and everybody else. That illusion is what they were going for, and how they got there wasn’t necessarily as important. Several years ago right after I moved to Philadelphia, there was a gallery that was showing your work, and Moebius’ work, and a couple of others’ work. They had one of the paintings you and your brother did for Lord of the Rings. It was huge. It was one of the ones towards the end of the story where they’re all dressed in white. GH: “At the Grey Havens” probably? The really wide one. DRAW!: You and your brother must have been influenced by seeing the work of N. C. Wyeth. GH: Oh God, yes. We grew up on N. C. Wyeth. Our parents had Treasure Island, Robin Hood, and all those books, so I saw that stuff as a little kid. I was always an N. C. Wyeth fan, going way, way back. I didn’t know anything about how he worked or anything, because nobody talked about that stuff back then, but he was always a huge influence. But many people were. My first main influences were the comic strips, because that’s the first art I can remember seeing. The newspaper was there every day, and when it got to the Sundays, oh geez. Hal Foster and Prince Valiant—I’d be copying that stuff, and Terry and the Pirates. Alex Raymond wasn’t doing Flash Gordon at that time, because he was in the Marines when I started reading the paper.

The painting in progress. Greg has a reference photo taped to his board as he paints the skull (left), and a shot with his palette for the painting prominently featured in the foreground (right). Old Man Logan © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: It was Austin Briggs. GH: Right! I read later that he hated doing it. DRAW!: Yes. In the old days, the fine artist was at the top. The fine artist looked down on the illustrator, the illustrator looked down on the cartoonist, and the guys who drew the strips looked down on the guys who drew the comic books. The guys in the comic books wanted to be in the strips, because then at least you were “legit”. GH: Yep. What a terrible conversation that was. I was never aware of that as a young kid. It wasn’t until much later that most of the comic book artists would admit they drew comic books. “I’m an illustrator.” Whew! Thank God I was never aware of that stuff and never got sucked into that conversation of elitism. It’s ridiculous to me, the whole conversation. DRAW!: They had a painting at the Brandywine the last time I went there by N. C. Wyeth, which I had not seen. It was one of those weird, ugly paintings he did at the end of his career when he was having that crisis of confidence. I love his stuff so much, and it was so horrible compared to what he could do.

GH: There was a biography on him about 15 years ago that really gets into that whole psyching out of him and [Howard] Pyle—the grandfather of illustration and the father of American illustration. These are the guys that basically create the conversation of, how they put it, picture-making—that’s illustration—and gallery work. The distinction of fine art and commercial art, in a sense, starts with these two masters. “Oh, that’s merely an illustration.” And Wyeth tore himself up over that. When you read his letters, he’s in agony all the time over this. He would try to do those still lifes, which were beautifully done, but when you see his Boy’s King Arthur, that’s the stuff that makes me shout. DRAW!: His best Treasure Island paintings—I always remember the one where they’re playing dice or cards—. GH: With the lighting. DRAW!: With the little parrot. The last time I saw the painting, I actually counted the strokes. He did that parrot inside of the cage in 27 paint strokes. GH: What a genius. Andrew [Wyeth] had his studio below

DRAW! WINTER 2018

N. C.’s, and he said there was a path worn where he would hear him tromping back and forth, bum, bum, bum, walking up to the painting, swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, then tromping back. Meanwhile, Andrew was downstairs picking away. It’s a great contrast.

he wouldn’t be tempted to noodle with it. I took that trick. I'll work on a painting, and I’ll swap, swap, swap on it. Then I’ll say, “That looks good,” and I'll turn the light off and leave. Because the point when you should leave the picture is when you feel good about it, not when you feel bad about it. [laughs]

DRAW!: It’s interesting in that Andrew’s work is powerful in a way his father’s isn’t. His father’s strength comes through his arm. He’s like a pitcher who can throw a 1,000 m.p.h. fastball, and Andrew throws it at 50 m.p.h., but he throws it in a very different way. GH: He was incredible. He can blow you away. When he’d do something like “Christina’s World” and the field of grass, he’d drop it in, rub it in, and then he’d splatter it, and splatter it, and splatter it. Then he’d turn the light out and leave the room so

DRAW!: But that’s the illusion we’re fed to us as youngsters, that artists are supposed to suffer. It’s Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh [in Lust for Life]. GH: Oh, that’s one of my favorite movies! [laughter] It really is! I have very little formal art education. I had six months of art school in Detroit—Meinzinger Art School. The reason Tim and I went there was because we kept writing letters to Disney, because we wanted to be animators. That was my first love: animation. We kept writing letters, and their PR department wrote us back and said, “If you want to apply as an animator, you need to go to a school that focuses on life drawing, perspective, and anatomy.” This was 1957. We graduated high school, and we enlisted in the Army to get it out of the way so we wouldn’t get drafted. We did a six-month active duty reserve assignment, and when we got out of that we started to look for an art school in Detroit, of which there were quite a few. DRAW!: Did you apply at the Art Institute? GH: No, we looked at a couple of them. One of them was misnamed Arts and Crafts, and it had nothing to do with William Morris or the Arts and Crafts movement. We went down there, opened the door, and the pictures on the wall of the entrance to the school were all abstract expressionists. It was just smears, so we said, “That’s not for us.” The next one we went to was Meinzinger, which was started in 1929 by Frederick Meinzinger. Bill Meinzinger was running it; his father had died. But it was one these old-time schools. The professors all wore bow ties and pinstripe suits. It was great. It was on Woodward Ave. in the art center where the art museum and library are downtown. It was an old walkup over a store front in an old building that had been there since the 1910s. We had a six-month basic art course, which was Anatomy, Perspective, Color Design, and Life Drawing.

The final sketch for a variant cover of Old Man Logan #5. Old Man Logan © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

DRAW!: How did they break it up? Did you have different classes each day? GH: You couldn’t screw around. The

teachers were fantastic. We had Perspective for one day, Anatomy for an entire day— they had skeletons and you learned all that stuff. Then they had Color Design two separate days, and then a workday. Then the next week you had five days of Life Drawing. That was the focus, and what they considered to be the most important. The class was filled with painters and beginners. As beginners, we drew charcoal drawings from model poses—everything from 60-second poses to four-hour poses. And we did that for an entire week. That was incredible, and we did that for six months. We were 18 when we graduated the course, and they wanted us to go on and select specialties. You could select Illustration, Engineer, Fine Art Painting, all kinds of stuff. We were going to take the Illustration course, which was three years, but my dad worked for GM. He had started in the stock room, and had worked his way up to head of office supply for Chevy, and he had a lot of contacts in the city. He asked Tim and me if we wanted to go check out the Jam Handy Organization. I’d driven by the building with my parents many times, looking at this sign with big lettering, “The Jam Handy Organization’s Path Along to Know-How. Help Make Meetings More Effective.” I didn’t know what it was. At first I thought it was a jam factory. [laughter] I was a little kid. Jamison Handy was the man who founded it in the ’20s. Handy had started in New York City in the 1910s at the Bray Productions studio, which was one of the premiere “Angel of the Gods”, a 1980s painting done for a cover of Heavy Metal magazine. animation studios in New York and defined Angel of the Gods © Greg Hildebrandt much of the animation industry. He started there along with the Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave; they people, and they hired us on the spot for a dollar an hour. That were friends. The Fleischers went on to theatrical cartoons was minimum wage in ’58—40 bucks a week. But working with with Betty Boop, Popeye, and the fantastic Superman shorts. all the people there—they had an animator who had worked on Handy went to Detroit and started this industrial film house. Pinocchio, Fantasia, Snow White, Bambi, and Dumbo. He’d He did training films for the Navy, the Air Force, Chevy, Ford. worked in the special effects department under Josh Meador It was an incredible operation, the biggest in the country. I at Disney, and he was now at Jam Handy working as one of talk to people about it, and some people in Detroit have never the directing animators. They also had two animators from heard of it, which kind of blows my mind. Somebody should Max Fleischer’s studio who were still there, who had worked do something on this, because it was a major institution in on Betty Boop, Popeye, and those Superman cartoons. It was America. When Fleischer’s studio folded for the umpteenth pretty mind blowing. I was 18, and all of a sudden I’d fallen time after the Mr. Bug Goes to Town fiasco, Handy invited him into this freaking great place to work. Animators are a special to come to Detroit, which he did along with some of his ani- breed. They do this ball-busting work, and then when they flip mators and Fred Goldman, who was a friend of the Fleischers out, they carry on these charades and skits and do all this crazy stuff. It was hysterical. Plus, Mr. Goldman was like the old man and who had a processing lab on Long Island. So my dad sets up this meeting for Tim and me—this is who takes you under his wing, a grandfatherly figure. He was 1958—with one of the VPs, and he likes the portfolio we had teaching us all kinds of things—stop-motion animation. We brought. We go to the animation department and meet all these worked on this stop-motion puppet TV commercial.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

did a great Groucho Marx imitation. He’d be in the middle of a Groucho Marx routine, and one of these guys from across the street would come over. He’d pitch a fit to Bob, and Bob would tell him, “Listen, these guys…”, you know what I mean? I loved working there. I did that for about six years.

The sketch for a possible poster collaboration by Greg and Tim. Moon Flight © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

DRAW!: So a lot of this was driven by the auto industry and ads for things like that? GH: Yep, and U.S. Steel, Campbell Soup…. The first thing we worked on was a training film for the Air Force. A pilot had come up with new combat maneuvers in Korea in ’51, ’52, and in ’58 the Air Force decided to put them into practice, so they commissioned Jam Handy to produce a film showing these maneuvers. The treatment of the film was these little pie cuts with a fan on the back that were fully animated—pencil on paper, and then inked by an inker. They would fly around to show the formations, and be followed by a ribbon that would stay on the screen to show how the loops and the movements went. Our job was to take these cels—there were two colors of blue for friendlies, and two colors of red for enemies—and paint these tiny pie cuts, between ¼" and 3" wide. We did that for seven months, put cotton gloves on and opaqued cels, and we were ready to blow our brains out after two months. [laughter] DRAW!: That’s the bottom rung. GH: That’s it. [laughs] Sweeping floors would have been more interesting. But Bob Kennedy was the immediate boss of the animation department, and he understood artists. He knew how grueling this was. You’d flip out at work and put the stuff aside and do something crazy, and he’d come back and see us and be completely cool with it. Except for when the VPs would come tromping in from the back steps to spy on the animation department. Frank, one of the assistants,

DRAW! WINTER 2018

DRAW!: So you were 24 or so when you left? GH: Yeah. I went to New York for, of all people, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. He was a Catholic bishop who used to be on television in the ’50s. He was huge in the ’50s—cover of Time magazine and everything. There were three stations. Milton Berle was on one network, Frank Sinatra on another, and Bishop Sheen on the other. Bishop Sheen had this incredible charisma on-screen. For lack of a better comparison, he was a lot like the present pope. He was very concerned about social issues, let’s put it that way. He certainly was ecclesiastic and lived by the laws of the church, he nonetheless was quite progressive when it came to social reform. He hired Tim and me to come to New York and make films on world hunger, to make Americans aware of the third world. DRAW!: What did that entail? Did he write a script, and then you’d have to film it? GH: He saw some work we had done, and it was totally synchronistic how the series of events happened. I had the opportunity at that time to go work for Disney on miniature sets for the Flushing Meadows World Fair, and it came down to going to work for Disney or going to make films for Bishop Sheen. I flipped the coin and chose to work for Sheen with my twin brother. Bishop Sheen would come up with the concepts. There was one film called The 30th Parallel. If you drew a line around the globe at the 30th parallel, all the wealthy nations are above that line, and all the poor nations are below it. So it became a contrast movie between the Haves and the Have-Nots. We took a mondo type approach, and he’d be narrating. He was an unusual man, because he’d be assaulting the rich church, and it was mind-boggling to me, because I grew up Catholic—a pre-Vatican Council, very conservative world. My mind was blown by this guy. He was throwing out facts on the World Health Organization and UNICEF and CARE and the UN. It was overwhelming. He never went to a studio. He had a tape recorder, very professional, and we’d go to his residence and set it all up for

him, and he would record for several nights. Then we’d get the tapes, and one of the girls in the office would transcribe them. We would then take the transcriptions and boil them down to a doable script contained with a 20-, 25-minute film. I would juggle them around, re-edit them, change sequences, make it more filmic. Then he would sit with that script, approve it, and we’d record him reading that edited script. Then we would shoot footage on ¼" tape, generally on an Aeroflex or an Éclair camera, and send that off to a place called Magnosound, where they would transpose it onto 16mm film. We would travel around gathering footage of the “Haves” here in America. Then we’d go to CARE and get footage there of, say, a family in India. We’d go to Magnum or BlackStar [suppliers of stock photography] and get shots of starving people in Biafra, and cut it all together into a film. DRAW!: Did he ever give you specific instructions, like, “Go film this part of the city,” or anything like that? GH: Never. I was hyper-enthusiastic and working like crazy on these things with no concerns over hours or time of day, and he saw that and saw we had a sense of grasping it. He completely trusted us, and let us do our thing. DRAW!: How long did you work A 27" x 36" concept painting for a possible poster collaboration by Greg and Tim. The image with him? was renamed “Pixie Flight”, and changed from a horizontal to a vertical. GH: He was there about four years Pixie Flight © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt before they kicked him out. What I said about him taking on the clerical establishment? Cardinal inner city parish—without going through the red tape—to Spellman was the head of the archdiocese of New York at the government to provide housing for the poor. That was the that time, and he did not like the bishop. The bishop never last straw, and they kicked him out of there. He kind of ended aired dirty laundry; it was not his way. I didn’t find all this up as a man without a country. out until later. To make a long story short, they booted him He was such a great man, and I still love him, even though out of that office and put him out to pasture in Rochester, I have nothing more to do with the religion. He was an amazNew York, to get him off the scene. He gets to Rochester— ing human being, and I was really fortunate to have worked this is 1968—and refuses to live in the bishop’s residence with him. because it’s too ostentatious. He takes a tiny apartment, which freaks everybody out, pisses everybody off. Then he DRAW!: What did you do when they kicked him out? Did gets involved with a black activist who was seeking to get you go looking for other work? blacks into white-collar positions at Kodak. He was doing GH: They brought in a new regime quite the opposite of him. ecumenical services, having rabbis come to the church and They basically said, “We’re not Bishop Sheen. He’s not us. having priests go to the synagogue. He then hands over an Are you going to be okay with that?”

DRAW! WINTER 2018

Before they fired Bishop Sheen, he said to Tim and me, “Boys, I want a film aimed at American teenagers, making them aware of these horrible situations.” That’s all he said to us, so Tim and I started gathering footage of all-American teenagers. This was 1967, and you know what was happening in 1967. [laughter] We had already been to Columbia to shoot footage. He had sent us there two years earlier to film poverty. We spent about five months there. That was when I lost all my naiveté. When this new regime took over, Tim and I were deep into this film. We were about ¾ through editing it. There was no narration; the bishop did not narrate this one. We were pretty much hip to what was happening, so we started this non-linear movie, with no voice over—only real sound and music. It was very much a fast-cut, pop in edits, contrasting black-&-white and color. We had a rough cut and about four soundtracks, and this new regime kept bugging us, “C’mon, let’s see the picture.” We kept holding them off, but finally we show it to them on the Moviola. We’re trying to control the

The finished sketch for “Eowyn and the Nazgul”. Eowyn and the Nazgul © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

DRAW! WINTER 2018

foley track and the music and everything, and these guys are flipping out because they’re arch-conservative. Just filmically they couldn’t buy it, because we were using extreme wideangle lenses, zooming around, moving camera shots, protest marches. They went nuts. “We can’t use this! This is not representational of our church!” They were ready to scrap the whole thing, and the girls in their publicity department, who were friendly to us because they had worked for the bishop, went to bat for the film. My approach was, “I’m not changing one frame of this film!” [laughter] But they basically talked these people into having a screening for teenagers. “Go to a Catholic school, and have the kids come to a screening, and see what they say about the movie.” They agreed to that. So we sat in the projection booth trying to control the sound levels, and the kids went nuts over it. They loved it, because it was very much hip to the moment—fast cuts, psychedelics, and rock music. After they got the reactions of the kids, they grudgingly said, “Okay, go ahead.” So we finished up the production work, the lab work, and they released it around the country. Ultimately I found out that a lot of non-Catholic schools were showing it around Thanksgiving Day, making their kids aware of the Have-Nots of the world. We Are One was the name of the film, and I’m still proud of it. DRAW!: Do you still have a copy of it? GH: I have it on film. I've been meaning to have it transferred to DVD, but I haven’t still haven’t done it yet. I have three films I worked on for the bishop I want to get transferred at some point. In any event, they finally approve it. Then they say, “We’re going to West Africa,” Ghana particularly, “to film missionary activity.” I’m not trying to be political, be these were more conservative people. They said, “First we’re going to Rome and shoot interviews with all the bigwigs in the Church.” They wanted another film for American teenagers. They figured that going to Rome and interviewing old, doddering cardinals was going to inspire American teenagers in 1968. [laughter] That’s how out of it and naïve this new guy was. So we get to the Vatican and film all these interviews. That was an eye-opener. We leave there for Ghana, and start a tour of Ghana, filming missionary activity. At the same time, Tim and I were gathering non-official footage of students at the university, anthropologists, African historians, priests who were quite disillusioned to put it mildly. We gathered all this information and came back and cut this film together that basically probed the whole

question of what is missionary activity? What does that mean? What happened to Africa when we came there and carved it up? It was a very probing documentary, and he fired us immediately after seeing a rough cut of it. Out the door, boom! DRAW!: All the feedback you’d received, it didn’t matter. GH: It didn’t mean anything, because this was an authoritarian regime. “You’ve got two weeks to clean everything out. Now get out.” Fortunately, we had our ears to the railroad track, and we knew maybe this was going to happen. I had been doing art at home for quite a while—painting, drawing, with the possible objective of illustrating some children’s books. Before they fired us, we’d begun taking our portfolio around the city, starting with Carlo De Lucia at Golden Books—Western Publishing. In those days you could call an art director. “Hi, I’m an artist and I have a portfolio.” “Sure, come on over.” Carlo loved our work. He didn’t have anything for us, but he sent us over to Frank Lamacchia at Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Holt did textbooks, and they were redoing all their textbooks. They provided us and about 300 other illustrators

work for about three and a half years. DRAW!: This was in New York. So once you moved from Detroit to New York, you never went back. GH: Well, I lived in New Jersey, not in the city, but no, I never went back to Detroit other than to visit. But we illustrated for about seven years, doing everything from Reader’s Digest spot illustrations to editorial art to magazine covers to advertising art to children’s illustration—you name it. DRAW!: Most of your work I’ve seen is acrylic, but did you work in watercolor or gouache? GH: Yeah, back then we worked in pencil, ink, watercolor— never oil. You’re knocking out illustrations that had to be taken in the next day, and oil would not dry fast enough. I tried oil once later on after we started Lord of the Rings, but I couldn’t deal with it. I was used to working in a fast-drying medium, you know? I was working casein paint along with watercolor, and a painter friend of mine said, “Try acrylic.” This was 1968, ’69.

“Eowyn and the Nazgul”, a painting done by Greg and Tim for the 1976 J. R. R. Tolkein Calendar. Eowyn and the Nazgul © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

DRAW! WINTER 2018

DRAW!: Were the acrylics different then? GH: No, it was the same stuff. It took a little getting used to because it’s a little more slippery than casein. I got into it, and that’s all I’ve worked with since then. DRAW!: I hear the formulation of the paint is better now than it used to be. GH: I’ve been using Liquitex all these years, so I don’t know. People keep telling me about different kinds of acrylic, but I’ve never tried anything else. You stick with the thing that works for you, and I use Liquitex—that or Grumbacher, depending on the colors that are available. DRAW!: Back when you were taking classes in Detroit, did you work with acrylic at all? GH: No, I never even heard of it until around ’67 or so. DRAW!: You guys use it so well, and it’s not an easy medium to use, especially the way that you use it. GH: I think it’s just what you get used to using. You stay with it, and you keep figuring it out and learning how to use it. DRAW!: When you’re on a large area, like you’re working on today, you must mix up a huge mass of the basic colors. GH: I do, and I keep them in airtight containers. I work on a strip of heavy duty aluminum foil. With, say, Daredevil’s red costume, there are six values from highlight to shadow. I mix those up in clean, neat piles of paint. In this case the primary true color is cadmium red medium, so I scoop out a pile of cadmium red medium. I don’t want it exactly straight out of the tube; I added a tiny bit of white to mute the tone. That’s my main primary color, right in the center of the strip of aluminum foil. For the next color over moving towards the shadow area, I use cadmium red deep right out of the tube. The next pile over getting darker is cadmium red deep with a little dioxazine purple added to it. Dioxazine purple is my color of choice to move towards dark with. DRAW!: Because it still has that vibrancy? GH: It adds color to it as opposed to black. Do you remember in Lust for Life when Van Gogh is sitting with Pizarro on the beach, and Pizarro says, “Look up at the leaves. There’s color everywhere. Throw away your black!” Tim and I went home after the movie and threw away our black. Then we looked at each other and said, “How are we going to get to a dark?” [laughs] Many years went by, and we’re using this and that, mainly burnt umber. That’s why with The Lord of the Rings they all look so brown. That was not a design choice. That was because I didn’t know what to use to get to a black. [laughter] DRAW!: In school I had a teacher who said, “Never use black.” Some teachers say, “Never use white.” Other teachers say, “Where is the black?” It’s all over the place. It sounds like what you’re doing is pre-mixing your string. In oil it would be wet, so you could mix up your string as you go, but with acrylic it would dry out.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

Painting for the cover of the Urshurak novel. Urshurak © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

GH: That’s the thing with acrylics. For ourselves, sometimes Tim would take the color home with him and work with it. Sometimes I would take it home and work with it. We had to develop those means. Like I said, these concise pile of paint, pre-mixed values. As for the light values for the Daredevil piece, the next color up is cadmium red light. So you’re moving towards yellow. The way that everything works from me when I paint, and it’s the most valuable thing I learned from Bill Meinzinger, if there’s a warm light, use a cool shadow, and if there’s a cool light, use a warm shadow. My light in this scene, the top light hitting Kingpin and Daredevil and the whole foreground, is basically a whitish yellow light. I have to understand and know the color of the light before I mix anything up, because the color of the light affects all the colors. DRAW!: Exactly. It’s the atmosphere of your painting. Do you do that off a color study, or do you kind of wing it? GH: Oh, I wing it. I have done color studies just because I wanted to try them, but by this point I know exactly the color of light that I want. For the color on the Kingpin, I squeeze out a pile of titanium white, squeeze in a touch of cadmium yellow medium, and mix that in. That’s my highlight color, so I know

that’s the color of the light. Everything moves down to that, all heading to dioxazine purple. While doing our novel, Urshurak, Tim and I went to the art store. We were trying to figure out what dark color we were going to head for. I saw this tube on the rack. “Dioxazine purple? What is this? I’ve never heard of it.” Again, we had a very limited formal education, so we would go to the art store, pick a new color off the rack, and say, “What does this do?” and figure it out. We took the dioxazine purple home and squeezed it out, and it was deep and dark. DRAW!: It’s like Phthalo blue, one little drop of that purple is like dynamite. I still have tube that I bought my first year at school. It’s not even a quarter done yet. GH: Well that’s a main color for me. I couldn’t paint a picture without it these days. That’s the color I use for moving to a shadow. It never reproduces that way. It looks black once it’s reproduced if you’re using it straight out of the tube. The concept of “warm light, cool shadow” started for me at Meinzinger in 1958. That’s the stone hitting the surface—you hear it, you grasp it. But for the stone to travel all the way down and go “clunk”—in other words, to translate that concept through this pigment—took some time. But once it went clunk, the whole universe came into focus as far as the handling of color. DRAW!: When you first saw originals by Wyeth, did that affect your process of what you were thinking? To me it seems like he’s the artist who had the most affect on your color sense. GH: Tim and I had the old books, the first printings, and we were emulating these old Scribner reproductions. When I saw them in person, the color was five times more intense. We were influenced by these reproductions where the color was toned way down. After seeing them in person, I tried one project where I did not add anything to the color as it came out of the tube. It worked with firelight, but with other stuff it didn’t come out so hot. I experimented a lot with chroma intensity, and when we got to the Marvel stuff in the ’90s, that was all souped up very intensely. It depended on the subject. Finally the conversation about “don’t use black” came to an end. Jean had a publishing company for years, and we decided to illustrate public

domain books that we all loved, and among them was Dracula. I consciously used black for that book. Not as a crutch to get darks, but as part of a breakdown of color. It basically became my warm for the blue light. DRAW!: You basically used your black as a blue. For a while I was using a limited palette. I was painting with enamel paints on cardboard, and I got that from Vincent Desiderio. He was teaching at the school, and one of the ways he was getting this extra luminosity in the whites on his paintings, was that he was using a white enamel, like the stuff you paint your fence with. I started experimenting with that, then the next teacher comes in and says, “Why are you doing that? I would never do that. It doesn’t make any sense to me.” Sometimes one man’s solution is another man’s poison. GH: Exactly. It’s all very individualistic.

“Rogmun Captures Ailwon”, an illustration for the Urshurak novel. Urshurak © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

DRAW! WINTER 2018

top of that. If you see any old photography, the color is shoddy. It wasn’t until the ’60s that color film started to improve. And it also depended on who you took the film to for developing, and how they mixed their solution, because that would also pull color one way or another. Do you do all your photography yourself? GH: Oh, yeah. I’ve always done it myself. DRAW!: Do you have a stable of people you rely on as models? Or if you’re walking down the street and see someone who looks like the Kingpin, do you say, “Hey, wanna make 50 bucks?” [laughter] GH: I have done that. We have people, but anybody walking by that fits the part, I’ll grab and say, “Do you want to pose for me?” Danny, our contractor—he does all kinds of work for us around the house—posed for Daredevil. He posed for Captain America. He’s in good shape and a young guy. He’s not hyper-pumped up. I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want that extreme type of body. He’s just in good shape, so I grab him. I was standing in line at the supermarket a coupe of weeks ago, and there was a 6' 4" guy who was exactly Kingpin. He had a shaved head, he was big but not fat. He was there was his wife, and I wanted to ask him to pose for me. He was in another line, and before I could get checked out and get outside, he was gone. Otherwise I would have asked him. So I said, “Ah, Greg at the lightboard making his finished sketch for a Marvel trading card set for Fleer. screw this. I need to get this done.” I All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc. put a suit on and Jean shot a picture of DRAW!: Rockwell loved purple. He used to do all of his me. Needless to say, I had to shave my head, make it look like a different face, and add a few pounds, but I can do that. I can take underpaintings with a reddish purple color. GH: Someone told me, or I read it, that if he had a piece of anybody and stretch them out or broaden them out. I don’t copy photographs; they’re just a point of reference. color reference, he had to paint it that color. In other words, he could not take a picture of someone with a green sweater on I'm altering stuff. I’m moving a leg around or twisting stuff. It’s and then translate that into red. He had to have the actual color mainly about the folds on the arm sleeve and things like that. in front of him. DRAW!: Did you ever use Steve Holland, the model for Doc DRAW!: I don’t know if that’s true. I got that book, Norman Savage who all the old guys used? Rockwell: Behind the Camera, which is really good. He painted GH: No. Didn’t Al Williamson say that every hero had to look a lot from life in the beginning, then he started using photo- like either Buster Crabbe or Stewart Granger? graphs. But he never painted directly from the photograph, and he would never take his color from the photograph. He would DRAW!: Or Al Williamson when he couldn’t get Stewart take a photograph of his grayscale and then put his color on Granger. [laughter]

DRAW! WINTER 2018

GH: A friend of mine was friends with Al. I met Al several times at conventions, and we would talk, and I’d go nuts over his EC comics and stuff. I’m a big fanboy. But that friend told me Al freaked out and got pissed off when Tim and me started Terry and the Pirates. But every guy in comics was. They wouldn’t talk to us. “How dare you take on that subject!” I, of course, grew up with it. Every kid on the block who drew was copying Milt Caniff. For me, he was one of the gods. When Mike Uslan, executive producer of the Batman movies, optioned Terry. He talked with them about reissuing the strip, and they said they’d love to. Here Tim and I are working on the Marvel trading cards in the ’90s. We had 150 paintings to do, and we were well into it. Jean opens the door to the studio—our studio was connected to Unicorn Publishing and SpiderWebArt—and says, “Guess what you’re doing next?” We said, “What?” She said, “Terry and the Pirates—a daily and Sunday comic strip,” and then she closed the door. [laughter] I went nuts.

GH: Well, first I panicked. [laughter] I did. I had a panic attack. “Oh my God! This is impossible! Ink! We’ve got to figure this out!” I asked when it was set, and New Media, who owned it, said they wanted it updated. It wasn’t going to be set in the ’30s or ’40s like the original. New Media wanted it to be set in the present or near future, Pat Ryan had to be more modern, Terry had to look more modern, so I was designing the characters. I gave Terry a butch haircut and an earring. I gave Pat Ran a five o’clock shadow—an Indiana Jones thing. Everybody was loving it, and New Media gave all the okays.

DRAW!: That’s a lot of work. GH: It wasn’t the work. You can’t follow in one of the gods’ footsteps. That was my true, honest feeling. “I don’t do ink. I’m a painter. I’ve done ink, but not…” I’m never afraid of work. I’d work 40 hours a day if I could, you know? Because I love it; I love doing it. But it was all those other reasons. I went in, and she said, “It’s a done deal. I’ve said yes already.” DRAW!: How did you split up the work?

Greg and Tim’s painting for the cover of the 1997 novel X-Men: Smoke and Mirrors. The image was altered for the printed cover. All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

The word started to get out that we’re doing this thing. The big Milt Caniff fan club, a whole bunch of guys my age and older, were saying, “This is blasphemy!” They really got intense, and when they saw the sketches they freaked out. They saw Terry’s pomp haircut and earring and went nuts. And I felt the same way, because that was my childhood. I adulated the strip. Caniff was one of the geniuses. But we go ahead with this thing. I posed it all. I didn’t fake any figures. I shot models for everything, and we were getting all these costumes. It was grueling. Tim and I had wondered for years about what it was like to do a realistic strip. We found out. We were working 40 hours a day. DRAW!: On top of that, a lot of the archetype characters in that strip don’t fly today. You can’t do the Dragon Lady, you can’t do the Big Stoop. GH: Not that way. Big Stoop was in there, but he wasn’t that type of character. The Asian-American community got freaked out too, because they were concerned we were going to carry on those pejorative aspects, which was the last thing Michael or Tim or I wanted to do. Michael met with them to assure them, and showed them all the sketches, and they were happy with it. They were fine.

DRAW!: But then the purists get mad because Terry’s not running around in jodhpurs. GH: Exactly. We were stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Dragon Lady was updated to be Vietnamese. She was in Saigon during the air lifts at the end of the Vietnam War to bring her into modern times. My friend told me that Al Williamson thought my design for Pat Ryan looked like a bum. DRAW!: I knew Al very well, and I can see how he would think that. An interesting side to that, he was a big fan of Jack Kirby. He even inked Kirby in the ’50s. His Jack Kirby is not my Jack Kirby. My Jack Kirby is the ’60s stuff, but Al was not excited about that stuff. He liked the ’40s Jack Kirby. That was his Jack Kirby. GH: Sure, with Joe Simon doing Boys’ Ranch and all that stuff. DRAW!: There’s that 12-year-old version of you, and that world is always pure. GH: That’s the one. For me, the greatest animated film of all time is Pinocchio, period, end of conversation. Because that’s the first film I ever saw, and is what turned me on to animation. It’s your kid that you keep alive, and that’s the stuff that turns you on. DRAW!: You’ve been keeping your kid alive a long time. This interview is going to be read by people who are 20, people who are your age, and people in between, like me. You’ve had a very long, successful career. Did you ever reach a point where you were feeling burnout? GH: Nope, because I’m all over the place. I don’t stick to one thing. I started out in animation, I went to live-action, then to general illustration, then we did Lord of the Rings, and we got a global fanbase over that. Then we did that Star Wars poster, and that zooped us up the fan ladder. I do pin-ups; I worked with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I love it all. My mother, I think, is the one responsible. She used to hammer into our heads, first of all, don’t follow the crowd. Don’t do what everyone else is doing. Also, your imagination is the most valuable thing you have. It’s my imagination I rely on, and if my imagination is turned on, I don’t care what it is I’m working on. I don’t want to specialize. I don’t believe in specialization. I’m not demeaning it, or saying that those who specialize are wrong. It’s not a matter of right or wrong. It’s my choice. There’s too much stuff going on that interests me.

(above) Greg’s finished sketch for “The Emerald City on the Horizon”. (next page) “The Emerald City on the Horizon”, a 1985 painting for an illustrated edition of The Wizard of Oz. “The Emerald City on the Horizon” © Greg Hildebrandt

DRAW! WINTER 2018

DRAW!: You could have just stayed with Lord of the Rings, but you didn’t. GH: I could have. “Three calendars is enough. I’m done with that. I want to do something else.” Then we did our own epic fantasy novel at Bantam, and we tried to get that off the ground through the William Morris Agency as a movie. That almost killed me. I quite literally nearly went nuts. I didn’t know how to deal with that. I was very much a fish out of water in the world of film in that day. Even though we had great people involved with it—John Dykstra, who did the first Star Wars

DRAW! WINTER 2018

He paused the presentation after about half an hour. He said, “Fantastic. It’s beautiful.” Everyone’s talking, and he keeps watching me. Finally, he makes his way over and puts his arm around me, almost in a grandfatherly way, and he says to me, “Are you sure you want to get involved in this?” He really sounded concerned. I said, “Well, Mr. Levine, I’ve come this far.” He goes, “Yeah, I can see.” He really loved the art. He collected Andrew Wyeth painting, you know. He had a private gallery of Andrew Wyeth where he would seclude himself to get away from it all. He really appreciated art. He said, “Look, what I’ve seen on the screen is going to cost $145 million to produce.” This was 1978. That sank it with William Morris, and they pulled out. You know that scene in A Star Is Born, when he realizes his career is finished and he walks into the ocean and drowns himself? [laughter] I didn’t know what to do. Then Jean fell from the sky like a heavenly gift, and she basically resurrected me and my career. She started a publishing company with her brother, and we started illustrating classic novels, and I got back on my feet and went in a whole new direction. But the experience was fantastic. There was a lot of suffering, but in retrospect you see the value it has in your life. Now I’m working with an animator, Scott Sava, who’s got a film called Animal Crackers. He’s got several screenings for it, and it’s coming out in September. I did one painting for the movie, but he’s a fantastic guy, and we’re talking about working on an animated film together—which, for me, is one of my unfulfilled dreams. I’m 78, and I’m still climbing up the mountain. An 1984 illustration for “Aladdin” from Greg Hildebrandt’s Favorite Fairy Tales. Paul O’Neill of the Trans-Siberian “Aladdin” © Greg Hildebrandt Orchestra just died, which is one of the movie [visual effects]. He was working on Battlestar Galac- most horrendous things to happen I’ve experienced in my tica at the time we met him. We went through Apogee, his lifetime. But his daughter is going to continue it, and we’re studio in Van Nuys, which was the original ILM location. He going to keep working with them. That was an amazing expebecame very committed to our project. He wanted to do some- rience I’d never had before, working with a composer. It was a fantasy fulfilled, because after seeing Fantasia, I thought, “I thing that wasn’t sci-fi. Anyway, we worked on that for a year or so, and we got a want to work with a composer.” Are you familiar with [Sergei] lot of great reaction to our pitch. We had a little mini-film of Eisenstein’s movies? Battleship Potemkin? Alexander Nevsky the presentation. Everybody kept saying it was fantastic, down was his first sound movie, and he was working with [composer to [producer] Joseph E. Levine. He came down to a presenta- Sergei] Prokofiev [most famous for his orchestral suite, “Peter tion at William Morris one day. There were about 80 people and the Wolf”]. Eisenstein was an artist and designed all this in this conference room, and he said, “Let’s see what you’ve stuff visually, and then he’d work with Prokofiev. There’s a got.” By this point my eyes were spinning. This was not my fantastic book on the making of Ivan the Terrible, and how milieu. I was not comfortable. I was having a panic attack and they designed that film together, picture and sound. I read that was just really out of it, and Mr. Levine kept looking at me. back in 1960 or so. I said, “This is incredible. I want to do this

DRAW! WINTER 2018

someday,” and in a sense that’s kind of what I ended up doing with Paul. DRAW!: Music is very important to you then? GH: Yes, always has been. DRAW!: Do you play an instrument yourself? GH: No. I’ve fantasized about it, but I’ve never gotten around to it. But I love all kinds of music.

and slopping it on, trying to keep the acrylics wet and workable, and it was a mess. It would all bleed together. And then the next day, we’d have to get up and mix the color up again. For that whole Lord of the Rings period, all those colors were being mixed up every single morning, trying to match them to the day before. DRAW!: And you can never get it exactly the same.

DRAW!: Do you have music on all the time in the studio when you’re working? GH: Yep. It could vary from rock to something much more contemplative—Mozart or something. It depends on what phase I’m at in what I’m working on. In the initial phase, where it’s just a sheet of blank paper, it has to either be dead silent, or something like Bach or Mozart—nothing with words. Once I’ve got it figured out and I’m proceeding on to finish, anything goes. DRAW!: I’m looking at the illustration, “Flagface”. Was that a reaction from you guys seeing all that stuff overseas? GH: Yeah. Tim and I were clowning around one night. We always “The Siege of Minas Tirith” for the 1977 J. R. R. Tolkein Calendar. had props lying around. He “The Siege of Minas Tirith” © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt slapped the flag on his face and put the straw hat on and started talking like, “I’m the ugly Ameri- GH: No, because one is wet and one is dry, and they look can.” [laughter] I said, “Tim, that’s fantastic! You should paint different. We had a friend back then who was an amateur painter—he was good, but never could make it happen. He that!” So I took a picture of him, and he painted it. was watching us slop on the water, and sat back and said, DRAW!: You were goofing around, but it has a sort of Andy “Did you guys ever think of using a plant mister?” It was like, Wyeth feeling about it too. Maybe it’s just the melancholy boing! It was so simple. I ran out and got a mister, and it was, “Oh, my God, look at that!” We asked him how to keep it wet lighting. GH: Both of us were into Andrew Wyeth at that time. When overnight, and he said, “How about a Tupperware container?” you see that picture up close, it’s very tightly rendered, almost It took this guy to inform us about these simple solutions. crosshatchy—almost an egg tempera sort of thing. I’ve never DRAW!: Did you ever think about doing sci-fi covers back in worked in egg tempera, but it looks like an insane medium. your Detroit days? DRAW!: What other mediums did you and your brother work GH: Not covers, no. I was doing a lot of painting, but I never thought about that until I got to New York. Between opaquing in? GH: We tried it all, but ultimately when we started illustrating and designing for films and storyboarding, I painted tons of Lord of the Rings, everything was acrylic, and over time we science fiction stuff. I wish I still had it, but it got lost in the developed a means of how to render with it together, and we shuffle. But Tim and I would take our portfolio around Detroit lookhad developed a means of how to keep it wet, that is to say in airtight containers with a spray bottle of ether. All through the ing for advertising work, and art directors would say, “What’s Lord of the Rings, we would mix up the color for whatever the a young guy like you doing this old stuff for?” because all our grass was and a series of six or seven values. We had no idea stuff was representational. We’d do sci-fi and fantasy, but it to use a plant mister yet. We were just taking water from a jar was always, “Why are you doing this old stuff?”

DRAW! WINTER 2018

DRAW!: When I was teenager, and I was seeing your stuff, and Frazetta, and Boris Vallejo, I was thinking, “I want to do my version of what they’re doing.” But you weren’t thinking, “I want to do what Kelly Freas does”? GH: Nope. My two primary obsessions from childhood through our teens were animation and special effects. Even though Tim and I kept drawing and painting, making costumes and props, you name it, it came down to an obsession over animation and special effects. We grew up in a tiny, little house on the East Side of Detroit, then we moved to Rochester, Michigan, which was 20 miles out of the city. We had three acres, a garage, and a barn, and Tim and I promptly took over the garage and the barn to build miniature sets. These were the days of George Pal’s War of the Worlds. DRAW!: And [Ray] Harryhausen and all that great stuff. GH: Yeah, and we became obsessed with that. I still have some footage—it’s on DVD now. We built a miniature street scene in the top of the garage about 1:24 in scale. We spent about a year building the set—very realistic. We built a tripod machine on wheels, and had it coming down the street zapping buildings—we scratched the emulsion off on the film for the effect. We had powdered magnesium and we made our own gunpowder, which you could do back then.

You couldn’t find out how this stuff was done. They hid it, because they didn’t want the public to know how it was done. So we would search and search and search, we’d go to the library, go through Popular Science, and we finally found that they used flash powder for the explosions. “Where in the world do you get flash powder?” Deductive reasoning and some detective work led us to a theatrical supply store in Detroit. We’re 16 years old, and we go to this theatrical supply store, “Do you carry flash powder?” The old guy says, “Yeah, yeah,” and he goes to this rickety cabinet, opens it up, and there were, like, 80 jars of flash powder. [laughter] If that had caught fire, the whole block would have gone up. “Can we have five jars?” He says, “Yeah, yeah.” We pay the guy and walk out. For the gunpowder we needed sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal. In those days you could go to the pharmacist, and they would have big bins of chemicals. We go in, “I’d like a mason jar of sulfur, please.” He’d gave it to you. He looked at us funny, but this was farm country. Then we asked for the saltpeter. “What are you going to use it for?” and he wouldn’t sell it to us. We had to go to a different pharmacist to get the saltpeter. Then we found out from deductive reasoning, and reading, and a friend who was a science nut that powdered aluminum sparkles, magnesium burns green, highway flares burn a nice red… So we got really into pyro and miniature building. We

A detail shot of the finished sketch and the painting of “Science Gone Wild”, a private commission for a friend. “Science Gone Wild” © Greg Hildebrandt

DRAW! WINTER 2018

shot many rolls of 8mm film— slow motion, 48 frames a second. DRAW!: My buddy John Knoll, who’s the head of ILM now, went out to ILM one summer. He came back, made up all of that stuff, and then we filmed it in slow motion to see what it did. But you couldn’t do that now. Most of that stuff is probably controlled substance. GH: Oh, yeah. So we’d bust our butt for six months building the miniatures and shooting, then we’d animate. We built our own animation table with peg holes. I still have some of the stuff on 8mm film. It’s very crude, but you could see it. Then we started at Handy and got totally into designing films, then moved to New York and did films there. So that was my main obsession for years. I never even thought about getting into illustration. DRAW!: Were you reading science fiction or comics back then? “Crucifiction”, one of Greg’s photorealistic dream imagery paintings. GH: Oh, yeah. I was totally into “Crucifiction” © Greg Hildebrandt EC. My primary contact with comics as a kid was EC. Then we walked into the soda shop Rings, which had been published in America in 1955, and was where we bought our comics and boom! They were all gone, taking hold in the college circuit. We read that and thought you know, because of the juvenile delinquency hearings. we should illustrate it. I didn’t become and illustrator because I read Lovecraft and all of H. G. Wells and all of Jules I wanted to illustrate book covers, but because I wanted to Verne all through high school. But I never thought back then, illustrate that subject. It grabbed me. There was a ton of stuff “I want to be an illustrator,” as much as I loved illustration in there that appealed to my imagination. and admired it. Everything from children’s books—Johnny Tim wanted to keep moving in that direction. I wanted to do Gruelle and Raggedy Ann, and his fairy tale books, which he New York galleries, because I hadn’t done that yet. I wanted see wrote and illustrated, were beautiful. I have them now even. I if I could make the New York gallery scene, so I started paintliked fairy tales and that type of fantasy, and did a lot of drawing my dreams and surrealistic imagery. Then I got into photorealism. A friend of mine, who was an art director at the time, ings and a lot of animation along those lines. After we got booted out of doing the films for the Catholic had an agency, and he was into photorealism. I’d never heard church, I was primarily interested in doing my own children’s the term before. He said, “There’s a show called ‘A Return to book. I was writing them and drawing them, but no one was Realism’.” I said, “What do you mean ‘return’? It never went buying them. They’d say, “Here, do this Disney book instead.” away as far as I’m concerned.” But there was a big show at the We started illustrating to stay alive and make a living. That Whitney—this was 1970, ’71. Lou Meisel, I found out much later, is the guy who coined the term “photorealism”. He was went on for about six years. repping [Charles] Bell, [Richard] Estes, and those guys. He and DRAW!: You weren’t thinking, “I want to be a paperback his partner were the ones who took up the cause of American pin-up art as fine art. In any event, my friend Bob told me about cover illustrator like James Bama.” GH: It never entered my mind. I was completely unaware of this show, and I went to the show and it blew my mind. I started it. While we were with Bishop Sheen, we had done a paint- painting “photorealistic”, for lack of a better term, paintings of ing of a little gnome in a nature setting. One of the girls there my surrealistic stuff and dream imagery. I knew nothing about the New York gallery art scene, but said, “Ooh, that looks like The Hobbit.” We said, “What in the world is that?” She brought the book in, this would have been Bob did. He was very hip to that world. He said, “You shoot about 1967, and we read it and said, “This is cool. We should your art on 35mm slides, and send the slides in to the galillustrate this someday.” Then we found out about Lord of the leries,” and he gave me a list of the galleries, especially all

DRAW! WINTER 2018

Finished pencils (above) and painting (next page) of “Faramir” for the 1977 J. R. R. Tolkein Calendar. “Faramir” © Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

the top guys: Sidney Janis, Ivan Karp’s O K Harris, Leo Castelli—all the big names. So I sent them to all the studio galleries. Castelli sent them back with no comments. Janis sent them back with no comments. Ivan Karp sent them back, but with a note that said, “I’m not repping this kind of thing right now, but keep at it and you’ll find a place in this city.” That was very inspiring to me, so I kept sending my slides around. Ironically, a gallery across the street from O K Harris asked me to come in with my paintings. I went in, but my paintings were all over the place. I had portraits, I had surrealistic dream imagery, I had a buddy of mine on a Harley—I spent five months painting the headlight alone. It was that tight. So the owner is looking at the stuff and says, “You’re all over the place. This is not the way it works in the gallery scene. You need to make a statement.” He goes to the guy on the motorcycle and says, “Give me 20 of these.” I said, “What?” He said, “You have to show that you’re committed.” It would take me ten years to do 20 of those paintings. I had a wife, three kids, a house, so I went back to Tim and said,

DRAW! WINTER 2018

“Okay, let’s try to do Lord of the Rings.” We call Ian Summers, the art director at Ballantine Books, and he said, “Yeah, c’mon over,” because you could do that back in the day. DRAW!: You could call up a publisher, and somebody would answer and put you on the line with the art director. GH: I didn’t even know who the art director was [when I called]. We sat with Ian, and he called in Judy-Lynn and Lester Del Rey, and they liked what they saw. They gave us a cover to do for a children’s book that Tolkein wrote, Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham. It was a cartoony knight with a dragon. We did that first picture, and they approved it and said, “Okay, you’ve got a calendar. We need 14 paintings in six months.” We only had six months to do that first calendar. So Tim and I reread the books, because it had been over two years since I’d read them. We scrambled through them, marking off scenes to illustrate, and we ended up with hundreds of them. “How do we get this down to 14?” We broke it down to good guys and bad guys. We took sketches in, they approved

them, and we went ahead on painting the pictures, which took about four and a half months. When the 1976 calendar hit, it was incredible. It was the first time we’d ever gotten fan mail, and this was well on into our careers. I was in my mid-30s and I’d had four careers already. We got all this mail, and it the main thing that hit us was that we struck a chord with these pictures that seemed to get through to people. I grew up with Pyle and the idea of being accurate to the text as much as you could. Sometimes you have to eliminate things. When you read Tolkein’s description of Gandalf’s eyebrows, he said they exceeded beyond the rim of his hat. Clearly he never drew a picture of Gandalf. Eyebrows that are eight, nine inches long? [laughter] No. But you try to stick to the text and be honest to the story. Pyle always said, “Put yourself in the scene.” The calendar did well, so we did the next one. That one we had more time to do. We spent about ten months on that one. I upgraded the size of the pictures, because I still had this obsession with art galleries, and I wanted the pictures to be worthy of a New York gallery.

DRAW!: How big were the paintings for the first calendar? GH: They were 24" x 30", maybe smaller. DRAW!: Was that because you had to work fast? GH: Yeah, and I was coming out of years of children’s book illustration. To me, that first calendar has more of a children’s book look to it, because I kept thinking of it as a children’s book, the way Tolkein thought about The Hobbit, as opposed to Lord of the Rings, when the group he met with said, “Okay, now take The Hobbit seriously, and write your heavy-duty story.” DRAW!: So you didn’t really have in mind what the audience would be for the first calendar? GH: I never thought about an audience. I did pictures the way Tim and I felt we should do them, and how we thought they should look. DRAW!: You were just trying to please yourselves. GH: That’s always the case. That, to me, is the first objective. Obviously you’re doing a job, but I never felt that way doing

DRAW! WINTER 2018

Rough sketch (left) and finished sketch (right) for a direct market variant cover to the Star Wars: The Original Marvel Years omnibus, vol. 2. Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC. Sketches © Greg Hildebrandt.

any of the three calendars. I was doing them because I wanted to do them, and I wanted to make myself happy with them. But we were both always hypercritical of ourselves. You’re always harder on yourself than anyone else can be. DRAW!: I teach illustration to young people in their teens, and I always explain to them how much easier it is to find reference now. You can type in “old scientist’s laboratory”, and there will be 500 pictures on Google. GH: If you want it backlit, rim lighting, you can find it. Back then you had to go to the library and search. Half your life was spent trying to find reference. DRAW!: How much of your production time for your first calendar would you say was spent either shooting or finding reference? GH: At least a third. DRAW!: The interiors of the cottages were based on Englishstyle medieval architecture. Did you go to England or do any travel to look for reference? GH: No, we never travelled at all. We had tons of books. Tim had a bunch, I had a bunch; we’d accumulated them over the years. And if we couldn’t find what we needed, we’d go to the

DRAW! WINTER 2018

library. But mostly we had enough books, and photos we’d taken from here and there. Costume-wise, we were inventing based on medieval tunics, and faking it as we went. DRAW!: And that’s where your experience from model making and costume making as a kid comes into play. GH: Totally. Tim and I made tons of costumes from the time we were little kids. Masks, make-up—everything from a Tyrannosaurus costume, to Superman, to a clown—Lou Jacobs was the archetype for that. We’d spend six months working on our Halloween costumes. That, and the miniatures set building, and the photography all came together with illustration. DRAW!: Now there are hundreds of companies that make capes and swords and all that. GH: Oh, my God! There are zillions of them. We had to fake it all. So the first calendar came out and we got our first taste of fandom. Then the second calendar sold more. I think one of the calendars even outsold [actress/model] Farrah Fawcett. [laughter] When the third calendar came out, bookstores would have three-foot stacks of them set up by the cash register. That’s how well they sold. They were the biggest selling calendars in history.

DRAW!: Did you make royalties? GH: Oh, yeah. Very miniscule. They wanted originally to own all the paintings and just give us a flat rate. Tim and I had no business manager or agent back then. This was long before Jean. I wish I’d had Jean back then, but I didn’t. But at least we stuck by our guns with the first calendar and said, “No, we own the paintings, and we want a royalty.” Finally they said okay. It was a very, very small royalty, but at least we owned the paintings. DRAW!: That ties in to how you painted but lost the original to the Star Wars poster. GH: Yeah. Vinny Di Fate was starting to get people together for artists’ rights, but I knew nothing about that stuff back then. All I knew was that when you finished a job, you took it in to the art director, you went home, and then they’d send you a check. Nobody ever said, “We own this,” you just kind of assumed they did, even though there was no contract that said, “We own the original.” With Star Wars we didn’t know. We just went home and they finally paid us the $4,000. DRAW!: And you had no way of knowing what Star Wars would be when you did it. GH: No. The agency that was handling Fox, they didn’t know. It was a little agency in Manhattan, and they called us in out of desperation because we had come through overnight with that Young Frankenstein picture three years before. The painting we did never got used, but they remembered the fact that we painted a picture overnight. Plus we’d gotten famous for Lord of the Rings, and they put that together and said, “Hey, we’ve got this science-fiction film here, and you guys work fast.” That’s how we got the job, and we banged it out in 36 hours. DRAW!: I still have mine. When I see you at Illuxcon this year, I’ll bring my dog-eared original 1977 Star Wars poster for you to sign. [laughter] GH: Okay! So that put us on the map a little more. DRAW!: As a fan of Star Wars, it really captured the feeling and the myth of the film. How did you come up with the lightsaber over the head? GH: We worked that out with the guys at the ad agency. DRAW!: Did they have a layout there? GH: They had something we looked at, and we talked about it, and went home and painted it. We did our thing with it, but it was pretty much defined by the agency. When we asked what they wanted, they said the directive they got was to make it look comic book-y. That was the only directive we got from Lucas. We never met Lucas. I still haven’t met Lucas. We went to the ranch and got the grand tour when we worked on another project for them. We met everybody down to his right-hand man. We were there for the whole day, and at the end they asked, “Is there anything else you’d like?” I said, “Yeah, I’d like to meet George,” and everybody in the room froze and looked at each other. “Well, he’s not here right now.” It was kind of like, [deep, stentorian voice] “No one gets in to see the great and powerful Oz.” [laughter] So I never met the guy. It doesn’t matter. That Star Wars poster—and I’m eternally grateful I did it—was a job I did. I’m glad I did it, but it was just a job because we were work-

Since the background will be predominantly black, Greg transfers the finished sketch onto a black scratchboard. Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC. Sketches © Greg Hildebrandt.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

Starting with the background, Greg makes progress on the cover painting for the Star Wars: The Original Marvel Years omnibus, vol. 2. Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC. Sketches © Greg Hildebrandt.

ing on our own thing, our Urshurak novel. That’s all I cared about at that moment. DRAW!: How much reference did they give you? GH: A whole bunch of stuff—the close-up of Darth Vader and the actors. They said, “Don’t worry about likenesses, because nobody knows who they are”—the two principles. You know how it is trying to get a good reference shot. There’s always light coming from the top of their heads or something. All the shots of Fisher and Hamill were at different angles with either flat frontal light or diffused light. I didn’t know these people. I couldn’t fake that. I made it up to sort of look like them, but you had a couple of hours to do it, and they didn’t care. We brought it in, and they used it. DRAW!: Were you painting on one side of it while Tim was painting on the other side? GH: We generally did that with the Lord of the Rings stuff, but with this one the picture was big, but not that big. We worked out the sketch with them, then added some detail on the train coming back to Jersey. Then we grabbed a couple of people and shot Polaroids for the two figures with an old bathrobe and a negligee I threw on my first wife. I still have the Polaroid. Then we did a sketch and a layout. I think it was one in the morning at that point, and I laid down and took a nap

DRAW! WINTER 2018

while Tim started painting. He woke me up about three hours later, and I started painting while he went to sleep. We did that for several turns, and then we stayed up together to finish it. It took us about 36, 36-and-a-half hours to do. DRAW!: Did you project your layout onto the final board? GH: No, we did a light sketch to size of the picture. I didn’t have a projector or anything like that back then—no Xerox machine. I can’t live without it now. All I had was a pencil, a piece of paper, and a drawing board. DRAW!: You were a caveman! How did you live! [laughter] GH: I prided myself that my studio was the pencil in my hand and a pad of paper. “I can work anywhere.” I kind of like that idea. I don’t know what I would do without my copy machine now. I’m constantly using it to blow up, reduce, flop stuff… But we did the sketch. Took a piece of gessoed Masonite, sanded it down, and transferred the sketch with a piece of graphite paper and a ball point pen, and started painting. When we were done we went back to our novel. After the William Morris agency fell apart, Tim and I split. He went his way, and I went my way. We’d worked together so much, we wondered if we could function on our own. We didn’t work together again for about ten years. We got back together on the Marvel trading cards in the ’90s.

DRAW!: Just to go back a second, when did you see Star Wars and realize how big it was? GH: They gave us tickets to go to the New York premiere, but I couldn’t because the Urshurak story was so close. This is the irony of ironies. We were working on it for about a year, and had defined these characters. Ailwon wears a short tunic, clad all in white, carries a magic sword, and has blond hair, albeit long blond hair. Hugh is the male archer, the predominant masculine figure. Then we had the gwarpie, who ended up being a two-foot tall guy, but in the original story he was a hairy, seven-foot tall Sasquatch derivative. [laughter] This was a year before we did Star Wars. Then there are our main evil antagonists—Torgon, the Death Lord of Golgorath. What is Torgon? He’s an ancient relative of Ailwon, our hero—an ancestor turned evil. There’s no Dark Side, but he’s gone to the side of evil. And he is a seven-foot tall, black mailed, black helmeted—you never see his face—black gauntleted, mace wielding villain. I go to pick up the Star Wars poster, and I see Darth Vader, and I say, “What in the world is this? And who is this eight-foot hairy guy?” It was totally a synchronistic event of co-creation with about 20 different parallels to Star Wars, only it wasn’t technology-based, it was magicbased. I freaked out. I got home and More progress on the cover painting with Greg’s reference taped to his easel. painted the picture, and Torgon was Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC. still in my mind. I’d just painted a big picture of him. We were getting ready to pitch our story Schwarzenegger, and everybody wanted to see what that was to all these publishers with our new agent. Ian Summers had going to do before they would commit to a fantasy film. quit Ballantine and was now our rep, and he was going to start pitching it. When the movie came out, I couldn’t go see it. I DRAW!: It’s interesting to see the lengths you guys went to was too freaked out. “It won’t last. It will disappear.” with the Lord of the Rings stuff compared to what [Frank] But it didn’t disappear. My brother went and saw the pre- Frazetta did with Conan. I love Frazetta, but he was never a miere, and he said, “You won’t believe it. It’s our Torgon. It’s research guy. exactly the same character.” So I had to reduce the size of the GH: Right. He did that thing that he did very well. I liked gwarpie, and take the helmet off Torgon, because everyone Frank. Did you ever meet him? would have said, “You copied Star Wars.” That really scuttled me. I couldn’t go see the movie for eight, nine months after that. DRAW!: I never met him. But we had to finish the book off, and I had to get the enthusiasm GH: We knew him, and we would go out to his compound a to pitch it to the William Morris Agency, and go through all that lot. He was a nice guy. I liked Frank a lot. He always played it stress that I did until the thing collapsed. Nobody wanted to try kind of cool. “Oh, I really want to be a baseball player. This is fantasy. They were shooting Conan at that time with [Arnold] all just something I do on the side.” [laughter]

DRAW! WINTER 2018

Progress photos of a black-&-white version of the painting—white and gray pencil on black board. Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC.

DRAW!: Al [Williamson] had very interesting stories about that. I think Al felt a lot of that was exaggerated, especially after those books came out. GH: He claimed that he never posed a model, but there are pictures of him posing. DRAW!: That is all B.S. Al told us that. Why did he have 500 cameras? He was always taking pictures of stuff and taking pictures of himself. My artist friend Villagran, and my grandfather, who was also a commercial artist, both told me stories of when they were younger and would go into the agency, and if someone was painting there, they would pull a sheet down over what they were painting so you couldn’t look at their technique and figure out what they were doing. People did not like to admit to using photo reference. GH: That did a lot of damage when Frazetta spread that around like that. I taught at Joe Kubert’s school for a while, and all these kids would claim they could do it without reference. It was almost like a macho thing. If you used reference, you were a wimp. It wasn’t “pure”. I think they were all emulating Frazetta’s line of B.S. I used to say to them, “What is wrong with you? Look outside. Look at nature. Look at trees. Look at the lighting. You’re not going to use reference? You think you can paint and draw the human figure under every lighting condition? C’mon!” They would show me pictures, and I would say, “It looks like you didn’t use any reference.” DRAW!: You’re right. I think it did come out of him. Today there is such a wealth of knowledge about how to do this particular job. You go back to 1977 when I was 15, 16 years old. Outside of the Famous Artist School, there was very little material available. GH: Nobody wanted to talk about it. Like you said, they would hide it, especially in film and special effects. You would have to dig and dig and dig. You’d find a Popular Mechan-

DRAW! WINTER 2018

ics with, “First Time on the Set of When Worlds Collide! Top Secret!” Animation—you had to figure it out yourself. There was next to nothing on that. DRAW!: Until Disney did those little bits on Wonderful World of Disney. There’s one on YouTube now of [Eyvind] Earle and all those background painters, “Four Artists Paint One Tree”. You would never see that on ABC now, four guys painting a tree while someone reads a book. [laughter] You and your brother came up with a way of working based on your hobbies, basically. GH: Our obsessions. They were more than hobbies. We were compelled. It may sound pretentious, but it’s a fact. Art chose me; I didn’t choose it. I was obsessed from my earliest memories. I started drawing and that was it, man. Then it became rendering and painting, building and making, inventing and creating. That’s all I ever did, and it gradually ended up being what I do for a living. You'll get to the other side of the room if you keep walking, you know? DRAW!: The technical difference in your process, I assume, changed somewhat in the ’90s when the computer came in. More of the responsibility is pushed on the artist now. In the old days, they would sometimes shoot the models for you, or they would hire the photographer. GH: Yeah, they were doing that big-time in the ’80s. I did a romance novel cover once, and I had to go into the city. They picked the models, and they shot the photography. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. DRAW!: You were basically just a renderer. GH: Yeah, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. I don’t know anything about computers. Jean does all the computer work. I know how to turn it on and turn it off, so I don’t use it.

DRAW!: You don’t handle your Facebook page? GH: I sit with Jean, and she’ll answer stuff. She does all the typing. I don’t do anything physical with the machine. I have no interest in it. They asked Al Hirschfeld in a documentary, “What would you think about working with a computer?” He said, “What are you talking about? It took me 90 years just to figure this out.” It would take me too long to figure it out. DRAW!: You’re what they would call a Grandmaster now. [Greg laughs] I say that because one of the things I’m dealing with as a teacher is that the digital aspect is very important for the young illustrator coming along. You have to know how to digitally paint and traditionally paint. GH: You can’t survive in this world without it. All this stuff is going to be forgotten. Nobody’s going to know how to create and draw perspective. Perspective was discovered in the 1400s by an Italian [Brunelleschi]. They struggled for centuries with how to draw things in perspective. If you start relying on computers to do it, you’re going to forget it all. It’s going to be back to the Stone Age again. They hit a button, and the picture is lit for them. I don’t get it. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a double-edged sword for me. I look at what people do with computers, especially in special effects, and it’s overwhelming. It blows me away. But the handmade quality is going away. Scott Sava, who’s doing Animal Crackers, is a fantastic artist. He wrote this story, got all the backing, the film’s almost done, fantastic digital animation all designed in pencil and paint. He painted a poster for the film. He has this quest to bring back painted posters into movieland. The distributor won’t use his painted poster. Why? “Because the painted poster makes it look old. The handmade thing is old. That’s not what we want.” DRAW!: I think that’s going to reverse. Maybe not with this generation, but with the next generation. I taught a class on concept design a year ago, and I used your

work, N. C. Wyeth’s work, Frazetta’s work, and Syd Mead’s work. I showed the images very small, like a thumbnail, and explained to them, “You can identify each artist at the size of your thumbnail, just by their color palette.” Then I brought up a bunch of modern stuff, and it all looks like the same person. Some may be drawn a little bit better than others. And I felt the exact same way walking through Illuxcon, and there are a lot of really great artists there. But a lot of the more contemporary guys look the same when compared to the older artists.

The finished black board drawing. Star Wars and all related characters © LucasFilm LLC.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

GH: I totally agree with you. It’s all some uniform thing. Films look that way too. I don’t know what it is, but there’s a certain look to them, like a banged out, repetitious, canned thing on a supermarket shelf. DRAW!: You see a lot of interesting designs. GH: Yeah, that’s all fantastic. DRAW!: But the final execution looks like it was all art directed by one guy, with a blue-green filter on everything. There’s always going to be a backlash. Back in the ’70s, there were people going back to nature. There was a movement of people getting away from the modern world. GH: You’re right. There are always those cyclical shifts. I wake up every morning blown away by the fact that I’m actually making a living smearing this squooshy stuff around on a canvas. I’m amazed people still want it. Marvel is hiring me constantly to paint covers. They like them, and they leave me alone completely. They don’t over-art direct me, and let me do my thing. I’m really overjoyed that I’m doing it. I enjoy every

single day. It’s happening now, maybe not en masse, but that’ll start to happen again. DRAW!: You also do the “American Beauties”, so you have different arenas that you’re playing in. GH: Different arenas, different markets—whatever you want to call it—the initial concept was not, “Let’s find new markets.” I just woke up one morning in 1999 and said to Jean, “I want to do pin-ups.” I painted one, she flipped over it, and then Meisel gave me my first show in 2000. He was impressed, and said, “No one’s done a good pin-up in 20 years.” He’s a very opinionated guy, and I like him for that. He gave me a show, and it opened up a whole other world for me, which I love. And, like I said, I’m working with Scott now, and we’re talking about working on an animated film of some kind. I don’t know what, and I don’t care. It will be incredible to find out what it’s going to be. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day. The thrill for me is finding out what’s around the next bend. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but there’s always something there.

Greg wasn’t happy with the figure in his sketch, so he redrew it on a separate sheet. “Saturday Night Special” © Greg Hildebrandt

DRAW! WINTER 2018

DRAW!: Going back to the pin-ups, there’s a line between pin-up and porn. GH: There’s definitely a line. No total frontal nudity. I’ve got nothing against pornography, don’t get me wrong. I’m not some moralist at all. Porn is a legit art form that has roots going back to Pompeii and before. It’s part of human nature. I choose not to do it, that’s all. It’s my choice to stay over here on this side of the line. DRAW!: Do you think that broadens the appeal? GH: I think it does. A lot of women love my pin-up art. A lot of women love Bettie Page. I have an equal number of female fans as male fans of my pin-up art. If I moved into that other arena, that probably wouldn’t happen. I don’t know. I think the unseen is more of a turn-on than the totally seen, bam!, in your face stuff. DRAW!: Your stuff has more of that [Gil] Elvgren, [George] Petty feel to it. GH: I grew up on that stuff. My grandfather had all those calendars in the basement—my dad’s father. All the men went down in the basement in those days in the spic and span, German-Swiss house, where you could eat off the floor. That’s where all the men went, and the women went upstairs to a fancy room. I remember as a little kid, it was a 50/50 deal. I was aware of the girls, and I was aware of the painting. Those beautifully painted Gil Elvgren pictures, man, they knocked me out One of Greg’s pin-up paintings, “Saturday Night Special”. as a kid. So that stuck, and then I saw “Saturday Night Special” © Greg Hildebrandt [Haddon] Sundblom, and Alberto Vargas, [Earl] Moran, and Zoë Mozert—she was one of the DRAW!: [John Singer] Sargent, in his time, was the bleeding very few women who did it. That Jane Russell picture she did edge. He wasn’t doing grandpa’s paintings. He was the forefor The Outlaw [movie poster]—fantastic stuff. It was all in my front of painting. If you were going to paint things like that memory banks, so I woke up one morning and said, “I want to now, people of society, you’d be painting celebrities. Because do this.” I don’t want to emulate that or copy it. I don’t want we don’t worship the Vanderbilts anymore, we worship celebit to look like it was painted in 1941. I want to paint it like it’s rities. How would you do a contemporary painting of Miley Cyrus or somebody like that? How do you face that same quesnow, looking back at that time, you know what I’m saying? When I got to Meisel’s gallery, I’d brought the four paint- tion as an artist today with that same—I mean, nobody has that ings I’d done so far. He basically said, “Had you made these skill set anymore—but with that skill set he had as a painter? things like you were trying to make 1940s paintings, I wouldn’t GH: Yeah. Sargent was amazing. And then Thomas Eakins be interested.” He’s already got Elvgren; he wanted something was working at the same time out of Philadelphia. Every time else. He loved the idea that they were modern, but looking he would do a portrait, it would be rejected. Because he was the guy painting what he saw realistically. back to the past.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

DRAW!: He made everybody too much of themselves. GH: Exactly. He did not fix them, or improve them, or perfect them. DRAW!: He was kind of a caricaturist in a way. GH: Yeah.

I’ll take care of everything else.” Aside from being extremely creative, she’s made so I can stay focused on art. DRAW!: That’s something you can’t put a price tag on. GH: There’s no way to. Every artist friend of mine asks me, “Where can I find a Jean?” She’s the most incredible human being. Consequently, I’m obsessed with producing. Too much is never enough, and she makes it possible. DRAW!: You’ll finish that Kingpin cover in a couple of days? GH: Oh, I’ll be finished tomorrow. Then I have a Star Wars cover to do for them. I’m not sure which story they want it set in yet. I have a Wonder Woman painting I have to finish. I have three commissions I need to do. I’ve got a plane nose cone to paint—like the World War II fighter planes. That’s coming up. I’m more busy at 78 than I was at 38. [laughs]

The first Tolkein painting Greg had done in some time, “Smaug Destroys Laketown” was done in 2010. This is Greg’s first rough sketch for the image. “Smaug Destroys Laketown” © Greg Hildebrandt

DRAW!: You just had a show back in the fall. GH: Yeah, in the city at the Metropolis Gallery. DRAW!: Are you starting to move more in that direction? GH: Jean’s going to be working on setting up more galleries like that. Metropolis we have a relationship with, and we’ll probably do some more shows there. I was flattered by the fact that Frank Miller came to my show, and we got along very well. He came to the house here, and he’s enthusiastic. He was telling me about the projects he’s working on at DC, and he’ll be doing some more Sin City stuff, and he’s enthusiastic. I want to meet with him again and see if we can do something together.

DRAW!: That’s great, because that means you’re doing it because you’re happy. GH: Exactly. I never pursued art for money. I’ll take as much money as I can get; there are no two ways about that. But ever since I was a kid, that wasn’t the motivating factor. Certainly, when it comes your way, you’re going to take it. You need it. But it was never the motivating factor—especially now. I only do what I want to do.

DRAW!: That would be interesting to see your version of Sin City or something. GH: I don’t know what it would be. We just threw it out there, “Let’s do something together!” I have no idea what it might be, but I keep looking for new stuff to get involved in that excites me and is something I haven’t done before. I’m 78, and I want to keep this going another 20 years.

DRAW!: What would you say to the 20-year-old aspiring illustrator? GH: I don’t know what to say to them in a digital age. All I can say is don’t listen to anyone but yourself. Don’t listen to anyone who says you can’t do it, or you shouldn’t do it. And also accept the voice inside yourself that says it’s not good enough. Don’t throw your pencil down because that voice is telling you it’s not good enough, just thank it for sharing and keep on trucking. Use that voice that tells you it’s not good enough to get better. A lot of people quit because they get stymied or they think, “I can’t do this,” or, “I’m not good enough.” That’s the death knell. That’s what, as Mae West said, separates the men from the boys. You just have to keep on going.

DRAW!: 78 is the new 40. [laughter] GH: It’s because Jean does all the work, and I get to have all the fun. We met in 1979, and she said, “You paint and draw,

DRAW!: Did you have that with your brother, where if you threw your brush down, he would say, “Shut up! Pick up the brush and paint”?

DRAW! WINTER 2018

A more refined sketch for “Smaug Destroys Laketown”. “Smaug Destroys Laketown” © Greg Hildebrandt

GH: Yeah. We both kicked each other’s butts in that sense. I was very fortunate to have a twin, because you’re alone in that room, and it’s the loneliness of the long distance runner. With two of us, if one of us would run into problems and get freaked out and say, “I quit,” the other guy would say, “Okay, if you quit, I quit,” and we’d challenge each other. “Pick up your pencil, or I’m just going to sit here too.” Each of us would inspire the other. We kept each other going in that respect. The other thing I’ve been working on for about 20 years is a graphic novel. It’s a little side thing I do off and on. DRAW!: Are you drawing it or painting it? GH: It’s all laid out, and I’m drawing it and writing it. DRAW!: You have work we see, work we’ll see eventually. Do you have work that’s just for you? GH: Loads of it. I have boxes and envelopes stuffed with ideas and concepts and stories. Things I’ve written and illustrated—mainly sequential art, because I love sequential art. I especially love the European stuff. They’re really dead serious about it. My son-in-law is Swiss, and he’s a comic book artist. We went to visit my daughter and him several years ago, and David took me to this comic shop in Zurich where he used to

go. It was four stories of the most incredible graphic novels you’ll ever see in your life. And they’re all hardcover. Those books are in all the stores there. Here you don’t get any of that. DRAW!: No, although you can go to Amazon France and order things. I’ve ordered some Moebius stuff from there. GH: Yeah. But I’ve been working on a book. I don’t want to give anything away, but it contains pretty much everything I love and everything I despise, let’s put it that way. [laughs] DRAW!: Do you do any life drawing? Any drawing from nature? GH: No, no. I used to do it all the time, and I know a lot of people who will go out and set up outdoors. I just work from photos. I shoot photos like a madman—thousands of them. I’m very isolated. We just came back from the islands. Jean needs a vacation now and then because she does all the work. She needs to relax and get out on a beach. Me? I’d be perfectly content to spend the rest of my life locked up in my little zone with my drawing board and my easel. [laughter] DRAW!: You sound like me. “We can go to the beach, as long as I can paint.” [laughter]

DRAW! WINTER 2018

The finished sketch for “Smaug Destroys Laketown”. “Smaug Destroys Laketown” © Greg Hildebrandt

GH: Exactly. Drawing and painting is it for me. That’s where I live. There’s nothing more inspiring to me than a blank piece of paper. There are endless possibilities there. DRAW!: It’s funny, because that’s some artists’ biggest fear, is a blank sheet of paper. GH: I know, but for me it’s just something to dive into. DRAW!: It’s been great talking to you. Your work has been an inspiration to me since that first book came out. GH: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, man. But it’s like Bob McGinnis said, “All I’m trying to do is get something right.” You’re always trying to get it right. It’s never good enough. It’s an anxiety thing. I’m not anxious, but I have a lot of anxiety. Chuck Jones had a great quote, “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.” DRAW!: That’s very true. GH: There’s something about the whole process, and I enjoy it all, even the anxiety. It’s what makes it happen.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

DRAW!: Looking at Frazetta, there was such a trajectory of his work, that by the time those books came out in the ’70s his work was never as good after that. Mentally, he must have felt he had reached a peak. GH: Yeah, he peaked out with those Pellucidar covers and Conan covers. To me, that was it. Then all of a sudden God only knows what happened after that. Maybe it was because he just focused on this one area as opposed to expanding and not wanting to be pigeon-holed. I hate categorization and pigeonholing. I don’t want to be labeled. “Oh, you’re a great fantasy artist. That’s what you do. You’re a fantasy artist.” “What are you talking about?” DRAW!: That’s the nature of the business. It always wants to make you— GH: Pigeon-hole you. Categorize you. “Oh, you’re a guy who does trees. We’ll put you on this shelf over here.” Jean wanted to destroy that idea too. She was against that whole idea of pigeon-holing, so we work extremely well together. DRAW!: In the illustration field, Jack Davis was kind of

“Smaug Destroys Laketown”, a 52" x 32" painting based on a scene from J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit. “Smaug Destroys Laketown” © Greg Hildebrandt

pigeon-holed, but he was the only Jack Davis, so he was very successful. Then in fine art, they say, “Give me 20 of those motorcycles,” until you reach that upper level. Then you can paint anything you want, because it sells, and they don’t care what you’re painting as long as they have something by you. And that field is changing too. The galleries are changing. GH: And that’s a good thing. DRAW!: It’s just another version of commercial art. GH: That’s all it is. I always despised that categorization of, “This is fine art and this is commercial art.” Once money is exchanged for an object, it’s commercial. Fine art? You just sold it. It’s commercial art. DRAW!: Do you still have many of your originals to the Lord of the Rings? GH: We sold a lot of them. I’ve got a few left. Not many. Some I choose to keep or Jean wants to keep. They were divided between Tim and me, so his wife has his half, and I don’t know what they’ve done with them. DRAW!: Is there ever going to be a Hildebrandt Museum? GH: [laughs] I don’t know about that. Thomas R. Benton was totally dead set against museums. First of all, they told him to take all of his stuff out of the Whitney, because he had fallen out of favor. Jackson Pollock, his protégé and almost adopted son, had ascended, and he had descended, and the Whitney

said, “Get your crap out of here.” There was a documentary by Ken Burns on Benton. It’s fantastic, because it’s about the triumph of the artist, and how he came back and reascended. Benton said, “I don’t want my work hanging in museums. They’re houses of the dead.” Both he and Frank Lloyd Wright called them that. He said, “I want my art hanging in brothels and bars.” [laughter] I can relate to that. That’s what I like about Diego Rivera, the Mexican revolutionary artist. He has a magnificent mural at the entrance to the Detroit Institute of Arts—the only surviving one. It blew my mind as a kid. I didn’t know or care about the politics, but what a fantastic work that is. His whole thing was art for the people. He was out there painting those murals, and he was taking on every revolution in Mexico because they would never fulfill on their promises. He’d paint these murals of them, and they’d keep threatening to tear them down, and he would show up on the scaffold with six-shooter strapped to his hips. [laughter] They made a movie on [his wife] Frida— it was great, and I loved it—but somebody should make a movie on him. He was a fantastic character. Art for him, he said, was “a biological function”. I really can relate to that. That really hits it. But they told him, “Diego, you’re making too much art. You’re devaluing your artwork. Stop producing.” But he was a guy who did art for the people. He wanted people to see it. He wanted to take on causes. He’s one of the guys I really admire.

DRAW! WINTER 2018

THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY, AND THE

ORDWAY ! MASSAGE THE COLLAGE by JERRY ORDWAY

Caricature by Rachel Ordway

ey, everyone. I recently completed a custom drawing for a client, and wanted to use this space to write a bit about the process. A horizontal composition, with collage elements, can be a challenge to pull off. The buyer had a short list of elements he wanted to include, with the over-all theme meant to convey a retro-origin of Batman. I’m often asked to draw retro versions of characters, I suppose due to my having drawn the DC Comics title All Star Squadron early in my career, which was set in 1941. To evoke any era, it’s always good to gather some specificperiod comic book reference. In the 1940s, Batman had short cowl-ears and a very square jaw, while Robin of the early days had a very round face! The Joker in his initial appearances still showed his inspirations, one of which was the actor Conrad Veidt from the movie, The Man Who Laughed. I took the extra step of digitally flipping the splash image I sourced, to make sure I didn’t lose his heavy eye-lidded look for my piece (see left).