Draw! #35

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

#35

Summer 2018 $8.95 in the US

Contains nudity for figure-drawing instruction; suggested for Mature Readers Only

SCI-FI/FANTASY ILLUSTRATOR

DONATO GIANCOLA

JERRY ORDWAY & JAMAR NICHOLAS

82658 00145

REGULAR COLUMNISTS

PLUS! MIKE MANLEY & BRET BLEVINS’

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GEORGE PRATT

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ACE PAINTER & COMIC ARTIST

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! #26

DRAW! #27

DIEDGITIIOTANSL BLE

AVAILA

DRAW! #23

DRAW! #24

DRAW! #25

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!

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!

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(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

DRAW! #28

DRAW! #29

DRAW! #30

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.

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.

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(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

DRAW! #31

DRAW! #32

DRAW! #33

DRAW #34

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’s Ord-Way of drawing, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY’S Comic Art Bootcamp. Mature readers only.

GREG HILDEBRANDT (of the Hildebrandt Brothers) reveals his working methods, BRAD WALKER (Aquaman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Birds of Prey, Legends of the Dark Knight) gives a how-to interview and demo, regular columnist JERRY ORDWAY, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY’s Comic Art Bootcamp!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

SUMMER 2018, VOL. 1, #35 Editor-in-Chief • Michael Manley Managing Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Front Cover • Donato Giancola DRAW! Summer 2018, Vol. 1, No. 35 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published

by TwoMorrows Publishing.

Michael Manley, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher.

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

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

DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 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.

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DONATO GIANCOLA

Mike Manley interviews the Hugo Award-winning fantasy and science-fiction illustrator

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RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!

Jerry breaks down a script and gets to the Action!

GEORGE PRATT

Mike Manley takes to the killer skies with the Ace illustrator and comic book artist

COMIC ART BOOTCAMP This month’s installment: The Sketchbook Workout program!

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

Jamar Nicholas reviews the tricks of the trade.

This month: Sometimes the old tricks are the best!

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DRAW! SUMMER 2018

1

T

-ING AHEAD

hese days the world of entertainment­­—that is, comics, games, TV, animation, and movies­—is all meshing and interweaving together more than ever before.

Characters from comics are in every entertainment venue now. What before was just geek stuff is now globally everybody’s entertainment. Ideas, characters, and stories that were once mostly the province of comics or pulp paper, pen, ink, and the four color press, are now multimillion dollar franchises.

The term “Concept Design”, though it’s been around since basically Disney invented it as part of the way they developed their features and later theme parks, is now the most popular dream job I hear young artists of all stripes say they want to have, followed by jobs in character design, 2-D animation, and comics. New schools and online resources seem to spring up every day, like Bret Blevins’ new Kickstarter for his online lessons.

As a result, you may have noticed DRAW! has shifted its focus a bit to encompass these other fields of craft as the entertainment industry changes. Many young artists don’t want to do just comics, if they want to do comics at all, but seek to work in gaming, film, etc. The same skill set I, along with the artists I interview in DRAW!, have, show that good skills are transferable across multiple genres and platforms.

The origin of this issue was the result of me attending last year’s IlluxCon (http://www.illuxcon.com) in Reading, Penn.

It was like the world’s imagination in one room, from Boris and Julie Bell, to past DRAW! interviewee Dave Dorman, to Neal Adams, and so many more. If you live within a day’s drive of Reading and are a fan of scifi, fantasy, and/or illustration, I say go and check it out. It has great low-key atmosphere where you can rub shoulders with pros, show your work, and take workshops as well. I have been attending the show since 2009, and once again I attended and chatted with so many great artists, like Donato and George Pratt, whose work I have long followed via social media. We had some great talks at the con—and I got two of my students in to get some portfolio reviews as well! We live, in some ways, in a golden age of opportunity for visual artists of all types, and access has never been greater for the aspiring professional and student.

Drawing by Bret Blevins My hat’s off to both Donato and George for their time and graciousness, and for showing and sharing their process; to Bret, Jerry, and Jamar; and as always, to John and Eric for getting this great looking issue out and to your hands. Enjoy the summer—go draw something!

NEXT ISSUE! DRAW! #36 (80 FULL-COLOR pages, $9.95), the professional “how-to” magazine on comics and animation does it again. From Deadpool to the Infinity Countdown, MIKE HAWTHORNE has continued his upward trajectory as one of today’s best artists in the comic book mainstream, and DRAW! has him for you—it’s going to get Crazy up in here!

(See, Mike has a webcomic called RAISING CRAZY… Never mind.)

Next, we’ll take you north of the border to track down tres magnifique Shuster Award-winning artist YANICK PAQUETTE (Wonder Woman: Earth One, Batman Incorporated, and Swamp Thing). And if that’s not enough, also on hand are regular columnists JERRY ORDWAY (showing you how to work the ORD-way) and Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS, plus another session at “Comic Bootcamp” with BRET BLEVINS and DRAW! editor MIKE MANLEY. NOTE: May contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; suggested for Mature Readers Only.

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Welcome to the Many Worlds of

Donato Giancola

Interview conducted by Mike Manley and transcribed by Steven Tice

DRAW!: I see you had your “open studio”— DONATO GIANCOLA: Yeah, this weekend.

DRAW!: Two of my friends did that a couple of years ago.

How many years have you been doing that now?

DG: On and off for the past twelve years. The typical time I host it is during a local art walk in the fall around October, but this year, because the New York Comic Con happened to be the same weekend as the art walk was, I missed out on having an open house. But I tend to do it about once a year, so it’s a pretty annual thing.

DRAW!: So if you do it during the annual walk, there are other artists’ studios near you that are open?

DG: Yeah, there are hundreds of them, literally—I’m not exaggerating—that are involved. Somewhere on the order of two to three hundred studios in and around the Gowanus area of Brooklyn.

DRAW!: Wow, wow.

DG: Yeah, it’s impressive just how many people are around and contributing art here. That’s not even counting Williamsburg, either.

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DRAW!: Oh, really? Wow. We have one in Philadelphia, and they tend to break it down Broad Street. They do the east side one weekend, and then they do the west side another weekend. Do they do that in New York, where they alternate, or do they do it all at one time?

DG: Well, probably like in Philadelphia, these events are actually run by volunteers, so even though other places have similar kinds of events, they’re all totally run by completely different organizations. There’s no coordination in that sense, and I think the organizers just select a weekend that’s a noncompete with other art walks that are already in existence, so that way they don’t lose out to or take away any of the luster from a preexisting art walk.

DRAW!: What do you get out of opening your studio besides, I guess, potential sales of people coming in and buying something? Do you get something yourself out of that?

DG: Oh, totally. I actually finally vacuumed my studio. [laughter] I get out the Windex and I take the grime of New York City off my windows once every year. I say it jokingly, but, seriously, it’s like, “Wow! It’s been a while since I

cleaned this place.” And I finally organize my—I had a collection of emails that I’ve grabbed from various conventions, having people fill out a form or write in a little book to stay updated, and those have sat in a pile for almost two years now. I finally get around to, like, “Oh, you know what? I’m going to put this data to use. I’ve got to let these people know what I’m doing, put them on my monthly mailing list.” So, as funny as it is, the actual physical walk, the opening up of the studio, is actually just a part of the benefit that I get from hosting this event. These are all parts of running my business that get waylaid, or set aside, I should say, because of the nature of I like painting more than I like marketing.

DRAW!: Well, I’m assuming most artists are like that, even the ones who are fairly organized. You don’t have somebody who helps you with that? You don’t have an intern or assistant?

DG: I have an assistant, Kelley Hensing, and Kelley’s been with me going on, I think, six years now. But she has her own business, and there’s less of her use around the studio as well, as things have changed, and my kinds of clients and my pace of commissions have changed from being heavily commercial with tight deadlines where I needed to get everything done on a fast schedule, to being more open with commissions that are—I’m working on one right now for a limited edition book, so it’s a much looser schedule. So, yeah, I don’t have anyone on a regular basis at this point that I have coming in as often as I used to.

Construct of Time, a 1993 oil painting for the cover of the novel Shadows Fall.

Construct of Time © Donato Giancola

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DRAW!: That’s an interesting point. I often try to cover that in the magazine, because some people are great at drawing, and painting, and creating, and not so good at organizing or the business side of it. But in your case, you just were talking about how your clientele is changing. Is that something that you’re pushing, or is it a result of a combination of marketing forces, like the way the business itself of, say, book illustration is changing? Or is this something where you decided you wanted to kind of get off the deadline horse a little bit?

DG: Oh, I think it’s more coming from my clients’ side. The business itself has changed for—not so much that it’s changed, but the kind of work that they’re commissioning is definitely more digital-based in that sense of speed of execution, and even aesthetically a different look than the high narrative that I execute. I’m very much grounded in focusing on storytelling and lots of figure and environment interaction in my pictures, and cover artwork is now gravitating to be something a little more symbolic and iconic in its structure, and less narrative overall.

Portal, a 2016 oil painting, measuring in at 60" x 40". This is about as close as Donato comes to painting starships.

Portal © Donato Giancola

DRAW!: When I talked to some people at IlluxCon last year, they were saying how that seems to be happening also because they want to be able to continue to manipulate or play around with your image after you deliver it. Like, they may suddenly decide, “Well, maybe this background should all be purple.”

DG: Actually, that stuff happened way in the beginning of my career anyway, the digitizing of the image and the manipulation. This cover I’m working on right now as I’m speaking to you is an oil painting, but in a couple of days I’ll be photographing it, digitizing it, and then modifying that information, that file, in order to send it off to my client. So, in a way, I’m working digitally anyway for the final result to my clients.

The digital medium is really what’s now changing, driving the market. It’s more of an aesthetic change of visuals associated sometimes with digital artwork. The first time I saw one of my covers heavily digitally altered was way back in ’95.

DRAW!: Wow. DG: There you go. I had a cloudy landscape behind a science fiction portrait, and they removed all the clouds and just turned it back into a blue sky in order to simplify the composition so the title could read a little more easily against it.

DRAW!: Wow, so they didn’t even send it back to you. They had somebody at the publisher do that?

DG: Yeah, the art director did it himself. He was fluent enough in Photoshop and was able to execute that. So, yeah, that’s what I’m saying—this goes back to the beginning of my career. And actually, that’s always the case with any kind of image as an illustrator. Your work is going to be modified depending on the needs of the clients, ease for marketing, or layout, or whatever it is that they’re going to do with your artwork.

DRAW!: Right. When I talked to Dave Dorman, he was talking about how people’s perception of you, if you’re “old school,” or you use traditional media versus digital, they assume that you are automatically going to take much longer working traditionally, although a lot of guys are very fast with the traditional.

DG: Yeah. To be honest, I’m not getting called by the people who do see me as being a traditional artist. In a way, I can’t answer that because I’m not even in discussion with those people who might be not providing opportunities for me. I don’t dwell on that, the thing I am not. Even in science fiction and fantasy, I was never an alien creature kind of guy, a starship guy, so there are all these potential commissions that I kind of miss out on by not having starships in my portfolio as a science-fiction illustrator. But I’m just not interested in that.

I think the people who are hiring artists for digital art for that

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DRAW!: Right, because when I was teaching a concept design class, I made little images of my favorite artists, like Frazetta and Moebius, Sid Meade, or whoever, and I was showing the students that you could tell, even at the size of a postage stamp— DG: Oh, who it was, yeah.

DRAW!: Just because of their palette.

DG: Oh, true, yeah.

Amber Prison, an oil painting on paper on masonite done for the Magic: The Gathering trading card game. This was done in 1996, fairly early in Donato’s career.

Amber Prison © Donato Giancola

look, they won’t even consider what I do anyway, so the idea that I’m losing out on a commission isn’t—I guess I don’t even bother thinking about those issues.

DRAW!: So you didn’t go through your Chris Foss phase, where you had your airbrush out and you were painting spaceships flying through space and shooting each other? [laughs] DG: No, no. I looked at a lot of Chris Foss when I was younger. Yeah, I love his artwork and all that, but it just wasn’t—I didn’t do that. By the time I got to be known as a professional, I was so good at working with the human figure that the commissions that I wound up getting were all based around human portraiture, not starships.

DRAW!: I think that also puts you in a more upper echelon, because there’re a lot of guys who can do tech and monsters and stuff, because you don’t judge that in the same way you judge…

DG: Yeah, the human figure. Likenesses are more difficult.

They require a different aesthetic.

DRAW!: Oh, yeah. I just set myself up with an ArtStation, and just looking at the sheer volume of artists there are globally, all spitting out something that’s pretty similar in a way.

That’s the one thing I notice very often with the digital stuff, it almost looks like there’s only one or two art directors. [laughs] DG: Yeah, there are certain digital artists who have very unique styles and flavor, but there’s another huge wave who, yeah, you can’t identify a style. It’s really well-rendered, it looks nearly photographic, and you’re going, “So who is this?

Who is this artist?”

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DRAW!: And when you look at the postage stamp-sized things on ArtStation, you kind of go, “Oh, there’s a whole bunch…” and then, “Oh, here’s one that kind of stands out because the color’s a little bit different.” You teach, too.

You teach in the Illustration Master Class?

DG: Yeah, there are a couple of places. I’ve got the Illustration Master Class coming up in June up in Amherst, and then I also have a class at the School of Visual Arts—that just finished up at the beginning of May. And I host online mentoring with the SmArt School.

DRAW!: Do you talk about that type of thing at all with your students?

DG: What, the idea of style?

DRAW!: Or the aesthetic, I guess. Everybody’s, like, three degrees shifted from the standard fantasy. You know, you’ve got a guy with giant horns and a mech gun. I mean, all the mech stuff is kind of similar, in a way.

DG: The way I teach is focused so heavily on storytelling. I just had a class last night—I do an online class as well—and I kind of weighed in a little bit on technique in that class, which I very rarely do in terms of the nuts and bolts of some of the decision-making process. I’m so focused on telling a story, because I think, in terms of opening up an artist to their future, their creativity, the idea of story is so much more important than the chops that you bring to execute it.

DRAW!: Yeah, that’s true. ArtStation recently had some western theme, and almost all of it seemed like it was digital.

DG: Yeah, something like 98% of it.

DRAW!: And it’s weird. This stuff would show a lot of effort, but then where they would place the key light would actually focus your eye away from the thing that’s important.

DG: The thing that’s important, yeah.

DRAW!: It seems so elemental. Or I’d see really horrible tangents everywhere in the drawing. And it looked like this person spent a thousand hours on this thing.

DG: That’s a great example of mastering the technical facility of the medium but not having anything to say, or not knowing what to say with it.

DRAW!: It seems like sometimes maybe, depending upon their trajectory of learning, that some people don’t learn about tangents, or I don’t know, they didn’t read that chapter in Creative Illustration that Loomis did on Howard Pyle that focuses on all that stuff, like storytelling.

DG: A lot of what’s happening now online with these communities is, you’re seeing people who very quickly can master a technique, because they have access to online information: little how-to videos about how to make this video effect, how to render in SketchUp, or do ZBrush and make a 3-D model of these things. They’re able to achieve a high degree of technical facility with those programs before they kind of mature in their storytelling capability or their desire to have something to say, so you wind up with these really beautiful images from young, new artists that are kind of vacant, I feel, or devoid of the content—at least content that appeals to me. I’m going to be biased, I’m biased toward stories, so almost all of my criticisms and comments are about these issues around story, and some other artists just don’t care about that.

They’re doing their mech guy standing there, and really cool tech and all that, and I’m wondering, “Yeah, what’s happening?

Why am I even interested in this picture?”

don’t, as a general rule, have somebody who’s been around a long time in many places now.

DG: Oh, I think they’re still there. I guess my point would be that it’s the nature of sales that has changed a little bit, because, look, we’re talking about cover art and imagery like that, which speaks to the idea of marketing—“Who’s going to buy this? What are we putting out there for people to buy in-store?” I think it might have less to do with the age of the people who are involved and their awareness of the industry than it does that the industry’s just changed so that everything is even faster. The speed in which people will browse through—even if they go to a bookstore, how long will they spend there, as opposed to what it used to be like? I remember spending hours going through the Strand bookstore looking for things, or browsing through the local bookstores looking for a new novel to read. And that passage of time, and how that time is spent, impacts how to market those books to the audiences who are going to buy them.

DRAW!: Where is he standing? Why is he standing there? I’m just a couple of years older than you, but when we came into the business, you were still dealing with editorial that had been around for, in some cases, 40 or 50 years.

DG: Oh, true.

DRAW!: Those art directors, those editors were focused on story because that was their job, and if your idea wasn’t clear… When I was working at Marvel, you would submit your cover idea, and then the editor would go show it to John Romita.

DG: Ah, interesting.

DRAW!: And if it wasn’t clear, John Romita would do a little sketch and send it back. DC had Ed Hannigan and a couple other people. They had an art director who would look at the covers and go, “This is clear. This is not clear”—some person who had experience in telling a story or selling a story, selling an image or an idea. A lot of places now don’t really have that. It’s almost like there’s a guy or a gal that shifts things from one inbox to the other inbox, but I’m sure at Blizzard and places like that they have art directors because they’re crafting their content very carefully. But it seems you

The Young Master Blacksmith, watercolor pencil and chalk on toned paper. This drawing was done for an auction on the Every Day Original website.

The Young Master Blacksmith © Donato Giancola

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LifeSeeker © Donato Giancola

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(above) The Hobbit: Expulsion, a mammoth 68" x 38" oil painting based on Tolkein’s The Hobbit. (below left) Kvothe at Trebon, a watercolor pencil and chalk drawing based on the Patrick Rothfuss’ novel The Name of the Wind. (below right) The Archer of the Rose, an oil painting for Kathleen Bryan’s novel The Last Paladin.

All artwork © Donato Giancola. The Hobbit © the estate of J. R. R. Tolkein. The Name of the Wind © Patrick Rothfuss. The Last Paladin © Kathleen Bryan.

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on all the covers, to not just keep it consistent, but also the kind of storytelling that I do probably speaks to that audience of readers. And, conversely, it’s not just that I’m old school, but the nature of how that image is consumed is different, likely, than some of the other covers they need.

Going back to this cover that I’m working on now, this is for a limited edition novel. It’s a rerelease of something that’s already been published, and it’s from Grim Oak Press. Shawn Speakman over there does these beautiful limited edition books, but they’re not marketed the same way because the people who are going to buy these limited edition books already know the novel, probably.

So the image on the cover can be slower, can be more sensual and detailed than a marketing image that needs to appear on Amazon at 200 pixels high in order to capture the sales of the book. So, yeah, you’re totally right that clientele is really different.

St. George and the White Dragon, a drawing in watercolor pencil and chalk (above) and a 2010 oil painting (next page).

St. George and the White Dragon © Donato Giancola

DRAW!: So you’re trying to shift more toward doing that, but at the same time, you’re part of the Muddy Colors blog. I don’t know, is it still a blog?

DG: It’s a blog, yeah. It’s more a website. It’s a blog/website/ platform. It started as a blog, so I think we still call it a blog.

DRAW!: I suppose the other thing, too, is that we see so many images every day just through your Facebook or your social media feed. I mean, you literally see thousands of images every day.

DG: Thousands, yeah, that’s right. You’re bombarded. So you have to simplify—you don’t have to, but the choice tends to be to simplify in order to deliver a message so that something gets through to the audiences.

DRAW!: Because it seems like, well, websites were cool, and now websites are kind of…

DG: Old-school. [laughs]

DRAW!: So your clientele, would you say, is focusing on a different speed, in a way, a different way of…

DG: Yeah, actually, that’s kind of true. The jobs that I am executing sometimes are a series. I’m working on a series for Tor books, and the series has been around for ten years now, so they know that’s got to be an older readership for this author’s work, so they can use my style, which has been appearing

DRAW!: The thing is, artists adapt to technology, these platforms, in a variety of ways. You have the younger people who just gravitate toward it because it’s new, and they’re new, and they just go with whatever’s being pushed. And then you have people who are like, “The internet is the devil, and I still will not have a website, and I will not have an Instagram.

Screw Instagram, it’s horrible.” [Donato laughs]

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DRAW!: And then blogs were cool, but now blogs are not.

DG: Yeah. Blogs are old-school now too. So, I don’t know, what do they call it? Social platforms? What’s a good way to call your new blog? [laughs]

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Mother of Dragons: Daenerys Targaryen, an oil painting for the 2015 A Song of Fire and Ice calendar.

Mother of Dragons: Daenerys Targaryen © Donato Giancola. A Song of Fire and Ice © George R. R. Martin.

DG: I’ll tell you, man, Instagram’s been great.

DRAW!: Right, right. And then you have people like you, or me, or a lot of artists in our generation or close to our generation who are trying to figure out how to adapt, because they might have had a blog. How do you adapt to the new technology, which, of course, is constantly changing? Because, remember, everybody was doing Vine for five minutes, then Vine kind of died.

DG: That one zoomed right by me. [laughs] DRAW!: Right. One of the things I’ve noticed probably in

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the last four, five months, there are a lot of artists on Instagram, like Nicolás Uribe—every day he’s doing something.

There are a lot of guys now, every day they’re doing a video of them painting something, or drawing something. There’s a lot of video now.

DG: Oh, the videos. Yeah, that’s been around for a year-anda-half or so, at least from what I’ve seen. That’s really powerful. I don’t go there. I’m just not a video person.

DRAW!: You don’t want somebody over your shoulder hovering with an iPhone taking video?

DG: Actually, I don’t mind that, but I just don’t have someone

to hover over me to video me like that. And I don’t need to share every bit of my creative process to find out it’s enjoyable.

DRAW!: When you and I were teenagers, when a new Frazetta cover or Jeff Jones cover appeared, it was a really special thing, because there wasn’t that much stuff. Now that there is so much stuff, and add to that everybody’s also now making videos, do we exhaust a certain amount of specialness?

DG: Oh, yeah.

DRAW!: I mean, you get a great illustration, and that’s great, but on the other side, there’re a bajillion images now, and now if everybody videos everything they do, at some point is there a drop away from that?

DG: When you’re talking about the video, I’m already done with watching artists paint on their platform. I did the Flash thing, it was really hot, and now I don’t even bother watching anymore, because it’s like, “Yeah, I don’t need that.” How different really is painting whatever you’re doing, technically?

I guess if there’s an artist I’ve never seen doing something new, then that’s kind of fascinating, but the infatuation with having to watch somebody create something, I’m already desensitized to it.

Jack Kirby got to basically work their entire career the same way: a piece of paper, pencil, ink. If you go back even to the 19th century, there are so many amazing painters and craftsmen who basically got to spend their entire life perfecting— DG: One thing.

DRAW!: Right. And now, as a commercial artist, you’re constantly having to alter what you’re doing. You’re still trying to do what you do, like you said, but there’re all these other things that are constantly coming in now, saying, “Oh, no, you’ve got to pay attention to this.” You’re not just learning how to paint silk really, really well. [laughter] DG: Well, that’s a choice that the artist makes, I think. When it comes down to it, it’s not something that’s imposed on them by a client. It’s a choice that the artist has to make about what kind of jobs they’re seeking or what they want to execute, and to stay with that. Since I never really embraced digital execution for illustration, that basically cuts me totally out of doing movie-related work, because that’s 100% digital, or videogame concepting, or image making for those marketplaces.

DRAW!: Since you guys have your blog and everything, do you ever talk about that? I mean, you have a wide variety on your blog of links to great older material, but you’re also staying up to date with the newer stuff.

DG: It’s just participating. I don’t try to do video because someone else is doing video. I’ll do it if I feel like I have something I can share. And the same goes with postings about process. That’s kind of how I’ve guided my marketing and even my choices in what kind of art that I do.

The fact that the clientele has changed a bit, I’m still doing the same thing. The clients have just slowly changed around me as I’m still doing my thing. You’re talking about artists embracing new platforms, new media, new outreach, and all that, and I think that’s what I’ve been doing is staying connected, using Instagram, and Facebook, and the blog of Muddy Colors and such, in order to stay connected to the audiences out there so that I can change my clientele but not change what I’m doing in order to do the art that I love executing.

DRAW!: One of the things I think is probably going to be more for people coming along is that Al Williamson and

Whispering Woods: Jamie Lannister, another oil painting based on A Song of Fire and Ice. Whispering Woods: Jamie Lannister © Donato Giancola. A Song of Fire and Ice © George R. R. Martin.

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The Golden Rose © Donato Giancola

Joan of Arc, a 24" x 42" oil painting. Donato has long been fascinated with Joan of Arc after visiting France early in his career.

Joan of Arc © Donato Giancola

DRAW!: I mean, look, Moebius didn’t do digital, but people still hired him to do concepts.

DG: Yeah, well, you can take an exception. “Michelangelo didn’t have to do that.” [Mike laughs] The highly few exceptional talents, yeah, they get to break the norm. But most everyone else is hired because they have skills within the industry that pertain exactly to the needs of whatever the process of that industry and the development of that which is required. And, actually, Moebius probably wouldn’t even be hired these days. They would probably have someone whose work looks like Moebius and get them to do that rather than having to hire the guy himself. Right?

DRAW!: I suppose that’s true. I would think that, if you’re telling a story and you’re making an image to tell a story, you want people that are really fantastic at telling a story. Whether they use chalk or pixels shouldn’t matter, because, in the end, whatever you do is scanned in, and then it’s a pixel either way.

DG: Right, yeah.

DRAW!: So you don’t have people calling you up saying, “Hey, can you work on this or work on that?” just because you’re more traditional at this point?

DG: Well, I think part of it is that, you kind of caught on it, is I’m telling a story, and I like to tell my own stories, whereas when you’re working on video games or movies, they already have the story. They don’t need you to tell a story. They want you to help visualize the cool creature, or the environment. They don’t want a story, because someone else is telling the story for these worlds. I’m kind of very near

photo-real with what I do, so I don’t have a style that’s a little more unique in that sense. My strength has always been in the realism and the subtlety of portrayal of character and the details in character and face and all that, and that’s not the same of what is needed, at least for video games or concept art or stuff like that.

DRAW!: Yeah, I guess it depends upon where you would plug in, I guess?

DG: Yeah, that’s just it. I don’t plug in well to that system.

Look at, as an example, someone who aesthetically is kind of like what I do: James Gurney, who did Dinotopia. Lucasfilm didn’t bother trying to go to Gurney when they were using his Waterfall City for The Phantom Menace. They just took the pictures out of Dinotopia and said, “Make it look like this.” [laughter] They just cut Gurney out of the loop, and I’d probably get that same way with what I do with my work. People would just bypass me because the nature of how I do what I do isn’t that… I don’t know. I’m not going to go there worrying about how someone would use me. “If I change my technique, then maybe I’d get hired by this industry.” I don’t want to do that.

DRAW!: I think this is very important because there are a lot of younger artists who are faced with, “Well, how do I plug in?” Some people are great renderers. They’re not particularly great storytellers, but if you give them an image to render, they can render the heck out of it.

DG: I’ve seen that certainly on ArtStation. It’s amazing seeing some of that material there.

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Donato painted this Iron Man oil painting as part of the Illustration Master Class.

Iron Man © Donato Giancola. Iron Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

DRAW!: Right. But a career is a long time.

DG: Yeah, it is. Because you know what? When you’ve mastered that program, you’ve mastered ZBrush, you’ve mastered Photoshop, and then guess what the next phase is going to be? 3-D moving environments. Have you mastered that software yet? Because the next 20-something-year-old who’s growing up with it is going to master it better than you, and you’re going to be cut out of the loop of image creation if you rely solely on technical facility to make your work valuable.

You know, being really great at chrome effects or suit design or whatever it is, that’s kind of a dead-end pathway.

DRAW!: Yeah. You had fantasy art, and then geek culture became mainstream culture, so fantasy art became mainstream.

Now everything—Harry Potter, Star Wars—is mainstream.

DG: Right, Iron Man and all that.

DRAW!: Yeah. So you have these giant entertainment factories that need—I mean, we just saw the Avengers movie the other day. Literally thousands of people worked on that movie. Some guy here is doing this, and someone over here is doing this, and somebody is animating this door opening.

There are literally thousands of people, like worker bees in this giant, global hive, making this stuff. You may be one of those worker bees and you may be fantastically happy and fantastically successful, but it seems like you’re much

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more interchangeable than someone doing what you’re doing, which is making your own individual content. That’s something that, within the last five years, can actually be very profitable. If you start generating your own content, and you make enough, it’s possible that you can earn a comfortable living.

DG: Yeah, that’s very true that a lot of those creative people who work in the movies are—look at the sheer numbers, right, and it’s like, “Wow! That’s a huge industry.” But it’s not like those people aren’t creative, it’s just that their choices for making a living, getting a job, that industry probably supports that kind of execution. To be honest, I just got lucky to fall into a business model where I’m given a lot of freedom to explore and embellish with a lot of my own story. I’m really thankful for that chance to be where I am. And like you said, look at all these people who are told, “Okay, you’re going to be rendering Thor’s hair. Animate his hair as he fights in battle, because we’ve got to embellish it beyond the model.”

Someone’s doing that. There are a handful of these hair animators who are excellent at doing that kind of work, and it’s incredible. But going back to your comment about building your own worlds, in a way I’m seeing that desire and a chance to do that even more so now. It’s certainly on my radar about projecting that forward more.

DRAW!: You’re sort of doing two things, because your commercial work is kind of like your personal work, but then

you’re also doing your personal work at the same time, right?

DG: Yeah, I’ve been able to sometimes cross over. When I’m doing a commercial job, I’ll weave in a lot of my own personal aesthetics into that. And literally this morning I was working on a robot painting which is totally self-driven. It’s going to be for auction for Every Day Original. That’s another website I’m a part of and share work with. And as I’m talking to you now, I’m working on a commercial project, if you want to call it commercial, for this book cover. So, yeah, I’m constantly bouncing back and forth between these personal projects and my more commercial style illustration commissions.

DRAW!: Do you block time? Commercial work tends to tell you when, but for your personal stuff, do you say, “I want to spend X amount a time a week researching, drawing…”? Do you break it down into stages?

DG: No, zero. It’s more about motivation. To compare time, I’ve actually put myself under a tighter deadline on my own personal project than I have for this commercial job. The robot that I just about finished this morning, I started painting it, oh, I think it was Thursday last week. Now I’m done. Whereas this book cover, I’ve been picking away at this thing for over a month. [laughs] So that shows that it’s more about the opportunity. With this book cover, my client is not on a tight deadline, so I’m just trying to give him the best possible painting, whereas that robot piece is actually on an auction deadline. It’s got to go up for auction in two-and-a-half weeks, so I had to have that finished and ready to go, because that’s going to come up pretty quick.

DRAW!: When you break down your workday, do you have time where you sketch, or time that you answer your email and do the business side? Do you have a structure, or you just sort of go by however it feels?

DG: Oh, I do have a little bit of a routine. In the morning I’ll do the emails.

I’ll start the day, walk up, see any crisis management I need to do because I’m really slow, as you probably found out, with answering emails. [laughter] Right? I didn’t get back to you until yesterday about the phone interview we should have had on Monday. So, there you go. You’re a living example of my work schedule problems. [laughter] So I’ll start the day doing that, and usually by 10:00 a.m. I like to say, “Okay.

Done. Now into the studio” And emails, the term “emails” is also related to digi-

tal media issues of scanning in artwork, sending digital files, contract execution, business management, and uploading stuff to the website. That’s all woven into that digital time in the morning.

DRAW!: Do you have any “me” time or free time?

DG: Oh, zero. Zero. I already know where you’re going.

Zero. I don’t do really anything for myself that way. It’s strange.

DRAW!: Sometimes after I’ve worked all day, before I go to bed I might sketch or doodle, or I’ll get an idea and I’ll just kind of play around, and then I’m too tired and I’ll go to bed.

You’re generating your own ideas. Are you generating them just as they pop up and then you run and sketch something?

DG: Well, there are certainly some down times, like in evenings if I’m down with the family, but I don’t sit there going, “Okay, I want to make something.” It’s more circumstantial.

If I’m sitting around reading a book and something hits me,

5th Dimension, an oil painting—from Donato’s series of robot paintings and drawings.

5th Dimension © Donato Giancola

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then I might get a sketchbook out a little later, depending how good the book is that I’m reading and whether I’ll interrupt that moment. And almost always, to be honest, I’m so busy with commissions and content that I’m just always working on somebody else’s stuff, or in general. This auction piece for Every Day Original, I had committed to providing a painting for them, so it’s like, “Okay, so now I gotta make it. What am I going to do? Oh, I like robots, so, okay, we’re going to do a robot.” But it didn’t quite start that way. It started off, “I’m going to do a hand painting of Aragorn,” because I love Lord of the Rings—that was the first option that they were going to get. As I was working on that painting, I felt like it wasn’t quite good enough to make a bold statement like I wanted to for this auction. As I was taking my daughter to school one morning, I looked down and I saw this manhole cover, and it was so fascinating, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, wow, I could put a robot interacting with that,” and then immediately, boom! I

had a new idea. When I got home I sketched it out, I started making photographic reference the next day, and within a couple of days, I was working on a new painting. Sometimes with the personal projects, I get a green light feel to say, “This is a really good idea,” and then I kind of put everything else on hold, commercial commissions, other projects, until I execute that idea and bring it out.

DRAW!: You sort of feel like you’ve got the hot hand. You really want to play it out while you feel— DG: Exactly, yeah. Because I know I’ll never make time for it if I have to say, “Oh, three weeks from now I’ll set aside some time,” because then another client might call in that time period, and then I’ll be doing client work instead. So I feel like I sometimes have to just do that hot potato, like, boom! “Here it is. Now’s your chance. Do it now or you’ll never get another chance at it.”

Eowyn and the Lord of the Nazgul, an oil painting and the back cover of Donato’s book, Middle-Earth: Visions of a Modern Myth.

Eowyn and the Lord of the Nazgul © Donato Giancola. Lord of the Rings © the estate of J. R. R. Tolkein.

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DRAW!: Would you say that that is how most of your personal work is created?

DG: You know, it’s not so much that it hits me super-fiery that way all the time, but when I do decide to tackle something—I’ve got a little wall right next to my studio of all these personal little thumbnail sketches of content that I would love to tackle. So it’s more like, let’s say a client suddenly says, “Oh, you know what? We’re moving back a deadline,” or, “We’re taking a little longer with sketches. We’ll get back to you next week.”

If I suddenly have an opening of three to five days in my schedule, I’ll immediately turn to this wall of ideas and work on something in that downtime that’s already been kind of sitting around, floating around in my sketchbook, or in my head.

DRAW!: Is one more important to you than the other? I mean, you can do commercial stuff and feel very satisfied, and you can do commercial stuff and be frustrated, but the wall is purely you.

If you’re constantly feeding the wall…

DG: Actually, the wall also sometimes becomes commercial projects. Sometimes because the ideas are there in such a rough work stage, they’re open to quite a bit of manipulation in their final state and how they can be realized. With any new commercial work I’ll turn to the wall and see, “Can I bring something from my wall into that project?

DRAW!: I think that’s a really awesome thing.

I always bring up guys like Moebius because he did everything it seemed like—he could do movies and whatever—but it was always him.

DG: Oh, yeah, it’s totally Moebius. It’s never anybody else.

Gimli at Helm’s Deep, a drawing based on a scene from Lord of the Rings.

Gimli at Helm’s Deep © Donato Giancola. Lord of the Rings © the estate of J. R. R. Tolkein.

DRAW!: If you can get to the point where you’re always doing you, then people come to you for you.

DG: Right. I should clarify what I meant. This wasn’t the way I worked even just ten years ago. I wasn’t thinking this way.

I’ve really turned on this more personal side of really projecting as much as possible of myself into the work because of the satisfaction. And I can’t render as well as some of those guys on ArtStation. They’re killin’ it! The only way I can trump them is with story, so I’ve got to deliver my story paramount in what I do as an artist.

DRAW!: Was there a point at which you became conscious that story was your thing? Because when you’re a young artist, you’re hungry and you want to get a job, and you do anything because you want to get a job.

DG: Yes, exactly. That’s me in the beginning.

DRAW!: And you go along for a while just working, and you get another job, and another job, and then maybe at some

point you have some frustration, which causes you to stop and think about your particular path you’re on, right? What you’re talking about is a very conscious way of steering your career and your output, and trying to link things in a way that you don’t if you’re just swinging from rope to rope, job to job, job to job, job to job.

DG: I think there were two points in my career that allowed me to do this gearshifting and reevaluation. One was, let’s see, ’98, ’99, so five, six years into my career, so it took a while before I really hit this issue. But when I did, I realized that I was executing doing what the client wanted. They tell you to paint this, interpret this story, use these characters, and so I did it. And, you know, I had a good career with that. But I also realized I wanted to do something—I wanted to be like Moebius and really get known for the art that I’m creating, not for being a renderer or an executor for these companies. And so, in ’98, ’99, I made a big creative leap those two years, and it was amazing looking back at what happened. While I was doing it, I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew that I was using more abstract design, a different kind of storytelling, a desire in the images. And when I look back, it’s just amazing the quality

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level of what I was producing, on a consistent basis, was way above what I was doing just a year before.

DRAW!: Was there a particular job that— DG: No, that’s just it, there wasn’t. I equate to a couple different working issues. It’s when I started using toned paper to do all my sketches rather than working on white paper. I know that sounds a little weird, but working on toned paper forced me to work more in value and think about lighting in my work instead of just doing outlined. Kind of the reason we’re even talking is that I loved comics. I grew up consuming comics like crazy, and reading and knowing about all these artists: John Buscema, Bill Sienkiewicz, John Byrne, George Pérez, Walter Simonson… and these are all heroes of mine. And also story was so intertwined with what I did as an artist, copying comic art, making my own. My point is that line was so heavily the way I thought. Everything was outline, everything was like a wire frame contour around things, and that changed that year when I started working on toned paper and using a little more abstraction in my designs. That was a huge cognitive and technical leap in my work.

DRAW!: Which is funny, because you think of something like toned paper, well, that’s such a very simple—it’s not like you’ve made some incredible process of layering some weird surface on your paper or something.

DG: Yeah, you’d think I’d conquered a major technical hurdle. No, it’s just using toned paper. I’m not sure if that was it entirely, but when I look back at my sketchbooks, what I have, that was the same year that I had toned sketchbooks for the first time. That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t know at the time what it was that was really making this change. I wasn’t aware of the fact that I was even making a conscious change to do something different, but it very severely impacted the quality in a very positive way for what I was doing.

A 1984 drawing of Iron Man. Iron Man © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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DRAW!: Well, I find that very interesting, because people always ask us, as artists, “How do you come up with ideas?

Where do you get ideas?” And your idea came from working.

DG: Yeah, just doing it. Just do it. Just do it. That’s what I tell my students so often is, “I can give you all this advice, talk about technique, and this is how you render skin tones, but there’s no substitute for just being in the battlefield and doing it. So just learn. It’s like driving a car. You can watch all the videos you want of driving a car, but there’s nothing like being on a road as you’re having to negotiate all of that with all the distractions and stuff.”

DRAW!: Would you say that was also affected by working with Vince Desiderio?

DG: Watching him?

DRAW!: Yeah, I mean, because his thing is all very personal.

DG: Oh, it is. You know, his visuals, his way of thinking really didn’t hit me until a handful of years ago, of really projecting that sensibility. Because I started working with him as an assistant back in ’93, back, literally, when I’d just moved to New York City. It’s just amazing being around him, but I didn’t implement a lot of his aesthetics because I didn’t want to copy him, as well. I didn’t want to be a mimic to Vince. It was just that I wanted to do something a little different with my work.

That gets us to the second phase of the big major turning point, and that’s where Vince was more of a player in that second phase, where, now that I had technical capabilities that I had never dreamed of, like being able to render and bring things to life that I never thought I ever could, then that’s when the idea of personal stories, like what Vincent does, and what I wanted to try to communicate— DRAW!: Because now you had the technical narrative, as he calls it.

DG: Right. Technical narrative is the actual, physical process of the painting—the surface, the look of the painting. For me, my technical narrative capabilities finally reached the level where I felt like I was really in command of what I was doing in terms of technical rendering, detailed rendering, and then I could now do something new.

DRAW!: You’re doing your personal work, you’re doing commercial work, you’re doing your collaborative thing with the Muddy Colors and everything. Do you get time to still go to the gym, so to speak? [Donato laughs] The art gym.

DG: I live and breathe what I do as an artist. In a way, I do the gym through my daughters. One of my daughters loves playing soccer right now, so I make sure I’m at almost every one of her games. When she was a little younger, I used to referee the games, and help out with coaching, as well. We also live in a four-story brownstone. My studio is on the top floor. I get my stairs in every single day answering that doorbell! Is that what you’re getting at, the personal lifestyle choices I make?

The Mechanic, a revised preliminary drawing (top) and the finished oil painting, done for a tutorial DVD. The Mechanic © Donato Giancola

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A page of Donato’s abstract design sketches for Grim Oak Press’ limited edition printing of Naomi Novik’s novel Uprooted.

Drawings © Donato Giancola. Uprooted © Naomi Novik.

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Drawings for Grim Oak Press’ illustrated limited edition printing of Naomi Novik’s novel Uprooted.

Drawings © Donato Giancola. Uprooted © Naomi Novik.

DRAW!: Yeah, and also, it’s one thing to work and produce, but as artists, we’re always attracted to other art, so there’s also that consumer part. You are not just a generator of art, but you’re also a consumer of art. Do you still consume it? Do you consume it in a different way than you did, say, in your 20s?

DG: I don’t read nearly as much science fiction as I used to.

I still do, I’m just more selective over what I’m reading these days.

DRAW!: Do you think that’s good, maybe a natural process?

DG: Ah, no, I think it’s just my own personal aesthetics. I guess my point is, the reason why I do that is I set aside so little time to sit back and relax or enjoy anything, so when I do, I just want to have something of quality that I’m consuming when I do that. I still go to quite a few shows here in New York, see a bunch of exhibitions, but I’m not seeing things nearly on the same pace like I used to. I used to just go out every Friday night and see whatever was out in the galleries, just walk around, wander the galleries, find stuff, seek stuff out. I just don’t have that free time like I used to to do that kind of searching and discovery.

DRAW!: Well, I suppose that’s good. Maybe if you did, you wouldn’t be doing your own work.

DG: Yeah, I know. It’s kind of a tradeoff.

DRAW!: One of the things I really loved the most about your

work is that the drawing is so great and vital, the foundation.

Can you talk about that process from thumbnail to drawing, then the drawing and where the photos come in? You are not photobashing, but you do use photos as a drawing aide.

DG: Drawing is the foundation of everything I do. I credit my passion for comics with that. Layout the shapes, tell a story, get the emotional content established in the work, then seek out the details to flesh it out, make it real. My abstracts, others call them thumbnails, are the absolute beginning phase of 99% of my images. If I can’t get it to work with these basic shapes and values—and these are worked up on that toned paper ground with pencil and white chalk—then I don’t move forward.

From there a large rough drawing is created as I test my concept, bring a bit more design and information to the game as I see what these abstracts will become as the image grows larger, more complex. These tend to be about page size, 8" x 10" or 11" x 14". When that is played out, and those roughs were still worked from my imagination with little or no references, then I turn to observations and photos as additions to the development.

So basically, references come on as a final veneer to my story, the concept. But I’m also open even at this stage for what nature and references can add to the resolution. Your mind can only make up so much… nature can blow you away big time with something you have never seen, imagined, or planned! I love it when the model or observation from life does that. It’s like baking a cake and nature hands you a lovely strawberry jam layer to slide in the middle as a wonderful surprise!

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THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY, AND THE

ORDWAY !

BREAKING DOWN ACTION by JERRY ORDWAY

Caricature by Rachel Ordway

I

was asked to participate on Action Comics #1000, which or digital clean-up on a page. Extra work, but I can fix bits doubled as an 80th birthday promotion for the character of drawing that bother me, like shrinking a head that looks a of Superman. I wrote and drew many well regarded sto- tad big, or raising or lowering a figure that isn’t following my ries for the character in the 1980s and 1990s and was up for the perspective plane.

I always tell aspiring artists that thumbnail sketches don’t challenge of revisiting the Man of Steel, teaming with writer Louise Simonson on a five-page story sequence as artist. need to be legible, so long as you can figure out what you When we’d worked on the characters scribbled! I’m not looking at referyears back, we’d worked “plot style”— ence at this stage, I’m only interested in meaning there was a broad outline prepanel flow and building in space for the pared, generally with individual page dialogue balloons and captions. If you breaks, and the artist was free to adapt zero in on the lower half of the sketch the story visually. Dialogue balloons for page 2, you can see how loose the were then written based on the penciled drawing is. Superman is stopping a train, pages that the artist came up with. This but I’m focused on deciding out how is always my preferred method to work, to break down the actions. Pages 3 and but times change, and most comic scripts 4 are even less defined, though they do help me in setting up the action in the now include full panel descriptions and dialogue. tighter prelims that follow. The final note on the thumbnails is that I believe they’re With Louise’s “full script” (descriptions and dialogue included), though, I a necessary stage in the whole process. still had the freedom to add to or interI’ve done them one by one before, going pret the story, as she would revise the from thumbnail to prelim to finish on a dialogue after seeing my finished art. single page at a time, but I prefer to work Another thing to note is that in the old in sequences of several pages on a londays, if you intended to ink your own ger or standard 20-page story. They help prepare you for what comes ahead in a pencils, you still needed to draw some form of pencils or a layout so that the Superman © DC Comics script, and I’ve had scripts where you get writer could supply dialogue for the to page 6 only to find there was an addipage, which had to be given to a lettering specialist to hand- tional character in the scene that wasn’t mentioned in pages letter onto the page before you could ink or finish the line art. 1–5, in which case I would have had to go back and insert that That impediment doesn’t exist now as the lettering is added character into the already finished pages. So, thumbnails are digitally onto the inked pages, which are uploaded to and necessary; they help you wrap your head around what the story retrieved from a server or storage site. It’s much easier to con- requires, and can force you to look for plot holes or important trol what you turn in to the editor, from making digital edits details a writer may have neglected to state up front.

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Superman © DC Comics

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PAGE 1 As I had not previously drawn Superman in the current continuity, I tried to familiarize myself with the reference provided to me by the editor. As I worked on the first page, set in the Daily Planet, I realized I needed more to bring me up to date on newsrooms, so I contacted a friend who works for a great metropolitan newspaper, to possibly have him take a few quick pics of his workplace and desk. With some real-world details, I was confident to proceed. For the purpose of this story, which required constant visual clues as to the time in each panel, I had to show various clocks counting down the minutes until Clark Kent’s deadline while he solves several problems as Superman.

When drawing my prelims, I am planning to ultimately use them as my pencils, so I try to draw them tightly detailed.

They will be scanned and printed out on good Bristol drawing paper later to be inked. I print my bluelines on an Epson Stylus Photo 1400, which handles paper widths up to 13 inches and takes a sheet of 2-ply Bristol paper pretty well. This machine cost $400 several years back and has six separate color ink cartridges, so you only need to replace the cyan if you mainly do bluelines, which is handy, as opposed to a printer with all the color tanks grouped in one cartridge.

(top) Jerry’s preliminary sketch for page 1 of his Action Comics #1000 story. (above) Jerry’s printer and the freshly printed blue lines for page 4. (right) Jerry’s finished inks for page 1.

Superman © DC Comics

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Superman © DC Comics

PAGE 2

As I got to page 2, I looked through my reference file for elevated trains and subway cars. Finding the results disappointing, I went to the internet and searched for elevated trains in Brooklyn, which would approximate the look I needed for Metropolis’ Suicide Slum location. I recalled that I once shot a cellphone picture of the inside of our commuter train’s control booth, which showed enough detail for me to create the view that Superman sees with his telescopic vision in panel 3 (above).

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PAGE 3

Superman © DC Comics

On page 3 the train derailment is prevented, which leads Superman to the street below him where his friend Bibbo is being robbed. Bibbo is a character I created based on a tough old guy in my neighborhood when I was growing up, and three punks are not going to intimidate him! He’d take them all on if they weren’t armed! Enter Superman and his bulletproof body! The previously mentioned Brooklyn elevated train reference search yielded a few good street-level photos for me to grab details from. I’ve rarely used reference “cold,” meaning I avoid tracing. I try to build off perspective points, which always helps to place the characters on the correct plane in the drawing. To each his own, I have no issues with anyone using reference cold, I just prefer to use the reference to inform the drawing. If you trace a photo, it can sometimes stand out from the other panels as too realistic, unless of course you trace photos for the whole job to get a consistent look.

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Superman © DC Comics

PAGE 4

On page 4, that first panel has so much going on—with Bibbo swinging his bank bag and Superman melting multiple weapons with his heat vision—that my goal was to try to get it all drawn and then finesse it when I scanned it for blueline. I rescaled elements in that one panel with Photoshop, as I had drawn Bibbo and his opponent larger than the others. I often look at the scanned prelim and move things around or rescale elements to ensure there is adequate space for the word balloons. It may seem like a lot of fiddling, but I appreciate having a good layout done before I ink. Drawing the prelims at print size and then enlarging them to the 10" x 15" dimension for the blueline printing ensures some rough edges, so the inking isn’t as boring to me. I don’t wish to simply follow perfect lines, even my own. In the example to the right, you can see that I inked the last panel first, likely because that first panel still scared me. I inked the panels in this order: panel 5, 2, 4, 3, and finally 1, when I was warmed up! I believe I played with that first panel after I inked and scanned it too. Is it perfect after all the fussing? Nah. But it’s as good as I could make it while still getting the job in on time.

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Superman © DC Comics

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PAGE 5

Jerry realizes he’s left his journalist friend out of his prelims, and so adds him into panel 3 of page 5, though the panel will need to be adjusted before the blueline is printed.

On to page 5. You’d think things would be rolling along fine, heading to the finish line, and for the most part that is true. Deadlines are a lot like pushing a boulder up a steep hill. You struggle and struggle until you get to the peak, and then it’s downhill to the end. In this case, the layout was straightforward for a tight little story like this— until I realized I had run out of space to draw my reporter friend (who had supplied me with the newsroom reference photos) into the comic! I admit I almost left him out, but working the way I do, I was able to adjust the prelim (see right) when I scanned it to move him into the live area of panel 3.

I also drew way past my page margin on that last panel, because I didn’t want to end the story with a tight, cramped panel arrangement.

Superman © DC Comics

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Jerry shrinks the figures in panel 3 of his prelim in order to squeeze his journalist friend into the panel on the finished page.

Superman © DC Comics

When I first started out as a penciller, I had a bad habit of not leaving enough dead space for the writer to place dialogue balloons, etc.

In the early years, I drew my layouts at full size on tracing paper and then used a lightbox to trace them onto the drawing paper. I always wished I had some kind of copier to reduce those layouts down about 20 percent to give the panels some breathing room. My 20-some-year-old self would be amazed at the technology available to individuals now, but remember, it’s still all about the drawing and doing the best you can with the tools available to you. No one work method works for everyone, and sometimes you need to tear your approach down and start fresh, if only to keep you on your toes!

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GEORGE PRATT

Artwork © George Pratt

ILLUSTRATION ACE

Interview by Mike Manley Transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington

DRAW!: How are you today?

GEORGE PRATT: Good! School’s out, no more classes.

DRAW!: Yeah, I just attended the annual student exhibition at the academy last night, because yesterday was graduation day at PAFA [Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts]. All the third-year certificate students, the fourth-year certificate and BFA students, and the second-year Masters students get to show, so it was a very good show. Do you guys have the same type of thing at Ringling?

GP: Yeah, we have the senior shows—they put all their work up. The only problem is, they don’t give them a whole lot of space. Where it used to be this sort of free-for-all, which

was really cool, and they could design the space however they wanted—some of it looked horrible, granted, but some of it was really fun because you got a feeling for the unique outlooks and points of view of the different students. They could hang large paintings and stuff like that, and now it’s so small, the amount of space they’re given, almost everything has to be a print. It’s just blanderized the whole process, which is sort of sad, because there’s not a lot of traditional work being put up, and that’s disappointing. We have our own painting department within our department, and we push that whole traditional mindset. We force them to get those skills.

DRAW!: You’re in the Illustration department, correct?

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The drawing begins as a pen-and-ink sketch, then George paints over the sketch with watercolor.

Artwork © George Pratt

GP: Correct.

DRAW!: So you have an Illustration department and a Fine Art department?

GP: Yeah. The Fine Art department has very few students these days. Our department is the largest one on campus. We have upwards of 500 students just in our own department.

Next is Computer Animation, and then Gaming. There’s a new one coming up they’re just starting, and that’s the Virtual Reality department. But we are the largest.

DRAW!: And this is Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida?

GP: Yes. Down south of Tampa. It’s nice here.

DRAW!: How many years have you been there?

GP: Man, it’s twelve years I’ve been here, I think.

DRAW!: And you were teaching in New York before that, right?

GP: Yeah, I taught at Pratt Institute and then the Joe Kubert School, and I did per diem teaching for Marshall Arisman and his Master’s program [at the School of Visual Arts]. I was also one of the advisors for that program, off and on, for students. Then in ’98 I moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and didn’t do any teaching until I taught a ten-week stint at SCAD in Savannah. My first day was 9/11.

DRAW!: Oh, geez!

GP: Yeah, it was horrible. My son was only one year old then, and he and my then-wife were in Chapel Hill. It was freaky.

Later I taught for three, maybe close to four years at Virginia Commonwealth University, and that was a bit of a long commute. That was when Greg Spalenka called, and he was like,

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“Oh, man, I’m going to be in your neck of the woods.” He was doing the Illustration Academy in Richmond. And that’s actually how I started teaching at Virginia Commonwealth.

They saw me do my dog-and-pony and hit me up.

I just wanted to see the Academy, because I’d heard so much about it. Greg talked to John English [co-founder of the Illustration Academy], and John said, “Have him come up. I’m not going to pay him or anything [laughter], but have him come up if he wants to scope it out, and I’ll get him a hotel room.”

So I came up, and John and I hit it off immediately. We had a blast, and he had me take over the drawing session one night. I was working on the Wolverine: Netsuke series at that point, so I had one of the covers I’d just finished, and I brought that. But John wanted me to keep coming back each year.

After Richmond we moved it down here to Ringling’s campus. Ringling saw me do my dog-and-pony, and they headhunted me from Virginia Commonwealth. I was on tenure track at that point, but I was actually happy to leave.

The tenure thing was so onerous, having to sit and validate my existence every time I turned around. I was like, “I should be teaching instead of sitting around doing this stuff.” Ringling doesn’t have tenure; it’s just a yearly contract. But if you’ve been here long enough, it’s pretty much like tenure. I’ve been here ever since. And I still do the Academy in the summers, but that’s now back up in Kansas City.

DRAW!: So the Illustration Academy was originally in Richmond, Virginia?

GP: Well, it was originally in Liberty, Kansas. And then it might have moved into Kansas City, but then it went down to Richmond, and that’s when I got involved. It was an offshoot. The original inception of the Illustration Academy was the Illustrators Workshop, which was Mark English, Bernie Fuchs, Bob Peak, Alan Cober, Fred Otnes, and Robert Hein-

Next, George applies an ink splatter technique. Finally, George goes in with white to clean up the background and highlight details.

Artwork © George Pratt

del. That gave us people like Anita Kunz, Chris Payne, and that gang, which is really cool. Anita and Chris, for the longest time, both taught there—Chris still does. This year we have a ton of people coming. We have Brad Holland, Gary Kelley, Mark English, myself, John English, Ted Kinsella, Jeff Love, Bill Sienkiewicz, Chris Payne…

Mark English started the Illustrators Workshop, and later he and his son, John, started the Illustration Academy. Now his son pretty much runs it. Mark is there and we go to his studio every year, which is just amazing. You go down in his basement and it’s History of Illustration 101. [laughter] It’s really cool.

The thing about it is everyone does demos. It’s a five-week summer program. The way it works is, at 9:00 in the morning it begins. Whoever is the illustrator of record gives a presentation, talks about their career and what they’re up to, and then they give an assignment that they come up with. And that whole week is heavy on process: ideation, thumbnails, tonal plans—we shoot reference, and all that—color studies, and then execute the final. It’s heavy on that front end. They have maybe two or three days to get that finish done, and that’s generally over the weekend. While everybody’s working there are demonstrations and break-out sessions where we talk about certain aspects of what we do. It’s a lot of one-on-one contact with the instructors. We’re all in one room together.

DRAW!: Well, that’s great, because one of the issues in many schools is that there are not enough demos.

GP: I agree.

DRAW!: I just had an experience with my assistant, Mimi.

One of her teachers was going over something she had done and said, “That figure doesn’t look quite right,” but was unable to do a drawing or to work on the illustration to help

her improve it. Of course, as my assistant, when I work with her, I do the tracing paper or draw right on top of everything.

That’s the best way; it’s what you would want. If you went to the Kubert School, you would love to have Joe come up and go, “No, like this,” and take the pencil and show you how to do something rather than say, “There’s something off about that. I’m not sure what it is, but…”

GP: When I was at school, no one did demos. The only person who did demos was Barron Storey, and that was a godsend because that was a wake-up call for me. When he came in he sort of exploded in class—I remember the first demo. He said, “This is a piece of typing paper. Do you know how much abuse this piece of paper can take?” And he sat down and showed us how much abuse you could actually put a piece of paper through. And it was life-altering. “Oh, my God. This is what I need!” Barron and later connecting with Jeff Jones and going out landscape painting with him, that was my Academy.

And calling up Burt Silverman out of the blue, and him allowing me to come over, and he did a little watercolor demo for me—that was my Academy. Without it, it would have been an even longer row to hoe to try and figure this stuff out.

Kent Williams and I, in our junior year, flipped into Fine Art, wrongly thinking, “It’s called Drawing and Painting,” which is what we wanted to do. Big mistake.

DRAW!: This was at SVA? GP: No, Pratt Institute. That was a huge mistake. They didn’t teach us anything. They literally didn’t teach us how to paint.

So we just went out landscape painting all the time and figured it out. We were painting with Jeff Jones at that time too, which was a wake-up call, because we’d been trying to imitate his look, and what he was getting out of his paint. It looked so subtle, but man, he beat the hell out of a canvas. We were like, “Ohhh, okay.” You see it happening. That one-on-one is

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A drawing from one of George’s sketchbooks done in pencil, crayon, and ink wash.

George: “Observational drawing is incredibly important, and is how I’m able to effectively use photographic reference. I work very directly in my sketchbooks and carry an odd assortment of pens, pencils, etc. I switch instruments fairly frequently trying to keep myself on my toes. If I stick with something too long I get complacent and go on overdrive or autopilot. If I’m using, say, a pencil, I’ll switch to something blunt like a crayon. What was working so well for the pencil won’t work for the crayon, forcing me to “be there” and create a different mark-making language. In all my work I revel in not knowing what’s going to happen. I love the act of discovery with the work revealing itself to me. The happy accident is a real and integral aspect of creating art for me.”

Artwork © George Pratt

absolutely vital, I believe, but not every teacher does it. A lot of teachers won’t do it. Which is fine. I have to tell students all the time—they complain about certain instructors, “Well, they don’t do demos.” I tell them, “You know, that’s not part of the job description.”

DRAW!: I find that very odd. I had teachers at the academy who drew or painted in the class with the students every week.

Then I had teachers who never, ever, ever did a demo. They would give you a problem to solve, and then they’re basically like monitors. They’ll be there to make sure you show up for class. They’ll come around and give you a crit, but a lot of stu-

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dents look at the crit as you being critical of them as a person. “Oh, by the way, Billy, you suck.”

But really the crit is an information exchange process where you’re saying, “Well, this isn’t working, but if you do it like this, or you try that, or you make your paint like this, or the arm does this…” It’s a way of giving the student information, not a way of just saying, “You suck.”

GP: Exactly. The funny thing is, during the crits, how many people turn off. It’s not just about your crit, it’s this entire process, and if you can see issues in other people’s work, maybe you can be honest enough with yourself to see issues in your own work. The first thing I do in class when they bring in an assignment that I’ve given them, I tell them, “You know the drill,” and I leave. I go get a cup of coffee. [Mike laughs] Their job is to go through the pieces and line them up, most effective to least effective. That’s their job. I’m like, “Do it.

I’m outta here.” They sit there and they haggle over it. And they’re like, “I can’t believe you’re making us do this.” I tell them, “You need to be able to understand what’s working and what’s not working. I can tell you all day, but if you don’t actually see it and make your own decisions on this, you’re never going to get it. This is not about, ‘He’s great and you suck’. It’s not a personal thing. It’s all about the work. This is all about what’s most effective and what’s least effective. It’s not a slap on the wrist to anybody.

This is why we’re here, and you need to learn what works and what doesn’t, and how do you make it better, because everybody has room for improvement. Everybody.” At first they’re uptight about it, but I think it’s a valuable lesson that they have to make those choices. And I’ll go through after they’ve done it, and I’ll say, “Well, I’ll move this over, and this is why I think it’s more effective than this other one you set in front of it.” I’ll do my own little bit of rearranging. Not all the time, because sometimes they’re really on. But it really helps.

DRAW!: I find that one of the two or three biggest steps, is when you go from being refrigerator-worthy for your grandma, to being the best kid in your class amongst your peers, to being in college being carried by the momentum of the teachers, to then being a young working professional and being honest enough to evaluate your work on your own, which you have to do then for the rest of your career. And if you cannot be honest—“Why is that person getting work? I'm better than that person!” [George laughs] The grouse, which everyone does, I suppose, to some degree, but the reality is you’re probably not being honest about where you are and the strengths and weaknesses in your work.

GP: When you and I came up, it was a very different world.

We grew up reading all this stuff, loving comics and magazine covers and whatnot. But other than the odd Rocket’s Blast [Mike laughs] or Comic Buyer’s Guide, until Mediascene or Comics Scene there was nothing devoted to revealing the secrets. We were sort of left on our own, and it was like, “Well, I’m just going to try to figure this out.” I knew as a kid I was a fanboy, but I knew I wanted to be a professional. I could look at Bernie Wrightson, and I could look at Jeff Jones, and [Michael] Kaluta, and Neal Adams, Al Williamson—you can go through the list. I knew it was hard, but I never deluded myself into thinking I was anything other than what I was—a fanboy who wanted to do it. These kids today—and I sound like the old fart; I get it—but the social media, as cool as it is, I think is the new refrigerator door. There are people who are just as bad as you are who are patting you on the back and telling you how great you are. They don’t have a real sense of where they belong.

DRAW!: There are certain people in social media, like Loish and people like that, who have a million people following them. I could go post a mermaid drawing today—I did a quick sketch today—and suddenly 10,000 people could “like” that drawing.

GP: [laughs] I’ve never had 10,000 people like something I posted.

tion. Your stuff is great, but some 15-year-old kid might copy a Disney face and get way more likes. What is this whole “like” thing going to turn into? Because it’s not even what it was three years ago.

GP: Yeah, we talk to the students about this. The numbers are interesting, but what does it really translate into, and how do you monetize that? What I’ve read, if you get 1% of your followers to pay, you’re doing really good. Yeah, if you have a million followers, and you can get 1% of them to shell out, you can do great, but it’s such an iffy proposition.

I don’t know if you know @georgedrawing, George Cwirko Godycki, on social media. He’s got a zillion followers. He’s amazing. He teaches here now at Ringling. He’s a great guy.

He’s like Moebius; it’s this automatic drawing. Man, he’s got a zillion followers, but he hasn’t done anything with it yet.

He’s working it up. He’s going to do something with it and it’s going to be huge. But he’s figured it out. A lot of it is he does these videos of him drawing from life, and they’re really cool. He seems to have hit a nerve. And if he reposts any of your stuff, your numbers go up immediately, but he hasn’t monetized it. The numbers are great, but what do you do with it? Where do you take it, and how do you mold it so it’s more than just pats on the back?

DRAW!: There’s this whole new game afoot, because it’s also affecting the universities and art schools. A lot of people just like to hear little tricks. “This is how you draw a shiny nose,” you know? “This is how you draw anime hair.” What they want to do is, “Oh, I don’t like the way I draw anime hair. I’m going to go on YouTube. Oh! Here’s how to draw

DRAW!: That’s the thing. We’re in this weird time. When I talk to my students, I tell them, “I came from Pangaea.

That land mass that I came from as a young artist no longer exists. The ways in no longer exists. But at the same time, the benefit of social media is, even if you’re only 20 years old, you can post a drawing that everyone in the world with a computer can see,” which is far greater than the number of people who might see any drawing we could have put in The Comics Journal or on the cover of Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector. Maybe a couple thousand people at most would ever see anything we did like that. Now you can have tens of thousands of people see your stuff, but where does that give you anything that’s really honest, because it’s so easy for people to “like”. You just click the button.

There’s no investment in it. They didn’t spend any money to buy it. They didn’t even hunt it; it was pushed to them by the platform.

And then you hear that there are people making a fortune off of their own IP, their own images, skipping the whole process, and basically being validated and vetted by social media, and then there are people getting hired by game companies or whatever Lug Nuts—a pen and ink drawing. because they have a high level of recogni- Artwork © George Pratt

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More from George’s sketchbooks.

These were done with gel pens and watercolors.

Artwork © George Pratt

cool anime hair!” [George laughs] And it’s not how to think of the big picture. Art is long—it’s your whole life. You may be doing something 20 years from now that you’re not even thinking of doing today. But they’re interested in these little tricks they can watch, and it gives the illusion of knowledge, but it’s not connected.

GP: Yeah, you can’t put it all together. It’s unique to that one little moment in time for you. And I get it too. Man, if I was a kid now, I’d be all over this stuff. Watching anyone draw— unless they’re just really bad—is magical. Watching someone else makes it look so easy. I can sit and watch people draw all day.

DRAW!: Me too.

GP: So I totally get it, but what I see as a teacher, and it’s something we as a faculty continuously talk about, is they’re not inquisitive. I mean, I’m generalizing obviously. There are some who are, and they’re the ones that make it all worth-

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while. But on the whole, they’re not inquisitive. They don’t understand the hunt, the feel-good of actually discovering something. They’re not hungry in the way we were. And the big difference is, at least from what I’ve seen, that it’s all about jobs. As a fanboy, I wanted to be a comic book artist, so there was that idea of working for the comic book companies, but it was never about just the job—it was the work. It was the line quality, having the gestures—the whole ball of wax—and they don’t have that at all. It’s weird. It’s all about the job.

And I keep telling them, “This is one of the hardest jobs. You have to show up not just as a warm body in a chair.

You have to show up mentally as well as physically to make this work.

And if you don’t absolutely love drawing or painting, it’s not worth it. There are other jobs you can make better money at, and not even have to show up mentally. They get really pissed off at me when I bring it up. “I can’t believe you’re trashing on it.”

I’m not trashing on it. “You want to work at these companies, and I get that. But why do you want to be a pair of hands when you could be the person hiring pairs of hands for your own IP? Why don’t you want to be the creator?” That’s what I don’t get.

DRAW!: The last five years especially, everybody wants to be either a character designer or a concept artist.

A few people still want to do comics. There are more artists alive working today than ever in the history of the world to this point. There are tens of thousands of 14- to 25-yearolds, and every one of them is saying, “I want to be a concept artist,” or “I want to be a character designer.” There are not tens of thousands of concept or character designer jobs in the world.

GP: And 99% of those people who want that don’t seem to understand the importance and value of learning how to draw or paint. If you want to be a concept artist, you’ve got to learn how to paint. You’ve got to learn how to draw. You’ve got to be able to put it all together. It’s not just a matter of drawing G.I. Joe and putting accoutrements on him. You’ve got to be able to put him into a space. You want to make yourself indispensable. You want them to hire you for your brain as well as what you can do with a pencil and a brush. You have to be able to put it all together, and they can’t. They don’t see the rewards in that.

DRAW!: I think the reality is, that’s a very rare skill, to be able to put a figure into an environment. In fact, almost all classes boil down to being able to put a figure into an environment. You’re just doing it from different points of view if you’re an animator or a fine art painter or a sculptor—we’re all putting the figure into some form of environment or having it interact with an environment. And every discipline you’re learning is contributing to your ability to be able to manipulate the figure in space somehow. In the older analog world, you couldn’t do that without the manual skills necessary.

GP: The fine motor skills.

DRAW!: Right. You had people who were able to do that in more or less interesting ways. [Frank] Frazetta could do it in a very interesting way. [Norman] Rockwell could do it in a super-interesting way because his thinking was at such a high level that his thinking was actually better than his drawing—and his drawing was fantastic. The ability to be able to project at such a high level the solving of a complicated issue in a unique way is what put him above everybody else.

That’s what made Frazetta so strong, because there were a lot of other guys who could paint as well as he did, and in some cases technically even better than he did, but they couldn’t come up with that cool way of solving a problem. I think the immediacy of everything today almost works against that old way of developing that skill, because everybody just wants to jump to the end. “I’m going to use this filter. I’m going to watch this video. I’m going to use this program, and that’s going to give me that skill,” but you still have to go to the art gym to see how it all connects.

GP: You have to put the time in.

DRAW!: I don’t remember where I read it, but when I read that Frazetta used Japan driers, I was like, “That’s it! Japan driers! I’ll just go get some Japan driers, and then…” [George laughs] That was going to be some magic liquid I could add to my oil paint.

GP: [laughing] The magic elixir.

DRAW!: I had no idea he’d been classically trained by Michel Falanga. He’d been getting training since he was a kid, which was a leg up. But a lot of those older guys did; they started out as apprentices. The apprenticeship has sort of been replaced now by videos.

GP: Yeah, and not hands-on. It’s very different too, in that they’re looking at these things, and no one’s cracking the whip. There’s no one giving them tasks that are geared towards helping their problem areas. They’re just willy-nilly grabbing up bits of information. The drawing ability is pretty amazing a lot of times, but there’s also this weird soullessness that comes out of a lot of it, because it’s all same-y. They’re not going to the source, they’re going to the copy of the copy of the copy. They’re not saying, “Well who was this guy looking at? And who was that guy looking at?” You keep going on down the line until you get to the wellspring and bring it all back forward, but they’re not doing that.

Nun, pencil and white gel pen—from George’s sketchbooks.

Artwork © George Pratt

DRAW!: Was there a moment when you were developing as a younger artist, an “aha!” moment when you were able to connect something.

GP: I was a big [Alphonse] Mucha fan as a kid, and I could definitely see the connections between Craig Russell and Kaluta and Barry Smith, and the pre-Raphaelites. I could see those connections. I didn’t know how deep they ran because there was very little on those guys until The Studio book came out, then it was like, “Oh my God!” When I got to New York, one of the first people I called was Kaluta, and he said, “Come on over.” I got there at eight in the morning, and I didn’t leave until eight that night. [Mike laughs] We were on the floor, and he was pulling out Alphonse Mucha books—and this was before there were the really super Mucha books. It might have been Bob Gould, I forget, but they had photos of Mucha’s Slav Epic stuff they had shot in color. Mind-blowing. Kaluta turned me on to different people—it was a holistic thing. He was sharing a space with Charles Vess, and I said, “Is this all you guys do?” wanting it to be true. [laughter] “This is what I want.”

When I show the students this stuff, their heads explode—a lot of them anyway. Recently this student was doing something,

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George: “Mary Arms Upraised started as a bright acrylic painting (see top and bottom left), which I then pushed way back with roofing tar (see bottom right). Then did a reveal by slowly wiping away the tar to reveal the bright color underneath (see top of next page). Then the piece was finished with oils and cold wax (see bottom of next page).”

Mary Arms Upraised © George Pratt

and it was horrible. Everything she was turning in was just ideation and thumbnails. I don’t expect a lot, I just need ideas. But her stuff was just tepid. I kept working with her, saying, “I need more ideas. You’re showing me an idea in different ways, but I need ideas, plural. And then we’re going to pick one or two, and you’re going to explore the compositional possibilities of that with your thumbnails.” Anyway, she brought in this thing, and it had sort of a Frazetta feel to it. It was a wounded guy with another guy—spacemen—on a rock being attacked by aliens. I said, “Well, this is kind of, sort of a Frazetta thing, but you’ve

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taken us too far away. We’re not part of the action. You know who Frazetta is…?” Flatline.

DRAW!: Cricket. Cricket.

GP: Never heard of him, and I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” besides the fact that I’ve talked about him in class and shown slides of his work. So I called it up and said, “See this composition? That’s your composition, but we’re up close, and it’s personal. We’re involved in it,” blah, blah, blah. I was redrawing stuff for her, and she was like, “Enh, I think I’m

just going to do what I want to do.” I turned off. “Fine. Here.

Whatever.” Other students were coming up on her behalf apologizing because she had done that. I said, “Honestly, at this point I don’t care. That’s just one less I have to worry about. I can focus more on you guys.” When we did the crit, and she finally turned in a piece, I gave her a solid crit. I said, “This is definitely better than anything you showed me in your sketches, but bottom line is, I’m the art director. If this had been a real-life situation, I would have fired you in a heartbeat, and I would have been on the phone with all my friends telling them not to hire you. I’m the client, and I’m asking something from you, and you aren’t delivering it. Every time I hire you or anyone, I’m putting my job on the line. You can’t do that.” I told the students, “You guys hate assignments. Do

you realize that you signed up for a lifetime of assignments? [laughter] You’re not going to get to sit there and choose what you want to do all the time. The hardest job is satisfying yourself while you’re satisfying me. That’s the biggest conundrum you face. How do I satisfy myself creatively while solving other people’s problems? That’s a hard one, but if you hate assignments, you’re in the wrong business.”

DRAW!: And some people can’t, and they end up being fine artists because they can only please themselves. When I was teaching storyboarding, I explained to the students that the cartoon exists so that people will see the ad for Lucky Charms or for Doritos. It’s not because Warner Bros. wants people to see a cartoon. Warner Bros. wants people to see the cartoon so they

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look like you really love it. Even if with every decision of the client you’re thinking, “Oh, man, what are you doing? You’re making it worse!” they’re paying you money, so you have to shine it up and make it look good.

GP: Yep. I keep telling them, “I’m asking you to turn on creativity—now. I need it now. Not when you feel like it, not when the muse hits. You have to turn on the faucet now.

DRAW!: Do you remember an example of that for you when you were younger. Was there a job you got where you had to figure out some way of doing that?

GP: I was doing commercial things when I was in high school. I didn’t really know how to draw.

I knew how to copy really well. That was how I learned how to draw, was copying all my heroes.

I could nail Neal Adams, but I was looking at Neal Adams. I never traced anything, but I could look at something and eyeball it and I could draw it. So I was trying to figure out how to put those things together without really knowing what I was doing.

In art school I apprenticed with Marshall Rogers.

I don’t know if it was my freshman or sophomore year. I’d do all the grunt work. “I need a chain link fence over here.” All the crap he didn’t want to draw. [laughter] I would get the imagery from the morgue, pencil it, and he would have me ink all that stuff up, and I would put the Zip-a-tone down and all that. That was what cured me of wanting to be a regular comic book artist doing a regular book.

For him it was pure entertainment, for me it was, “No, this is an art form, man.” [chuckles] We never This painted illustration was done in 1984 for Eagle magazine for an article got in huge arguments or anything, but he was, “No, titled, ‘The Deadly Tupamaro Terrorists of Montevideo’. George painted using this is entertainment. That’s all it is to me,” which the Barron Storey technique directly on top of a map. was great. I’m still a huge Marshall Rogers fan. His Eagle © Harris Publications Batman was one of the seminal things for me. But will get high ratings and they can charge Doritos more money I was wanting it to be more than just entertainment. It was a for the commercial during that new cartoon than they could wake-up call for me, having to satisfy what Marshall needed for the old Scooby-Doo rerun. The cartoon is a trick so people then and there. will go out and buy Doritos. Their brains exploded. I said, “You’re going to try to get this job because you love drawing DRAW!: What about after school?

Bugs Bunny. But very often the producer of the people you GP: I was struggling to find illustration work. That was really work with, who was hired by the corporation to make sure the difficult for me because I was so into loose painting, and that’s train runs on time, won’t know anything about Bugs Bunny. not what anyone wanted. They wanted really tight stuff.

They won’t know really why Bugs Bunny is funny, but they’re Scott Hanna was apprenticing with Carl Lundgren. “Oh, working in animation. Some of them do love the material, but you would love it. You guys would really get along. I’m going very often they don’t love the material, and they’d much rather up there if you want to come. He’s got a portfolio he’s got to be working on something with George Clooney, because that’s do.” So I went up. I was already hanging with Jeff [Jones] much sexier, but it’s a lot easier to break into animation. Their by this time, and he was my beacon. He was who I wanted job is to get the train in on time, and you’re going to get a lot of to be. So I go up to Carl Lundgren’s, and he’s doing these flak for doing things a certain way when it’s not what the cor- wizard things, and I’m trying to apply what little I knew of poration wants, and you’re going to get frustrated.” The hard- light, color, and design, and it stood out like a sore thumb on est stage is to go from drawing what you like, when you like, his pieces. He was really not happy with the work I did, and how you like, to drawing what you don’t really like for really he didn’t want to pay me. That was a wake-up call too, and I long hours, but it’s an opportunity, and you have to make it was trying to tow the line. I was trying to give him what he

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was doing, but I was also trying to inject some reality to it or whatever, and that didn’t go over well.

DRAW!: Or your reality and his reality were clashing.

GP: Absolutely. I was never invited back. [laughter] All these little things definitely helped mold me and make me aware of where other artists were coming from and what they’re demanding out of their work, and then what I wanted out of the work, and that they might clash. Not that one was necessarily better than the other, but it was very different from what I wanted for myself. Again, coming from The Studio book, I had this romantic idea of what an artist was, and it had very little to do with commercialism. It was more about lofty goals and “Art” with a capital A. And then you realize as you’re in the middle of something like that,“If you’re going to survive,” at least at that point for me, “it can’t be just this and it can’t be just that. There’s a gray area in here I’ve got to figure out how to navigate.”

And that sort of set the course for me, because I had a very difficult time getting work because of the loose nature of the way I painted. I was lucky enough to find a couple of things that were fairly steady, but it was also going into the galleries.

I was a big Skip Liepke fan, so I was pushing that along with Jones. And then I went into Grand Central Art Gallery, and they had a Milt Kobayashi show up, and it blew my mind. I already knew his work, but I’d never seen the originals, and I ate that show up. I remember going home and calling the operator, getting his number, and calling him up. [laughs] DRAW!: Wow! GP: I told him I was painting with Jeff, and he was like, “Are you kidding me?” He was a huge Frazetta fan, so we hit it off.

He said, “You’ve got to come over,” so I got all my paintings together and dragged them up to his studio—and he shared a studio with Liepke. So all of a sudden I got to meet Liepke, and there they were cranking on this stuff. That’s what sort of bailed me out.

I was not doing well with illustration, because that just wasn’t what people wanted. I asked [Liepke and Kobayashi], “How do you get into the galleries?” And they said, “Oh, man. It’s a real pain. You have to shoot all these slides and send them off, and they’ll get back to you or they won’t.” I barely had two nickels to rub together. I couldn’t afford to shoot slides. They looked at my work and Milt said, “We think they should carry your work at Grand Central. You need to go talk to James Cox and tell him that I said he needs to look at your work and that I think he should carry it.” So I showed up unannounced at Grand Central with my big-ass portfolio of originals— [Mike laughs] DRAW!: That’s just what a gallery owner wants, some guy traipsing through the front door with a big pile of art. [laughter] GP: It was this big vinyl, fake-leather-looking portfolio that weighed a ton. The secretary said, “Can I help you?” I told her, “Well, Milt Kobayashi told me I should come talk to James Cox.” So she said, “Hang on.” He came out and asked,

“Milt sent you over here?” “Yes.” “I need to make a phone call. Can you give me ten minutes?” So I just wandered the gallery. Then he came out and took me to the back and went through my portfolio and said, “Yes, we want to carry it.” I was like, “What?” [Mike laughs] And that was my bail-out. I just painted. I was getting paid to learn how to paint.

And that’s when I began to really work up Enemy Ace. I was dabbling with the idea of that thing because I’d been helping J Muth on Moonshadow. He would call up and ask, “Hey, do you want to come up and help me on an issue of Moonshadow?” and he would buy me a train ticket. He’d say, “This is all penciled,” but J’s idea of pencils was a circle with two eyes and an arrow that said “Moonshadow”. [laughter] But we would bang one of those issues out over a weekend, painting our asses off with watercolors. It was sort of the Lundgren thing again, but it worked because I could do what J wanted. I could instill enough of myself into it, but also sublimate enough that it melded fairly well with what J wanted, so that was cool. And it gave me the confidence to think, “I could do one of these.”

I was doing a job a month for Eagle magazine, which was a mercenary magazine. I tried to get comic work from Tony Dispoto, who was starting Creepy and Eerie again at Harris.

This was way back in the ’80s. He absolutely did not want me to do anything for him.

DRAW!: Really? I’m surprised.

GP: Well, the night before I had done a painting, a Vietnam war piece. He says, “Well, we have a magazine here. You want to talk to that guy?” So I did, and I hit it off with him.

Jim Morris, the writer, was the editor of that, and I became sort of his pet artist, which was great. It came out every other

A pen and ink drawing with ink splatter and white highlights done for the same Eagle article.

Eagle © Harris Publications

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month, but he gave me a job every month. And it was nice.

It was a painting with two or three pen-and-inks. That was cool; it covered all my rent because the rent was practically nothing. I was in a brownstone with four or five other artists in this really tight space. We were all living there and working there. Most of them were children’s book illustrators, but it was cool. We had a blast, and I was there for years. So I didn’t have to pound the pavement looking for illustration work. I had enough to cover the rent and food.

DRAW!: So you worked it all up before you approached DC? GP: Well, I kept two sketchbooks which became No Man’s Land. I was just drawing and doing these watercolors for myself because I was fascinated with the idea of WWI, “I need to learn this stuff.” I started writing the idea for Enemy Ace, and doing little sketches, but I wasn’t actually doing pages or anything. I was really trying to figure it all out and get all my ducks in a row about how to make something like that happen.

It was actually Scott Hampton who made it happen. I had been farting around on that thing for, I don’t know, three-plus DRAW!: When was this?

GP: ’84, 85. ’85, ’86 maybe. I farted around with Enemy Ace years, and he would come in infrequently from South Caroa long time before I went to DC. It was my pet project, my lina. I’d get a phone call, “Hey, what are you up to?” I’d be like, “Nothing.” Click. And eight hours later Scott’s pulling little toy. in at four in the morning, ringing my doorbell. He would usually stay with George: “Enemy Ace: War me for a couple of weeks, but this Idyll was done with the time he said, “Hey, I’m coming in, Burt Silverman techbut I’m going to go to Rick Bryant’s nique, though some pages (the tunnel rat place. Can you bring all that Enemy scenes in particular) also Ace stuff over?” So I went to Rick’s, had oil washes on them.

Scott showed up, and he said, “Is this I did use India ink and all the Enemy Ace stuff?” He picked Pelikan 4001 Brilliant it up and walked to the door. I’m like, Black ink as well. The bright yellow spots in “Where are you going?” “I’m going the explosions were to DC. If you want to be there when just rub out areas of the this lands, you’d better come with Pelikan ink. Dependme,” and he just left. So I followed ing on how long you him. We got on the train, and we let water sit on the ink went to DC. He asked to see Andy before you rub it with a paper towel, you can Helfer. Helfer came out, we went in get different intense and he looked through it, and said, colors left behind. I used “Yeah, we want to do it.”

3- or 4-ply Strathmore That was scaaary, because all Series 500 Plate Bristol, of a sudden it was this real thing, measuring 11" x 16". when before it was just this thing I Everything was done on kept playing with, and was stalling, the boards based on my I guess, because I was petrified of page layouts and photohaving to do it. The longest thing I’d graphic reference, and ever done was an eight-pager—that were penciled before was my senior project at Pratt Instipainting, though not always fully penciled. tute, which was published in Heavy Sometimes I just needed Metal with Steve Ringgenberg doing a rough indication of the writing. And that was black-andwhat was going to white; that wasn’t watercolor. Other be there, as using the than the Moonshadow stuff, I’d Silverman technique I never done an extensive watercolor could work dark to light, which would obliterate project. any detailed drawing.

But that started the ball rolling, Putting down a midtone and suddenly it was real. It was scary, ground, I could pull out but it was incredibly exciting. And color with a wet brush I was smart enough—they wanted and in that way define me to go ahead and get started on it my light shapes, which is another way of drawing.” without a contract, and I said, “I’m Enemy Ace © DC Comics not doing anything without a contract.” We went through a lot of stuff

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with the contract. It took a year to get that contract ironed out.

They didn’t want me to get away or go to Marvel or something like that, so they started giving me covers. That’s how I got cover work. That was their way of keeping me around while they got the contract in order. I knew Archie Goodwin already because of the Epic stuff I’d done while I was still at school. I showed Archie some of the stuff, and he said, “Well, if DC never buys it, you could always do it as the Phantom Eagle over at Marvel,” but in my head I was thinking, “No, that’s never going to happen. I’m an Enemy Ace fan.” [laughter] I didn’t even know who the Phantom Eagle was. I was a DC guy because they had Batman, Sgt. Rock, and Swamp Thing. So thank God for Scott Hampton, because that book probably never would have happened if Scott hadn’t forced the issue.

DRAW!: When you were slowly developing it, were you also building a library of reference for yourself?

GP: Yeah, and at that time we didn’t have the internet—I didn’t anyway. I didn’t have a computer, so I was haunting Hacker Art Books and the Strand—anyplace I could to find visual reference for that stuff, and it was pretty difficult. The funny thing is that after I was done with the book, I couldn’t turn around without falling over reference.

DRAW!: That’s always the way it is. I had to do, in an issue of Quasar, the Statue of Liberty. He gets trapped inside the head of the Statue of Liberty. You can find all kinds of shots looking at, up, over, and behind the outside of the Statue of Liberty, but there was no reference for the inside of the head.

And then right after I finished, within a couple of months later, I found this book that had pictures of the observation deck inside the head.

GP: It’s funny, at that time too, just after the book came out— Angelo Torres lived down the street from me. Curtis Woodbridge, George Woodbridge’s son, hung out with Angelo a lot. I guess I met Curtis through Scott Hampton. Scott and I had hunted Angelo out, and gone over to his studio, then we connected with Curtis. We would all hang out and go to Little Italy and eat, then come back to my studio and talk.

Angelo was really into the war stuff. We talked a lot about war comics. But Curtis was like, “Oh, my dad wants to get rid of all his World War I reference. Do you want to buy it?”

I got everything for $100, and it was the complete New York Times pictorial reviews—those big, fat tomes of the actual newspapers bound from that time. I got all those, and there was a German book. It’s really hard to find German reference.

And then he threw in one of his portfolios, and he did this really fun drawing of a Doughboy in a trench at night with a bird taking a crap on his helmet. [laughter] It was really cool. I never got to meet George Woodbridge though. It was through Curtis that all this happened. I still have all that. I have a massive World War I reference file, and I own most of the helmets. I have an original Doughboy uniform, but no one can wear it, so when I did Enemy Ace, I had people put on clothes that were similar, and then I would have to adjust it.

Doughboy, a charcoal drawing from George’s sketchbooks.

Artwork © George Pratt

DRAW!: You didn’t have a mannequin you could dress it on?

GP: No. I shoot reference for everything. John VanFleet was the young ace. Mark Chiarello was the reporter. Floyd Hughes was one of the tunnel rats, and so was Jack Morelli— he was Krazy Kat. Everybody was somebody. I would shoot 35mm black-and-white reference. I don’t shoot 35mm anymore, I shoot digital, but I flip everything to black-and-white and make up my colors. If I see a color, it becomes very hard to divorce myself from it, so I convert everything to grayscale and I play with the images. It’s something that Jeff [Jones] taught me: losing information—coming up with bad darkroom techniques to lose information so you have to invent.

You don’t want too much information so you won’t become a slave having to put it all in there. And I still do that.

DRAW!: In the old days, illustrators like Rockwell shot the reference, then he would photograph the drawing, and he would do his color study on top of that because the color photography was fugitive. Back then you didn’t get good color, so he would make it up. And you can tell that artists who learned to do color before color photography was good have a much more personal sense of color.

GP: Yeah, it’s true. And I force my students to switch to grayscale. I keep telling them that these cameras are all designed to make happy pictures. The color doesn’t work. It really doesn’t. If they have to get a color reference, I tell them, “You can’t copyright a color scheme, so go to the old masters. Start looking at paintings. Find something that has the same mood you’re after, and see if you can find a way to apply the color structure to your painting. They’ve already solved the problem for you.”

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(above) Photo reference of Jack Morelli as Krazy Kat for Enemy Ace: War Idyll. (right) Rough sketch for the cover of Warner Books’ edition of Enemy Ace: War Idyll.

Enemy Ace © DC Comics

DRAW!: Do you do color story there too? They call it different things at different places.

GP: I don’t personally. I do discuss the emotional impact of color, but there are classes where they do color keys for animation. I don’t make it a big thing in the class, but I have used it—there are a couple of programs out there where you can run a film through it, and it shows you the “DNA” of a film.

It takes a frame every certain number of frames, and it shows them really small. You can’t really see any details, they’re just tone and color, but you can see how the film progresses. It’s pretty interesting.

DRAW!: Right. I came across one because I was working on a color story lesson. You could put in an image, and it would give you the palette of that scene. If you look at the first Star Wars and then The Empire Strikes Back, the palettes are very different. The first Star Wars looks like an early ’70s film, and with Empire the camera technology, the color… everything really started to change. Now every movie looks like it was done by the same person. Unless you have a really great art director or a great cinematographer, you can take almost every film from today and you’ll see that blue-green standard filter on top of everything. There’s no personality with it.

GP: Next semester—and I have before, but the last semester or two I haven’t—I’m drawing a line in the sand and telling them, “I’m sorry, no digital. I want your thumbnails in real pencil, not a mechanical pencil, because I want you to be able to lay down the edge and put tones in. For color studies, I want you to mix paint. Either gouache, acrylic, or straight to oils, but I want you to mix the paint and figure out your color scheme. You can’t just pick colors.” Because they pick these colors, and sometimes it looks halfway decent, but then they can’t paint it because they had no idea how they got there.

“You have to mix it now, and that’s a very different animal than just choosing color.” They’re not learning color if they’re just choosing color, because they’ll have no idea of why this palette grouping works or doesn’t work.

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DRAW!: Rockwell developed because there was an environment for him to develop in. There was a way for him to develop and grow as an artist. Now digital is the engine driving everything. The companies want everything digital because they can endlessly manipulate it. I just set up my ArtStation page. Do you have an ArtStation?

GP: No. DRAW!: A lot of what I’m seeing is they’re doing photobashing. You go get a whole bunch of photos and you slap them all together, and then I guess you sample this part, and then clone this other part. Are you dealing with this at all at Ringling?

GP: I’m not involved in that, although I helped spearhead getting the visual development classes started. There were a handful of us. We have a lot of recruiters come in from gaming and movies, and they ask us to go to these lunches with them.

Generally, every time I went, it could be Blue Sky, Sony, or whoever, they would always say, “You know, we really want to hire illustrators, but your students don’t have visual development down,” which was ridiculous because they had visual development classes, they were just coming from the CA [Computer Animation] department. That’s a whole other bag I’m not going to get into. But I was being told this over and over from these recruiters, so finally I was talking with a couple of other like-minded people in my department, and I said, “We need this. We need to own this and not let CA teach our students this stuff. We need to push it through,” so we did. Now we have a minor track, in a way, for Vis Dev. I’m

assuming they’re tackling some of those issues, but the big push at Ringling is that in order to be a really good anything, you have to learn how to draw and paint traditionally. You just have to. They take Figure Painting, Figure Drawing from Life. I don’t know if they’re getting great color classes or not, but that’s on our list for shaking up the Foundation year. But the traditional skill sets are absolutely needed before they go in and really start playing around with digital. They get the digital pretty early on. We’re a Mac-driven department. I have an iPad Pro with the Pencil, and the Pencil is a game-changer. That thing’s cool.

DRAW!: When I met you at IlluxCon, you were doing stuff with it, and showing Liang and Mimi, the two students I brought with me, and it was really great stuff. But I was explaining to them that the reason that it was great was because you knew what you were trying to get the machine to do based upon practical experience.

I finally bought a Cintiq. I’ve been doing Judge Parker all-digital, and I’m probably going to buy an iPad and learn ProCreate. But I bring a lifetime of drawing and painting to that, which is different than if you just learn to do stuff on this machine which has a particular set of algorithms. I was just helping my assistant; she was doing a painting. And part of learning to oil paint, depending upon the type of finish you want—[William-Adolphe] Bouguereau does not paint like Milt Kobayashi.

Bouguereau does not paint like Edgar Payne. Bouguereau does not paint like Dean Cornwell. If you want that particular feel of a pre-Raphaelite, there’s This painting for the cover of Warner Books’ edition of Enemy Ace: War Idyll was 5½ –6 ft. a certain process of mixing your paint, high and 4 ft. wide on stretched linen. a certain type of brush you use, a certain Enemy Ace © DC Comics way of applying the paint, and you have to follow that recipe GP: Which is sad. [laughs] I mean, I enjoy playing around enough that you understand it. And you don’t get that on the with ProCreate, and I like what I get out of it. And it’s deficomputer. nitely informed by my traditional background, but nothing GP: No, there’s absolutely no physical return on a computer. beats paint. Nothing beats a canvas, or a dip pen. I like that It’s a piece of glass you’re constantly sliding over. it’s a dialogue with the material, and that I’m going to get dirty. The smells—everything about it.

DRAW!: But the reality is, and it’s different from what you I remember talking to Jeff and he goes, “Hey, I’m going and I had, is that the graduating student has to be able to do to send you something, and I want you to tell me what you that if they want to get a job in the industry, because they’re think.” It was his first digital painting. I asked him how it felt, probably going to be digitally painting. Very often people and he said, “I hated it. I had to keep a bottle of turpentine don’t want an original. open just so I could feel like I was painting.” [laughter]

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While George was working on Enemy Ace, he also did several covers for DC, including this cover for Batman #431.

Here we have his initial sketch and the finished inks, and on the next page, his color key (giving notes to DC’s production department which did the color separations), and the printed cover. As you can see, they weren’t always able to perfectly match the artist’s coloring.

Batman © DC Comics

DRAW!: One of the things I was very impressed with watching you, and it’s one of the things you bring from working traditionally, when you work traditionally you have risk, which you don’t have when you work digital. It forces you to think while you’re painting, because as the painting develops, the decisions you’re making can become much more critical. You have the loose, sloppy stage at the beginning where everything’s flying around. And then you have—when you get tired, you can’t really paint. Painting is very complicated, and it requires so much from you. If you were trying to apply a certain type of finish, let’s say, and then you start getting sloppy because you’re tired—you put the paint on too thick, or you don’t get your medium right—then all of a sudden you’re going to start having four or five different types of painting on the same painting. It’s not going to be consistent.

GP: You’re totally in the weeds at that point.

DRAW!: Then you have to scrape it off or whatever. The difference with fine art is you can do that. You can totally bollox the whole thing up, destroy it, have it be a complete failure.

The luxury you have as a student is the luxury to completely fail. But when you’re a professional and you get the cover on Friday and have to turn it in on Monday, you can’t burn down like that. So I was very impressed watching you work that time, because I could see you bring that aesthetic to digital.

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And there are people who do amazing digital work.

GP: Oh, absolutely.

DRAW!: There’s a whole school of Chinese painters. There’s this guy, I don’t know if you know who he is, his name is Xu Beihong. He sort of started the modern Chinese school of painting way back before Mao [Tse Tung]. He had gone to France to study and then went back to China. You can usually tell a Chinese painter just by their palette. And one of the things I’ve noticed about the Chinese painters is that when they add contrast, like when they make something brighter, they tend to add white, but not chroma. So when you see the lighter, brighter areas, they tend to be white. They may still have some high glow blue or whatever, but it’s isolated. It’s not like the whole atmosphere is brightening. Not like the old masters, where you would see the color intensify before it turns into the shadow. I can tell a Chinese painter just by how they move from the light source into the shadow. They do not intensify the tone before they go into the terminator.

It’s also very different from the Russians. Social realism came from Russia, and went into China, but the Russians are much warmer as painters. You can tell a Russian painter from a Chinese painter from a French painter from a Spanish painter just from that. And you don’t get those nuances from a computer program.

GP: Right. And half the thing for me is I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. I want to be engaged, and the idea of the happy accident is big for me—the discovery. In digital, I’m constantly trying to create that idea that there is some serendipity to it, in that there is a happy accident in there somewhere, but you sort of have to manufacture it. When I’m working digitally, I try to keep it to one or maybe two layers, so I’m still working like there’s no going back. I don’t use Undo. I try to just put it down and live with it, just like I would when I paint.

And I try to get my students involved in that, because it’s turned into this thing where they have to have the safety net. They’ve got ten million layers, and they’re hitting Undo constantly. They never take chances, and they don’t make decisions anymore. You should come up with an idea, then you make your tonal plan, your color study, whatever your process is, but execute the plan. Right? But they don’t. They get in there and they wallow around, throwing layers down, and it’s play time. Which I get, and I can understand the enjoyment factor up to a point, but they’re sort of just accepting what the program will give them rather than bending the program to solve the problem, and executing the decisions they’ve made, and putting it down like they mean it. I honestly believe that a lot of it is never what they intended, it’s just what they got.

DRAW!: Exactly. That’s one of my talking points, I suppose.

Doing Judge Parker, and working digital, there’s always that interface between me and what I’m creating that is not in the real world. The other thing is you’re always zooming in and zooming out, and that requires a different thought process, because you can’t get a big image on a 13" computer screen.

You have to zoom in and zoom out.

GP: The thing about painting, and the best of the digital artists have this, and it comes from their traditional backgrounds—I look at Craig Mullins and guys like that, they’re bringing a traditional sensibility to the digital medium. They’re working it so it has a sense of the physicality of paint. But when all is said and done, it’s still just trying to be paint. The thing about paintings is people want to touch them. They really do. They get up close, and have to be kept away. There’s a tactile sense to paintings. It blows people’s minds. It’s very attractive to people, and even if the painting is something they don’t necessarily like, they want to touch it. That’s something that’s missing from a huge portion of the digital work. You need that background of having worked traditionally.

I keep telling the students, “You have to make decisions.

You need to make decisions and live with them.” So I force them in my drawing classes, “You’re going to go out and get a big bottle of either FW black acrylic ink or a big green bottle of Sumi ink, and then you’re going to go out and collect twigs

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Mary, a traditional watercolor painting still in progress. George: “In my gallery watercolors I do not do any initial pencil drawing, opting instead to eyeball the work from start to finish.”

Mary © George Pratt

and leaves from your yard, and you're going to learn to draw with just that. It’s not going to do what you want it to do, so it’s going to force you to step out of your comfort zone and the things that you glibly do on auto-pilot.” All of a sudden they’ll be thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to try and describe the things I’m seeing with this crappy thing in my hand, and I have to make it work.” When I see them start to get comfortable, I say, “Okay, I want you to start working with a putty knife now.”

There’s no way what they were just doing translates to using a putty knife, so they’re in the deep end again. So it goes down, and it’s there. “Put it down and live with it, but roll with the punch. Let it inform what’s happening next. Work that sense of balance, or harmony, or disharmony—whatever it is you’re after—and make it work. When you go to digital, you’ll be able to breathe in that sense of being able to roll with the punches. And maybe a lot of these things that happen, that you didn’t want to happen, actually make everything better.

The piece will be better for it. It won’t be predetermined, it will be alive.” But left alone they do not think that way; it’s all about comfort.

DRAW!: I suppose that’s a natural condition of living in the modern world. We prize our comforts. That’s one of the things I stress to the 20-year-old. “You’re competing for jobs with other 20-year-olds, but the 20-year-old overseas has a much less comfortable life than you have, so they’re willing to work hard for the job, which means you have to be willing to work hard in order to get that job.” Now you have a global market for art. Entertainment is like an engine, constantly making games and cartoons and movies. People want more of it, so there is a demand for it, but there’s also a personal cost to you long-term that sometimes you’re not thinking about when you’re younger. Like you were saying, you can spend all your time working for the big corporations. They will not

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return the favor to you outside of a very, very small handful of people. Having that physical original, I think, is going to become very important again. Because if you spend 30 years painting on glass for Disney, you have nothing.

GP: It’s true. Jon Foster comes down to the class, and he is one of my favorite digital painters. He’s such a good painter.

I quiz him in front of the students. “You’re all digital now.”

He goes, “Yeah,” and the face he makes. He starts a lot of those digital paintings traditionally with oil. Then he’ll photograph it and bring it in digitally and go. He says, “Yeah, I have a closet that’s full of unfinished paintings, and it drives me insane. I totally miss having originals, but the time constraints don’t allow for it because of the type of work they’re asking me to do.”

And I reinforce that on my end by telling them that a good chunk of my income comes from the sale of my original art.

And I just personally like having it. I joke about it, but it’s not a joke when I say, “I’m the biggest collector of my work.” [laughter] It’s true. I value that, and I collect art. Nothing beats looking at an original piece of artwork and trying to suss out its secrets. Someone actually touched that thing and made it happen, and that’s vital. It goes back to the earlier part of our discussion and living with what you put down and knowing the idea of risk. There’s a legacy to every piece, and every mark is part of that legacy. Whether you cover it up or not, it’s there. In digital, it’s not. “I’ll turn that layer off.”

DRAW!: Was there a piece you saw or bought that was important to you for those reasons?

GP: I could argue that every original I’ve looked at had that inherently. Hanging at Jeff’s place a few times—or Kaluta’s— and seeing those originals hanging on the wall, just eyeballing those. And then going to the Met when I was a student and hanging out in front of Joan of Arc by [Jules] Bastien-Lapage…

I can tell you one instance of really being moved by a piece of art. I was never really a fan of Van Gogh. I just didn’t get it. But I remember going to the Met as a student one day, and walking up to Cypresses, and it was like someone physically punched me in the stomach. I just started weeping. It got me, and I’ve been a fan ever since. But I had to be in front of that thing and see the texture of that paint, the thickness of that paint, and the energy he put into that thing, the size of it. You could see it was just manic. It blindsided me. It’s funny, because I’ll tell students about that and ask them, “Have you had an art epiphany like that?” and you can see all the guys get really uncomfortable because I’m talking about crying. [laughter] “Haven’t you ever been moved by a painting, and if not, I don’t get why you’re here. I don’t understand why you’re here if you have not been brought to your knees by some piece of art.”

I think we were fortunate, because we grew up in a print world, and you were getting art from unexpected sources. Now there’s nothing unexpected; you just go on the web and get it.

When we were growing up, you’d go with Mom to get groceries and you’re being hit by a TV Guide cover. My dad was a voracious reader, so we had Scientific American, we had The New Yorker, Time magazine, Newsweek, and Robert McGinnis covers were all over the house. Robert McGinnis defined women for me as a kid, and that ’70s look where everybody was glistening. [Mike laughs] It just gets into your psyche. But there’s nothing unexpected about any of the stuff they’re looking at. They can get it whenever they want. It’s a continuously running faucet. They don’t have to earn it. They don’t have to hunt for it, so I don’t think that they respect it in the same way.

DRAW!: Images are so cheap now. Technology is amazing, and if I’m talking to the students, I can go right on my phone or iPad and pull up whatever we’re talking about. I can go on my Instagram right now and flip through images for days.

A new Frazetta cover, or a new Wrightson frontispiece, was

like gold to us as kids. There were so few of them, and you never knew when you were going to see one. Now you just flip through images forever, so nothing is ever precious. The thing that I’m heartened about is that there are more young artists wanting to learn the traditional skill set than there were when we were young.

GP: That’s absolutely true. I remember Kent Williams and I sitting around in a hotel room at the San Diego Comic-Con. I came from a little town in Texas, and Kent came from a little town in North Carolina, and at that time things were getting pretty heady. We were getting a lot of kudos. It was like imposter syndrome. “This doesn’t make any sense. There has to be a ton of people who are doing this, but where are they?” It was this weird thing where we felt totally undeserving, and we were. [Mike laughs] But we were like, “Where are all the other people? It can’t just be us and these other people we already know.” And now everyone and their dog is doing amazing stuff, which is really heartening and cool, but there are these weird little twists where you think, “Yeah, but where’s that ‘something’?” Frazetta had that something, and Wrightson had that something. Mignola has that something.

Where’s all that stuff? That’s not to say it’s not out there, because I do see it, but it’s a weird thing.

At Ringling I teach the way that I was taught. When I got to art school, I was in heaven because finally I was surrounded by weirdos like me. [laughs] My drawing classes at Pratt were, “Here’s the figure. Draw it.” It was all about observational drawing and the emotional content of the line. They used words like calligraphy and handwriting and personality—it was all touchy-feely, but it was all about, “Look at it. Here it is. Put it down.” They’re being taught, “No, no, no. You have to measure everything.” It’s all this sight-size method where you put points down. They’re not really drawing, they’re just putting dots down, and then connecting the dots. Are you kidding me? It’s right there. Draw it!

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DRAW!: It’s all skinning the same onion, right? Some people skin it one way, some skin it another way. One of the critiques I hear from certain quarters of the art school is that the ateliers are very limited and only teach you one way of doing something, and it’s not very creative. But the way I look at it is if you want to sing jazz, but you can’t sing jazz, maybe you need to go study with a jazz singer. That doesn’t mean that you’ll ever be a great jazz singer. You may not possess that type of voice, but you will develop a better voice for having done it.

GP: I think it’s all worthwhile, honestly. There’s something that can be gleaned from all of the different methods.

But I think when they go straight into the sight-size, they become stunted a little bit. It’s safe. There’s a safety net there when you measure everything, and for me, it sucks the life out of the drawing. Especially for illustrators. You can be a reporter—“Just the facts, ma’am”—or you can be a poet, and they’re very different. One is just the facts—“I’m going to tell you about this picture that I’m drawing. It’s exactly what I’m seeing.” Then there’s the other side—“I have feelings right

An illustration for a multimedia project on blues music George began shortly after finishing Enemy Ace titled, See You in Hell, Blind Boy. The novel incorporates comics, illustrations, photographs, and audio of songs and interviews. George, along with Steven Budlong and James McGillion, produced a 1998 documentary film of the same name. It won Best Feature Documentary at the New York International Independent Film Festival.

Artwork © George Pratt

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now that have nothing to do with this picture, but I’m going to inject them into it,” or “I’m illustrating something that needs to have this emotional content or thrust to it. The narrative aspect demands this.” And the kids who are just measuring, from my own experience at Ringling, it’s just sucked the life out of their work. If I’m going to be that precise, I’d rather just take a photograph.

DRAW!: From what I’ve read of the old ateliers, you started with the still lifes and drawing the basic forms. You learned to control your tools. That’s why you drew the casts, so you could draw properly. But you had to have a certain level of facility before you were allowed to go to the next level. You weren’t just automatically advanced at the end of the year.

I think that’s the biggest problem with modern art schools.

It costs so much that people are pushed from one year to the next. If you get a C-, you still go to the next year, which means you might graduate with a really poor skill set. When you look at the old Russian Academy, the students’ work, that stuff has so much energy in it. It’s amazing. It has such power to it. It’s not just measuring the knee cap against the other knee cap. They’re doing that, but they’re doing it in a way in a way that still has power to it.

GP: Maybe they were measuring, but it seems to me that they were working with landmarks, which is a very spontaneous way to attack the figure.

And I think it’s a cool way. “Well, the way that arm angle connects, if I follow it down it will connect with the hip.” If you get all these angles right as you’re drawing with snap-decision making, the proportions are there. And it works. But the students I come into contact with, the majority of them don’t seem to adhere to the idea that drawing and painting are the things they really need, and yet they talk about wanting to be concept artists. Concept artists are like comic artists—they can draw anything and they have real skills.

DRAW!: Take Gil Kane and Joe Kubert. They were both highly expressive, great with the figure.

Kane was much more about construction, and I learned a lot from him as a young artist because his work was very consistent in the way he constructed things. But then you had the feeling of someone like Kubert, who would sometimes draw a figure that was so distorted. “How did he get that guy’s head”—[George laughs] he’d draw the head through the body and the head looked broken off and shoved over. But you’d have two conflicting styles that you would like.

GP: Kubert’s felt right. It wasn’t right, but it felt right. And to me that was vital. And believe me, I love Kane, but Kubert felt right. There was an energy to it that was different from Gil Kane’s, but they both had that dynamism in their work.

DRAW!: Right. It was a conundrum for me as a young artist. Or someone like Jack Kirby, who became more exaggerated and stylized the older he got, but I also loved Neal Adams, who was completely the opposite.

GP: What you’re underlining also is, think about how unique all those guys were. And I don’t see that in the same way today. Maybe that’s the old fart in me waxing nostalgic.

But they were different. They were all shooting for the same thing, but they were intrinsically different stylistically. And it wasn’t like they were putting on a style; that was totally them. Now everything is blanderized.

DRAW!: You had someone like [John] Buscema, one of the greatest figure artists ever, but then you had Gene Colan, who was somewhere in between. He had that sense of photorealism, but he would draw things super-distorted.

GP: But it felt right.

DRAW!: A story that was one of the biggest influences on me wanting to become a comic book artist was a Russ Heath story where they’re running through the snow, and there’s an injured soldier. They’re trying to keep the plasma bottle held up so he doesn’t die, but the plasma bottle gets shot, and the blood goes all over the snow. The way he used the snow as negative space—I was maybe ten years old when I saw it—just melted my brain. It was so intense.

GP: It was visceral, man.

George: “The layouts for Batman: Harvest Breed were about working with storytelling and composition and less about drawing. I kept them very small to force myself not to get caught up in drawing. I did them on a tan paper with a Fine Point Sharpie and two crayons. The Sharpie gave me a fine line, but not too fine, and the crayons were very blunt so that I was forced to lay in simple value.”

Batman © DC Comics

DRAW!: Artists then had very strong, unique skills or styles, like Wrightson. I’m not a horror fan, per se, but I always loved his stuff. He made you like it even when it would sometimes be really funky in some ways.

GP: That was the cool thing with Bernie, because he definitely had a sense of humor about it, and that came across, but that brushwork was just… “Oh my God,” you know? Unbelievable.

DRAW!: If you were to go and do another comic today, how do you think you would operate differently than when you were doing Enemy Ace?

GP: I was working on a Batman book, and that became a very difficult book for me. It should have been something like Ace, where it was a total labor of love, because Batman was the reason I became an artist, because of the 1960s TV show.

So on Batman: Harvest Breed I was doing these preparatory drawings on loose sheets of paper. They were in pencil, but I didn’t do any erasing. I was just going for it, and it was so much fun to just draw again. But then I had to transfer them to the boards and paint them up, and I felt like I was losing a lot in the transition. It was really bugging me.

But during that I started doing my first digital construction, where I was putting panels together and making pages.

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which you couldn’t find here. They both experimented with other paper [trying to reproduce the same qualities of the clay-coated paper], and Levine actually figured out to use the Strathmore Series 500 plate Bristol, and he told Burt about it.

Burt said, “Don’t tell me,” but he did eventually go to the Strathmore 500 plate Bristol boards.

It doesn’t come in a pad; you have to buy the sheets, but what’s cool about it is that it makes watercolor incredibly forgiving. You can even work dark to light. You can put a heavy brown down, like an oil painting, and blow dry it, then go in with a wet paper towel and pull out highlights back to the white of the paper, very similar to the way [Arthur] Rackham and Edmund Dulac worked, although Dulac also used piles of Chinese white in his watercolors. There are effects you can get which are just mind-blowing, but, at least when I’ve done George: “Mary Hiding shows a piece in progress being done in the Silverman technique. I’ve taped it to a board and you can see the ground color I’ve put down in the background. From there I’ve it, it takes longer than a traditional pulled out some highlights and added some warmth to the flesh. I’ve deepened the shadows and watercolor, where you’re working will continue to push the piece further playing with temperature through glazes and pull outs. on a cold-press paper, leaving the Edge work becomes very important as the piece progresses. Every time I throw a glaze over the white of the paper for your lights. piece it softens everything. This, I’ve always felt, gives me a second lease on life to be selective Traditional watercolor is reductive. about where I put a hard edge. Mood is very important to me and I’m constantly trying to get to The paper is the light source and a heightened emotional place in the work. Suggestion is more important than details.” you’re putting veils of color over Mary Hiding © George Pratt the light, reducing the light. Oils So a couple of things happened during that book. I was like, are additive, you’re painting light on top of shadows. The Sil“I just want to draw and let it land, and have fun with draw- verman technique allows for additive effects by pulling out ing again.” And I also didn’t want to do pages necessarily. back to the white of the paper. There are effects that you can I mean, I was going to make pages, but I just wanted to do get with this that I love because they’re very lush. You can art where each panel could get what it needed. So when I do glazes and pull-outs and all that kind of stuff. I wasn’t got to Wolverine, I just dipped the pen and went straight to going back in with a pen or anything. It was straight-up waterink on those panels. I was using those Canson drawing pads. colors. Every once in awhile on Enemy Ace I incorporated It’s a good paper. It’s acid-free. So I would just dip the pen oil glazes over certain passages, like the tunnel rat scene. To and have fun drawing. Then I would do watercolor on it. enhance the underground/tunnel feel I used gouache with a And instead of really laboring over the watercolor, I treated palette knife to build up texture, then rubbed a cobalt blue oil everything almost like local color. I was still thinking in glaze over that. Watercolor and gouache are water based so oil terms of color space, but then I would come in with charcoal won’t move the pigment at all since oil and water don’t mix. and let that really be how I molded form, so I wouldn’t over- This tinted everything a deep rich blue, enhancing the darkness and claustrophobic feel that I was after. work the watercolor.

The Wolverine work was really pen drawings and then On Ace I was doing the Burt Silverman technique through the whole thing, and, man, I wore myself out. After that I was treating it more like a traditional watercolor, where I was laying down straight onto the drawings. I was using Sumi ink, like, “I’m done with this for a long time.” which isn’t waterproof, but it didn’t bleed much, and if it did DRAW!: Describe for the readers the difference between the bleed it actually became a beautiful gray. When that was all dry, I would use vine charcoal to mold form, turn form, and Burt Silverman technique and what you did later.

GP: The Silverman technique is something he worked out make it more volumetric. Then I would seal them with fixawith David Levine. They bought a clay-coated paper in Italy, tive and scan them.

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Wolverine © Marvel Characters, Inc.

George: “The Wolverine: Netsuke layouts were mostly done with a crayon, which forced me to not noodle. It’s a blunt instrument, so I just worked with simple shapes and simple light and shadow. The final layouts came from many, many sheets of sketches where I played with panel arrangements and content. Most of the work on Wolverine: Netsuke was done directly in pen without penciling. If I’ve already drawn it in pencil, I feel like I’ve made all the decisions so there’s little for the ink to do. I’d rather have fun exploring the emotional quality of the line and let things be fairly serendipitous. If it doesn’t work out, then I’ll do another.”

The way Wolverine came about was interesting. I was in the middle of Batman and I was struggling with it because there were all kinds of issues going on with me and the editor.

What he was wanting was for me to basically redo Enemy Ace, and I was like, “I don’t paint that way anymore.” It was a whole weird thing. Chris Claremont lived down the street from me in Brooklyn, and I bumped into him. He asked, “Hey, what’s going on?” and I just started bombarding him with all this angst over the Batman book. [laughter] It was like he stepped into a buzz saw. He goes, “I just got made Vice President in charge of story development [at Marvel].” I said, “Oh, that’s so cool!” He said, “Why don’t you come work for Marvel?” I said, “Well, I’m in the middle of this thing.” He said, “If you come to us, we will leave you totally alone. You can do whatever you want to do.” I was never a Marvel guy. I mean, I read a lot of Marvel books, but I was really a DC guy.

But the character I especially liked at Marvel was Wolverine, which I read in my art school days—the Frank Miller stuff

with Chris writing. I said, “Well, would you mind if I tackled Wolverine?” I’d always heard he was very protective of the character. He said, “That would be great!” “Can I come in Monday?” He said, “All right, yeah.”

I’d already been reading all this Japanese literature—ghost tales and folk tales and stuff. But I had not read Wolverine since I got out of art school. I always liked the samurai thing with Mariko and all that, but I had no clue she had died. I knew nothing about what was going on in the canon, but when I found out, “Oh, that fits perfectly.” So I came up with this ghost story, went in to see Chris, and he said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” I said, “But I have two years left on Batman.” He said, “That’s okay. Let’s go ahead and get it all figured out, sign the contracts, the whole bit, and when you’re ready, that’s when you do it.”

When it finally came around, Chris had unfortunately been let go by that point, and I was like, “Oh, no. I hope I still have a job.” But he said, “It’s cool.” He’d already handed it

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Thumbnails and line art for “Bloodlines”, an unpublished story intended for DC’s Solo series. George: “In this story I gave myself the challenge of creating color separations by hand. Each panel had a minimum of four or so drawings, one for the actual line art and a bunch of others for color holds, etc. Each panel/drawing was executed, like Wolverine, directly in dip pen. I then used a splatter brush to add tone and obliterate areas. I then went back in with white acrylic and a brush to restate, refine, or simplify areas, etc.

Bloodlines © George Pratt

to [Joe] Quesada, who let it go through, so basically I packaged that entire series for them. Except for the covers where they wanted to see sketches, everything else I just did it. They never said boo. They never looked at anything. I was doing it as separate panels based on my layouts, which I just did for me, and then I scanned them into Photoshop and put them together as pages, and I designed the issue in Quark. I did my own lettering, and they said, “You have to do the lettering in Illustrator.” I absolutely despise and loathe that program. I said, “Well, that’s not going to happen.” [Mike laughs] They said, “No, it has to be that way,” and they put me in touch with John Babcock, who had been a student of mine at the Kubert School. We sat on the phone and he tried to teach me for an hour and a half about how to do this in Illustrator. Finally I said, “John, this is not going to happen. This all has to be put in a Quark file ultimately, so why am I not just lettering it in Quark? It’s so easy. You just draw a balloon, you type in it, you can put tone on it, and then you’re done. You don’t have to do all this complicated junk in Illustrator.” He said, “I don’t know, man. I don’t know if it will work.” “It’ll work.” So I did it that way, and of course it worked, and it was so easy. I just sent them DVDs that went straight to the printer.

DRAW!: Wow! GP: I did all the lettering, all the packaging—everything. It was a really great experience, because they really did leave

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me alone, and I had a blast. That was the first time I’d done anything that was not a graphic novel, where I would come out of the gate fast like a race horse, and as I got further along I’d be dying because I couldn’t see the end of the tunnel. This was a real pleasure because I had two or two-and-a-half issues in the bag, and then they started releasing them and it was like a shot in the arm. “Oh, yeah! I want to do more!” It fed itself and kept me going.

But that was the big difference in going from doing complete pages the traditional comic way, and then on Wolverine doing them as panels and putting them together in Photoshop and Quark. It was such a liberating experience because I could just have fun drawing and painting. Each panel was a piece, and I could have fun with it. At the beginning I was overpainting, drawing more than what was needed in each panel. I was doing way too much. But as I went along I got the idea more in hand about just how far I needed to push things. There are some panels that are just storytelling panels—going from A to B. And then some panels you need to say, “Yeah, let me put some time into this thing.” It became a real pleasure to work that way.

DRAW!: You’re doing so much teaching now. Teaching is your full-time gig. Are you doing much freelancing now? Or are you just doing your own personal painting?

GP: I’m doing shows and mostly personal work. I recently took a sabbatical and went to Morocco, which I’d been wanting

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George: “I put the final drawings on a lightbox and on a new sheet, using a pen, brush, or crayon, defined areas of color [1: color hold for shadows; 2: color hold for the shirt patterns; 3: color hold for the foggy background element].

These analogue files are preferable, to me at least, to creating these marks digitally, as they contain dry brush effects, etc. These were all scanned as bitmap/ line art files (1200 dpi) and saved as tiffs.

So everything is solid black-and-white, no grayscale.

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3

Next, I opened these files in Photoshop and flipped them to grayscale, then flipped them to RGB files, dropping the dpi to 300 after the conversion. I copied them and added them each as a Multiply layer within one file. The line art file would be the black plate.

Each of the “color” files I opened in Hue, Saturation (Cmd + U) and then played with the sliders to colorize each of these layers.

When I was happy with the colors and the arrangements, I would then Flatten all the color layers to one layer, keeping the black line art separate.

I would add “Noise” to the color layer which gives it the feeling of an old stone lithograph and makes it warmer in the sense that it feel less digital and more man-made.

I then flattened the Line art and the color art together for the final file [see right], saving it as a 300 dpi tiff file.”

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we see the connections. So I’m just going to throw them out there. Each issue can be one of these scenes, and the connecting tissue is this framing device I have of our soldier sitting in the bottom of the trench writing letters. And whenever I want to cut away from his story, he collects things from the dirt of the trench from other soldiers, even soldiers from other countries, and out of the blue I can use that to tell someone else’s story. That may or may not ever happen, but it’s a massive project of sequential stuff I’ve been working on—just writing and a few paintings, ideas for covers.

That’s what I’ve been up to, trying to focus on my personal paintings. I just got back—I was one of the finalists in the International Portrait Competition in Washington, which was pretty cool.

DRAW!: I saw that! I’ve always wanted to go to that.

GP: It was a lot of fun. I was having a blast seeing so many Window Fez—in progress. This is one of George’s Morocco oil paintings after the first sitting. people who were interested in Window Fez © George Pratt figurative work. And I finally to do for years. So a lot of personal work, especially oils, and got to meet Quang Ho, who I’m a big fan of his work. When watercolors for gallery shows. I don’t actively pursue illustra- I had the gallery show in Denver, he bought one of my drawtion work, but it does come to me, which is neat. I have a few ings. I’d never met him, but he bought one of my drawings. things going on right now, which is fun. Even writing. I just It felt great. “Quang Ho bought one of my paintings!” I wrote got hit up to do an introduction for the book after next for the him a letter and he said, “Oh, I’m going to be at the CompetiFantagraphics Prince Valiant collections. That’ll be fun. The tion. We’ve got to get together,” so I finally got to meet him. fact that anyone even knows who I am these days—because He’s the warmest, coolest guy. He told me, “Your comic books Wolverine was the last big thing I did. I was doing a Solo book were a big deal to me.” We’re going to have a show together, for DC, and I was just finishing that up when they pulled the actually, in Denver sometime next year of just nudes. plug on the series. I have all that work, which I do own the copyright to, so maybe at some point I might do a Kickstarter. DRAW!: That’s awesome! The funny thing is that we someAnd I’ve been writing on—and I’ve been talking about this times assume there are these separate universes. There’s the for years, so maybe it will never happen—a World War I opus fine art universe, the animation universe, the comic book unithat I’d like to do at some point. It’s a massive project where verse. But then you realize that almost everybody who loves you follow a guy through his entire time in the trenches—a drawing, loves figurative work, loves the same things. When black-and-white series with painted covers. I’ve done maybe I went back to art school, so many of my teachers were old a handful of layouts, but I’ve been writing scenes for years, Marvel heads who read comics back in the day. My teacher, and it’s all coming together. I was struggling with the whole Scott Noel, was a huge Burt Silverman fan. When I bought prospect of stringing it all together into a big story, but the that book Silverman put out, he said, “Oh, go to this page and more I thought about it, our lives are only linear when we look look at this thing!” I don’t think he even had a copy anymore, back, but when we’re living it, they’re not really linear. So I but he knew that book so well, he could tell you exactly what was thinking these scenes don’t have to be totally connected page to go to. But it’s really all connected. There might be a in a linear sense, because it’s only when we look back that slight cultural separation, but everybody likes art that’s good.

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GP: Yeah, it’s really interesting. A couple of years ago we had Steve Mumford come talk to the school.

It was a tag-team thing with Illustration and Fine Art. He’s the guy who went to Iraq and did all these drawings—the Baghdad Journal.

Really fun drawings. Mark, who was the head of Fine Art, said, “Hey, we’re going out to dinner. Want to come?” I’d followed Mumford from Artnet or whatever, watching him do these things. We went to dinner, and we started talking about comic books. Mark says, “But Kirby,” and he starts going on about Kirby, and he’s the head of the Fine Art department. It wasn’t just that he’d read it, he knew it. We were laughing, and then Mumford was like, “Yeah, and what about Russ Heath?” and I was like, “What?” Everybody was on the same page. It was killer.

DRAW!: I think the stigma of comics pretty much died out with the previous generation. And people who are coming up now have grown up in the rich world of entertainment. Geek culture is now the mainstream culture. The first time I went to a science-fiction show I was 16, and it was the first time I’d seen somebody dressed up in a Star Trek costume. The first few comic shows I went to, nobody was dressed up in a Captain America costume. In fact if somebody had walked through the door dressed as Captain America, people would have looked at them funny. It started in science-fiction conventions, and now it’s part of everyday fashion for people. The geeks have inherited and reshaped A page from an unpublished Sgt. Rock story for Solo. George: “I guess I’ll have to rename the the earth.

GP: Yeah, it’s a different world. character and make a few alterations to publish it for myself. The art was done as free brush When I went to Pratt, we had a lot acrylics black and/or sumi ink, then drawing back in with white. of comic guys there: me and Kent Artwork © George Pratt. Sgt. Rock © DC Comics.

Williams, John VanFleet, Mark Chiarello, Peter Kuper, my was like, “Comic book guys? Absolutely! They can draw roommate was Dan Clowes. It was like Comic Central, but anything. These are killer draftsmen.” He got it. So we had comics weren’t talked about. The school would not sup- acceptance, but we couldn’t really do it. By senior year I port any of that. In the classes, it was a no-no. But you had said, “To hell with it,” and my senior project was an eightJacob Landau, who had ghosted on Captain America or page black-and-white story I did with Steve Ringgenberg, something like that at one point, and Dave Passalacqua, who and that was fine. It was cool, but overall, if there was a club had ghosted for Hal Foster a couple of times, so they got it. or anything, the school was hands off. They didn’t want to They understood it. And then you had Barron Storey, who have anything to do with it.

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DRAW!: And now the Illustration departments are what’s saving a lot of colleges. That’s the biggest draw now with everyone wanting to learn how to do comics, illustration, and animation.

GP: It’s paying all the bills. The thing is, it kind of always did.

The Fine Art department at Ringling has maybe 40 students.

Kansas City Art Institute killed their Illustration department.

They just nixed it. That went on for a couple of years and then they realized there was no money coming in, so guess what?

Now they have their program back, and they’re trying to beef it back up, because they realized that’s what was paying all the bills.

DRAW!: My thing is art school is not long enough. It should be six to eight years like medical school just because of the proficiency you need, and not everybody develops at that speed. You never know your anatomy well enough.

You’re constantly getting better at it and noticing things you didn’t know.

But they can’t be charging people $50– 60,000 a year to go to art school. It’s just too expensive.

GP: Yeah, they have to change their paradigm in a big way. And that’s the beauty of the Illustration Academy. We

don’t teach drawing, although we do three nights a week of figure drawing, and we have people draw a certain way that’s all about seeing the entire figure. It’s all about silhouette and seeing the figure as a whole rather than details. What we teach is all about process and solid picture making, period. It’s like boot camp. We’ve had Disney send in people to study—all these different companies send people—but we also have tons of professional artists who come and people who are still students. “Here are the nuts and bolts. This is what’s important.

We trust that you already know how to draw. What this is all about is how you really put a picture together and solve a problem and make something that’s solid.”

It’s amazing to see the transformation of these people when they leave.

DRAW!: Do you have semesters?

GP: No, it’s a summer program that runs five weeks, and that’s it. Now John does have an online school, but it’s not accredited. Neither is the Academy, so it’s not a threat to the regular schools that are giving out diplomas.

It’s just information you need. He did that, but there’s so much that gets in the way of the information you want to deliver because you have to satisfy all these demands that have nothing to do

Photo reference, two layout sketches and the finished painting (next page) for Chris Williams’ graphic novel Red Fog. Red Fog © Chris Williams

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away from them, they have to solve their problems themselves, rather than coming up to us, “Hey, can you help me with this?” But they’ll stay laaaate.

And it’s also a community. When they leave they have ongoing access to each other and the instructors. You can email Gary Kelley or Chris Payne, and you’re going to get feedback.

A 2010 sketch of George’s daughter, Mary, done in gel pens.

Drawing © George Pratt

DRAW!: What’s your summer looking like now?

GP: My son is graduating from high school, and he’s getting his Eagle in Scouting. He’s got a job up in Minnesota he’s going to take, but he’s been accepted into Ringling to study photography. He’s got a great eye, and it’s so much fun to see him start to blossom and find what he really wants to do. Then I’m going up to Kansas City to teach, but this will be the first time in ages that I’m not going to do the whole Academy. I’m going to come back and take my daughter to Paris, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

She has a step-aunt who lives in Waterloo who we’re going to try and visit. And through all the years of doing festivals there, there are people I’ve contacted who we’re going to try and hook up with. And then I’ll come back and get back to my own painting. I’ve got a large oil I’m going to try and do with my daughter, and I’m still working on the Morocco material that I started a while back. And I’ve got a couple of illustration jobs I can’t talk about. They have NDAs on them, but they’ll be fun. And I’ve just been hit up to do an exhibition in Madrid in September in connection with a festival there. That’s it.

with making art. So he said, “I’m done with accreditation.

We’re just going to teach what we want to teach.” But it’s taught by practitioners—people who are at the top of their field, and it’s all people who want to be there, faculty and students. If you go to theillustrationacademy.com, there are videos that talk about it, and you can scope it out. It’s just an incredible program.

DRAW!: That’s all? [laughter] Wow! Are you going to go back to IlluxCon? GP: Not this year. I just didn’t have time to get it together and fill out all the paperwork. The next year I’ll do it, if I get in. But I enjoyed it. It was great. It was neat to meet you and other people I’ve only been communicating with online. And the amount of really great work there is a neat thing.

DRAW!: The colleges, in order to get accreditation, have to have this class, and you have to have this many credits of this, which does not contribute to you learning an aspect of your craft. But in order for you to get that Pell Grant or student loan, those things have to be in place. And it does get in the way of people just drawing and painting, which is what you need. There’s never enough time to draw and paint.

GP: We start at nine in the morning, and we use the campus facility of Rockhurst University. The dorms are a short walk away, but we’re in this one big room. We have folding tables, and everybody grabs a table. We used to stay until one, two in the morning, but as a faculty we finally realized that if we get

DRAW!: It’s great for students to see that much work.

GP: It’s huge! And I really enjoyed reconnecting with Steve Hickman. Whenever I’d go to Kaluta’s, I’d hang with Hickman there and we’d play guitar. So we’d go up to his room and play guitar for hours during the con. That was a great time. And I met Jody Fallon there. We’d been communicating online, and it was neat to see him and his work, and to meet his wife, Cheryl, who’s a really, really good photographer.

Jon Foster talked me into it after our Morocco trip. He said, “Dude, you’ve got to do this thing. You’ll have a blast!” So we set up next to each other and had fun.

It was great!

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Also here are recollections from STEVE DITKO, WALLACE WOOD, JOHN ROMITA SR., and more Marvel Bullpen stalwarts who worked with both Kirby and Lee. Rounding out this book is a study of the duo’s careers after they parted ways as collaborators, including Kirby’s difficulties at Marvel Comics in the 1970s, his last hurrah with Lee on the Silver Surfer Graphic Novel, and his exhausting battle to get back his original art—and creator credit—from Marvel. STUF’ SAID gives both men their say, compares their recollections, and tackles the question, “Who really created the Marvel Comics Universe?”.

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All characters TM & © their respective owners.

THE 1990s was the decade when Marvel Comics sold 8.1 million copies of an issue of the X-MEN, saw its superstar creators form their own company, cloned SPIDER-MAN, and went bankrupt. The 1990s was when SUPERMAN died, BATMAN had his back broken, and the runaway success of Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN led to DC Comics’ VERTIGO line of adult comic books. It was the decade of gimmicky covers, skimpy costumes, and mega-crossovers. But most of all, the 1990s was the decade when companies like IMAGE, VALIANT and MALIBU published million-selling comic books before the industry experienced a shocking and rapid collapse.

the

Sketchbook

Workout System

by Mike Manley & Bret Blevins

O

ne of the questions both Bret and I (or any successful artists) are asked is, “How do you get your ideas?” quickly followed by, “How do you get better?” or “How do you study?” If I had a dime for every time I was asked this, I could retire with enough coin to buy a Frazetta original from Heritage Auctions.

All kidding aside, they are important questions, and I asked them myself as a young artist, though I think I had plenty of ideas—actually at times I seemed to have too many of them, some diametrically opposed to others I later found out.

Not having any formal art education until my mid-40s, I was always very serious and focused on breaking into the business and studying, but looking back I could have studied smarter and made better progress. I had no internet, and only the local library and a chance meeting or two with a pro at a con in my teens. I had only myself to curate my intake of art, and reading, and what to study or whom, which led to me studying mainly what I wanted—which is different than studying what I needed.

I was always an inveterate doodler and sketcher, as was Bret. And I had a few sketchpads in my teens, most now long lost, but I still have a few. My sketchbooks were not any formal way of studying, but practice or big doodle pads. In fact,

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Monsterman © Mike Manley

when I was a teenager, like many students I have taught, I also had a “fear of blank paper”! F.O.B.P., as I call it, is a real thing—especially with a fresh sketchbook. It freezes some people up until at some point maybe it gets dirty or drawn in enough not to be precious anymore. So often I drew on sheets of scrap paper. Then came the opposite—feeling very free in the sketchbook, but then tightening up on the job, trying to keep the same energy of the sketch in the final piece.

It’s always something! And the latter is something artists of all kinds have battled for centuries.

While talking about this subject on the phone with Bret, we decided this would make a great “Bootcamp” article. Like I said earlier in this article, I always doodled, and as a kid my parents and especially my grandmother supplied me with plenty of paper, pens, etc. My grandma worked as a secretary for Chrysler and always brought me plenty of scrap paper, pens, and pencils they were tossing away. I even had a big box at her house just stuffed with drawing supplies. In my teens as I got more and more serious, I kept up drawing but never really in a formal way in a sketchbook—though I should have.

They are great journals of our process, as opposed to a pile of loose drawings which float around and get lost.

Some drawings done to study anatomy while I was attending PAFA as an undergrad. I made many pages like this to go over specific portions of anatomy.

Drawings © Mike Manley

Later on in my career, I’d hear stories from Al Williamson about Frank Frazetta filling a sketchbook with drawings of just shoes, or just hands, etc. Al, always a doodler himself, never seemed to have a sketchbook, but like me, had lots of great loose sketches and drawings. Then I met Steve Rude and saw his sketchbook, and there were other artists like Adam Hughes who supposedly had great sketchbooks. Robert Crumb sold one of his for enough money to buy a house in France! So clearly there were artists whose sketchbooks were perhaps even more precious than the published pages they drew—and far more personal.

Now, of course, I have many sketchbooks, maybe twelve to fifteen floating about. These also include watercolor books for landscape painting. I do enjoy my comics work, but honestly I enjoy what I do in my sketchbooks more. I feel total freedom there, and the discipline from many years of work allows me the skill and ability to explore ideas which are purely my own.

I wish I’d been more serious about using sketchbooks earlier, but you can’t change the past. You can, however, grow into the future.

What I recommend now to every young artist on their tenyear march into the business and gaining the necessary skills to succeed, is to have a dozen sketchbooks and to use them for a variety of studying tasks. Use them, if you can, at least once every day—especially if it’s for something of your own— even if you don’t do it for any other reason or don’t even show them to anyone. For my students I recommend from the start that they have a stack of sketchbooks to use like a gym training routine. Just like when working out you might have a leg day, a back day, a cardio day, etc., break out a specific sketchbook for specific training. A basic list follows:

1. Heads (male and/or female) 2. Hands/Feet 3. Figures/Anatomy (male and/or female)—you can even break it down to arms, legs, torsos, etc.

4. Drapery/Folds 5. Gesture drawings 6. Animals 7. Perspective/Environments 8. Compositions/Master studies 9. Life drawing—a sketchbook you take on the train or bus, or to the coffee shop. Draw from life as often as possible. We are mostly drawing fellow humans, and compiling observed gestures really builds the memory banks to pull from later.

10. You can add your own: vehicles, aliens, inking, etc.

Dick Blick, Michaels, A.C. Moore, etc.—all the art stores are constantly running sales on sketchbooks. They don’t all have to be Moleskines or expensive. In fact, in the beginning maybe they shouldn’t be, you just need the paper to not bleed.

Be serious and takes notes and observations too. Think about what you are studying. You can do a drawing of the hand, then a drawing of the bones in the same position, etc. You will be surprised how only 50–100 drawings of anything will dramatically improve your skill set and memory banks. “A hundred drawings!” you are thinking. Yes, but three to five drawings a day for a month easily reaches that goal.

The following are excerpts of various sketchbooks from my teenage years until today, and even though much of my teenage work was nothing special at all, it does show that if you are honest about where you are at skill-wise, keep at it, and stay focused, you can reach your goals and dreams.

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FROM THE SKETCHBOOKS The following is a selection of drawings from about 40 years’ worth of time from a lot of old and new sketchbooks. Looking back at this is quite amazing to myself, and it’s the best way to see how my journey as an artist has evolved in all that time.

Hulk © Marvel Charecters, Inc.

(left) I drew a series of pencil drawings of Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk while still in high school, in 10th grade I believe. I was thinking I could possibly work at the local newspaper doing illustrations for the TV section. That never happened, but I still have the drawing—and look at that fancy signature! (right) A funny, much more cartoony drawing, which, I think, was colored with Dr. Ph. Martin’s dyes. As much as I loved realism, I also loved cartoony cartooning. My work was at times confusing because I wanted to do both styles. I do that now and have worked out how to do multiple styles.

(left) These were drawn within a few years of each other. I would often work from photos for practice and to try and gain knowledge. I was on my own and trying to get better one drawing at a time. (right) The same subject with roughly 30 years between them. You will find themes running through your sketchbooks you might not be aware of while drawing, and see them only later.

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Conan © Conan Properties International, LLC.

This was done while I was co-drawing Conan the King for Marvel in the late ’80s, all inked with a brush.

This is the first collaboration between Bret and myself—my pencils and his inks. It was done on my first trip out to New York in 1983 to try and get work at Marvel.

This is what many of my sketch pages were like the farther back in time I go, piles of loose doodles, like the one I did featuring a little caricature of Al Williamson here (in the spacesuit). A great way to have fun and loosen up before hitting the pages.

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Two landscape studies from Arizona—both this and the watercolor below were done in the same sketchbook in the early 2000s.

Studies © Mike Manley

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Drawings © Mike Manley

These days I have been doing ink drawings as a way of winding down after a long day drawing The Phantom or Judge Parker. In the past three to four years I have been really pursuing my own work in pen and ink, and plan on producing a book with them.

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A

Another fundamentally valuable use of sketchbooks is to lthough the examples reproduced here are all from paper sketchbooks, a portable digital tablet can serve the same make studies of the work of other artists you admire (or are purpose, though the techniques will vary. That purpose is to trying to understand). After almost 40 non-stop busy years as create a space for exploration of an idea, make a study, record a working professional I still do this. There is always more to information, or simply “play” that is distinctly separate from learn, and there is no better way to gain a deeper understanda strictly disciplined or high pressure undertaking. That’s the ing of a piece or style you admire than make every line, shape, way I use sketchbooks, as an escape from the responsibility or tone yourself. It’s not necessary to use the same medium, of getting it right the first time while working within a specific though if possible that’s good too. For several centuries the set of technical requirements, which is the precondition of standard education for an artist was to serve an apprenticeship most professional jobs. In other words, an escape into free- with a master, learning by hands-on participation the preparadom that allows room to search and find what you are after, as tion and properties of all the tools and mediums to be used, opposed to engaging in a calculated performance, usually to then long periods of copying—the work of the master, antique very specific parameters and under deadline pressure. statutory, observation from life, the work of other masters— I work at least 60% of the time nowadays with digital tools, until sufficient skill and practice was ingrained into the stubut I treat sketching as personal time, and for me that means dent’s consciousness to enable him or her to create original not looking at a screen, so I have stacks of sketchbooks I’ve work. No modern teaching techniques can match this method accumulated over the years, and fragfor grounding an artist in skill, especially for ments of ones I discarded as no loncreating realism (or stylized realism). ger useful to preserve in their entirety.

As a copyist, I’ve included an image that Even when working out designs for an is among my earliest surviving drawings, assignment, such as the Harley Quinn scrupulously dated 1973, age 12 (possibly for page roughs or the Bozz Chronicles turning in at school?), a very crude copy of a cover reproduced in the following Frazetta paperback cover, Conan the Usurper, pages, the mental shift of working done with the cheapest dime store colored pencils on the cheapest dime store sketch paper. in a sketchbook alleviates tension and opens up my imagination. Nothing is at stake, in a sense, so I’m not inhibited by caution, and the ideas flow more freely. I can grab any tool as the spirit moves me, I can slap post-it notes over parts and adjust/ change them, even throw watercolor, gouache, or casein paint onto most sketchbook paper—if it wrinkles from the moisture it just adds to the sense of casual spontaneity.

You’ll see that some of the drawings are observational, notations of my surroundings, or the visual remembrance of a scene viewed while on a hike or walk. I have a small portable watercolor kit with a tube of white gouache and flask of water included, so I can mix the white opaque paint with any watercolor tint to build up layers (gouache is just watercolor with (usually) chalk and thickening binders added). It’s a very flexible means of putting down information quickly, as well as being very pleasant to handle. I would encourage any artist to incorporate tactile, non-digital mediums into their range of skills, as the physical relationships with the materials, and most importantly the lack of the Command + Z undo option sharpens your abilities in a way a touch screen and technique Conan © Conan Properties Ltd. simulation program cannot.

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This would have been among my earliest exposure to Frazetta’s work (as well as to the word “usurper”, I’m sure), and it was the most exciting painting I’d seen. I don’t think I yet knew he had done comics at this point, though I was about to plunge headlong into the world of fantasy art and begin (very prematurely) sending samples to publishers a year later. I remember what struck me (and countless others), was the combination of comic book energy and exaggeration with classic Rembrandt/ Rubens-esque painting effects. I made many, many copies of Frazetta, as I found and gathered examples of his work, along with the work of so many others—Jeff Jones, Bernie Wrightson, Barry Smith, Jack Kirby, Jim Aparo, Mad artists Mort Drucker, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Will Elder and Don Martin—along with other artwork I liked, illustrators outside the comic book and pulp fantasy realm—Norman Rockwell, Joe and Beth Krush, Ernest Shepard—plus Carl Barks and other Disney artists, newspaper comic strips, coloring books, anything that struck my fancy.

I saw this mainly as fun, but I was learning all the time, mostly unconsciously—how to turn a pencil, pen, or brush in my hand to imitate a certain quality of line, picking up fundamentals about how composition worked, how to make something look exciting or funny—an endless amount of internalized information. Later when I devoted my attention to serious study, I was able to codify much of what I’d picked up earlier by osmosis, but each little bit of casually acquired proficiency urged me along, made me want to learn more.

I don’t approve or respect copying other’s work and passing it off as your own in the professional realm, but learning by copying as study is a time-tested and undeniably enjoyable method of improving your own abilities, and what better place to keep them all together for easy reference than a sketchbook?

Here are some examples of later, (and thankfully more proficient) copies:

A study of a Jeff Jones book cover (left) and a simplified value study of a Frank Frazetta book cover (right).

The Haunting of Drumroe © Claudette Nicole. The Silver Warriors © Michael Moorcock.

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Making studies of photographs are another great use for sketchbook pages. I often play around with mediums to discover various effects I can achieve. With this very early study of Frankenstein done in my mid-teens (see right), ordinary Crayola crayons were used on cheap, toothy paper. Artwork made with very inexpensive drug store art material helps me date a lot of my surviving early work.

For this casein study of Egyptian mummies from a book of photographs, I first painted the page solid black, let it dry, then worked the color into the black, experimenting with textures and brushstrokes. The subject matter was chosen because it lent itself to this sort of coarse treatment of form and surface.

Ordinary graphite pencil is the medium here.

This is fairly recent. While researching some history on the internet, I saw this mug shot of a man arrested for a crime (in the 1920s, I believe). His intense haunted look arrested my attention, so I pulled out my sketchbook and recorded the impression it made on me.

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Drawings © Bret Blevins

Artwork © Bret Blevins

Another important use of sketchbooks is the invaluable experience of creating your own customized textbooks. As a teenager I filled many sketchbooks with basic anatomy studies, as seen in the surviving fragments shown above. I’d read somewhere that Frazetta had copied an entire anatomy book, so I did the same (it may have even been the same book— a famous volume by George Bridgman).

As mentioned above, you can’t estimate or even fully understand everything you are learning by diligently pouring yourself into this sort of attentive scrutiny of a subject. Just imitating the mark-making of another artist is adding a new skill to your hand that you may not even be aware of.

I did the same with animals. This sheet dates from when I was 14 or 15.

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Observational sketching is a basic use of these workhorse books of blank drawing paper. Occasionally recording impressions of the physical world around you is never wasted time. It folds into your store of knowledge and your facility in expressing yourself through your tools and materials.

I have quite a history of drawing lazy cats. Here are a few quick pencil notes of my much missed companion Slyvia.

Drawings © Bret Blevins

Drawings © Bret Blevins

Another quick remembrance of a lovely walk by a local lake—pencil with a few touches of watercolor.

Seeing this reminds me of the weather and fragrance of the water and foliage with greater emotional effect than a photograph would.

Your sketchbook can also serve as a visual diary of experiences.

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Of course the most frequent use of sketchbooks for most professional commercial artists is to plan assignments, and again the freedom associated with working “out of the spotlight” typically opens up ease of invention. It’s a comfortable space to experiment, letting your intimations find their way onto the paper with forced effort.

A quick, broad notation of a commissioned portrait.

This is very simple but captures the overall feeling I wanted.

Solomon Kane © Solomon Kane LLC

Here are a couple of stages showing the refinement of the composition and vignette design of a cover for Dover’s reprinting of The Bozz Chronicles. First the attitudes, placement, and shape pattern are loosely established in pencil (below). Then a second page shows the refining of details of form, drapery, and facial expression (below right). Adding a bit of wash and color brings it into sharper focus.

The Bozz Chronicles © David Michelinie

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Harley Quinn, Joker © DC Comics

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The method I’ve eventually settled on for designing comic book storytelling and page designs is to keep an inexpensive ring-bound notebook and lay the pages out in order, using a central frame drawn to correct proportion, with space all around to try changes, add variations, refine gestures or poses, add pasted-over Post-it notes if need be—whatever is required to make sure everything important is solved before moving on to the final rendering, whether that’s to be on paper or using digital programs. It is vastly easier to make changes at this sketchbook stage than to find later that completely finished and rendered artwork has some fatal flaw and must be redone.

Above is a page of layouts for a Harley Quinn story. By comparing the sketches to the final art you can see how closely the pre-plans were followed. There are countless difficulties to be met in any comic book page or storytelling imagery.

It’s so important to solve them at the stage when it is easiest to do so, especially when working under the pressures of a deadline.

A sketchbook can serve many purposes, and can be tailored to the needs of each individual artist, so take advantage of them. They’ve been indispensable to creative people for centuries. For good reason!

Mike & Bret

UNDER REVIEW Tricks of the Trade

W

elcome back, all and sundry to another letter from your dip-pen pen-pal, your fail-safe freelancer friend, your Blackwing (pencil) wingman who will never let you down and always have your back when you go out there and try to pick up art supplies (and hopefully fall in love)! The Crusty Critic returns once again!

My mission: I travel through the world by day as Jamar Nicholas, your friendly neighborhood cartoonist trying to make his deadlines, and at night (and also day—who am I kidding) your Crusty Critic, taking to the brick and mortar rooftops or patrolling the internet alleyways, keeping his eye out to save you, the reader, from getting robbed by poor art supply purchases! It’s a tough job, but I’ve sworn an oath to serve, protect, and get you the best stuff for your hard-earned buck!

As referenced in my last article (issue #34, where I reviewed the WACOM MobileStudio Pro), we are squarely living in the age of digital, and more and more cartoonists are coming into the industry using a totally digital loadout—bypassing pen and paper, brush and Bristol, and going straight for the digital tablet to get work done. Yours truly hears the siren song of the digital tablet call my name almost daily, but I stay firmly rooted in both worlds. Sometimes nothing is better than a “real” pencil and a sheet of illustration board.

Which brings me to my article this issue: A few of my favorite real-world hacks for spicing up some of your traditional workthroughs at the table. This time I won’t be using my trusty beret grading system, but don’t fret—the hat will be back!

RIPPING IT UP One of the coolest effects that is hard to replicate without a workaround or a custom brush is the tried and true “rain effect” on a comic page, most striking when a white staccato-styled white line is placed on a dark background, giving an organic mood

This 1992 Batman pin-up by Klaus Janson is a fine example of the razor nicking technique.

Batman © DC Comics

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(above) Detail from the Klaus Janson Batman pin-up, showing the razor nicking up close. (below) Attack your board with a blade! Show it who’s boss! … or see what you can do with a little white-out action. The board (and world) is your oyster!

Batman © DC Comics

to the art. This effect was perfected on Bristol board with a sharp edge, usually a razor pulled across the board’s surface, ripping or nicking the paper and leaving behind a stuttered white trail.

It’s also used to show speed or velocity as an effect, used in explosions, or muzzle flash from a weapon in full on “BUDDA-BUDDA” shooting. Our fearless editor-in-chief has an old, but great YouTube tutorial on how to nick up an illustration here: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=teKXRlT-LF8. Go check it out!

Alternatively, you can get a similar effect skipping a white-out fluid pen across black art. You’ll see this effect used a lot in commissioned art illustrations by cartoonists like Jim Lee or Ken Lashley.

On that note, as a Crusty Sidebar, I have found a new entrant to the White-Out Fluid Pen, the Kugelz brand correction pen (premium), which I found for a song on Amazon and sells in a brilliant 12-pack so you’ll never go without again—as of this writing, it was priced to move at $11.95 USD! Now that the Pentel Presto! pens are getting harder to come by (a Crusty Conundrum), this pen fills in the gap nicely with a juicy flow without having the need to exert a lot of “squeeze” on the body. I ran off a few “skip tests” to go along with my razor samples, shown above.

The Kugelz Correction Pen is Crusty-approved!

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Use whatever you can to make a mark—a cut piece of sponge makes great textures.

Broccoli Rob © Jamar Nicholas

INKY TEXTURE ALTERNATIVES BRUSHING UP Also, let us not forget that the tools that work the best are the ones that are found, especially when you’re working traditionally. When you’re done with your toothbrush after a few months (How long do you use your toothbrush? I won’t judge!), don’t throw it away—save it! A tried and true technique to create ink spatter on your art is to dip a toothbrush in a pool of ink, then run your thumb across the bristles onto your page.

RUNNING YOUR PRINTS Looking for a different texture for a background that can’t be duplicated by anyone else but you? Stick your thumb into some ink, then make impressions on the board, repeating into overlapping patterns.

SPONGEHANDS INKPANTS Cut up a kitchen sponge into a tiny triangle, then dip into ink for a great clustered texture. Tricks like this usually work better when you don’t oversaturate the tool—a light touch allows more of the pores, nooks and crannies of the sponge to show as readable texture. There’s so much more than crosshatching out there!

MARKER HACKS I’ve already shared some disposable tech pen and marker tricks in previous issues, but here’s one more: Buy a clutch of affordable markers, such as a studio favorite, the Kuratake ZIG line of marker with a thick nib (see above), and then get at the point with a blade and cut pieces out of it to create special double-lines or more. Just another way of utilizing your tools to get a different result than at first glance!

Now, touching on the digital once more, I’ve seen instances of

A simple gouge with a blade in the nib of a marker makes one line into two.

cartoonists bringing their old habits to the tablet—for instance, creating circles or curves by placing a plastic template on the surface of your iPad Pro or Cintiq to make a quicker shape than having to cycle through in-program menus. Some habits are indeed hard to break, and as I always say, whatever you need to do to get the job done is all that matters.

If you have some great art hacks, trips or traps you’d like to share, feel free to tell me about them! You can find me on Twitter @jamarnicholas—I’d love to hear from you!

That’s it for this column! Until next time, stay Crusty, my friends!

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From a seminal turn on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and creating the lost world of the Warlord, to his work on Green Arrow—first relaunching the Green Lantern/ Green Arrow series with DENNY O’NEIL, and later redefining the character in Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters—MIKE GRELL made an indelible mark at DC Comics in the 1970s and ’80s.

But his greatest contribution to the comics industry was in pioneering creator-owned properties like Jon Sable, Starslayer, and Shaman’s Tears. Grell even tried his hand at legendary literary characters like Tarzan and James Bond, adding to his remarkable tenure in comics.

This career-spanning tribute to the master storyteller is told in Grell’s own words, full of candor, optimism, and humor. Lending insights are colleagues PAUL LEVITZ, DAN JURGENS, DENNY O’NEIL, MIKE GOLD, and MARK RYAN. Full of illustrations from every facet of his long career, with a Foreword by CHAD HARDIN, it also includes a checklist of his work and an examination of “the Mike Grell method.” It is a fitting tribute to the artist, writer, and storyteller who has made the most of every opportunity set before him, living up to his own mantra, “Life is Drawing Without an Eraser.”

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VIDEO GAME ISSUE! Get ready as LEGO designers TYLER CLITES and SEAN MAYO show you LEGO hacks to twink and juice your creations! Also, see big bad game-inspired models by BARON VON BRUNK, and Pokemon-inspired models by LI LI! Plus: Minifigure customizing from JARED K. BURKS, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art, & more!

Career-spanning discussion with STEVE “THE DUDE” RUDE, as he shares his reallife psychological struggles, the challenges of freelance subsistence, and his creative aspirations. Also: The jungle art of NEAL ADAMS, MARY FLEENER on her forthcoming graphic novel Billie the Bee and her comix career, RICH BUCKLER interview Part Three, Golden Age artist FRANK BORTH, HEMBECK and more!

Celebrating the greatest fantasy artist of all time, FRANK FRAZETTA! From THUN’DA and EC COMICS to CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA, STEVE RINGGENBERG and CBC’s editor present an historical retrospective, including insights by current creators and associates, and memories of the man himself. PLUS: Frazetta-inspired artists JOE JUSKO, and TOM GRINDBERG, who contributes our Death Dealer cover painting!

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