Draw #7 by TwoMorrows Publishing

NUMBER 7 FALL 2003

THE “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS AND CARTOONING

DAN BRERETON ZACH TRENHOLM ALBERTO RUIZ BRET BLEVINS PAUL RIVOCHE ANDE PARKS

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FALL 2003 • VOL. 1, NO. 7

FEATURES

Editor-in Chief/Designer • Michael Manley Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Proofreaders • John Morrow & Eric Nolen-Weathington Transcription • Steven Tice

COVER STORY FROM THE MACABRE TO THE SUPER-HERO WITH DAN BRERETON

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THE CRUSTY CRITIC DRAWING SUPPLIES AND PRODUCT REVIEWS BY ANDE PARKS

DAN BRERETON

30 SUBSCRIBE TO DRAW! Four quarterly issues for $20 US Standard Mail, $32 US First Class Mail ($40 Canada, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail). We accept US check, money order, Visa and Mastercard at TwoMorrows, 1812 Park Dr., Raleigh, NC 27605, (919) 833-8092 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com ADVERTISE IN DRAW! See page 2 for ad rates and specifications. DRAW! FALL 2003, Vol. 1, No. 7 was produced by Action Planet Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor, John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Address is PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Dr., Raleigh, NC 27605. DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2003 by their respective contributors. 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 and historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied. Batman, Superman, Birds of Prey, Aquaman, Joker, Batgirl are TM and ©2003 DC Comics • Devil Dinosaur, SpiderMan, Blade, The New Mutants, Sleepwalker, Wolverine TM and ©2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. • The Crow is TM and ©2003 Fallen Bird Productions Inc. This entire issue is ©2003 Action Planet Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

ILLUSTRATOR TECHNIQUES A STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL ON ILLUSTRATING IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR BY ALBERTO RUIZ

CARICATURES A STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL BY ZACH TRENHOLM

THE POWER OF SKETCHING WITH BRET BLEVINS

DESIGNING LIGHT AND SHADOW BY PAUL RIVOCHE

Figurative interpitation by Bret Blevins

FROM THE EDITOR Welcome to DRAW! #7. As the autumn breeze sweeps the first hints of the cooler season past my home office window, it also brings with it the usual change and hectic pace my life seems to take every fall. This August, I started teaching a class on storyboarding and storytelling at the Delaware College of Art and Design, in Wilmington, Delaware. I’m also busy storyboarding on The Venture Bros. for Noodle Soup Productions in NYC. The pilot has already been shown on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. I plan on covering the show production in-depth with a trip to the studio in DRAW! #9. Next year I also plan a crossover with our sister book Write Now!, edited by old Darkhawk partner, Danny Fingeroth. We will do a crossover between DRAW! and Write Now! which will cover the complete process of creating a comic character from designs, plot, pencils, and script to final art and printed comic. It was also great to see so many regular DRAW! readers at this summer’s annual Comic-Con International: San Diego. Once again I shared a table with DRAW! contributor and best pal Bret Blevins, Chris Bailey, John Gallagher, and Randy and JeanMarc Lofficier. Our table was busy all show long with both Bret and myself selling our new sketchbooks as well as art and copies of DRAW! It’s always a hectic show and there was just too much to see this year, as the show somehow grew even bigger. Surf over to the drawmagazine.com web site and check out the pics I posted from this year’s summer shindig. Once again I’d like to extend another heartfelt thanks to this issue’s contributors, Bret, Paul, Ande, Dan Brereton, Alberto Ruiz (a.k.a. Dr. Cyberfunken), and Zach Trenholm. What a diversity of talent here—something I plan to keep striving for in DRAW! I’d like to leave you with two quotes: “A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.” —Michelangelo; and “An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.” —James McNeill Whistler.

Best,

Mike Manley, Editor The DRAW! message board is up and running, so please post feedback and ask questions at: http://66.36.6.76/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi

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MISSIONS NOCTURNAL

From hard boiled detectives, giant monsters and superheroes to the macabre, illustrator Dan Brereton covers it all with his lush and evocative brush strokes. The busy artist shares some of his working techniques. INTERVIEW BY MIKE MANLEY TRANSCRIBED BY STEVEN TICE

DRAW!: So what got you interested in drawing and painting monsters and horror material? Were you into that as a kid? DAN BRERETON: I started drawing monsters as soon as I could draw. They were the first things I felt I could draw, people never interested me as subjects, nor machines or architecture. I’d draw a hillside full of caves in profile and then fill the caves with reclining monsters. I don’t have a recollection of doing this, but my mom has shown me some paintings that I did when I was two, two-and-a-half years old. She has one that’s a blue, pink and red watercolor. My mom painted a lot back then, and she’d set me up sometimes with brushes and paints. The painting is entitled ‘Pecos Bill’ because it reminded me, for some reason, of the Disney character. I think just the colors, because there’s really nothing going on in the painting, it’s just a bunch of colors smashed on there. It’s probably one of the first examples of painting that I have. But as soon as I got to the point where I could actually sit down and think about what I was going to draw, it was monsters. I drew horned monsters with big teeth. Little more than stick figures, you know? One day in kindergarten we had an hour to kill and the teacher asked us what we wanted to do, so I piped up and suggested we draw monsters! She wanted to encourage me, I guess, so she indulged the request and the whole class had a ball. I was like the expert and I remember classmates coming to me with their drawings for approval and advice. It was like my first comic book convention appearance in a way. That day must have sparked something. It surely reinforced my love of creatures and the idea of excelling at something. I’ll never forget that day. DRAW!: So you liked things like the Godzilla movies, I take it? Things like that?

DRAW! • FALL 2003 3

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

You know what? This is really weird, but I watched Ultraman on a daily basis. I watched Speed Racer, I loved the Warner Brothers cartoons, I loved the Groovy Ghoulies and Scooby-Doo and stuff like that, but Godzilla I could not get into. Because it was just a big rubber suit with a guy in it, and it just seemed really fake to me. And a lot of the Godzilla movies that were out when I was a kid were the ones with little Minya, and the more friendly Godzilla stuff was just lame. It wasn’t cool like Ultraman. I didn’t draw monsters from films or TV, most movie monsters scared me too much. I had what I guess you could call night terrors or something. I was scared to walk down the hall to use the bathroom at night and would imagine things wanting to get me in the darkness. My parents didn’t leave a single light on in the house at night and it was creepy. Years later when Poltergeist came out, I could totally relate to the scene with the clown, toys and clothing that always looked like devils and creatures in the dark. I would spook the hell out of myself. Its not like I had a bad childhood, either. My parents are great people and they encouraged my imagination. I just had this over-active imagination, like, to a fault. Comic books were my salvation, I loved superheroes instantly and I loved stories where they triumphed over the villains. The first comic I ever saw was Captain America battling the Red Skull, drawn by Kirby, I knew I was home. The only time I wasn’t drawing monsters or aliens was when I was trying to draw Cap. DRAW!: So were you into the Gamera movies at all?

BRERETON: This piece started with a color rough (center right) that I did as a scribble of a sketch with washes of color, then scanned in. I don’t do color roughs often, but I wanted them to see the color treatment I had in mind because it was important to the composition, which is rather simple. I really liked the pencil sketch for the finish (left)—something about the Baroness’ face really appealed to me. But when I got into the painting stages, I started to feel that, since she is a villain, she ought not to be so cute—it really didn’t fit the feel of the illustration, so she ended up looking much more evil. The tilt of her torso and where I had to crop her chest makes her end up looking much chestier than she would if you could see her entire torso line—believe me, I wasn’t trying to go crazy there.

4 DRAW! • FALL 2003

GI JOE © AND TM 2003 HASBRO

DB: I hadn’t really seen Gamera when I was a kid. See, I got into all this stuff later, when someone in ’95 or ’96 sent me some tapes of the more recent Godzilla movies of the early Nineties, and I was like, “Oh, this is cool!” They’re somewhat low budget, but they’re pretty well done for being low budget, and I really liked what they were doing. And I totally got into them. I completely fell in love with the Godzilla stuff. Old, new, you name it. I bought a Japanese laser-disc of the original movie, the

DAN BRERETON

ILLUSTRATION

(ABOVE) BRERETON: For this cover to Nocturnals: The Dark Forever, I worked out a pleasing montage and I instantly knew what the color scheme would look like. This is not unusual for me, I tend to get an image in mind in color and rather than try and nail it down on a comp, I let it come naturally. There have been times when this approach hasn’t worked out, but 99% of the time, I have the palette well in mind. If you look closely, you can see I made few changes. (LEFT) BRERETON: The painting of the rawhide ghost town character, Digger Payne, was something I could have done off the cuff quite easily. The comp for it—done in monochromatic blues and ink washes—was kind of pleasing when it was done, but they needed a higher level of finish and warm, autumnal tones, so I gave that to them. I’m still partial to the rough.

DRAW! • FALL 2003 5

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

Japanese version. DRAW!: Right, the one without Raymond Burr? DB: Yeah. It’s not even subtitled. And I just watched it. I just took it all in and realized what they were really trying to do with what they had, with the technology. One thing I was really, really into as a kid—about eight, nine or ten years old, around the time I was reading comics—were those Sinbad movies. DRAW!: Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts and all those Ray Harryhausen movies. DB: Oh, Ray Harryhausen was such a huge inspiration to me at that time. That was who I was really into, because I would see those commercials for those movies on TV, and I would beg my parents to take us to see the Sinbad movies. They never would. So I didn’t see the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad until I was a teenager. I think it came on TV. DRAW!: Were you also into the Universal Monsters? DB: No, that stuff was just scary. See, I grew up being afraid of the dark, and scary movies would just send me right over the top. So I couldn’t have watched a movie like Creature from the Black Lagoon when I was a kid; it would have just freaked me out too much. DRAW!: How ironic. It was just to real for you? DB: Yeah! Black-and-white stuff, first of all, I thought was creepier than color. I don’t know, I just couldn’t handle that stuff. That’s why, I think, when I discovered comics and superheroes and things like that, and even monster comics, I could totally handle those. Marvel super-hero comics were perfect, the perfect sensibility. Because I wasn’t even into those monster magazines, those black-and-white magazines that Marvel did. They were just a little too creepy for me. It’s almost embarrassing to say it, but I was kind of a lightweight when it came to horror, as a kid. Up until I became a teenager. I remember when Trilogy of Terror came on TV for the first time. I took a bath and ran in my room, avoided it completely. My mom tried to tell me about it, to reassure me it wasn’t that bad, but the idea of a little tiki god chasing Karen Black with a spear was too much... it was too much like my own dark fantasies and I was only like 8 or 9! I remember kids talking about the horrors of The Exorcist when that was in theaters, and I didn’t want any part of that stuff. I watched The Omega Man in the fifth grade, and I swear it gave me nightmares for a full year. I just couldn’t get over it. I hate to admit it, but I was a wuss as a kid—not what you might expect at all. I’ve had conversations about Rob Zombie about this. As a kid, he loved all that gory horror stuff like it was candy. I was fine with Disney critters. It might be why I do a book like Nocturnals where the monsters are the good guys. I didn’t get into the horror and scary stuff till I was 13 or so, the first R-rated film I saw was Alien. I read the graphic novel and the novelization to gear up for the scares—it helped. I got over my horror movie fears eventually.

6 DRAW! • FALL 2003

DRAW!: So you weren’t immediately fixated on blood and gore like a lot of horror fans are? DB: Oh, never things that had blood and gore. It was always creatures of the imagination. I sat and drew monsters. They weren’t monsters that were crunching bones or doing violence, they were these imaginary creatures. And I’ll tell you one guy who I really identified with at the time was children’s book illustrator Mercer Mayer. Maurice Sendak, too—Where the Wild Things Are—but Mercer Mayer has done a whole bunch of books with monsters and stuff like that, and I really loved his work. I really loved the imagination and the coming up with the new creatures. I never wanted them to be violent. Because the monsters that I made up were my monsters. They were somewhat friendly. DRAW!: So you were more into making up your own monsters than just drawing Godzilla or the monsters you saw on TV? You were more into creating your own worlds and letting your imagination run. DB: Yeah, I drew my own stuff. I never tried to copy stuff. The only time I remember trying to draw anything that was preexisting when I was a kid was I tried to draw Captain America several times, I tried to draw Luke Cage, things like that. But I never really got very far with it. I would lose interest. So I was always coming up with my own characters, I was always drawing monsters straight out of my imagination. I think that’s one

ILLUSTRATION

INFLUENCE AND PHILOSOPHY DRAW!: Were you also getting into things like Bernie Wrightson and Frank Frazetta and that boom of ’70s fantasy art? DB: Yeah in high school, I totally got into Frazetta and Wrightson. When I was in grade school it was Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, John Buscema. They were my three main focuses as far as art. And then as I got into my teens, it was William Stout, Bernie Wrightson, Frank Frazetta. Once I discovered Frazetta, I thought there’s no better artist on the planet, and there never had been and there never will be. I basically felt like he was the pinnacle. And, for the most part, I still do. Frazetta is just such a huge influence on everybody, to the point where most people don’t even mention it anymore. They don’t think that it’s worth mentioning.

DRAW!: Well, it’s easy now to take artists like that a bit for granted. DB: The Leonardo da Vinci of what we do. DRAW!: Right. And especially fantasy art—there would be no Lord of the Rings movie looking the way it does without Frazetta. DB: No. And there would be no Conan the way we know Conan today without Frazetta, because until Frazetta drew Conan, nobody gave a crap about Conan. There were just these musty pulp novels that Avon or whoever were reprinting, and they got Frazetta to do a couple of them, and it was like, “Holy cow! What’s this?” Frazetta totally reinvented Conan, breathed life into him. Who would remember the character if not for Frazetta’s contribution? And then you get a little older and you discover that without a guy like Roy Krenkel, there probably wouldn’t be the Frazetta that we knew. And without Heinrich Kley, N.C. Wyeth or Dean Cornwell or Mead Schaeffer, Hal Foster.... DRAW!: Yes, exactly. Frazetta’s one of those artists that I think that’s a bridge to the past generation of great illustrators... he’s such a key artist that he can also lead you back to the past, to the great illustrators, painters, pulp artists and great cartoonists.

(LEFT and ABOVE) Nudes on watercolor paper BRERETON: I love the figure; the cast shadows, the value changes within shadows, abstracted shapes, attitude and pose, composition, negative space.... My biggest joy has always been painting and drawing the female figure. Phil Hocking, who taught for many years at CCAC in Oakland, once told us in figure drawing class one morning, that when you master the human figure, you can draw anything. I began to wonder what happens when one get so adept at this, what then? I asked Mr. Hocking about the fact that he must have been drawing the figure for three decades or more—and what was left for him to learn or see? That’s when he started talking about Picasso as a young man, having more or less mastered the figure from a classical point of view, began deconstructing the figure, re-imagining drawing and painting. it was the first time I really started to get that there was a world of Art out there besides comic books and Frazetta. (RIGHT) BRERETON: A birthday gift for my girlfriend, who loves these two characters. Watercolor on paper—as much as I love the standard super-hero poses in my favorite comics, it doesn’t tend to hold my attention as an illustrator. I prefer quieter moments—a chance to see a side of the character in repose. You can squeeze a lot out of good lighting and shadows, they tell a story all their own.

of the reasons I liked drawing monsters so much, because it didn’t require any knowledge; it didn’t require you concentrating or focusing on something else. You could just sit and do it for its own sake. I tell you one thing I would say to any parent who’s trying to develop the kid’s imagination or get a kid into developing their imaginations: have them draw imaginary creatures— stuff out of your head that doesn’t require any sort of rules. Just freedom, just complete freedom. Just sitting down and just drawing what comes right out of your head. There’s just a great joy in that. I still love that. It wasn’t until I got to high school or a little older that I started to really get into horror. I think Stephen King was my first real introduction to how cool horror could be and how fun it could be.

DAN BRERETON

DRAW! • FALL 2003 7

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

The Crow BRERETON: The assignment for this Crow image gave me an opportunity to do a little portraiture of Brandon Lee. I started with the prismacolor sketch on the far right—which was originally just the prelim sketch—and ended up being the drawing I physically painted over. I fixed the pencils with acrylic matte medium, then painted over it with watercolor and acrylic washes, sometimes mixing acrylic gesso with the watercolor. (I do this a lot to get an opaque or pastel shade) the effect of the water-based medium on the matte medium created a very painterly look without sacrificing a bit of the drawing, which is the backbone of the piece. I also loved how the fixative “bleeds” the prismacolor, making it more brilliant in hue and creating a “soft focus” sort of line. Matte medium is a great way to create an instant surface for painting over a drawing, while protecting the drawing if the painting isn’t going so hot and needs to be wiped off—something I learned from Barron, who often fixed sketches to paint later, or add to a larger piece.

8 DRAW! • FALL 2003

DB: I always wonder about something: look at Walt Kelly, who started drawing Pogo in the Fifties? Forties? Look at the funny animal stuff that Frazetta was doing when he was younger and then look at Pogo. Is there a correlation there? Was somebody looking at someone else’s stuff? Was Frazetta looking at Walt Kelly at one point? I don’t know. And then you look at Buscema, and there’s so many similarities between Buscema’s work and Frazetta, and you think, was Buscema influenced by Frazetta? And I met John Buscema—I was really lucky to meet him that one year he went to San Diego—and I had a nice talk with him. And I asked him about Frazetta. He liked Frazetta’s work, but he didn’t go on about it like, “Oh, he was so great!” But you got the feeling that he was looking at his work. I always used to wonder if Buscema was inspired by Frazetta. I really don’t know. DRAW!: I think all of his peers were. It’s hard not to be, because Frazetta was so huge, so popular, but I somehow think Halloween Girl—BRERETON: Evening is one of my favorite characters to draw. Imagine, after all those years of super-heroes and monsters, first reading about them in comics and then illustrating them, she is really refreshing. The drawing is watercolor over black prismacolor, done at the table of a comic book show. I probably did some clean-up in photoshop, which I’ve taken to doing after scanning art in. I’m never interested in relying heavily on digital tools—they’re just tools. The drawing and painting is always done in the physical world, with digital tools helping to come in at the finish. Maybe after I’ve come to learn it better I’ll be able to do more, but to honest, I don’t mind having a limited knowledge, because I’d hate to become dependent on it.

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

Tarzan’s Jane BRERETON: Colored pencil with watercolor wash. I did this piece in a sketchbook full of depictions of Tarzan’s girl. I was blown away by many of the pieces in the book, but inspired too. This was originally a two-page spread, something I enjoy doing in sketchbooks. After scanning the piece, I used photoshop to play with it, and touch-up the area where the two pages met. The winding trunk shapes and twisting vines are prime material for creating a strong composition that carries the eye through the piece from left to right, from background to foreground. Simpler compositions are best—if it’s strong enough, you can build off it and it remains powerful.

house style of comics. The ’60s era style.

Buscema was more inspired by Alex Raymond and Hal Foster than Frazetta. And Frazetta was heavily influenced by them as well. It all goes back to the same well. DB: Yeah, I think he was inspired by the guys that Frazetta liked, too. Raymond and Foster and Wally Wood... the adventure strip artists. Burne Hogarth, Foster.... DRAW!: I think those artists of that generation all were inspired by the strip artists; that’s the material that they read as kids. Milt Caniff or Foster or Raymond... the great illustrators in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, etc. DB: Yeah. I always thought Conan was all Buscema, and I really like his Conan. And then you discover, oh, there’s this guy named Frazetta who painted these Conan covers, and you look at those and you think, “Wow! These are pretty cool, too! What’s going on here? These guys, do they know each other?” No, they didn’t, but they’re all in the same family. They have the same fathers and uncles. DRAW!: Right. That’s a very good way of putting it. DB: If you look at, say, the Image house style...when I say that I mean back when Image first started, you had Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane... who was the other guy? DRAW!: Liefeld? DB: Liefeld, yeah. You look at their work and you see that they established this house look that is still so heavily prevalent in comics. DRAW!: Well, it basically replaced the de facto Jack Kirby/John Buscema Marvel Comics style that was the sort of

DB: Well, look at DC Comics. DC and Marvel, you’re looking at the house styles of John Romita and John Buscema, Jack Kirby. And then at DC you’ve got Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino— DRAW!: Curt Swan.... DB: And Dick Giordano, those kinds of looks. I know I’m leaving out a bunch of awesome guys. José Luis Garcia-Lopez. You name it. And they’re being replaced by this other look. And at DC, especially, forget about the Image style, there’s this DC house style now. It’s this sort of really realistic, rendered style. And I just look at this stuff sometimes and it just boggles my mind. John Cassaday and Bryan Hitch, those two guys, I look at their work and I go, “Holy Christ. I’m in the same business as these guys?” They’re incredible! But, at the same time, as incredible as these guys are, their work leaves me.... From a technical point of view, I’m stunned, but I get weary looking at it. I think, “I can’t draw, I stink.” [Mike laughs] But the stuff leaves me cold, emotionally. So from a technical point of view, I’m stunned, I’m in awe. DRAW!: Well, there’s not much humor in it... the way there was in Kirby’s stuff. DB: No animation in it. DRAW!: Yeah, there was a bit of humor—the old Spider-Man stuff had a lot of humor in it. DB: They’re British. DRAW!: British? Can you explain that? DB: Not really. But it’s rendered heavily, worked endlessly. If you look at a lot of the other British stuff that was coming out in the late Eighties, early Nineties, guys like Steve Pugh and... DRAW! • FALL 2003

ILLUSTRATION

who drew Grant Morrison’s first book over there? He has a real great style... Steve Yeowell. He had some animation, some humor, some opinion to it. And that’s the stuff that really gets my juices. That’s why I think I like Bruce Timm’s work so much. People who are working on his end of the spectrum get me a lot more excited. I’m juiced to it. DRAW!: That’s why I really liked what Darwyn Cooke was doing on Catwoman. DB: Yeah! In fact, I was just looking at that stuff. I actually happen to have a copy of it someone gave me, and I was just looking at that stuff. I love the way he draws figures. There’s some opinion to it, there’s some juice to it, and there’s also this sense of... you’re not just going to be super caught up in rendering. You know what I mean? DRAW!: Yes. But I think, as an artist... it’s all so personal. It’s your taste, some like detail, some like exaggeration, some simplicity. It reminds me of the old Alex Toth argument. Many artists hold up a guy like Alex Toth as being the artist’s artist. Sort of the artist’s ultimate goal/example of less equals more. Yet fans’ taste is often reversed—more equals more, or better. I think, if you’re an artist, your interest in the comic is more based upon your desire, in a way, to emulate your art heroes, your influences—to be able to draw as good as them. In your case, it would be somebody like Frazetta. DB: Yeah. DRAW!: Where I think, to the average comic-reading fan or person looking at art, they look at most modern cartoonists drawing super-hero books today and they see all this attention to detail, and to the average person, they equate detail with sincerity and quality. That means if the artist was really, really rendered up, his drawing is really good. It’s easy and obvious and lays there and requires the reader to do little work to complete the connections. There it all is. Not much mystery. DB: It means, “Wow, he put a lot of work into this.” DRAW!: So there’s always this eternal argument going, this little battle going back and forth, within some artists in the industry. Maybe not huge, but I certainly talk with many artists about this, because the fans never raise up an artist like Toth. The artists raise up a guy like Toth as sort of the ultimate—an artist who got really close to perfection in the medium. DB: Well, you have to get to a certain level as an artist to be able to understand why it is that Toth is a genius. Just like when you’re studying art, and your teachers are pushing Picasso on you, and you’re like, Picasso, Van Gogh, these guys sucked! They couldn’t even friggin’ draw! Give me a break! Picasso draws a nostril in the middle of the face? Well, then you come to realize, well, okay, Pablo Picasso mastered drawing the figure when he was a boy. He transcended and went up into the stratosphere artwise. And most people don’t get that stuff. They just don’t have the education, they don’t have the patience to under10 DRAW! • FALL 2003

ABOVE—Gatchaman—BRERETON: This piece might have worked better for me if I’d played with the value more, there needs to be more push and pull in the art so that some of the montage elements don’t conflict with others for dominance. The only thing that saves it is the varying sizes of the figures. At the same time, it has a crazy anime feel to it that I kind of get from watching the shows the card is based on, so its not a total disaster.

stand why it’s important or what makes it great. And Van Gogh, oh my God. I couldn’t have cared less about Van Gogh before I got into school, and now I look at his stuff and it is so simply beautiful. It burns with emotion and passion. It has all these things that I guess just took people a while to figure out were there, just like it took me a while. DRAW!: Well, if you go into an art gallery, the work that the average person would buy is work by someone like Thomas Kincaid, because to them, they look at it and it’s very detailed and it’s got all the glowy light and everything—that’s good. DB: That’s “good” artwork. That’s like my great-uncle. One day he comes over and he shows me this painting of a boat in a harbor. It was totally photo-realistic. The watercolor painter had obviously taken a photo and tried to do as photo-realistic a job on it as possible. And he shows it to me and goes, “See that? That’s Art.” [Mike laughs] He was basically telling me that what I do is not ’good’ art because I don’t make it look real. And then of course I show him a panel of my comic where I had taken some reference and done a portrait of someone’s face, and I said, “What about that? Does that look real enough for you?” and he nods and says, “Well, that’s good. That’s good, right there.” But basically anything where you use too much imagination is not

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artistic to the average working guy. “Everyone’s got that, that doesn’t cost anything.” Almost as if the technique is worth something to someone. Because they can’t do it—they see something they can’t do. But you show them Alex Toth and they have no concept of how that works, how he makes something with such a small amount of work happen. They don’t see the design, they don’t see the inherent understanding of structure and character and storytelling and design that he had; they just see four lines that make a guy’s face, and they don’t get it. Whereas if you show them that same drawing and it has fifty million hatch lines on it, they see the construction involved in it and they think, “Wow! That’s a lot of work!” Maybe because we value quantity over quality, as Americans. That might be why a guy like Toth is so highly regarded in Europe and less so here. Because we like detail. DRAW!: We like big portions on everything: french fries and art. I also think that he is more regarded by people who are well north of thirty years old. If you’re much younger than forty, you probably never bought an Alex Toth comic, and you’re probably not even very aware of his artwork. Or his influence amongst his peers.

DB: And those people are not aware of the fact that any HannaBarbera stuff they liked, they could thank him for it.

EDUCATION

DEVIL DINOSAUR AND MOON BOY © AND TM 2003 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

DRAW!: Did you have any art schooling? DB: I did four years in the San Francisco Bay Area. I attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland for twoand-a-half years, then when their illustration department was looking like it was going to be phased out by the Evil Design School, four of us transferred to the Academy of Art College in SF. It was a great move, they had a huge illustration program. The following semester, 15 more students followed us. Since then, CCAC has gotten much better after Barron Storey took over as head of the illus-

ABOVE—Nude study—BRERETON: This study was done with a terra cotta prismacolor—a sketch for a collector named David, who has commissioned several nudes and pin-up style pieces from me over the years. I liked the way this one came out. Convention sketches, whether they are done at the show or in the hotel room at a show, aren’t always inspired pieces—it’s difficult to do my best work “on the road” outside the studio, but when I do something I think is successful, most collectors are very gracious and will send me a scan of the piece.

tration school there, I’ve heard. I studied painting, drawing, some design and art history. Art history is something I never would have figured I would have liked, but it was a great experience. I wouldn’t be where I am, working in the field I love, without the experience of art school. I got my first comics job out of art school; the very first was designing characters for a Doctor Doom/Doctor Strange graphic novel, Mike Mignola hired me to do. I’d met him when he visited one of my teachers LEFT—Devil Dinosaur—BRERETON: Convention sketches, as most artists who attend comic books shows will attest, cover the gamut from familiar characters to things you wouldn’t in a million years expect to be asked to do. It’s always a pleasure to get a request for the more relatively obscure stuff, like Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy. This piece was done in colored pencil and some marker, if I’m not mistaken. I tried to give the T-Rex that vivid expressionistic feel, something Kirby was a genius at—not exactly anatomically correct, but altogether alive, if you know what I mean.

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in class one afternoon, where he saw my student work. Later, he asked me to design some characters for this scene where Strange is dueling with a bunch of mystics. It was fun. Mike paid me, and that’s my first gig in comics as a comics artist. A little over a year later, I did some painted pages for a class semester project and they became the first seven pages of the Black Terror mini-series I did for Eclipse. I hadn’t done them as an audition piece, per se, but to see if I could actually pull off painting comic pages. By Christmas, I’d shown the pages to Eclipse and they hired me right away to do the book. I walked on a cloud for months until my fourth year of art school ended. DRAW!: What about sketching and studying. Do you sketch a lot? DB: Not like when I was in art school. I don’t sit and draw trees and stuff; I don’t do figure drawings, workshops. I should do them and I would like to do them. There’s nothing where I live that’s really viable for me. When I moved up to the Bay Area, there was a community college course they were offering at the high school. And they had a life drawing class, and I went in there and did that class for one session. I showed the teacher all my work. I showed him my Lady Justice covers and some other stuff I was doing. This was back in ’95. I said, “Really, I just want to get in some drawing time. I feel rusty with the whole life drawing thing.” And he didn’t understand that, for a professional artist, going and drawing figures is like a cop going to the shooting range. You really gotta get time in with the gun and know the weapon. Otherwise, you shouldn’t be carrying it. And that’s how I felt; I felt like I really had to get some time in drawing from the figure. And he expected me to do his class. He expected me to come back with book reports on artists, things like that. [Mike laughs] Okay, that’s great if you’re in a class, but I already went to art school for four years. I wanted to just draw. That didn’t work out. I went to one session and I didn’t go back, and it’s too bad I couldn’t do more of it. It’s really important. But for me now, when I sketch, it’s mostly I jot down visual ideas for characters and stories and things like that that I want to do. I do a lot of sketching at shows. When I go to comic conventions, I do a lot of drawings. DRAW!: So you don’t keep a sketchbook specifically to draw for learning? DB: I have lots of sketchbooks around the house, but there’s nothing I keep specifically for drawing sunsets or old barns or portraits of my kids and things like that. Every once in a while, the mood will take me and I’ll do stuff like that, but there just doesn’t seem like a lot of time for that stuff. There’s just too much work to be done. DRAW!: Well, it’s not odd that you’re saying that, because I find that most of the artists that I interview for DRAW! seem to say the same thing: there was a time that they used to do a lot of drawing and sketching for its own sake, and that now that they’re so busy, they don’t have the time to do it. They would like to do it, but they draw rarely, they sketch rarely outside of the demands of the daily need to meet the commercial deadline. Most of their sketching goes towards their work, and when 12 DRAW! • FALL 2003

ABOVE—Ultimate Team-Up layouts—BRERETON: My layouts done here at about 5x7 inches, are a very shoot-from-the-hip affair. Quick—about movement and composition—and usually, incomprehensible to others, nevertheless invaluable to me.

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DAN BRERETON

SPIDER-MAN AND BLADE © AND TM 2003 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

LEFT—Inked Ultimate Team-Up page—BRERETON: This Spider-Man job was one of the first inking jobs I did in a long time. I was asked not to include washes of grey tones, and they wouldn’t let me paint it in full color for whatever reason, so I was left to rely on line and spot blacks. It was a struggle at first, because I’m not used to inking as a process. It helped to read the Dick Giordano article in DRAW! #3, believe it or not, and afterward, I picked up some tips. Never be afraid to consult a fellow artist. I’ve since learned little tips here and there from friends who ink well. I tend to get by on a lot of blacks in my inks, but I’m fine with that because that’s the kind of feel I wanted with this story—oppressive, lots of shadows. I have a new appreciation for the concept of leaving areas unfinished for the colorists—something I don’t think twice about when I’m painting, obviously. BELOW—Working from photos —BRERETON: I find that working from life, whether its captured in photographs are when one has a model sitting (something that I almost never have happen) is crucial to working in a loose style. The subject will end up possessing the effect of being both realistic and existing in the mind of the artist simultaneously. That’s the idea for me, anyway. I get really excited when I’m shooting reference—it inspires me—I’m lighting and posing models and objects. I see light patterns I could never have conceived on my own. Ideas begin to form, atmosphere comes into play. For me, shadows describe at least 75% more than line can in my work. And it works because of the reference I shoot. It’s too easy for me to noodle and have too much detail—it may not show in my work, but I really do try to economize. Maybe someday I’ll learn how to do it the way Toth does.

LEFT—Ultimate Team-Up pencils—BRERETON: After I scribble out the layouts or thumbnails, I usually shoot reference for lighting, figure perspective, and accuracy in anatomy. Then I pencil. When I pencil, I tend to think in terms of lighting, shapes and composition, rather than describing form with line. I tend to approach drawing and painting from the same POV of being aware of lighting and form and value. If your painting is working in color, odds are, it will translate well into black-and-white most of the time. And a drawing that is strong in light and shadow relies less on color to get it through.

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they’re not working, if they have a family, they’re usually trying to spend time with their families. DB: Exactly. That’s exactly right. I have three kids, I’m a single parent, I’m raising the kids by myself. I don’t have a lot of time to do much else other than work and have a social life and be with the kids. So I divide the bulk of my time up between working, my kids, my family and my girlfriend. And with my other family and some of my friends. Going to conventions is very good for me because the bulk of my friends are people I’m going to see at shows. Whether they’re people in the industry, people who are related to the industry.... I’m good friends with quite a few art collectors. I used to think it was weird that guys in comics I knew had so few friends outside of the comics circle, but now I understand more why. Because when I started out, most of my friends were people that I had worked with or gone to school with, they weren’t involved in comics. And now I would say the bulk of my friends are people who are in the business. It’s because it’s where I’m at, it’s where I go, the people that I meet. DRAW!: You’re not down spending your time hanging at the local bars or something. DB: No, I don’t go to the bars. And my people I went to art school with or people from my old job at the movie theater back in 1988 or whatever, or ’89, they’re off doing their thing. So it’s my family, it’s people I know in comics, it’s my kids. Even my girl, I met her at a show. So that’s just how it works out. Now, I’m not complaining, it’s fine. It’s good to have common interests and things like that, and I’ve made some very good friendships with people in the business. I think the comic book industry has... mostly I’ve noticed with professionals who draw, I think, more than anything else, some of the best people I’ve ever met. Artists, writers... there’s a lot of great writers out there, there’s a lot of great publishers and editors and people who I consider great friends, but the majority of artists I know are like... they’re the knights of the industry, in a way. They’re sort of the Knights of the Round Table. Most of us have very similar kinds of temperaments, and they’re fairly honest, hardworking individuals. They’re very intelligent and creative. And they all seem to get along pretty well with each other. DRAW!: Except on Internet message boards. [laughs] DB: Oh, I’m just saying overall, in general. I’m generalizing like crazy. But a lot of the guys I know... one thing I’ve noticed, it’s like instant friendship sometimes. I think it’s when you like someone else’s work and they like your work. Like when I met Phil Noto. I really loved Phil’s stuff. It turns out Phil’s a fan of my stuff. We became instant buddies. And it’s not like Phil and I have every single thing in common on the planet. We have a lot of stuff in common, we have just enough stuff in common to keep interest in each other. But we never would have found that out unless we liked each other’s work first. I’ve really noticed this thing where if someone likes your work, it’s like you’re an instant member of the club. DRAW!: You’ve already broken the ice, really. 14

DRAW! • FALL 2003

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DAN BRERETON

SPIDER-MAN AND BLADE © AND TM 2003 MARVEL CHARACTERS INC.

LEFT—Ultimate Team-Up— BRERETON: Super-heroes are pure opera, which I learned from reading Marvel comics as a kid, I suppose. Silver Surfer and the Fantastic Four were just a few of the comics I loved—and the larger-than-life staging, exaggerated drama and action of those comics have found their way into the way I tend to treat super-hero tableaus. It’s Jack Kirby, it’s John Buscema and Gene Colan, really. I seem to be reaching for them at the same time I’m reaching for the samurai westerns.

LEFT—Ultimate Team-Up—BRERETON: There are often several ways a page can be designed. Sometimes there’s only one good way to describe the action and you might have to do several takes to get it right, but it’s crucial to ending up with a good page. I tried very hard to get a “Marvel feel,” but my style insisted on creeping in. I prefer fewer panels per page, and had I written this sequence myself, would have had fewer panels. But it’s good to be challenged—to find the simplest way to tell the story—and it forces me to be more inventive.

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DAN BRERETON

DB: Yeah, you’ve broken the ice. And it’s weird because, how strange to base a friendship or whether you like someone on whether or not your taste happens to coincide with what they do. ’Cause I’ve noticed something really strange, is that when they don’t like what you do, they don’t want to be friends with you. DRAW!: Well, the hardest thing is if you meet a person, and you don’t particularly like their work, but you like them as a person. That makes it much more difficult. DB: Yeah. I know people like that, that are friendly to me and they like me as a person, but they’re never going to hire me. There are editors who I get along with just fine, but they’re not going to call me for a job. I just know they don’t like my work. They’ve either told me, or other people told me, or it’s become obvious. You meet an editor a dozen times and have a nice conversation, yet they never call you for a job, they never seem interested. I’ve had that happen with other artists, other writers, publishers. And it’s kind of strange, because you’re so used to this whole, “I like your work, you’re accepted” thing, that when it goes in the opposite direction, it kind of hits you hard. It’s just a cruel reality of life. That’s what life is really like. It would be great if we were all in some big club together and we run into each other on the street, “Hey, I like your work, let’s be friends.” [Mike laughs] It’s just bizarre. BREAKING IN DRAW!: Right. To get back to a little bit about your career. You started working on the Black Terror. Was that your first big gig?

afternoon, we were doing a critique, we had all our work up on the board. Mike Mignola and Steve Purcell walked in. I didn’t know who they were, but they were coming in to visit the teacher and said that they were all former students. They came in, they saw the stuff, and Vince said, “Oh, these two guys do comics. Danny, you should talk to these guys who do comics.” And he introduced them to me. Basically, the teacher said, “Here, ABOVE: The cover from Legends of the World’s take this guy under Finest. your wing.” And they didn’t exactly take me under their wing as much as crush me under their wing. A couple of afternoons at Mike’s place and at Steve’s place hanging out with them, being browbeaten by them, sitting me down at the table saying, “Okay, draw an old woman carrying groceries! You can draw a better hand than that! It’s not always going to be super-heroes!”

ILLUSTRATION

DB: Yeah. I met Steve Purcell and Mike Mignola in one of my classrooms in 1986, ’87... wait, or was that... it was ’88. I think I was a junior, it was my third year of art school, and I was in Vince Perez’s drawing and illustration class.

DB: The California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. That’s where I went for two-and-a-half years. The next year-and-a-half I was at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, and that’s where I did my four years of art school. When I was in Vince’s class one RIGHT—A panel from Legends of the World’s Finest—BRERETON: I find myself wanting to paint a certain size, I dislike working on small figures, and because of it, I am likely to cram them in, like in this composition. It really needs to breathe more as a painting and could benefit from more open space, but the story and the space one has to tell it in demands that I sometimes bring the “camera” closer to the subjects.

16 DRAW! • FALL 2003

DRAW!: And what college was this?

ILLUSTRATION

DB: There was no love. But it was tough, and it was instructional and helpful. But, no, there’s never been any love. To this day, I can’t tell if Mike Mignola even likes me. [Mike laughs] But those guys were really instrumental in getting me jump-started into a career, because I found stuff out that I wouldn’t have found out otherwise. They were both living in the Bay Area at the time. They said, “Are The cover to The Psycho NO.3 you going to go to Wonder Con?” I said, “What’s that?” “It’s a comic book convention. You should go and show your work, do some samples.” My first comic book sample pages I ever did were done because Mike had suggested it. So I did them, and I brought them to his house, and he critiqued the hell out of them. Very helpful, very helpful. He was very brutally honest, and that was very helpful to me. My problem was that I was like, “Wow! These guys are so cool!” I wanted to be best friends with them. They wouldn’t have anything to do with me. [laughter] I met Arthur Adams through them. And the first time I went to a comic book convention was in 1984, where I had a meeting with Deni Sim at the time. I was hoping she would publish this comic I had drawn called Storm Knight. I was maybe a year out of high school. And she said, “You know, I would suggest that you self-publish.” And I said, “Okay.” So I kind of looked into that and then just realized that I sucked, and went to art school instead. So this was my second convention, Wonder Con in ’88. I brought my samples and I showed them to Mark Gruenwald, I showed them to Fred Burke at Eclipse. They had good things to say. Sam Kieth was just starting on Sandman at the time, and I showed my work to him. He was very friendly; he was very nice. He goes, “You’re good enough to be working now. You just need to work a couple of things out and you could get hired.” And that’s when he introduced me to Fred Burke at Eclipse. And Fred liked some of the stuff that he saw, and they gave me my first penciling job, this little back-up story that Kurt Busiek wrote. And Kurt was just starting out, so no one really knew who he was. And after I did that, Richard Howell inked it. Nothing against Rich, but he was just the wrong guy to ink me. After I did that, Eclipse basically didn’t have any interest in hiring me again. They were, to quote Fred, “slightly unimpressed.” DRAW!: [laughs] Oh, geez. DB: Yeah. So I was kind of depressed about that. I went to San

Diego Comic-Con that year, a couple of months later. I wasn’t going to get any work there. DRAW!: Now, were you showing pencil work, or were you showing— DB: Pencil work, stuff that had been inked by other people like the one job. And I showed painted stuff, too, from school. But nothing where you could look at the painted stuff and go, “Okay, we’ll give this guy a painted cover.” You know what I mean? DRAW!: So you were doing fantasy paintings or what? DB: Yeah, stuff from art school. Stuff that was me trying to plug what I like to do into an assignment from school. So it was obvious that I liked the kind of stuff that was comics-related but that I lacked the experience to do a painted comic book cover. So I kind of twiddled my thumbs around San Diego, and some of us ran into Dave McKean, George Pratt, Kent Williams. They were all at San Diego, in the Artists Alley, showing their work. Dave McKean had just done Violent Cases, he was working on Black Orchid, so he had some original pages there. George Pratt was working on Enemy Ace, he had some pages there. And Kent Williams had just done Blood, and he had some pages there for sale. I remember looking at these, and I was completely mesmerized. I was just blown away, and I thought, “This is what I want to do. I want to do it like this. I can’t ink. I’m not a penciler. This is the way I want to do comics.” These guys were really good. I remember asking Kent Williams, “Do you do all the panels on one page?” He goes, “Yeah.” I ask, “Well, what if you make a mistake? What if one panel gets screwed up?” He goes, “You just work on it and fix it.” I go, “What if you can’t fix it?” He goes, “Then you just have to live with it.” You talk to the other guy and he says, “Well, you just do a patch.” “What’s that?” “You just take the shape of that panel and you redo it and just put it over the top.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” It boggled my mind that they did all that work on one page. DRAW!: So up until that point, you had not thought about trying to paint comics, you were just trying to do it the traditional way? DB: Well, because I didn’t have the foggiest clue how those guys did that stuff. Because I had seen Blood, I had seen Bill Sienkiewicz’s stuff on Elektra: Assassin. I thought that stuff was beautiful. I had no idea what they were doing or how they were doing it.

DRAW!: So it was “tough love,” then?

DAN BRERETON

The cover to The Black Terror #2.

DRAW! • FALL 2003 17

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DAN BRERETON

DRAW!: Wow.

GIANT KILLER © AND TM 2003 DAN BRERETON

And I sure as hell didn’t think I was good enough to do that stuff. So I saw their work, I was totally inspired, but I was totally depressed. I went home the next day. John Estes and Bill Koeb and I were sharing a room. He went down to the convention. I said, “I’ll meet you down there.” I got a plane, I got an early flight home. I left them a note and I went home. I was so depressed.

DB: “What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.” So I go home. It was a bad scene. So I go back to school the next semester and I’m in this illustration class with Kazu Sano, a very highly regarded illustrator. He does movie posters, book covers, things like that. He did the Return of the Jedi movie poster, the montage with Luke and Leia and all that stuff on it. I took his class in illustration. He gave us a semester project which was, “Do whatever you want. Just work on it every weekend. I want you to do something by the end of the semester, some big project.” So I thought, “Hmm. Maybe I will do a painted comic book story.” Now, going back to my first two conventions I’d been to, Fred Burke at Eclipse had talked about how Beau Smith, who was ABOVE: From Giant Killer. the sales guy at Eclipse at the time, wanted to revamp the Black Terror, this Golden Age character. They showed me samples of the original character. I’d actually done some Black Terror drawings that Fred liked, but Eclipse wasn’t going to hire me because they didn’t think I could pencil worth a damn. But Beau liked the stuff that I was doing, Fred liked my designs on the character and they liked my color stuff, but nothing was happening. So I thought, hey, what I’ll do is I’ll take this Black Terror character that I revamped and I will do a seven-page story with him. And I didn’t tell Eclipse or anyone I was doing it. I just did it on my own. I could just as well have done a Batman story, but for some reason I did the Black Terror thing. I don’t know, maybe in the back of my mind I was thinking that I might show it to them, but I really wasn’t planning on doing it. I just wanted to try it. So I got my friends together and I started shooting some refer18 DRAW! • FALL 2003

ence of them fighting each other. I came up with some dopey idea of the Black Terror fighting a vampire. And then I started painting the pages one at a time in my spare time, on the weekends. And I’d bring them into class and my classmates would gather around and look at them and go, “Oooooh... how are you doing this? And what’s this for?” My teacher thought it was really cool and he encouraged me. I just started working on these things and I was having fun doing them, and they were coming out pretty good. DRAW!: Was he giving you any technical feedback on the technique or painting or anything? DB: I was doing acrylics. I was painting in acrylics and I was painting in watercolor. I wasn’t doing any pen and ink stuff, I would just paint and paint and paint on these things until they looked good. So there was this build-up of acrylic, layers of acrylic. There were some where I was using watercolor and acrylic. I was using everything at my disposal—all the stuff I was learning in school, all the things that were working for me. And I spent so much time on the first couple of pages, I spent so much time on them. If they had been an actual job, I would have lost money on them. They just took so long to do. But they looked pretty good. DRAW!: So what did you do once you had the pages finished? DB: I had about five or six pages done by Christmas. Over Christmas break, I got in touch with Fred and I showed them to him. He was in Oakland at the time, so I went over to his apartment and I laid these boards out. They were done on Bainbridge and Strathmore illustration paper. Heavy board, about 12” x 18” size. And he was blown away. He goes, “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to do this before?” “I dunno, I just did it for school.” So he went to Forestville to visit Cat Yronwode and Dean Mullaney at Eclipse the following weekend. They called Fred on Monday or Tuesday and said they want this book “done yesterday.” “You’re hired, and they want it done, and that’s it. Congratulations, they’re doing a Black Terror

ILLUSTRATION book, three 48-page issues.” All of a sudden I was a comic book artist.

DB: No. I was completely overjoyed, because they were going to pay me $75 a page or something? $125? I was in heaven. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was I going to get to do what I wanted to do, they were going to pay me for every page. [laughter] DRAW!: Hopefully you make a little bit more money a page now! [laughs]

DRAW!: Did it seem sort of daunting, that amount of work to do?

DB: At the time I knew nothing about artists not getting paid for work. The first time I ever heard about that, I thought, “That’s ludicrous! They should be sued, they should be paying you!” Overnight I was a comic book artist, and I was still in school, still doing these pages, still showing them to people in school, but this time, now, I was hired. I was working on a book. And I was never less accepted at my school, in my illustration department, than at that point in time, when I was doing a comic and I knew I was going to be a comic book guy. I felt like the whole department was just against me. DRAW!: You were an instant pariah, huh? DB: I was a pariah, I was the black sheep. We did this spring illustration show for the juniors that year—I wasn’t yet a senior because I transferred from the other school, even though it was my fourth year of school that year—and I remember, I didn’t get one piece in the show. I had friends that had ten or twelve pieces in the show. I had a friend who got scholarships and awards for the stuff he had in the show. I didn’t rate one piece. And I was one of the better artists at that school; I was in the top 10%. Not one piece in the show. The teachers just looked at

DAN BRERETON

me with these hang-dog expressions, like “we’re really sorry.” And I’m like, “Why? How?” And they’re like, “Well, y’know, I think the show is supposed to reflect what the school is trying to accomplish with its students, getting them ready to do commercial jobs. Your stuff is a lot of fantasy stuff, and the things that you chose to put in there were things that reflect your tastes rather than what the school wants to show off.” And I was like, “eff that!” [Mike laughs] “This is what I want to do, this is my best stuff.” They were like, “Well, how about that painting of the homeless guy that you did? That was really nice, why didn’t you put that in there?” I said, “Because I did it in an hour before class. I found a picture of a homeless guy in a paper, I projected the photo, and then I painted it, an hour before class. And that’s why I didn’t turn it in, because it’s not my best work.” They said, “Well, it was a nice piece and you should have put it in there.” DRAW!: So, the school wanted to control you. DB: They editorialized me. They were teaching me a lesson. I felt like they were trying to teach me a lesson by omitting everything, obliterating me from their showing. And that’s when the school became the instant enemy to me after that. I was like, “I’m just gonna mark time, I’m gonna get out of here. I don’t need a Bachelor of Arts degree in illustration. Why do I need that? Who’s going to hire me because I have a degree? I have a portfolio, I’m working in comics, I don’t need these guys. As soon as I’m done with this semester, I’m out of here. I accomplished what I came to do.” And that’s what happened, I got out of school. The first issue of the Black Terror came out at the end of that year—that was ’89. And I remember sending Barbara Bradley, the Dean of Illustration, a copy of the first issue with a note that said “Thank you for everything. this is what I was working on when I was still in school, and I hope you like it. I would like to go back to school at some point.” A sort of thank you. I didn’t want to have hard feelings, because I learned a lot at the Academy—it wasn’t all bad. A week later she called and left a message on my answering machine, which is completely unheard of. Barbara Bradley was like the anti-comic book woman. The only comic book artist that she would even bother looking at or she would give any props to was Bill Sienkiewicz. I remember trying to show her Kevin Nowlan’s work, and all she would look at is the way it was colored by the colorist. [Mike laughs] “No, no, but look at the line drawing, look at his drawing!” and she’s huffing and snorting, “Look at the colors, they’re just all over the place, they don’t work at all.” When it came to championing comics, there was no getting through to this woman. She’s the illustrator who designed the Dole Pineapple Kids in the Fifties. That was her claim to fame. The DRAW! • FALL 2003 19

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

little hula kids with the cherubic faces? She’s a great artist. No affinity for comics whatsoever. So I get this answering machine message from her in which she talks for about five minutes about how great this book is and how wonderful it is, I don’t need to go back to school, I have made it, she’s completely impressed. She never heard any of this stuff before then. I heard that they had the comic up in their hallway hanging from a string for like a week, so everyone could see it. “I saw your book at the school.” And it wasn’t much longer after that that they started teaching ’graphic novel’ classes at the school. Kieron Dwyer taught there and I think Bill Koeb too. DRAW!: So they drive you out of town on a rail— DB: Out of town on a rail, and then I become a hero, because here I am working in comics. And the funny thing was, the year after that, most of the guys that I knew from my class, who were studying Illustration—which means you were doing a lot of painting—got jobs in comics the next year. Miran Kim, who was one of the darlings of the department—deservedly so, because she did these great paintings—she started doing the XFiles stuff. Years later, the guy who was the total darling favorite of the school, and a really talented artist, was back living in Hawaii somewhere. He was considered the next Bob Peak, the next Drew Struzan. They flooded him with awards scholarships and accolades, and he was very talented. He went back to Hawaii and didn’t do anything.

DRAW!: So after the Black Terror, did you start thinking of doing your own thing? DB: Well, I was working on the Black Terror when I met Jim Hudnall at Wonder Con the second year I’d done the show, so this would have been Wonder Con ’89. Jim comes up and says, “I’m doing this series for DC. It’s a creator-owned series called Psycho, and we’re looking for an artist—we haven’t got one yet—and I really like your stuff. Can I show them your samples?” So I said sure. A week later I get a call from Mike Carlin at DC Comics telling me that they want me to do The Psycho, they really like my work. Mike’s saying, “Hey, Andy Helfer is in the office. He wants you to do a Justice League graphic novel.” Then Mike turns to Helfer and barks, “He doesn’t want to do a Justice League graphic novel! Shut up and leave him alone!” Then to me, “We want you to do lots of stuff for us, but we want you to do the Psycho thing first. Get this out of the way and you can do a Superman book.” I was very excited. It turns out Mike Mignola had been in the offices that afternoon, because he’d moved to New York at that time, and had seen my samples, and went, “Wow! What is this stuff? This stuff is great! Who’s work is this? ‘Brereton’? Who’s this guy?” And then all of a sudden, to quote Mike, “Bong! It hits me who it is! We used to make fun of this guy!” And I remember there was a time after that, he came back to visit his family. It was around Thanksgiving vacation and he called me and wanted to come by my place. I was living in Oakland at the time. He stopped by, and I was living right across the street from our old school, CCAC and I remember looking out the window and seeing a kid hauling his portfolio to class. And I said, “Look at that. Look at 20 DRAW! • FALL 2003

that poor guy hauling his portfolio to class, trying to make it.” And he goes, “Yeah, but don’t make fun of that guy, because you never know when he’s gonna turn up.” [Mike laughs] DRAW!: So you started doing the work for DC and these other companies, but when did you start thinking of doing your own characters, like the Nocturnals? DB: Well, Psycho was a creator-owned gig, so that was a really great way to break into comics, because there I was working for DC, a big corporation, but they didn’t have their hooks into us, editorially speaking, because the Psycho was our creation. So Mike Carlin said, “Look, it’s not my character, it’s not DC’s character, it’s your character, so you guys call the shots.” So we had a lot of freedom. Very hands-off. But at the same time, I learned a lot from working with him. He’s a great editor. I’m really glad he’s gone back to editing. So after that, I was really not bitten by the creator-owned bug at this time. I had just gotten into comics and I really wanted to do super-heroes. I wanted to do their characters. I wanted to do Batman, and I wanted to do X-Men, Wolverine and Punisher and stuff like that. My next project after The Psycho was I had agreed to do this Clive Barker adaptation of a short story called “Dread,” which turned out to be one of the most boring jobs of my life, because the writer, who was so in love with Clive Barker and his work, tried to put every word of the story into the adaptation. DRAW!: Which you can’t do.

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

LAST PAGE: Pencils for the White Wolf Games job. LEFT—Final painting—BRERETON: I get asked to do ensemble compositions for role playing games, such as this image for White Wolf Games. They like me to pack a lot of characters on the cover—and it’s fun. You can sort of let go, not worry so much about staging and storytelling, and let the characters just be. These sorts of jobs can be intoxicating— pure character design. I love ’em.

DB: I would do that today in a second! But I would have a good reason to do it, because the editor said, the wolverine book would have been a license to print money. And it would have done a lot better things for my career to do that Wolverine book than it would have done doing the Clive Barker book. Even though the Clive Barker book sold well, it didn’t recommend me as a guy who you want to hire to do a Punisher book. They brought in Clive Barker like he was going to save comics. All he did was show comics it would have helped if they’d wanted to do good comics instead of bad adaptations, and drag them into the sludge.

DRAW!: It just didn’t really lend itself to being a comic book.

DB: It was the most boring comic book adaptation ever done. Pure drudgery. You can’t do that. No, I didn’t realize it at the time, but one of the things I learned was that that’s not how you adapt something. So I spent eight months on that book, and it was a nightmare because it was just bad comic storytelling. There was very little action going on in the story. And then when the book came out, they covered up all the artwork I did with captions. DRAW!: So you must have felt really good about that. DB: Well, here’s the thing that made me feel really good. I was a month into doing that book when someone from Marvel called me and offered me a Punisher/Wolverine graphic novel. And I said, “Oh my God, I can’t do that because I just signed a contract to do a book for Eclipse. Sorry, I can’t do it.”[Mike laughs] Can you imagine? Can you imagine that I was in a place where I thought I was being a professional, so I just... instead of just quitting the book, and taking this awesome project— [laughter] DRAW!: Which is what people would do today!

DB: So when I was done with the Clive Barker book.... You know, they’d offered me the Punisher/Wolverine book when I started The Psycho a year before “Dread.” And I said, “No, I’ve got this book I’m doing for DC,” and they said, “Oh, come on, you don’t have to do that book. Do this book.” And I said no. So when I started in on the Clive Barker book, they called me again and said, “Do you still want to do this book?” I wailed at them, “You have such horrible timing!” After “Dread” I told Mike Carlin I wanted to do a Batman book, to help get over the last book. Mike said, “The only way you can do a Batman book with me is if you put Superman in it.” So we did. That was Legends of the World’s Finest. I got to work with Walt Simonson, which was great. It helped me get excited about comics again. WORK SCHEDULE AND STUDIO SET UP DRAW!: What is your typical work day like? DB: I get up around 3 p.m., when my kids get home from school, answer e-mail for about nine hours (it seems like), make dinner, hang with the kids, chat with my girl on the phone for a few hours, then hit the drawing board. I start with whatever penciling I need to do for any given jobs I’m juggling at the time, or if I have a painting on the board, I start in on it. Some nights I write when I need to; I tend to set aside an entire night to write. They don’t always go together; they are different mindsets to me. I usually work past dawn, till the kids are heading off to school, then when I’m done or feel I’m too pooped to go on, I hit the hay, usually by 8 a.m. It works for me. I can’t really work during the day, and I’ve been on this schedule for 16 DRAW! • FALL 2003 21

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON companion for burning the midnight oil. My walls are plastered with movie posters and art prints by Gil Elvgren, Frazetta, Jordi Bernet, Dave Stevens, Phil Hale, Buscema, Colan, old comics and pulp mag covers, an Alex Ross Spider-Man poster and a Star Wars poster on the ceiling. I need the visual stimulation, I guess. I have my computer on a table next to the drawing board. I don’t use the computer much for making art, but I do scan the pieces and “tweak” them afterwards. I’m pretty ignorant of Photoshop, but I know enough to punch things up and put them on disc. I’m kind of reluctant to learn to use it so well that it replaces the drawing board. I don’t use my Wacom tablet at all, I just use the mouse. It sounds archaic, but it works. I’ll never get tired of actually painting—the feel of the brush and paint on the paper, the pencil on the board, the tink-tink-tink sound the brush makes in the water jar. Those are just as much a part of the process as anything else. The rest of the studio is flat files for storing art, bookshelves, toys, statues, Shogun Warriors, Godzillas, family photos....

years, ever since I left school to work in comics full time. There are too many distractions for me during the day, and I’d already trained myself to be more creative at night after pulling allnighters in school. It took some getting used to living like that, mostly for friends and family—they didn’t want to accept it. I think they thought I was sleeping in.... In reality, I probably get less sleep than they do in a week. DRAW!: What’s your studio set-up like? DB: It’s a good sized room in the house. I have a drawing board/easel my dad and I made out of a rug making table (which is a table with no top, kind of a table frame) and scraps of particle board and wood from the garage. I’ve worked on this makeshift table all my career. It has an incline to it that’s perfect for drawing and painting. Less than 45%, I’d say, to the left—I’m left-handed—is a level surface that holds paints, brushes, boom box, CDs, comics and whatever else I can pile on there, and to my right is a bookshelf flush with the edge where I have reference books, art books and a small TV. I can watch TV or listen to the radio. I prefer to listen to Howard Stern, taped that morning—the show keeps me company but doesn’t distract me. I need part of my brain to be entertained while I’m working. Some nights you just don’t feel like working and it’s good to have some entertainment to get you in the chair. I also need that form of interaction, and I’ve found over the years of trying music, TV, movies, etc., that talk radio is a good working 22 DRAW! • FALL 2003

DB: Pretty much. I mean, I don’t employ anyone, my kids help out sometimes, but mostly it’s my show. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to worry about being a promotion machine so much and just work. Nothing saps your strength more creatively, than running your business. I really just want to draw and paint and create, make stuff. But the other has gotten to be integral. If I had someone running the biz end I’d probably be a lot more prolific, like in the first half of my career. As for the web site, Gregor Hutton, my friend in Edinborough, Scotland, maintains my web site. He does an awesome job. DRAW!: How effective or important is your web business? Do you generate a good amount of sales and work from it? DB: It’s important to have a web presence, it exposed the work in a way I couldn’t do otherwise. It generates work, commissions, sales of merchandise and art, but mostly it’s a place for fans to see what’s going on and get a fix of the work in between projects coming out. It’s pretty crucial these days, especially when you are doing creator-owned projects. You want your

DRAW!: Do you handle all the business yourself, things like shipping your posters, prints and maintaining your web site?

DAN BRERETON

ILLUSTRATION

ABOVE—BRERETON: Another example of a two-page spread in a sketchbook. Can you see how I kind of added the drawing on the left side of the spread as an afterthought? I try to take advantage of any excuse to draw the Nocturnals. Every time I draw them now, it’s a potential piece that could be used down the line. It’s probably seems a little joyless, but any chance to draw my characters is a joy, so why not make them all count?

characters to have a life outside the pages of the books, and fans need that too, I think. DRAW!: Being an entrepreneur, running your own business as a freelance illustrator, where do you spend most of your time? DB: At the computer. I’ve managed to make a long afternoon of phone calls a thing of the past. I think I spend too much time answering e-mail. I tend to answer everything I get, which sometimes I think isn’t a great idea. I find I have less time to paint and draw than I used to, that’s for sure. But I guess it’s a trade-off, because communication is so important in business. A lot of what we do now used to be done at cons, and still is, but the Internet has augmented it. It’s so great that anyone who needs to, can get hold of me (ok, well, maybe it’s not always so great). My greatest wish in my career is to be painting as much as I can, to write stories, create characters, so when I can actually sit down and do this, I’m in heaven. DRAW!: You are really developing a brand of sorts, branding yourself with properties like The Nocturnals. Is this a goal of yours, something you set out to do?

like I have these properties and characters, and I’ve put so much work into breathing life into them, I want them to work for me. I want to expand the audience as much as I can. And I do have an eye toward seeing properties like Giant Killer and Nocturnals move out of comics and into other media. Comics will always be the wellspring for me, and I always want to do comics, paint, draw, write, but it’s a dream to see them reach more people than read comics. On the other hand, I want to see the comic readership in general expand. It’s a wonderful medium and it’s undersold, overhyped and misunderstood. It deserves better consideration than its getting from inside and outside the art form. DRAW!: Do you have a type of work or genre you prefer? DB: I don’t know that I prefer a genre, because I feel the most comfortable when I’m sort of juggling them. The work that gives me the most joy in comics is drawing—sitting down and doodling up new stuff, coming up with something new that’s mine. I love working on other people’s characters, but to create something that wasn’t there before is exciting, whether it’s a new story for existing characters, or something out of whole cloth. There ís an energy that’s released or something when you create something new. I feel it every time I come up with a character that didn’t exist before.... But, it’s weird, they never feelnew, they feel discovered. My dream projects now consist of doing a crime book and combining the characters from Nocturnals with Giant Killer into a single story.

DB: Not at first, but it’s more of a conscious effort now. I feel DRAW! • FALL 2003 23

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON reference I collect from it is the jumping off point to getting what ís in my head down on paper. To make reality conform to the vision or world in my head. My inner world is a comic book place, a larger than, darker than, more fantastic than life place. But there are still days when I wish I could paint more like Alex, and he has confessed the same to me; he would like to get looser, and I want to get tighter.

DRAW!: Do you pose and take the photos yourself?

ABOVE—BRERETON: I tend to “hatch” my way through sketches and drawings. I have a frenetic hand and I think the sketcher in me gets control a lot of the time. There’s this tendency to want to get it all down on paper, and I try to concentrate on what’s important and let the rest of it go to hatching. This comes from the part of me that is used to letting the big shapes and less important parts of the composition go because I know I’ll go back and resolve them in the painting stage. So you get a drawing like the one above—the important stuff is all there, but its not overly detailed and loose. Part of me is a little put off by painting a drawing that’s too detailed.

DB: I rarely pose, but sometimes it happens. I’m in a restaurant scene in an issue of Birds of Prey I’m doing. Friends and family tend to make up the bulk of the models I use. Once in a while I’ll meet someone who expresses an interest in modeling for me, and that’s worked out well, too. Some people really get into it, and they love seeing themselves in a comic. Others have done it so much that they are totally impatient and bored with the whole thing— until they see themselves in a book. I use an old Canon T-50 from the ’80s. Its just the totally wrong camera for anyone else to use- its not manual, it doesn’t have a light meter, but its perfect for what I do. (Continued on page 50)

TECHNICAL SIDE BAR: TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

DB: I start with my little thumbnail roughs, and then I torture the people who are kind enough to model for me by trying to get them to do the impossible poses in my roughs. It makes people crazy. I hear things like, “The human body can’t do that!” and, “But I wouldn’t normally claw my fingers up like this!” I try to get the reference I shoot as close to the internal vision as I can. I’ve contrasted how I work to Alex Ross. Alex is a master of conforming imagination and what’s in his head to reality— the end result is his painted world looks more real than our own. It is idealized, sure, but rarely past the limits of the real world. For me it’s kind of the opposite. I feel the real world and the 24 DRAW! • FALL 2003

DRAW!: I know you use photos in reference for your work, but one of the things I always liked about your work, is that you are not a slave to them. You can get trapped by a photo, become trapped by only what the camera sees. But you don’t let the camera freeze dry your work, sap the dynamics, shapes, etc. Do you draw from the photos and do studies, to incorporate what you want from them, like lighting or drapery etc.? Work them into your style so to speak?

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

ANDE PARKS

For my purposes, I bought a couple of packs of nibs, which came with holders. I had some old pens on hand, but I thought it might be a good idea to buy new stuff, in case Hunt had changed them since I stocked up a decade ago. By the end of the testing, I was really thankful for that decision… one of the pens had changed dramatically, and it has become my new favorite nib. Hunt makes a wide variety of nibs, which I quickly narrowed down to pens that I thought appropriate for comic book work. Pens were eliminated for being too blunt, or for not being large enough to carry a good amount of ink. A useful pen needs to be capable of detail, and I don’t intend to waste my working day dipping my pen every couple of lines. Here’s a breakdown of the pens that made the final cut:

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HEEBINK

100—A flexible nib, for use with Hunt’s 104 pen holder, but can be used with the 102 holder, as well.

PENS and INK Greeting, fellow Draw-ers! Your humble critic returns this issue to give you the rundown on your choices in pen nibs and India inks. I have to admit that I’ve been in a rut for several years when it comes to these tools… using pretty much the same products, and finding myself fairly satisfied with the results. When I hit the art supply store shelves to refresh my knowledge of what’s available in today’s market, I was shocked by what I found. There were more choices regarding inks than I had imagined, and I was equally surprised to find that, in the American market, a single company holds a near-monopoly when it comes to pen nibs. Even so, I found some revelations awaiting me when I put these products to the test. PENS Since I started slinging ink for a living, I’ve used dozens of different pen nibs… pens made by Brause, Gillott, Esterbrook, Soennecken, and Hunt. At times, I’ve preferred a number of different pens, but the one I’ve found myself using most often is the popular Hunt 102. When I hit the Internet to see what’s currently available, I found that Hunt dominates the marketplace. I did find Gillott pens at one source in the US, www.aoeartworld.com, but the Gillotts I tested were not as well made as the Hunts, and did not offer any unique properties. I’d encourage you to try the Gillotts, but since Hunt pens are so much easier to find, and I prefer them, I will not be reviewing the Gillotts in depth. The good news is that Hunt makes some excellent pens, and they are widely available. You should be able to find them at any arts and crafts store, not to mention a number of internet retailers. Unfortunately, a lot of crafts stores carry only packages of a variety of points. That’s fine if you want to try them all, but not practical if you use the same pen or pens every day. The Critic’s favorite internet source, www.misterart.com, offers all of the Hunt pens in bulk. If you buy a dozen pen points, you should pay well less than a dollar per nib.

102—A stiff nib, for use with the Hunt 102 pen holder. This is probably the most popular nib amongst comic book artists. It’s capable of very fine detail, but can be pushed into making some fairly wide lines. This is the pen used by Terry Austin, Erik Larsen, Kevin Nowlan, Jerry Ordway, and yours truly, to name just a few. 103—A very flexible pen, for use with Hunt’s 104 pen holder. This bouncy pen can almost be used like a brush. You can get a wide variety of lines, but it takes a gentle touch. Beware of ink blobs! 107—A very stiff pen, for use with Hunt’s 102 pen holder. This pen is even stiffer than the 102. It’s wonderful for backgrounds or for ruling lines with a raised straight-edge. 108—A flexible, bronze-finished pen, to be used with the Hunt 102 holder. This is the pen I was most surprised, and pleased, with. When I used this pen in the past, it was very bouncy… even more so than the 103. The new version, though, is stiffer and easier to control. This pen is used by Al Williamson and P. Craig Russell, among others. I know… it may look like your humble critic is slacking off, only reviewing 5 pens. If you search, I’m sure you’ll find other options, and you may prefer one of those alternatives. My focus, though, is on tools that are widely available. I’m confident that you’ll be able to find a pen that will suit your purposes among these choices. As always, I encourage you to contact me if you love a pen that I haven’t mentioned. I’m always looking for new products. I’ve provided a visual example which should help demonstrate what lines each pen is capable of, but I’ll give you a brief rundown here, as well. I found the Hunt 100 handy, but I prefer the 108 or 103. This pen falls between those two in terms of flexibility. It handles well, and ink flows well from its tip. If I want a pen with this much flex, though, I’d probably just jump to the 103. The 102 is an old standby. I’ve been using this pen pretty exclusively for years. It handles well, and you can get it to produce an amazing variety of lines. It’s not especially durable, especially if you press down hard. I snap the tips off of these pens several times each year, and it’s never fun. At best, you can end up with a small ink splatter on your page. At worst, the ink, DRAW! • FALL 2003 25

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

ANDE PARKS

PEN INKING DEMO STEP ONE I asked my pal Will Rosado to provide a copy of a panel for this demo. Will’s stuff is amazingly rich and textural. Check him out these days at CrossGen. Anyway, Will was nice enough to provide several examples, and I chose this one to demonstrate how I might use several different Hunt pens to approach a drawing.

STEP TWO I first hit the drawing with the Hunt 108, using the pen on the main contours of the figures. The pen’s flexibility allowed me to produce some very heavy lines. It’s fine enough for some detail work, but I save the finest figure work for the 102. I plan on doing most of the hair with a brush, but I provided myself some guidelines with the pen.

STEP THREE I did the face on the background character with the Hunt 102, along with the papers. This pen is great for fine work where some variation of line weight is called for. I want to use a dead line for the background elements, so I saved them for an even stiffer nib.

26 DRAW! • FALL 2003

THE CRUSTY CRITIC

ANDE PARKS STEP FOUR

I finished off the linework with the Hunt 107. I ruled some of the straight lines, using the quill along an elevated straight-edge. I also did a lot of the lines freehand, not wanting them to look too mechanical. The stiffness of the 107 allowed me to worry about just the direction of the line, without being concerned with the line weight. I misinterpreted some of the glass shards in the background as shrubbery, but I’d be able to take care of that in the final step.

STEP FIVE No more pen work here. I hit the panel with a Pitt brush marker, doing the hair and filling in blacks. I also did some touch-ups, and fixed the shrubbery problem.

INK JUGGLING The task of finding the prefect ink is made much more difficult by the fact that pens and brushes call for different kinds of inks. For pens, you need an ink that flows easily. A quick drying time is a plus, as well. For brushes, a thick black ink is better for holding up to erasing. I’ve been using Pelikan ink for a long time. Keeping a bottle of thinner ink for pen work, and thicker stuff for brush. How do I get this thinner and thicker ink? I’ve found that Pelikan straight from the bottle is fine for the thinner stuff. As for thicker ink... well, there are a few options:

Boiling—It’s not as scary as it sounds. Pour several ounces of ink into a small pan. You’ll be able to clean the residue out of the pan, so you don’t have to worry about ruining the cookware. Bring the ink to a mild boil... just until small bubbles start to appear. Turn off the heat, and just let the ink sit out until it comes to room temperature. This process will produce a rich, black ink... perfect for use with brushes. Juggling—You don’t necessarily have to resort to boiling to get a good brush ink. This process is slower, but, once established, easy to deal with. I have two bottles on my table. For the pen ink, I simply use Pelikan straight from the bottle. Try to pour it to just the right level, so when you dip your pen to the bottom of the bottle, you get a healthy amount of ink without getting it up into the pen’s holder. Every so often, as that ink begins to thicken (I do this once a week or so), I pour it into the other bottle... the brush ink. The brush ink will eventually get nice and thick, much like the boiled ink, while the pen ink will always be fresh. Both bottles are always left open, assuming I’m at home and working. My ink bottles are very old, and I have lost the caps. Actually, the bottles are often so encrusted with dried ink that the caps wouldn’t fit, anyway. If I leave home or don’t work for several days, I just grab an old kneaded eraser and mold it to fit the bottles. It may not be completely airtight, but it keeps the ink from getting dried out.

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THE CRUSTY CRITIC

ANDE PARKS

or even a piece of steel, can end up in your eye. It can also be tricky getting these pens broken in. The same can be said for any pen, but these stiff nibs can be especially fickle... particularly if you aren’t using the correct ink (more on that in a minute.) The 103 was a pleasant surprise for this reviewer. I had always thought that the 108 was the most flexible nib Hunt made, but it seems things have changed. This is a very bouncy, and tricky, nib. Tricky because of the great degree of flex. If you’re used to a stiffer nib, you’ll be quickly surprised by what a little pressure can do. Just a bit too much pressure will cause the end of the pen to splay widely, which causes too much ink to flow to the page, which causes you to reach for a clean rag and a bottle of whiteout. I’m going to stick to the easier to handle 108. With the 107, Hunt jumps back to a stiffer pen (is there no rhyme or reason to this numbering system!) The stiffest of the bunch, in fact. I had never used this pen before, and I liked it a lot. It’s perfect a number of circumstances. I used it with a raised straight-edge to do some ruling, and it’s handy for any fine work that doesn’t require a varying line weight. The 107s I tried were all well made, with tips that were sharp, but not ragged. On very few occasions has The Crusty Critic found a tool that he was so fond of that he immediately threw aside whatever he may have been using in favor of this new toy. That’s exactly what happened with the Hunt 108. Hell, I liked it so much, I found myself momentarily referring to myself in the third person… scary. As I said before, I had used the 108 extensively years ago. Over time, though, I found that I wanted a stiffer nib… leaving the task of making beefier lines for the brush. I’ve been using the 102s, and have been satisfied, for the most part. I still searched, though, for a pen with a bit more give. I was pressing pretty hard on the 102s to get the variety of line I wanted, which lead not only to the occasional pen explosion, but to fatigue of the hand. The 108s I acquired in Hunt sample packs really fit the bill. I see no reason to believe that the pens bought in bulk are any different, but I have ordered some, and I’ll let you know if they disappoint. INKS While the market for pens in the US seems to have collapsed, leaving Hunt as the lone manufacturer, there seem to be more India inks available than ever. I ended up purchasing ten different brands, only three of which did I eliminate completely from serious consideration. Pro Art’s Super Black India Ink was the blackest, but I found it too thick even to use with a brush. Two Higgins brands, Higgins regular India ink and Higgins Eternal, were too weak to stand up to any erasing… they were also eliminated. I put the remaining seven inks through a series of tests, to see how they handled with both brush and pen. Despite the wide variety, I didn’t end up finding any ink that I preferred, overall, to the brand I’ve been using for years, but I can guide you to some other options… leaving the final decision up to you. Hey... I can’t do all the work. I first tied all of the inks with a few different pens... the Hunt 102 and 108. A good ink has to be thin enough to flow easily from the pen’s point. All seven inks flowed well, with the exception of the Speedball Super Black, which gave me a little trouble. It flowed, but not as easily as I’d like. The Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph ink worked especially well. I loved the way this ink flowed, but it also dried slower than the other inks. The Pelikan offered the best compromise between good flow and quick drying time. 28 DRAW! • FALL 2003

While pens require an ink that flows well, brushwork calls for a thick, black ink. Because the ink is applied in greater quantity with a pen, opacity is rarely an issue. With a brush, the ink goes on thinner, which can lead to problems once the page is erased. Especially when applied over graphite, ink can rub off badly when erased, leaving a washed-out black. While it’s true that even a light black will probably reproduce properly, most artists want their inks to appear solidly black. We don’t, after all, want to leave a stack of pale, sickly looking pages for our progeny to admire. I tried all of the inks on pages of Green Arrow (I hope my editor will forgive the patchwork blacks he’ll be seeing on this issue.) The results were somewhat disappointing. Several inks appeared to be pretty black when applied, even over heavy graphite or blue pencil marks. Once erased, though, all of them faded. Straight from the bottle, I was most pleased with Dr. Martin’s Black Star. One of the inks, the Speedball Super Black, went on thick, but erased very unevenly. Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bombay India Ink This is one of my favorite inks among those tested. It flows easily from a pen, and dries about as quickly as any of the inks. When applied with a brush, it produced a good, flat black. It did not hold up to erasing very well, but no ink did. Dr. Ph. Martin’s Black Star India Ink (HICARB) The good doctor scores high marks again with this ink. It was probably the best performer with brush, and it does well with a pen, as well. If you want one ink to use for all of your needs, straight from the bottle, this might be the best option. It is not cheap, though… you’ll pay about twice as much as you would for the Bombay ink. The list price is $5.95 per ounce. You can do better at www.aoeartworld.com... paying just $3.99, but that’s still a lot of money for an ink. FW Acrylic Artists Ink This ink flows well with a pen, but the drying time is especially long. It also provides a decent black when applied with a brush, but again… it dried slowly. When dry, it has a unique sheen. It held up pretty well to erasing, but spots where ink was heavily applied still showed. The long drying time and the fact that this acrylic gets sludgy when left open keep me from recommending it. Higgins Black Magic Waterproof Ink Before I discovered the Pelikan, this was the ink I used regularly. It works well with pens. With brush, it goes down fairly black, with a matte finish. It erases poorly, but can perform better when thickened. A good choice, but not my favorite. Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph Ink This ink worked beautifully with pens. I wasn’t happy with the slow drying time but, upon further research, I learned that I may have tested the wrong ink. It turns out that the Ultradraw, which I bought, is made to dry slowly so that pens filled with it can be left open for a while without clogging. I have tried the other varieties of Koh-I-Noor in the past, but I must confess that I could not lay hands on them for testing in time for this article to go to press. I suspect that their Universal ink would be an excellent choice for pens, but I’d rather just buy one ink… one that works well with both pen and brush. Pelikan Type A Drawing Ink This has been my ink of choice for at least a decade. It performs

THE CRUSTY CRITIC well with pens, even when left open for days, and produces a fairly solid black. I like to thicken the ink for use with brushes, as you can see in the “Ink Juggling” sidebar. The Pelikan Type A ink is also available in bulk… www.texasart.com has it in bottles as big as 33.8 ounces, for just over a dollar per ounce. The Koh-I-Noor works better with pens, and the Black Star goes down darker with brushes, but this ink is the best option for handling both jobs. Speedball Super Black India Ink I was really disappointed with this ink, because I’ve heard several artists recommend it. I found that its flow with a pen was less than average, and it did not hold up well when erased after brush application. Perhaps it could perform better when either thinned for pen or thickened for brush, but I can’t recommend it for use straight from the bottle. If you don’t mind using two different inks… one for pens and one for brushes, I think the Koh-I-Noor and the Dr. Martin’s Black Star are excellent choices. I’ll stick to the Pelikan, though. It performs well with both media, and I only have to worry about finding a good deal on one product. That’s it for this edition of The Critic. As always, I remind you that the opinions presented here are just that… the feelings of one solitary, grouchy artist. I encourage you to let my reviews guide you, but it’s also important that you try these tools out for yourself, to find what works best for you. Until next time, The Crusty Critic reminds you to draw well, and carry a finely crafted stick.

ANDE PARKS

If you’re viewing a digital version of this publication, PLEASE read this plea from the publisher! his is COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, which is NOT INTENDED FOR FREE T DOWNLOADING ANYWHERE. If you’re a print subscriber, or you paid the modest fee we charge to download it at our website, you have our sincere thanks—your support allows us to keep producing publications like this one. If instead you downloaded it for free from some other website or torrent, please know that it was absolutely 100% DONE WITHOUT OUR CONSENT, and it was an ILLEGAL POSTING OF OUR COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. If that’s the case, here’s what you should do: 1) Go ahead and READ THIS DIGITAL ISSUE, and see what you think. 2) If you enjoy it enough to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and purchase a legal download of it from our website, or purchase the print edition at our website (which entitles you to the Digital Edition for free) or at your local comic book shop. We’d love to have you as a regular paid reader. 3) Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR COMPUTER and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. 4) Finally, DON’T KEEP DOWNLOADING OUR MATERIAL ILLEGALLY, for free. We offer one complete issue of all our magazines for free downloading at our website, which should be sufficient for you to decide if you want to purchase others. If you enjoy our publications enough to keep downloading them, support our company by paying for the material we produce. We’re not some giant corporation with deep pockets, and can absorb these losses. We’re a small company—literally a “mom and pop” shop—with dozens of hard-working freelance creators, slaving away day and night and on weekends, to make a pretty minimal amount of income for all this work. We love what we do, but our editors, authors, and your local comic shop owner, rely on income from this publication to stay in business. Please don’t rob us of the small amount of compensation we receive. Doing so will ensure there won’t be any future products like this to download. TwoMorrows publications should only be downloaded at

www.twomorrows.com

DRAW! • FALL 2003 29

A DIGITAL LIKENESS

An interview and demo with caricaturist

ZACH TRENHOLM San Franciscan Zach Trenholm is a busy artist. He’s not only a top, in-demand caricaturist, but is also a scholar of the art form. This interview had to be slightly delayed because Trenholm was fighting a tight deadline for Fortune magazine the very day DRAW! Editor Mike Manley called to conduct it via phone. Trenholm’s easy going demeanor and laugh definitely kept him from “hulking out” over the last minute changes to the illustration he had just e-mailed over to the art director....

This interview was conducted over the phone, transcribed by Steven Tice and copy edited by Zach Trenholm. DRAW!: So Fortune magazine called you up this morning and gave you a quick assignment to draw, an illustration featuring.... Zach Trenholm: Larry Ellison, CEO of the software firm Oracle. Basically they wanted ’em him pointing directly at the viewer or the reader and holding a fistful of bills— pretty straightforward. I thought I could knock it out by the requested five o’clock East Coast deadline (I’m here in California) and did. After e-mailing the illo over, I guess an editor got... DRAW!: Got a brainstorm? 30 DRAW! • FALL 2003

ZT: Yeah, exactly. After getting the art, the art director, Robert Dominguez, got back to me immediately with an editor’s request that Ellison now be turned into the Incredible Hulk. He wanted him appearing angrier then had been done and as the Hulk it could be accomplished in a timely, pop cultural reference sort of way. I guess the barrage of summer movie promotionals really does have an impact. So now I needed to ditch the body I had just spent the last few hours doing and quickly redo him as the Hulk. To be honest, I’m not much of a superhero artist (even an anti-hero like the Hulk). But here’s what I typically do in a situation like this: I go straight to the masters, and the master in this case would be none other than Jack Kirby. DRAW!: [laughs] Go find some cool, old Jack Kirby Hulk examples....

CARICATURE

ZACH TRENHOLM

ZT: Exactly. Find a Kirby take on the Hulk. Which incidentally I was able to easily do online.

Ellison”—you’re going to bring up a lot of image files titled “Larry” or “Ellison” or both that won’t necessarily be him....

DRAW!: Did you try to incorporate Kirby into your style?

DRAW!: So you need to try and narrow the search criteria.

ZT: Oh, that’s impossible. That wouldn’t work at all. For starters, he excels at foreshortening, and I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around that too terribly well. DRAW!: When did Fortune originally call you with the assignment? ZT: I got a call around 9:30 this morning here in San Francisco, so it was around 12:30 there in New York. And the art director needed it by 4:00 or 5:00 New York time, so I needed to really knock it out. DRAW!: What’s your first step? Do you draw up a rough and then... do you go on the web and try to find as many pictures of the person you are going to draw as possible? ZT: It depends on the art director. In this case, he supplied me with two pictures basically from one of the same sources that I would have gone to, which is Corbis (an online public access photo archive). Another is Google’s search engine for images. DRAW!: Right. So you could go to Google, and search under “Larry Ellison” and hope to find some pictures of the subject. ZT: Google’s my last-ditch place to go actually, because if what you’re looking for has a common name, such as “Larry ABOVE: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison “Hulking out” from Fortune magazine. LEFT: Neo and Orpheus from The Matrix.

ZT: Right, so even though the art director sent me reference, I still always go online myself to see if I can conjure up anything better, especially any type of candid or offguard reference. That’s always ideal when striving for the most definitive likeness. DRAW!: Do you draw something quickly in pencil and scan it in, just so you can mess around with the shapes of his face, to get down the caricature, the likeness? ZT: No, no... I pretty much do a tight sketch. Particularly with the face. The rest I can approach like that, such as the body and background aspects.... DRAW!: Now, is this in pencil, or is this on the Wacom tablet in Photoshop or...? ZT: No, it’s done in pencil on paper, and after scanning the sketch into the computer, I convert it into a template for tracing over in Adobe Illustrator. DRAW!: Is that what you send to the art director first, or do you send him the sketch? ZT: No, I’m really bad about that. Unless they’ve worked with me before, I probably give ’em a slight case of hives the first time around [laughter]. What I do instead for my own creative flexibility is, after making sure I’m clear on what’s needed concept-wise, I simply just proceed with it and then provide the more or less finished illo the first time as a proof. The client then has the option to make any fixes or revisions as they see fit. Most of the time though, things are pretty much accepted without any rework. DRAW!: So there’s not a lot of back and forth changes, “move his arm, move his leg”? ZT: Well, never on that micro of a level, but as I mentioned earlier with Larry Ellison, he went from being simply himself in a business suit to needing to look like the Hulk, or to being the Hulk. DRAW!: Now, do you charge them extra to do that, because you had essentially already finished the illustration? ZT: [laughs] It’s interesting that you ask that. No, I never really do that—I lack the business cajonés I guess [laughter]. The majority of my art directors are quite fair and in the particular case of Fortune, they were already paying me a couple of hundred dollars more than normal because of the shorter turnDRAW! • FALL 2003 31

ZACH TRENHOLM

CARICATURE

around. As a matter of fact, when I got the commission, he told me they were going to compensate me X amount for it and as I thought that sounded overly generous, told ’em to knock off $100 instead. DRAW!: Really? ZT: Yeah, but this was, of course, before I had to re-make him into the Hulk. [laughs] So after spending another couple hours or so converting him into the Hulk, I then asked if he wouldn’t mind boosting it back up to the originally quoted fee. DRAW!: Do you have a standard day rate for this, do you have an hourly rate that you figure for yourself in case things like this happen, where they go haywire, or do you just have a standard way of...? ZT: No, I just sort of roll with it. Budgets are generally dictated by the publications and I pretty much take on the jobs that I do based on who’s calling. DRAW!: And what interests you, I guess? ZT: Yeah, that’s as equally important. It’s basically two things; the more esteemed the mag or newspaper, the more inclined I am. And then of course it depends on how famous the individual to be depicted is. The more well known the individual, the more timely the individual, then the more I want to take the assignment on.

DRAW!: So you can keep your portfolio fresh, so to speak? ZT: Well, yeah, but it’s not entirely based on portfolio reasoning. Speaking of such, I actually don’t even have one anymore. I’ve got my website, and then I have some folders that I slip tear sheets into, but I haven’t had a tangible portfolio, y’know, something you would show an art director, in probably about ten years. DRAW!: Wow. So most people, then, if they want to find out what you do, or to find out the kind of style you have, you are referring them to your website? ZT: Right. Well, they usually find me—mostly by seeing my work. DRAW!: They’ll see your byline and then look you up online and give you a call? ZT: Right, that’s usually how it works. I also send out a promotional postcard every couple of years or so. That way if they’re not already familiar with what I do, they’ll hopefully take the time to visit my web portfolio and that will (once again hopefully) lead to a commission at some point. At least that’s the idea behind the nefarious scheme. DRAW!: So, most art directors who you have not worked with before are people who are either coming across your work BELOW: Producer Weinstein and directors Scorsese, Rob Marshall and Stephen Daldry done for the Wall Street Journal.

32 DRAW! • FALL 2003

CARICATURE

ZACH TRENHOLM

in a magazine and seeing your name and then contacting you via that, or contacting you because they come across your website? ZT: I would say, at this juncture, it’s people who are already familiar with me. I’ve been working long enough so that there’s already a...well, I’m hardly well-known, but I would say that I’ve been out there long enough so that most art directors have usually seen something by me at some point. They may not click on the name, but they probably know the style. As far as tripping across my website while roaming the web, that’s fairly unusual. Most site visits are due to specific search engine inquiries and not like, by coming across a link attached to illustrations I’ve done for the online mag salon.com over the years. DRAW!: Now, is that where you started, with Salon? ZT: Well, my career actually didn’t start there, but yeah, I would say that it really began to pick up steam there. I’ve long been their resident house caricaturist.... DRAW!: Were they your first, say, steady client? ZT: No, before that I had been doing a smattering of regular freelancing and even had a stint as staff illustrator at the old San Francisco Examiner. Although initially hired for my skills as a caricaturist, I was also expected to do more general-type illustrations for the various sections of the paper. But you’re

mostly right, after the Examiner, Salon became my first steady freelancing client. DRAW!: Now, what year was that? ZT: Fall of 1995. Salon was actually founded by ex-Examiner people, editors and reporters and.... DRAW!: So you sort of followed along? ZT: Exactly... even illustrating the prototype issue that was shopped around to get.... DRAW!: To get the funding? ZT: Right—to get funding, investors. So I’ve been with them since their inception. For the first couple of years I was doing illustrations for them on a very regular basis, and for a short while, when things were particularly flush, was even on a monthly stipend so they could keep me available for any sudden deadlines. At this stage I now have countless Salon illustrations just floating around out there in web limbo. Much of it now embarrassing. [laughter] DRAW!: I guess it’s also a really good training ground, because even if you feel like you have an off day, well, then the next day you have an opportunity to do something different or something new.

ABOVE and RIGHT: Examples of Trenholm’s work from Salon featuring Oprah and Stalone.

ZT: Exactly, exactly. But the problem with working for the Internet, or being part of the digital age is that at least with dead-tree media of the past and present, you could hone and practice your skills at some small or obscure publication and be assured that whatever crap you produced at the time would eventually end up twenty feet down... DRAW!: [laughs] ...in a landfill somewhere! DRAW! • FALL 2003 33

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ZT: One doesn’t have that luxury anymore. [laughs] DRAW!: Everything gets archived forever now. ZT: As fresh as the day it was published [laughter] and just as accessible. DRAW!: No yellowing or degrading. ZT: No, none at all. Just plenty of ongoing wincing on the part of the artist. [laughs] DRAW!: So would you say a day like today, where you get up and you get a phone call from an art director giving you a job with a fairly short deadline, four, five, maybe six hours, is a fairly regular occurrence for you? ZT: No, no. Thank God it isn’t! Usually I get anywhere from three to about six or seven days’ turnaround. It depends on how large the job is or how immediate they need to go to press with it. The three other deadlines that I have at present are all due late next week, which is nice. DRAW!: So that gives you time to do a little studying, I guess, or warming up. ZT: Much of its spent procrastinating actually. [laughs] But some of the time is put to good use by seeking photo or video reference that I’ll need, either, as I mentioned earlier, via the Internet or through my own photo morgue, which I’ve been compiling for almost 20 years. DRAW!: So you still cut and clip and put things in your own morgue? ZT: Yeah. I subscribe to upwards of 15 publications and get a couple of daily papers. I let ’em stack up, and then force myself to periodically cull them for interesting photographs. Everything from personalities to interesting pictures of just about anything—nature, cities, cars, landmarks, concepts, societal types, body stances, etc. DRAW!: That’s interesting, because I know a lot of other artists, myself included, have stopped doing that, because you usually seem to find anything you want on the Internet if you spend a little time searching. ZT: I find that I spend way too much time doing that though. 34 DRAW! • FALL 2003

Hours can go by looking for just the right reference. One tool that I’ve acquired to help in this whole process is a digital camera. DRAW!: What kind of a camera is it? ZT: It’s just a low-end Minolta DiMAGE, still a fairly good camera. It does the job. DRAW!: Do you run it in with a firewire or something into your computer? ZT: No, it comes with a USB connection. DRAW!: So you can run the camera into your computer and download the photos? ZT: Yeah. You can download the pix directly into your hard drive and open them up in Photoshop. And it’s really useful, because I can stage myself or get one of my kids to. It’s much more easy than trying to find the right picture in my files or go hunting on the web for it—just create it myself. DRAW!: Yeah, I’m currently trying to decide which camera I want to buy myself. I’ve been doing that for about a year, and every time that it seems like I’m going to buy one, then it seems, oh, they bring out a new one, and the five megapixel camera’s a little bit cheaper. You know how it is. You sort of feel like, “Well, if I buy it now, tomorrow they’ll come out with the ten megapixel camera for what I just paid for the five megapixel camera. ZT: Exactly. Anything you buy that’s of a digital nature will have a built-in regret factor. The next day, you’ll either hear or read about something either cheaper or more powerful.... DRAW!: Now, when we talked before, you were telling me a little bit about your family. You were saying that your parents used to do silk-screen T-shirts of Disney characters? ZT: Yeah, it was a small, short-time business endeavor they had back in the late Sixties and during the time we were living in S.F.’s HaightAshbury district. What they did was to take Disney and Warner Brothers characters like Porky Pig, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, etc., and have ’em depicted doing, shall we say, “alternative lifestyle things.” I think, if I remember rightly, they had Porky Pig smoking a joint, Popeye complete with a big gold earring and a bottle of booze, and a stoned Minnie flashing a Peace sign—all doing, y’know, fun stuff.

CARICATURE DRAW!: [laughs] They didn’t have you drawing any of the characters in this manner ? ZT: Nawww, I was actually seven at the time. DRAW!: Were you aware that they were doing that, that Porky Pig was smoking a joint, or did you just think, “Cool! Mom and Dad are making Porky Pig!” ZT: Honestly I can’t remember what I thought. I imagine I viewed it with some sense of normalcy—a natural part of being a child of hippies. We were certainly at center of the whole Haight-Ashbury scene of the late Sixties; living around the corner from Jimi Hendrix and probably a block or so over from Janis Joplin. DRAW!: Wow. Did you ever meet them at all? ZT: Actually, if I did, I don’t remember. The only thing like that that I do recall was a party thrown by the Jefferson Airplane. They had this small mansion, a really nice one over on Fell St. near Stanyan that had been totally painted black. The one thing that stands out, memory-wise, about the house beyond that was this life-sized stuffed alligator that they had glued to the side of the place. I don’t remember anything else about the occasion, like meeting Grace Slick or perhaps even banging a tambourine if they played. [laughter] DRAW!: And I guess, being seven... ZT: ...you’re sort of oblivious to this stuff. It was definitely more my parents’ thing. DRAW!: So your parents were artists? Did they support themselves through their art? ZT: For my step-mother it was more of a hobby and as for my father, yeah, but it was only later, when he was in his mid-30s or so, that he started doing the sort of conceptual art, like Dadaism, that he became known for.... Hmmmm, did I finish your question on the T-shirts, on the silk-screening of Disney and Warner Brothers characters? DRAW!: Did they ever get in trouble for that?

ZACH TRENHOLM

ZT: They actually did. They eventually received a cease-anddesist letter from both Warner Brothers and Disney. DRAW!: So they had some narc, there in Haight-Ashbury, some trademark lawyer dressed as a hippie? [laughs] ZT: [laughs] Most likely. They were designing these Tshirts, printing them up at Bay Area silk-screening companies, and then taking them around to various head shops as well as selling them independently at flea markets. Eventually, I imagine, one of these T-shirts found their way to someone who’s interest in them went beyond the novelty factor. DRAW!: One of Walt’s pool parties or something. [laughs] ZT: So they ended up getting that... I wouldn’t say it was a polite letter from the attorneys, but I’m sure it was far less aggressive than they’re sending out these days regarding matters of this nature. DRAW!: Well, there was that artist, Dan O’Neill, who did the Air Pirates, who did that neo-underground Mickey Mouse comic, and he got in a lot of trouble, too. ZT: Yeah, I’m sure that at various points in time different cartoonists have done things of a similar nature, and depending on the extent of the usage & appropriation, they’re merely slapped with an attorney’s cease-and-desist letter or actually hauled into court. DRAW!: Did this have any influence on you as far as making you want to draw or how you look at drawing or creating? ZT: I don’t think so. I had already been into drawing and cartooning on my own by then. One of my earliest ambitions oddly enough, was to become an alternative, or as it was regarded back then, underground cartoonist. DRAW!: Like Robert Crumb or Spain etc.? ZT: Yeah—exactly. I wanted to model myself on Robert Crumb. Not on a philosophical level mind you, just wanted to replicate his achievement. DRAW!: Did you ever meet any of the more famous underground artists? LEFT: Sir Anthony Hopkins and Elijah Wood. ABOVE: Rosie and General Tommy Franks.

DRAW! • FALL 2003 35

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ZT: Some of them, yeah. Not so much during the time I lived in the Haight, but later, after the family moved up north to Mendocino County, I would return to the city while in my early teens to make all the comic conventions. There was usually a section set aside for the undergrounds and that’s where I could be found. DRAW!: You also said, when we were talking before, that you were also sort of interested in trying to do, like, Marvel comics for a while? ZT: No, not really. My interest never went beyond that of a fanboy and collector, and that only really lasted from the age of about nine to 13, when, in the process of getting rid of most of our possessions, I was forced to sell my collection so that my father and I (by this time he was separated from my step-mother) could go and live in Mexico. I ended up selling... it must have been, easily, 2,000 comic books or more and I think I probably got a grand total of 13 bucks or so for them from some second-hand shop guy. DRAW!: Geez. ZT: [laughs] I thought I gotta swell deal at the time, too. DRAW!: Now, why did you go to Mexico? ZT: Oh, my father wanted to go down there mostly so that he could live cheaply & concentrate on his art.... That was the main motivation for us doing so. DRAW!: And what were you doing in Mexico, were you doing art, too?

ABOVE: An early example of Trenholm’s work of the Ayatollah Khomeini from the college newspaper circa 1979.

36 DRAW! • FALL 2003

ZT: Sure, I was still cartooning but I was spending an equal amount of time playing on the beach, running around with the local kids, etc. Mexico in the ’70s was fantastic. I picked up Spanish fairly quickly, too, and ended up doing much of our communicating, like handling travel arrangements, hotel rooms, haggling over the price for a pair of huaraches (hand made sandals)—all the way to ordering my dad a beer; “Señora, una cerveza, por favor.” [Mike laughs] My father never learned more than 15 words or so during the entire time we were down there. DRAW!: And was he doing these neo-Dadaist paintings down there, or was he doing something different...? ZT: Well, actually they were mostly collages, which he created by combining images from magazines and other objects, like cigarette package labels, costume jewelry, pins, hood ornaments, coins, etc. Basically anything that caught his eye and that could be juxtaposed with other elements to make an artistic statement of sorts. DRAW!: Now, when you came back to the States, I take it you finished your high school here in the U.S.? ZT: Actually, I never finished high school. I took the GED instead, and by the age of 16 was enrolled in junior college. DRAW!: That was an art college? ZT: No, not art school. That came later... just a community college. I became a journalism major but took classes in everything from sociology to political science to fulfill requirements. The school’s newspaper was the journalism class and as I was made its art director at the start of the semester, ended up not having to do anything that journalistic, such as writing.... DRAW! Did you do cartoons and caricatures and things then? ZT: Yeah, very much so. I was doing a lot of caricatures and political cartooning for the paper. DRAW!: Were you studying old artists or being influenced by—illustrators? ZT: That would be the caricaturist David Levine. I was really into his approach. DRAW!: So did you then become interested in doing that type of editorial work and then delve back and study guys like Al Hirschfeld and people like that? ZT: No, I wasn’t particularly keen on Hirschfeld at the time. I was definitely more into detailed, representational caricature. DRAW!: So you’re saying the more you drew, the more refined and simple your work tended to become? But in the beginning more detailed work appealed to you?

CARICATURE ZT: I think there is a natural tendency towards that. The more you draw, the better you get and with that comes a certain refinement in your line. DRAW!: I think that’s true. There’s a lot of cartoonists that do that. Artists like Alex Toth, for one, who started out being a lot more detailed, worked toward being simpler and simpler. It seem to be the good path to follow. ZT: You’re right. As Mies van der Rohe infamously once said; “less is more.” I think one just gravitates in that direction over time, whatever their style. DRAW!: Have you ever tried to just, for interest, to go and do something that’s more detailed, or do you usually do things very streamlined now? ZT: Well, I wouldn’t say my work is that streamlined, just efficient on the details [laughs]. But there was a time, nine or ten years ago, when my work derived a lot of inspiration from the caricaturists of the 1920s and ’30s who in turn had been inspired by the modern art of the period, like Cubism. DRAW!: What led you to this? ZT: I’m not sure. My interest in that aesthetic, often referred to as “Art Modérn” or “Art Deco” caricature, probably got started in the mid-’80s after coming across examples of such stellar practitioners as Miguel Covarrubias, Paulo Garretto, Al Frueh, Ralph Barton. ABOVE and RIGHT: Covarrubiasinfluenced work by Trenholm from the ’90s featuring Nancy Kerrigan and Arafat.

ZACH TRENHOLM

DRAW!: So do you find yourself sort of metamorphosing into something different, constantly growing, absorbing and changing? ZT: Well, I don’t imagine my style gradually morphing into anything too radically different than what it’s been for the past ten years. But yeah, back when as I was starting out, I went through period of rapidly changing influences and thus spent a lot of time switching from one crutch to the next. DRAW!: I think a lot of artists go through that phase, where you lean a little bit on the crutch, that influence, and it’s very easy to find a solution to a problem from other artists, because they’ll design or solve a problem, and it seems so appealing. Like, “Yes! All the answers are right here.” ZT: Exactly. But it hinders you if you let it go on for too long. And not only does it hinder you, it’s never really you anyways. But there was a time when I was very much “yet another bastard son of Miguel Coverrubias” as I liked to joke before I began pursuing my own graphic vision. I have to admit that I have a real... um... I should say “lack of appreciation” for illustrators whose official, professional style is based too much on the work of another illustrator or cartoonist. I mean, it’s one thing when you’re starting out to learn from someone, but before you jump into the marketplace, it’s essential that your work stand on its own and not have any sort of direct resemblance to another’s— at least someone who’s still alive. [laughter] DRAW!: [laughs] Well, I guess you could go back 30 or 40 years and rip off people and take their styles and it would be fresh today, because most people wouldn’t even know. ZT: True. In fact, later, over time, as I’ve continued to research caricature, I’ve discovered artists from the later part of the twentieth century, such as from the 1950s and ’60s, who are virtually unknown today. Most never achieved any sort of presence where scholarly or historical works on the medium are concerned. Not even a footnote. And many of these guys were brilliant. DRAW!: It’s like finding a buried treasure or a favorite old book that somebody had up in the attic. ZT: Exactly. A couple of these artists I’ve even been able to make contact with. Both are now in their 80s and 90s, and it came as something of a shock to them to have a another caricaturist, who wasn’t even born at the height of their careers, now approach them after all this time with a desire to discuss their work. Each of them said it was the first time it had ever happened. DRAW!: I’m sure! They feel like they labored in obscurity or something. DRAW! • FALL 2003 37

ZACH TRENHOLM

CARICATURE

ZT: Exactly. DRAW!: Well, thanks to DRAW!, that won’t happen to you. [laughs] ZT: Thanks, it’s appreciated. [laughs] The web, if it continues in the direction that its going, will probably make it harder for most artists, writers, etc., to simply disappear. Somewhere, someplace online they’re sure to be found. DRAW!: Do you do a lot of drawing, sketching, outside of your work? ZT: Not really. I rarely have the opportunity to draw just for the hell of it, for the pleasure of it. It’s a job—guess that sounds pretty mercenary.... DRAW!: Did you used to do more of that and you’ve fallen out of the habit of it? ZT: I would say probably about ten years ago, before I started working professionally, I drew a lot more in that regard. But these days it’s enough just to stay on top of deadlines. When I’m feeling more disciplined though, what I try to do every day is draw about eight to ten likenesses very quickly while reading the newspaper or watching the news. DRAW!: : You mean you’re, like, drawing from TV if you see somebody’s face on TV? ZT: Exactly. I do quick, one- to two-minute sketches and then compile them into large binders. Once again, not entirely for fun, but to have a leg up regarding any future commissions that I may receive. The idea here is that hopefully I’ll already have some sketches of the requested individual when the time comes and that will mean less work. DRAW!: How often do you do this? ZT: I go back and forth. Sometimes, when I get caught up in deadlines it sort of falls by the wayside, but I would say that I ABOVE: A recent Mark Wahlberg study. RIGHT: Nora Jones.

38 DRAW! • FALL 2003

get back on track every couple weeks. I’ve been slacking off lately though. [laughs] DRAW!: So you are sort of, then, drawing. You’re sketching. You’re doing it so that you’ll be able to possibly use these sketches later. ZT: Well, only faces, though. Faces are really what interests, motivates me. And because of this, all that other stuff that goes into an illustration, bodies, background details etc., I usually need to work very hard at. DRAW!: Do you like to go and, say, draw abandoned buildings or— ZT: Yeah, or interesting body stances, like trying to imagine what it would be like to draw somebody turning a certain way or doing a certain task. That stuff is difficult, so I rarely do it. Obviously if I made a serious effort to sketch this stuff on a regular basis it wouldn’t be, [laughs] but since I don’t, I’m always needing to seek out specific reference material. DRAW!: When you’re sitting there in front of the TV and you’re drawing, as an example, Walter Cronkite or somebody from TV, are you doodling in ballpoint pen or in pencil or marker? ZT: It’s always in pencil or litho-crayon, and I try not to refine it too much, so to keep them spontaneous and fresh. It’s an extension, I guess, of my being a quick-sketch or entertainment caricaturist as well. I probably do a lot less of that these days due to scheduling conflicts with publication stuff, but in years past I used to entertain frequently at conventions, festivals, upscale parties, everything and anything except kiddie events. [laughs] It’s surprisingly good income too—I charge around $125/hour and on that basis actually end up making less on illustration work, hour for hour than I do sketching at special events. Not as stressful either. DRAW!: Like having to turn Walter Cronkite or someone else into the Hulk. [laughs] ZT: [laughs] Right, right.... DRAW!: Do you stay on top of the current software. When the new Illustrator comes out, do you immediately go buy it? ZT: No, not at all, not at all... in fact, I’m

CARICATURE down-right resistant about it. The problem with working digitally, as with Adobe Illustrator, is that they upgrade the program at least every year and a half, and when they do, they change the interface remarkably. Shortcuts change, they switch. DRAW!: The palette’s different.... ZT: Yeah, they change everything around. Everything that allows you to work speedily. Funny as it sounds, I actually do buy these upgrades in moments of supreme motivation and/or stupidity, but they end up just sitting on my shelves, shrink-wrapped and all, collecting dust. I miss the time when you were able to learn a craft or tool and then spend the rest of your career simply honing and improving your skills at it. Working in the digital realm completely throws that concept out the window. DRAW!: Why do you do it digitally as opposed to, say, drawing it, inking it, and then importing it and coloring it in Photoshop that way. Or converting it into a vector drawing with Stream-line and then importing it to Illustrator, Painter or whatever you wanted to do that way. Why are you inking it in Illustrator? Is it faster? ZT: Well, it’s slower in some respects, faster in others. For me, it’s more about the flexibility, and because of that, it would be hard to return now to using traditional media. When I joined the San Francisco Examiner, it was a prerequisite of the art department that I work in Adobe Illustrator, but if I could do it all again, I think I would continue to work traditionally but use Photoshop for its editing advantages. DRAW!: They wanted you to be able to do your work digitally? ZT: Right. At the time I was hired, the paper was in the process of computerizing all aspects of its operation, including the art department, for reasons of efficiency, flexibility, speed and I imagine, eventual profits. I had been doing my illos up to that point using Winsor-Newton brushes, doing gouache for color work. I tried replicating my style in the version of Adobe Illustrator out at the time, which I think was 3.0, and found that it was near next to impossible—taking about ten times longer to do than it would have naturally and even then never looking ABOVE: Jimmy Kimmel. RIGHT: Author Lewis Carroll. More of Trenholm’s work from Salon.

ZACH TRENHOLM

quite right. I tried using Streamline to convert scanned art into vector paths but it also required a lot of extensive tweaking. So after much time & effort I realized that I needed to discard my style and experiment with Illustrator till I found an approach that was more conducive to working in it, but that didn’t appear to be too computer-generated.... DRAW!: So you could still work organically, in a way, while working digitally ZT: Well, that’s always been important to me. I’ve always thought that the problem with most digital drawing programs like Illustrator, Freehand or Painter for that matter is that a good thirty to forty percent of the artists style is directly related to the program they use. They’re just not that customizable yet. For me, that was a important thing to avoid. I also didn’t want my style to be fixed in a particular point in time years from now, meaning I didn’t want my stuff to look like it was Adobe Illustrator 0.6, circa 1999. DRAW!: Right. So you tried to do things like avoid using a lot of filters and things like that? ZT: Exactly. I try to avoid all the tools that actually help speed up the process of working [laughs]. DRAW!: No “lens flair.” [laughs] ZT: Right, no gradations, etc., the sort of stuff that would be instantly recognizable as being from the program. I wanted a style that was independent from the software, one that could easily revert to being done with traditional media if need be. Around the time I was exploring this, I was also discovering illustration of the 1950’s and 60’s and getting a great deal of inspiration from there. Artists such as Jacque Kapralik, Ben Shahn or DRAW! • FALL 2003 39

ZACH TRENHOLM

CARICATURE

Aurelius Battaglia, for example, all share a wonderfully spare and stylized approach of simple color and linework that helped me. Not a lot of texture—very flat and two-dimensional.... DRAW!: Now, when you’re working with your regular cadre of clients, do they usually send you a layout? Do they give you a sketch? Is this something where they’ve worked with you before, so they let you come up with the idea yourself? ZT: Yeah, other than how they’d like ’em depicted, I usually have complete latitude. It’s rare to receive a sketch, although sometimes I request one if the concept or layout is particularly complicated. Beyond that, I’m usually just given a size, a timeline and a maybe a stipulation to either box it or keep it a free shape. DRAW!: Do they give you type placement? ZT: No, they basically can wrap type around anything I give them. Quark, Pagemaker, etc., have long made type specing extinct. DRAW!: Are you working with your figures on a layer and your background on another layer? ZT: No, I approach things real simply. That’s something that would probably be a good idea to do, but once again, I try to use the Illustrator on its most basic, elementary level and not get too caught up in stuff like that. The furthest I go is to keep certain elements grouped and locked while working on other aspects of the drawing. DRAW!: You know, that’s one of the things I always find fascinating about doing this magazine. Last issue I interviewed Celia Calle, and now talking to you, I can really see everybody uses these programs in really different ways, personal ways. Some artists have a lot of layers, some, like you don’t have any layers. It’s really amazing that there’re so many approaches to a digital illustration. But everybody is really coming at it from a really personal perspective.

40 DRAW! • SUMMER 2003

ZT: Well, the problem with these programs is that they’re not as artist-friendly as they’d like you to believe. Sometimes I think it really helps to have the mentality of an engineer, because the process of creating digital illustrations is about as fun as doing a blueprint. DRAW!: I find that to be more true with Illustrator than Photoshop. I think Photoshop, you know, a pencil’s a pencil, an eraser’s an eraser. But in Illustrator, it is more like, well, you’ve got to use this thing over here. I’m not very good at it, myself, because of that—it seems sort of mechanical. I’ve never spent a bunch of time trying to do illustrations with it. ZT: I totally agree. And the thing with Illustrator versus Photoshop is that with Photoshop, you’re using it mainly to manipulate and enhance traditionally done art, rather than creating it wholly from scratch. Drawings done this way always have a hint of sterility or soullessness about them since they’re completely machine generated. It’s something I’m always feeling a need to work against. The one good plus about vector-based illustration though is that it’s resolution-independent, meaning that you can reduce the art to the size of a postage stamp or blow it up to the size of a billboard and not lose anything in the process. DRAW!: Right. Do you try to stay current with illustration, yourself? Do you study the field? ZT: Oh yeah, very much so. The majority of the publications I subscribe to use a great deal of illustration. DRAW!: What are your favorite magazines for that? ZT: The New Yorker is good, and Fast Company is excellent too. Patrick Mitchell, the art director over there, has long made it a major design aspect of the magazine. Let’s see, what else... well, Entertainment Weekly used to be another where illustration was an inte-

CARICATURE

gral part of things, but recently it has changed. DRAW!: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite magazines, but you’re right, it does seem they’re using more photos and less drawings. ZT: Yeah, I recently had an exchange with David Cowles, one of their regulars regarding EW’s re-design and he aptly described it as “the Maxim look.” That men’s mag is apparently so successful these days that many others are now racing to imitate it not only in terms of its content but appearance as well. That probably doesn’t bode too well for illustrators. DRAW!: I guess everybody will jump on that, and in a year or two they’ll reinvent themselves again because that will be old. ZT: Well, I hope so. Magazine illustration has had a good run since the early ’80s, and it would be regrettable for it to diminish now. You know, there’s a precedent for this; illustration had another heyday back in the 1920s and ’30s and when Life magazine reinvented itself, it created a photographic standard that a lot of magazines soon followed suit on. DRAW!: And then, after the second World War, they really started using a lot more photography. ZT: Exactly. It wasn’t really until the ’60s that illustration—and for that matter, caricature—had a kind of resurgence in the form of artists such as Edward Sorel and David Levine. DRAW!: And illustration had artists like Bob Peak and Bernie Fuchs and other people like that. ZT: Right, right, exactly. DRAW!: And that lasted all the way into, oh, probably the mid’70s, and then things seemed to change again.

ZACH TRENHOLM

ZT: Yeah... things kinda plateaued and then had a resurgence after Tina Brown took over The New Yorker in the early ’80s and brought back the sort of illustration The New Yorker was known for back in its early days. DRAW!: Now, who are some of the caricaturists that you like or whose work you follow today? ZT: Let’s see... Richard Thompson is a fave. Wonderful stuff that differs a great deal from my own.... He does a weekly political panel for U.S. News and World Report and the occasional illustration for The Washington Post. Definitely one of my favorites. Consistently solid likenesses.... DRAW!: Do you follow political cartoonists at all, like Pat Oliphant and people like that? ZT: Yeah, I like his work. I wouldn’t say he’s a keen caricaturist, although he does better caricatures than the majority of political cartoonists that are working at the moment. Another caricaturist whose work I like and who has just come to mind is Eric Palma. DRAW!: Yes, he’s really good. He also does a lot of work for Entertainment Weekly. ZT: Right. David Cowles too, my good pal Gary Smith of The London Sunday Times, Charlie Powell, Chris Pyle—they all do terrific stuff as well.

VISIT WWW.ZACHTRENHOLM.COM

NEXT PAGE: Nelly and California Gov. Grey Davis. TOP: Internet CEO roundtable done for Fast Company. ABOVE: Julia Roberts. LEFT: Eminem.

DRAW! • FALL 2003 41

From pencil sketch to Adobe Illustrator—THE PROCESS STEP 1: Zach’s first step in doing this spot illustration of Cybill Shepard was to compile photo reference of Ms. Shepard. He does this by visiting an extensive clipping file of personalities that he has built up over the years and by the Internet, which has become an excellent source for material with its thousands of celebrity shrine or fan sites. After studying the collection of pix of her, Zach lets his mind, rather than eye, take over. With regards to likeness and character, it is far more selective and interpretive—retaining what is essential and ignoring that which is inconsequential. He usually achieves his likenessess in anywhere from 1 to 5 sketches, although it can sometimes take upwards of 50 sketches to obtain the same desired effect. He states that he knows when a likeness is successful: “It’s when the subject looks more like the caricature rather than the other way around.”

STEP 2: After he gets the likeness where he more or less wants it, he then moves on to the other elements of the illustration, sometimes doing a complete sketch (as he has here with Shepard), but more typically drawing each aspect separately (i.e., head, body, rocket, exhaust clouds etc.) and then later composing the “parts” collage-like, on the computer. Zach finds this way not only faster than working out compositions on paper but that it also allows for unlimited experimentation.

STEP 3: The sketch or sketches are then scanned into the computer for conversion into templates for tracing in Adobe Illustrator. Since time was of the essence in this case, the treatment fairly straight-forward and the magazine familiar with his work, Zach proceeded directly to final art without providing a detailed sketch to the publication. Working digitally makes this possible. He sends all his illustrations, finished or otherwise, initially as “proofs.” If after seeing the artwork the client has any changes or additions, he can easy make those corrections to the original file and send the illustration again.

STEP 5: Producing illustrations in a vector-based drawing program like Adobe Illustrator is definitely to the far left of being a creative process, but Zach finds it ideal for the simplified style of caricature he practices as the software allows him to easily and incrementally manipulate a portrait towards getting the best results possible.

Contact Zach and see more of his great work at http://www.zachtrenholm.com/

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

ALBERTO RUIZ

INKING AND COLORING YOUR SKETCHES IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR By Alberto Ruiz

he approach described in the following steps has very little in common with techniques used in photo editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Painter, which manipulate pixels to achieve the end result, instead you will be outlining and coloring simultaneously by tracing over your sketch and by overlapping vector shapes. PREPARING AND SCANNING YOUR SKETCH Since you would be basically tracing over your 1 own sketch, using more than just the “pen” tool, It helps tremendously to have a very clear image to go by. Think of it as drawing on top of a light box, you’d need a lot of guess work to trace over a fuzzy, cluttered sketch. “Clean up” your drawing as much as possible before scanning, by erasing unwanted lines, excessive shading and smudging. Although your lines don’t need to be perfect by any stretch, the closer your sketch resembles the final image the better. A low resolution scan (anywhere from 72 to 150 dpi) is pretty much all you need to use as a template in AI, a high-res image would only slow things down to a crawl. 1 I scanned this image at 100 dpi, to allow for zooming in very close on heavily detailed areas such as the gun, I then saved the scan in TIFF format (you can also place other file formats in AI but TIFF, JPG and GIF files are preferred because of their small size). If your drawing lines are still not sharp after scanning, open the sketch in Adobe Photoshop and play with the “Levels” slider— Command+L (Mac OS), Ctrl+L (Windows)—to adjust the image to an acceptable clarity. PLACING YOUR SCANNED IMAGE IN ILLUSTRATOR After creating a new document in AI choose File > Place. A dialog box will prompt you to select a file to place. For this demonstration I chose draw_girl.tif from my desktop. Check the template box and click the “Place” button. (By the way I work on a Mac, so my screen and dialog boxes look different than the ones on a PC, the process is the same though.) By selecting the “Template” option, AI dims the placed image by 50% (the default value—you can change the opacity level by double-clicking on the layer’s name). This helps you see the lines and shapes you’re creating as you ink or trace over the sketch. You can also resize, skew, flip or rotate the template at will after you unlock its layer (padlock icon on the layer palette). AI also locks the Template layer and generates a new one (Layer 1) right above the template. 2

44 DRAW! • FALL 2003

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

ALBERTO RUIZ

PLANNING YOUR LAYERS Managing a complex illustration is made easier by nesting groups of objects into layers. You should create as many layers as you deem necessary, not just to organize, but also to simplify the tedious process. You can lock and hide layers to isolate and protect their contents or to avoid the obvious cluttering. To further prevent or minimize the guess work and confusion on the work in progress, I identified and defined the various areas in my image before I start inking by grouping elements in the image based on their overlapping order, and creating individual layers for each group. Because of its complexity I divided the hair 4 into two groups. The shapes behind the girl’s face became Layer 1 (I double-clicked on its name to rename it “Hair Back”). Next I created a second layer by clicking on the “Create New Layer” icon (folded page) located on the layer’s palette (bottom row)—I renamed it “Girl’s Face”—followed by the hair overlapping the girl’s face in its own “Hair Front” group (Layer 3).

List of layers created for this image, in overlapping order from back to front: 1- Hair Back 2- Girl’s Face 3- Hair Front 4- Left Arm 5- Right Arm 6- Torso/Legs

SPLITTING THE HAIR I started by tracing the contour of the hair behind the girl’s face as one global shape with the pen tool, using a 0.25 point black “Stroke” (outline) and “No Fill,” matching the lines of my sketch as closely as possible. The intersecting lines that make up the mosaic-like pattern inside the hair were drawn individually using the same stroke and fill properties as the big shape. In order to apply the “Divide” Pathfinder filter effectively, all the lines were drawn past the main hair shape’s perimeter. I then grouped them together—Command+G (Mac OS), Ctrl+G (Windows)—and set the group’s attributes to No Stroke 6 and “No Fill.” I selected all the elements I had drawn up to this point (including the main hair shape) by choosing “Select > All” from the top menu bar and clicked on the “Divide Filter” from the Pathfinder palette. After the filter was applied I deleted the residual shapes and proceed to color the various objects. 7 5

DRAW! • FALL 2003 45

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

ALBERTO RUIZ

After finishing both hair groups, I got them out of the way by hiding them from view. This was accomplished by merely clicking on the eye icon in the Layers palette. Hold down Option as you click on the eye icon to show/hide all layers but the active one. FACE VALUES Before I started tracing the contour of the head I created and named a new layer for the face, then I clicked and dragged the new layer and sandwiched it between Layers 1 and 3 (the “Hair” layers). I set my object’s attributes to “No Fill” from the icon at the bottom of the toolbox and mixed a medium flesh tone for the Stroke. Zooming in at 300%, I drew a quick outline of the face using the Pen tool. I kept the flesh colored Stroke without a Fill to be able to see the pencil outlines I was tracing over; I always get very excited at this point in the image because faces are my favorite things to draw. I began to lay down the rest of the objects in the face, as always, working from back to front, I completed this part of the image in a very short amount of time, mostly because I don’t have to be too careful about drawing parts of the image that will eventually be covered by overlapping objects,

46 DRAW! • FALL 2003

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

ALBERTO RUIZ

After most of the objects in the face were drawn, I held down Command (Mac OS)—Ctrl (Windows)—and clicked on the face outline to select it and switched the Stroke to Fill by clicking on the two-headed arched arrow (located between the “Fill” and “Stroke” icons at the bottom of the tool box), and began to add the high-lights and shadows. FLESH TONES I usually mix my colors as I go. I try to limit my palette to three shades of any one color: the object’s main color, a darker shade for shadows and one for highlights. This forces me to simplify the drawing, and it also makes for more dramatic lighting. AI saves the current color palette you create within the document automatically, so if you mixed a set of flesh tones you really like in a previous file, you can import it at any time by choosing “Window > Swatch Libraries > Other Library” and selecting the file you wish to import a color palette from. SOFT GRADIENTS To complement the freckles and create a soft shadow, I placed three rectangles filled with the default black-&-white gradient from the Swatches palette at different angles, straight across the width of the face. 16

To achieve a smooth blend, in the Transparency palette I set the blend mode to “Burn” and the Opacity to 80%.

DRAW! • FALL 2003 47

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

ALBERTO RUIZ TORSO, HIPS, ARMS AND FIREARMS The torso and both arms were put together on separate layers, using the methods described earlier, main shapes got divided to generate highlights. Outlines were drawn mostly to keep same color shapes apart.

The right hand was added after the illustration was finished. The original sketch shows the girl leaning on a vehicle, her hand barely visible.

A SIMPLE MASK I created the mesh for the gun handle easily by selecting the Rectangular Grid tool and clicking and dragging across the screen. (To specify the amount of horizontal and vertical dividers beforehand, click once on the screen while having the tool selected.) I skewed the grid to my liking with the aid of the Shear tool and masked the grid into the ellipse by selecting both the grid and the shape and choosing “Object > Clipping mask > Make” from the top menu bar. You can also use Command+7 (Mac OS)—Ctrl+7 (Windows). Make sure that the shape is always in front of the objects(s) you wish to mask. 22

48 DRAW! • FALL 2003

ALBERTO RUIZ

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

THE FINAL ILLUSTRATION

You can contact Alberto and see a lot more of his fantastic work on his web site:http://www.brandstudio.com DRAW! • FALL 2003 49

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON doing the dessert last, but I don’t feel comfortable with painting characters and figures until I’ve established them as characters. When I like the way their faces look, I’m more anxious about painting their figures and the surroundings. It sounds a little childish maybe, but it works. Laying in a painting in stages according to glazes of color, shadow and detail can be nervewracking when you haven’t established a solid personality behind them. You basically use the same brush until you can’t do anymore with it, then move to a smaller size. I work back and forth, from the #4 Winsor-Newton to a #2, #0, or #1. When I need to an opaque white I use acrylic gesso. It can be worked over and it can be mixed with watercolors as well for a pastel effect. I use Winsor-Newton, Holbein, and Cotman brand watercolors in tubes, on 25” x 12” palates. The surface of the drawing board is a cut piece of Plexiglas—they are easily replaced when they get to scratched up or painted up and they are easy to clean. I have a ton of clippings of art and pictures underneath mine (more visual stimulation).

INKING When I ink, I use sable brushes, Artworks brand Super Black India ink (I don’t think its really India ink), and sometimes a Rotring Sketch pen—they have cartridges of ink that are not waterproof, so I don’t use them that often. Sometimes, I use a waterproof marker, a Sakura Pigma brush marker, and Micron tip. Tomm Coker told me he uses them exclusively to ink and the look is awesome, but he says you’ve got to beat the pen up and go through a ton of them on a job. I also use Hunt Crowquill nibs, but I don’t use them much. I prefer inking with a brush when possible. If I can get away with it, I’ll approach

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I don’t use a flash and I light everything any way I can. I have a pair of photographic lights that are falling apart along with the camera. Once I find something that works for me it dies hard. DRAW!: Can you list the materials you use, or favorite ones, i.e., pens, paper, watercolors, etc.? DB: I use whatever watercolor brushes I can that aren’t too expensive, I tend to stay away from actual sable, unless I’m using them to ink something. I tend to be hard on my tools and brushes don’t last at all.

BRERETON: Here is a cross-section of some brushes I’m currently using. I start by taping the board (500 series Strathmore two-ply bristol) down with white paper tape, making sure the board isn’t going to come up during painting. Then I use a big brush to lay on a light wash of color over the whole painting—a Liquitex #1 Kolinsky sable. I usually lay it on and let it dry over the course of a day—the paper tightens, dries flat. Sometimes I’m in the mindset to paint, sometimes I’m not after a long session of drawing. Next I lay in the middle darks with a smaller brush (#8 Winsor-Newton series 233 Synthetic Sable) until the light pattern becomes visible from blocking out the shadows and darks. I try to work on the background while I’m working the figures, with an eye toward tackling the faces of the figures where applicable. Some artists feel the eyes and faces are like 50 DRAW! • FALL 2003

PAINTING

BRERETON: I’m a big fan of the old lurid girlie magazine cover paintings—and chose a stark red and black chiaroscuro background to frame this femme fatale.

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

HOMER OF THE RINGS

RIGHT—BRERETON: In the case of the Simpsons, I couldn’t exaggerate enough! I did my best to keep the energy of them in the finishes. The story was supposed to look as much like an actual adaptation of Tolkien as I could get, to contrast with the Simpsons, and it worked for the most part, but the goofy Simpsons feel started to creep in here and there. I think it actually increased the humor in the story, so it worked out well in the end.

Detail from one of the panels

ABOVE—Layouts for the Simpsons’ Lord Of The Rings parody—BRERETON: Spontaneity and exaggeration in layouts is the main ingredient for powerful imagery in the finished stages. Often something I drew in about two seconds right off the top of my head becomes the entire inspiration for the finished piece. The gesture sketches are the backbone for the action, attitude and character. My first impression isn’t always my best, but I find my best work in sketches and layout come from this sort of gunslinger approach to thumbnails. Thumbnails often hold three times the power of the finished piece, and sometimes I find myself more in love with the roughs than the finished piece.

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DAN BRERETON

VAMPIRELLA © AND TM 2003 HARRIS COMICS

ILLUSTRATION

STEP 2 BRERETON: What you’re looking at here are the pencils for the painting itself. The drawing is done on the 13” x 20”, two-ply Strathmore bristol sheet (500 series—the only kind I use for covers and painted pages if I can help it) that I’m painting. It’s kept simple. The shapes and details I need are there—the rest will come out in the painting. As with the rough sketch, I’m leaving myself choices to make later. I’ve also redrawn her face to make her less ferocious, and more like a cat stretching languidly. It has a quality to it I like now. I can relate to this drawing and am looking forward to painting it. I’m aware that I haven’t given myself much room to really describe the tomb she’s perched on... but I did enlarge the moon so it partly frames her head and hair. I’ve also kept the bats in the background to a minimum because I have done bats and more bats on another cover in the series, and in general, I have a tendency to “bat it up” a lot, so I held back here.

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STEP 1 BRERETON: The irony is, I tell people all the time, don’t send in the sketch you think is weak. Don’t show them something you don’t want to do. I sent my editor four or five sketches, done on 8.5” x 11” paper—this being one of them, but it was my least favorite. I’d done some others that were actually a little more detailed, and were a little more exciting to me. If I’d hated this sketch, though—which I didn’t—it never would’ve been sent in. The thing I didn’t like about this piece was the facial expression. It was supposed to be cat-like and feral, but I wanted something more attractive— softer. It had little in the way of strong lighting and neat things going on with the figure from cast shadows and stuff I generally like about figures. As it turned out, the editor liked this one quite a bit, responding to the cat-like pose that I’d originally liked about it. Since I’d done three covers already I was really happy with, I didn’t fight it. I wanted to make her happy and I was thrilled to be doing four Vampirella covers. The rough for a cover should be simple in the beginning. Too much detail means less leeway later on after it’s approved. Since I’d done this one as an afterthought to the three or four others before it, I’d left it relatively simple.

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

STEP 3 BRERETON: The image on the left is the finished painting. But I’m not done yet; I still need to scan the piece. I know that once I scan it in, and look at it on the computer screen, I’m going to make changes here and there. There’s nothing like seeing it shrunk to the size of a postcard to show you the errors and flaws. Because the last three covers were heavy on the reds (they were all kept to a monochromatic range of red and black and grey), I kept the background neutral and grey with just a touch of warmth in the moon. the bulk of reds are in the foreground in order to create a sense of depth and concentration of color on the figure.

VAMPIRELLA © AND TM 2003 HARRIS COMICS

STEP 4 BRERETON: I took care of that problem with the tomb by extending the bottom of the painting digitally—and adding more detail on the stonework. Chances are it will be cropped on the cover, but it can’t hurt. I’ve upped the saturation of reds a bit, as well as making the darks a little darker, because bright colors and dark shadows can come out muted in publication. Overall, I’m happy with the results, and I can’t wait to see it with the logo, because I know that the right treatment with the Vampirella logo at top will make this cover sing. Illustration isn’t supposed to be about the finished painting—it’s about the printed piece, and I’ve tried to lay a groundwork the production people can bring to a stunner of a finish.

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create the illusion of color showing through darks, as in life and any good painting. The worst thing an artist can do is pick one dark color (like purple) as the designated shadow color, and use it alone. One thing you learn from painting from life or from color reference you shoot from life, is that shadows hold the most color. I can’t stress this enough. Another area in working in color that’s really important is that the colors “sing” together. The palette in a painting can have three colors, or 30, but they have to harmonize. It’s not the colors you use, or the lack of color, it’s how you use them in relation to each other. They have to fit together on the painting like a formula. And in fact, there are color formulas, the simplest of which is “cool shadow, warm light” and the reverse thereof—having bright color in a predominant field of muted or “supportive” color (this is used constantly in coloring and painting comics these days to good effect). There are painters who use the supportive color formula almost exclusively, and it works, but it’s not the only way. Look at a J.C. Leyendecker or Dean Cornwell painting and you’ll see color used in abundance, while an N.C. Wyeth or Maxfield Parrish and you’ll see color used sparingly but to great effect. I’ve tried to strike a balance in painting, but mostly I get labeled as being too colorful, not controlled enough, when in actuality, I’m constantly monitoring what the color on my painting is up to and whether or not the colors are working together. It’s a tough call because everyone sees it a little differently. Some people like to use limited color, some prefer to mute everything down to an analogous range and save the bright color for accent or focus, and others tend to paint more inking like painting or illustration—using gray and black watercolor with the ink, colored pencil, etc. I’m not a technician when it comes to inking. I’m always looking for new ways of making things work. But when it comes to watercolor, I use the same paint, the same paper and brushes. I use a Berol mechanical drawing pencil with a 2H lead or non-photo blue leads, depending on the job. Sometimes I draw in colored pencil. I find the Colerase pencils are good for sketching. And of course, it can’t be discounted that a regular ballpoint pen can be a great drawing, inking, or sketching tool as well.

I tend to use watercolor in ways most people wouldn’t think it should or could be used—laying on the pigment thick, for instance is a no-no with some watercolorists, but it’s perfectly acceptable with illustrators. I am asked a lot by people how I get the darks so dark. When I tell them “less water, more paint” they shake their heads like they already knew that—I mean, it’s simple right? But it’s not. I mean, you have to build up those layers of darks with more than just solid black. Black is not the absence of color as some think, it’s the presence of all color. That’s why the darkness at night can seem to vibrate—the eye is constantly discerning and trying to separate out color, and you end up seeing this thing we call “black,” but it’s really all color. So you want to put as much color in your blacks and shadows as you can. Even artists who primarily work in black-&-white, when they are excellent at what they do, allow for spots of color to show through their shadow areas. Color is laid over them to 54 DRAW! • FALL 2003

COLOR

ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

HALLOWEEN TOWN STEP 1—RIGHT—BRERETON: For this job, I started with several sketches, very rough. It came down to the difference between fewer characters or a gang of them. The client chose a gang of them to give the idea of a lot of stuff going on at their Halloween attraction out in Arizona. So they sent me a pile of photos of the western town and how it had looked on past Halloweens, and I incorporated the architecture into the background. They’d sent me a few shots of the town at night, which helped a lot. I then shot a roll of reference of my dad holding different poses and firearms and set about doing the drawing on the big sheet of bristol board (approx. 16” x 24”) starting with the foreground characters, moving back to the buildings. I had the drawing completed in one night and then taped the whole thing to my drawing table. I taped off the drawing well and laid down a wash of warm orange hues over the whole thing. Later I went in and laid that green color over the buildings with reds in the sky that would later be shaped into flame-like clouds by adding blacks to the sky. I let it dry, and the paper stretched tightly after drying. The warm orange hue I laid over the painting set the light source tone for the entire painting. This is an important step in painting: killing the white of the paper. It keeps the range of color in control and saves your lightest values. (Later, if you need a pure 100% white somewhere, you can always use white gesso to make it.) At this point, I left the painting alone and went to bed or concentrated on some other job.

intuitively, using color as freely as they want, letting the color tell them when things are working or not. But these approaches are governed by a single thought, and that is to convey mood, to guide the eye where it needs to go in a composition, and to come across with some kind of internal feeling of comfort from the color. Barron Storey tells students that a good palette looks like a meal you’d want to dig into, whether it’s blueberry cobbler, a garden salad and a steak, or spaghetti and meat balls. The colors work together in a way to cause a positive sensation the way a well prepared dish works on us the same way. Recently, I did a Nocturnals story and used a limited color palette and relied less on painting and more on the drawing. I worked STEP 2—LEFT—BRERETON: The multiple figures, crowded so tightly, were daunting. I began with the background, wanting to establish the atmosphere before moving to the figures. It seemed like a good idea to start at the top for this big painting, since the background is all at the top third of the piece. The next night, I finished the background buildings and sky. I was really happy with the way it came out, and had the spark to get over the anxiety I had about the gang of figures. I used a brush loaded with a mix of Middlemen dark purple and Alizarin to sort of draw in the figures, establish the light pattern and darks, etc., to give myself a place to focus on the painting. I started with the three figures in the foreground. At the point I stopped to take this picture, it was at the end of the second night of painting. The next day I left for Comic-Con in San Diego and didn’t sit back down to work on this piece for at least a week. From there I moved to each character in the middle ground, and when I was done with them, I blocked in the pumpkins and jack-o’-lanterns in the extreme foreground. Having the entire painting’s darks blocked in before laying the bulk of the colors in isn’t a typical approach in watercolor—watercolorists tend to work light to dark—but it helps me see the painting as a whole. So much of the work is done when the darks and shadows are blocked in, the rest is a breeze. It’s akin to spotting blacks on an inked page, then moving in to the details and linework.

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ILLUSTRATION

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About photo reference and models—BRERETON: Photo reference is crucial to me. Lighting is so important in what I do; if the lighting isn’t right, it affects the entire piece. Even if your subject is zombies or something equally fantastic, the light pattern still needs to be believable. In fact, believability depends on good lighting. I don’t use a flash, and I use strong light sources. The shapes you’ll get from good lighting you can’t make up, and they will sell your figure more than drawing the entire figure in great detail.

STEP 3 BRERETON: I lay in the color, the details, and the modeling of form. Layers of color and detail are added in different parts of the painting. I tackle one section at a time: the foreground figures, then the extreme foreground, then the background zombies, keeping in mind the focus needs to be on the three figures—the grave digger, the sheriff and the skeleton in the coffin. The rest of the cowboys end up demanding too much attention, so I go back and simplify their colors, details, all the while keeping the darks to a certain level where they won’t compete with the main figures. Diffusing the darks and the level of brightness in the color helps to create distance. I removed a ghost framed against the moon that was crowding the sky line. I worked on the skeleton a lot to keep it from competing with the sheriff figure; it was important that the two figures not melt into one another. I realized a little late that I could have designed several areas of the painting better; I had to work with what I had. Eventually, after four nights of painting, the illustration was done. It went much quicker than I thought it would, which made me very happy.

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ILLUSTRATION

DAN BRERETON

RIGHT—GRENDEL—BRERETON: This job was computer colored with red and it came out looking gorgeous. Matt Wagner wrote the script in a way that left room to do these vignetted images instead of separate panels, and I loved the way the story flowed in that regard. The reference I shot in one afternoon with my girlfriend’s niece, Cynthia, created a personal connection for me that often translates into better work in the end. The pictures I arranged inspired the finished pieces. When you are composing photos, remember that part of the drawing happens at this point—your arranging, lighting, posing—all of this ends up affecting the drawing and composition.

LEFT—UPCOMING BIRDS OF PREY—BRERETON: I was lucky enough to make a sort of transition with the Birds of Prey stories I’m illustrating from painting to drawing by using grey washes to create values. It’s an interesting way to work and I’m curious how the colorists will handle the art. I’m trying to keep the white of the paper more than in a regular painting. The “Grendel” story helped in that regard, though it was more of a painted story, whereas the BOP stuff is inks and washes in watercolor and inks. Blocking in shadow shapes is crucial here as in painting.

smaller—10” x15”—and it came out really nicely and took much less time. I may have found a new way to work for a while. It’s encouraging to know I can move along more rapidly on a story. Sometimes the absence of color can be freeing. I especially like working in gray tones at times, because I can concentrate on value and design. I have a hard time, though, leaving values out entirely in black-&-white work. it probably comes from 20 years of painting. I managed to do it in the “SpiderMan” job last year and I liked the results, but it was a tough transition!

Contact and stay up on all of Dan’s projects and art at: www.nocturnals.com

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The Power Of Sketching BY BRET BLEVINS

THE POWER OF SKETCHING

he value of sketching is impossible to overstate. Habitual sketching will sharpen your perceptions, teach your mind how to see with ever greater depth and subtlety, and transform your hands into skilled instruments of visual expression. It’s also a lot of fun—for a person in love with drawing, sketching is the path to the good life! Constant drawing is the surest means of becoming a fluent draftsman—if you are searching and stretching to improve the accuracy or emotional eloquence of every mark you make. This distinction is crucial—filling reams of paper with repetitions of learned rendering tricks or minor variations of familiar contrived imagery is not what I’m describing. You

BRET BLEVINS

must draw as a process of informing your perceptions—increasing your understanding of rhythm, form, shape, light and shadow, composition, your mediums and tools, and unlocking access to the core of your imaginative powers. This sounds like a daunting task, but a relaxed, playful attitude will work wonders and make sketching a pleasant and satisfying addiction. If sketching doesn’t appeal to you, or seems to be a waste of effort because there’s no money in it (a common stigma among commercial artists), decide to develop a joy for observing everything around you and a hunger for creating images. Don’t allow the act of creating art to become a chore—you can choose to approach your work with an attitude that feeds your ABOVE: The old farm sketch (done in the late 1980s using a medium-soft HB pencil and a kneaded eraser) accents the linear contours of the forms—many small lines build up the shading within outlines. The overcast winter day weakened contrasts and softened the shadows into gray. LEFT: This Fairy-embellished life drawing (drawn with a soft 6B Rexel Derwent graphite pencil) is recent and more elegant in treatment; very simple, subtle lost-andfound contour lines edge the forms—the volume of the masses are shaped by smooth gray tones rubbed in gently with a finger.

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spirit as well as your stomach. With proper enthusiasm it’s possible to eventually escalate that conscious choice into an obsession—then you’re on magical ground and every sheet of blank paper becomes a rewarding invitation to soar. Any act of intense creativity both drains and inspires the mind, opening the way for new ideas and skills to arise, building and building your store of experiences. The more energy you expend, the higher you rise—and constant practice is the pragmatic aspect of this ascent. Just as a musical virtuoso hones his or her talent by daily revisiting scales and technique or an athlete depends on specific physical exercises to achieve and maintain superb performance, diligent drawing is the training regiment of the master draftsman or draftswoman. Aim high and always shoot for the the moon—it’s the only way to find out how far you can go. The rewards of this enthusiasm are far greater than just filling your studio with stacks of filled sketchbooks—the practice of sketching develops technical facility as it nurtures your curiosity, observation skills, and sensitivity to ever more subtle perception, and this will enrich all your work. Until you make a considered drawing of a subject, you’ve only glimpsed it— never really seen it. The process of drawing an object, atmospheric effect, or emotional impulse carves nuances and depth into your consciousness that cannot be gleaned through casual observation, and builds a storehouse of memory that will inform all your future work. A devotion to sketching also enriches your experience of living—using your eyesight becomes a constant delicious adventure. No two trees are alike—no two leaves on a tree are 60 DRAW! • FALL 2003

TOP: The rotting barn was drawn was drawn the same day as the sketch at the top of page 59, and the technique is identical—more attention is given to contour and texture than the sculptural effects of light and shadow. ABOVE: My small son’s peaceful sleeping face inspired a spontaneous recording, with a fairly hard pencil on the nearest surface handy—the back of a comic book script page.

THE POWER OF SKETCHING

BRET BLEVINS

ABOVE: Blowing palm trees and rolling surf seem to cry for wet media—fortunately I had a small portable box of cheap cake watercolors and a single brush with me. I used melted ice in a paper cup to moisten the paint (salt water is no good for painting) and recorded a quick impression of this warm scene. LEFT: I did this still life study with an 8B Rexel Derwent wash pencil and a beat-up old inking brush. These wash pencils are rich in tone, very flexible and a lot of fun—you can draw just as you would with ordinary graphite pencils, but wetting the marks produces a sumptuous velvety black wash, and when dry it’s possible to erase quite a bit of the tone back out. The softer grades create the widest range of tone—choose a paper sturdy enough to handle the strain and try these wonderful pencils.

exactly the same shape, size or color—the veins and patterns on each leaf create their own individual kaleidoscope of visual delight—the panorama of visual wonder is endless if you train your eyes to savor each seen detail. If I sound rapturous, it’s because I am—and I want to infect you! On the following pages I’ve gathered a variety of images that only hint at the unfettered fun a compulsive sketcher can have—I’ve made hundreds of thousands of drawings and learned something from each one, either positive or negative. This is important—a failed attempt can teach you as much or more than a successful one—learn to appreciate this fact. Every bad drawing I’ve made taught me how not to do something. Don’t set impossible standards of perfection or precision when DRAW! • FALL 2003 61

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BRET BLEVINS

sketching—no one else ever has to see the drawings. Don’t be precious or ponderous, just respond to the impulse to record something that strikes you, by any means at hand—you’ll notice that a sketch reproduced here of my sleeping son was drawn on the back of a comic book script page. Don’t hesitate—draw on napkins,

envelopes, paper bags—it’s the act of making the drawing that counts. I also believe it’s invaluable to attempt a drawing of anything. Don’t reject the most common objects or sights around you as unworthy of your attention—they can be fascinating challenges, and drawing them will broaden your appreciation of the marvels of light on form—or if you are so moved, the wild possibilities of stylized distortion or symbolism. Let your imagination become amazed by the very act of perceiving—you won’t regret this leap of faith. Dream visions are another powerful source of imagery, and are sure to have personal resonance (even if you don’t know what that may be!). I find making images from remembered dreams very therapeutic, even if the images themselves are frightening or disturbing. The process opens access to an emotional intensity that you can consciously tap for other work. I’ve included a few studies made from photographs, though I find this the least satisfying source for sketching. A photograph is already a simulated flat depiction of a mechanically recorded instant, and your starting point is the photographer’s work, not your own response to the content. Photo studies can be very useful, especially if the subject interests you and the real thing is unavailable to draw from. I advise caution, though—the danger of drawing from photographs is real and severe. Photographs are frozen fragments of the human field of vision— RIGHT: This nude resulted from a quick five minute warm-up pose, and shows that focus, concentration and long familiarity with drawing tools enable an artist to capture an enormous amount of information and atmosphere in just a few moments. ABOVE: I grabbed a 6B graphite pencil to jot down an impression of my daughter practicing the violin, and used the same pencil to outline a life drawing model before splashing a monochromatic wash over the shadow pattern falling down his back.

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flat arrangements of dark and light shapes that resemble something you may recognize—but they are not an accurate representation of reality, or of the way our eyes perceive depth, color and atmosphere—always go to the real world source if possible. I usually sketch from photographs as a change of pace, to record some technical information about an object’s construction or design or because one strikes my fancy in some way. Use them sparingly. The preparatory work for commercial assignments are included here as examples of the fruits of compulsive sketching. This is a great and essential function of sketching— it’s a marvelous tool for the exploration of visual ideas. There is a looseness and freedom in these conceptual stages of searching for designs and character personality that grew directly from my approach to sketching. I begin every doodle with the willingness to toss it in the garbage can if it doesn’t work, and that cavalier attitude is invaluable for opening the flow of inspiration. As I mentioned above, playfulness is a key to spontaneity. It invites fertile invention because there are no harsh conditions or expectations cramping the impulse to frolic and explore. A few days ago I did the fairy drawings seen here in a manner new to me—I was transforming the live model before me into a fantasy creature as I drew her—I didn’t change the features and ears after the

THE POWER OF SKETCHING

BRET BLEVINS

I used a conté crayon to draw this clubby group of Saguaro cacti—these delightful crayons mellow any subject with a rich warmth. The crumbled texture of the marks and their pleasant earth-colored tones imbue drawings with an antique quality that’s filled with charm. Smearing conté with a finger or blending stump creates soft deep tones.

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LEFT AND ABOVE: These two embryonic (I intend to add wings and other details) fairy drawings were done from a live model. I distorted her lovely features into a fantasy creature as I drew—this was a first for me and I’m not sure I prefer it to fictionalizing the drawing later, after the session. Though fun, it felt strange to be grossly caricaturing the charming face in front of me. I felt a bit sheepish, but I’ll think it’s important to try anything. You never know what might result!

session. It felt odd at first, but I enjoyed it. In the classes I’ve taught I’ve found that most students (of all ages and levels of experience) have a debilitating fear of defacing a blank sheet with their tension-wrought marks— beginning is an agony for them. If you suffer similar qualms, buy a 500 sheet ream of the cheapest copier paper and move through it in a week—warm up by covering a dozen sheets with scribbles if need be, then draw quickly and fiercely (the subject doesn’t matter)—intending to discard most of the pages. Draw images flitting on the screen as you watch television—sit in a park or mall and sketch the passing show—draw scenes from memory, things that happened to you or you read about—don’t judge the finished results as if they were destined for a museum. The point is to become familiar with the act of making unpressured drawings—grow comfortable with the intimacy of responding to your intimations. You can’t make love in a suit of armor. Take the concept of sketching seriously, but don’t approach it soberly—have fun and remember that the drawing itself is only the souvenir of an experience. The really important event is the act of perceiving and discovering the means of sharing a quality of that perception with others. See you next time!

Bret 64 DRAW! •SUMMER 2003

THE POWER OF SKETCHING

BRET BLEVINS

This life drawing was made with Prismacolor pencils on medium-tone colored paper. This is a terrific technique for achieving rich drawings very quickly—by using dark and light colored pencils (monochromatic against a dull brown surface in this case) you can use the ground as your midtone, and scale up the lights or push down the darks with great speed. The pre-toned background creates an instant environment to work against, saving lots of rendering time. The Prismacolor pigments are very thick and heavy, giving the final image an impasto effect resembling a painting.

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WORKING FROM PHOTOS The monkey photo studies were made by sketching in the forms with a non-waterproof felt tip Flair marker, then revisiting them with a sable brush dipped in water—the bleeding marker ink creates a pleasing purple-colored wash that is quite easy to control (if the brush isn’t oversaturated with water). This figure study was made over 20 years ago with an HB graphite pencil. I drew many of these photo studies in the course of learning human anatomy and found them useful—I wouldn’t have the patience or desire to expend this kind of energy to copy a photograph now. A live model is so much richer in information and character. If you don’t have access to live models, good photos can expose you to figure proportions and flat graphic rendering techniques—but aim for a life drawing class and get there as soon you can!

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THE POWER OF SKETCHING

BRET BLEVINS

The Hollywood monster photo copies were made with ink, sable brush and steel nib pens. As a tyro I did a slew of these studies, from of all kinds of photographs, as a process of learning how to translate photographed textures into line rendering techniques. Some of the coarse textures in the portrait were made with a Q-Tip dipped in ink.

These figure studies from “The Atlas of Foreshortening” were made with the same tools as the monkey heads on page 66—a wet sable brush applied to Flair marker line sketches. I’ve also made life drawings using these tools, but this can be frustrating—if the drawing turns out fine, you must accept losing it. (Flair marker ink soon bleeds and fades if exposed to light.)

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THE POWER OF SKETCHING

BRET BLEVINS This nightmare image was recorded after a troubled sleep disturbed by stress and deadline pressures. Dream imagery is always powerful, and attempting to capture it opens channels into your memory and subconscious that allow you to return there and tap intensity that can strengthen other work. Keep a sketchbook and drawing tools next to your bed.

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BRET BLEVINS

THE POWER OF SKETCHING

The sheet of doodles and the dapper bird are playful explorations—whimsical daydreaming on paper—calisthenics to limber your imagination. Let your mind wander and speculate—who knows what might pop out. The preliminary sketch of the Animator illustration shows how the freewheeling approach I’ve been discussing informs my professional work. The searching scribbles that developed into this rough drawing were made with exactly the same attitude I bring to unassigned sketching—I let my imagination suggest the swooping lines, finding pleasing rhythms and shapes, guiding my hand and watching the image evolve until I like what I see. This image was drawn on tracing paper—I then placed this under a sheet of bristol board and switched my tactics to careful precise delineation, choosing a harder grade of lead (3H) and making a careful pencil diagram for an inker to follow.

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THE POWER OF SKETCHING

BRET BLEVINS

LEFT and RIGHT: These are pages of sequential storytelling images, again on tracing paper. Prior to this stage I had conceived ideas for each panel, and noted them in crude chicken-scratch “thumbnails,” often right on the margins of the script (in this case a plot). After deciding on the size and shape of each panel and ruling them in, I shift my mind into “sketch mode” and treat the entire page as a composition, lightly swirling my pencil through and across the frames, creating a pleasing rhythm and paths for the eye to follow, trying to use the figures and background forms as pure instruments of shape and pattern (leaving room for speech balloons and captions, of course). As this develops I begin to construct mass, “fleshing out” the forms, constructing anatomy and character details. Finally I use a marker to clarify convoluted patches of complex overlapping forms by outlining them. The key to the process is to remain loose and inventive, watching and reacting to the entire image and letting it emerge gradually. This is so much more fun than building a picture methodically, like a bricklayer.

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BRET BLEVINS

THE POWER OF SKETCHING

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THE POWER OF SKETCHING

BRET BLEVINS

All these except A are exploration sketches for comic book projects. The John Carter of Mars image is one of many I drew after revisiting the novel in preparation for a Dark Horse series. The character sheets are the initial designs for a comic book arc based on Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. The insane creature shown in A is another sketchbook remembrance of a lunatic I met in a dream. I woke before getting his name.

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THE POWER OF SKETCHING BRET BLEVINS

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THE POWER OF SKETCHING

BRET BLEVINS

THIS PAGE: The images of Stuart Little are initial tracing paper sketches for illustrations from one of my favorite children’s books. NEXT PAGE: Page 75 contains idea searches for a space-woman illustration, first attempts at the character Sleepwalker, and a couple of dragon doodles. All of the art shown in this article was created without precise preconception, and this is the whole point. Learn to use sketching as your physical method of visual germination and your drawings will constantly surprise you—and keep you eager to sketch and sketch and sketch!

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BRET BLEVINS

THE POWER OF SKETCHING

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SKETCHING TOOLS These are the tools used to make all the drawings shown in this article—the only expensive items are the two sable brushes— everything else shown can be obtained at a craft/art supply store for under $25.00. (Except maybe the Q-tip—raid the medicine cabinet for this instrument.) The watercolor tin is a cheap set intended for children, but the color and handling quality is sufficient for sketching— the conté crayons are a waxy brand imported from Russia— they crumble easily but cost little. The pencils, blending stump and markers are cheap and sold everywhere. The use of steel pen nibs is fading, but most shops still carry a limited array— try them. Don’t settle for the dead, rigid, characterless lines produced by Rapidiograph pens—these ghastly little abominations are responsible for the death of lively pen and ink drawing. Avoid their life-killing coldness. The Tuff Stuff mechanical eraser is a fairly recent product, but very handy for fine-edged erasing and “tidying up,” especially if you’re working at small size. The other requirement for sketching is of course, paper. The choice of papers is immense—experiment with as many surfaces as you can afford to try—you’ll find a few that become favorites. I’ll draw on anything handy, but for most sketching I prefer Dick Blick’s inexpensive Blick White Sulphite Drawing Paper, 60 lb weight. The surface tooth is excellent and the sheets can take quite a bit of dry media handling. For washes or dipped ink drawings I like Blick All-Media paper or for even tougher treatment, a good quality Bristol Board.

For quick doodling ordinary copier paper is fine for both pencil and markers. Any sketchbook full of high rag or cotton content paper is suitable for a wide variety of attack—just be aware that the cheapest sort of papers and sketchbooks typically found in department store aisles are largely synthetic or last quality, and will repel your advances in a variety of frustrating ways. Drawing is challenging enough—you don’t need the avoidable annoyance of fighting the paper surface. Now lay aside the magazine and start sketching! You can reach Bret via e-mail at: and check out his newly revamped web site at: www.bretblevins.com

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$200,000 PAID FOR ORIGINAL COMIC ART! COLLECTOR PAYING TOP DOLLAR FOR “ANY AND ALL” ORIGINAL COMIC BOOK AND COMIC STRIP ARTWORK FROM THE 1930S TO PRESENT! COVERS, PINUPS, PAGES, IT DOESN’T MATTER! 1 PAGE OR ENTIRE COLLECTIONS SOUGHT! CALL OR EMAIL ME ANYTIME!

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DRAWING AND DESIGN

PAUL RIVOCHE

DESIGNING

LIGHT and S H A D O W By Paul Rivoche his time out, I have chosen to outline a few thoughts about T how I approach lighting a design drawing, illustrated by various animation background renderings. My aim is to discuss some of the thinking process behind the choices which were made, not to prescribe an ironclad step-by-step procedure. As with other areas of art, the topic is so large that it’s only possible to put down some central ideas—in other words, to outline various interesting areas for further investigation. Regarding my comments and diagrams, I assume that the reader will have some basic understanding of perspective theory and the geometry of forms, because these underly many of my statements. ARTISTIC LIGHTING VS. NATURAL LIGHT AND SHADOW In the real world around us, light and shadow behave according to inflexible laws. For example, a given geometric form— let’s say a cube—repeatedly lit from the same angle and with the same intensity, will cast the same exact shadow every time the experiment is attempted. The rules of light will not change according to the day of the week, but instead act with utter predictability. One can verify this for oneself by observation. This is the natural world which is recorded in candid photography, such as news photos—nothing is arranged or altered, but is all there as nature allows it to unfold. In contrast to this is what could be termed “artistic lighting.” Just as “artistic anatomy” is different than the anatomy which a medical student would study, so too does the lighting which an artist uses differ from the raw light and shadow seen around us or in spontaneous photos. The artist’s advantage is to be able to “edit” the elements of his picture carefully, to arrange and manipulate light and shadow to suit a given artistic purpose,

while still remaining obedient to the rules of light and shadow. The artist strives to reveal or “explain” form to the viewer and direct the viewer’s eye, not simply to record raw data as it happens to unfold in nature. An artist has limited means at his disposal, yet wishes maximum results. His transmission device is a flat piece of paper and a relatively narrow range of tones. If he slavishly records everything everything he sees, unaltered, whether the source is in front of him or in a photo, he soon discovers that some sort of editing is required, that the paper has a two-dimensional language of its own that must be taken into account. He discovers that the more marks he makes, the more he tries to copy every nuance of light and shadow, often the less form is described— paradoxically, form can get lost in the confusion and complexity. Some alteration is required, some editing, to cut through the clutter. You could term the results of this editing process “artistic lighting.” It is a process of clearly revealing three-dimensional form by careful placement of light source(s), manipulation of highlights, halftones, core shadows, reflected light, and cast shadows, and also the removal of extraneous and distracting information. Similarly, if an artist seeks to capture an internal vision seen in imagination (as opposed to drawing from an external model or photograph), and describe it clearly and convincingly to the viewer, he also soon realizes the need to understand the rules of light and shadow and the language of describing form on paper. Without a convincing play of light and shadow across his invented forms, the viewer’s eye will probably not “suspend disbelief”—will not accept the artist’s invention as real or possible. If the artist wantonly ignore how shadows really fall, stubbornly calling any excess “style,” conviction will be lacking because even at a subconscious level, people know what rings true and what does not.

ALIEN COURTHOUSE: This was a development rough sketch done for a key scene in a Justice League episode. The setting was a vast alien courthouse under a dome, with an accused person on trial, a prosecutor on a floating pod, a giant viewscreen with alien judges, and an audience of aliens ringing the whole scene. Including all these elements in one angle was a juggling act, so to simplify things I used a surrounding “frame” of aliens. I varied the lighting on them, with one alien in total silhouette, and the rest with increasing lighting as we go upwards. This gave the viewer some information, but also kept some mystery by not showing them completely clearly. And rather than showing thousands of aliens at once, which would be impossible, I chose to show only these foreground eight up close, and suggested the rest in the far distance by using specks. These foreground ones “explained” the distant ones. For the lighting in the arena, I chose to use a harsh toplight, to create a feeling like a blinding noontime sun—the accused has nowhere to hide. The cast shadow below the accused’s floating pod gave a height indication, with just a little softening at the edges to give a touch of realism. The screen unit where the judges are seen was rim-lit from behind and below, to create an ominous mood.

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PAUL RIVOCHE

DRAWING AND DESIGN

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PAUL RIVOCHE

DRAWING AND DESIGN

FACTORY COMPUTER ROOM: This pan shifted from the top lit computer area at left, arriving at a second focal point showing a mysterious room on a lower level. The challenge was to design an interesting lighting effect that would create the appropriate dark mood, while being careful not to go so dark that key details were lost. I visualized the area at left as being lit from an off-camera light somewhere up above, creating a soft pool of light. This can be seen on the desks and the floor, reflecting more or less brightly according to the shininess of the surface material it is hitting. Beyond the reach of this weak pool of light, surfaces quickly go to black: for example, the back of the computer and the sides of the keyboard, or the group of pipes in the lower right corner. The distant factory and walls scaled off into pure black, with only a little reflected light bouncing from the floor hitting the undersides of the girders. The grid window at left was kept weak as a light source, only showing its influence under the girders and reflecting of the side of the nearest giant cylinder. At the right, the lower room was given a very bright light source, which created natural interest by implying that activity was taking place there, that it was being used. The bright light silhouetted the grid window and wall, creating a strong contrast to draw the eye. This lower light source tied into the upper level on the middle set of large pipes, acting as a low-angle light source. This created the slight black shadow on the bottom of the pipes, which is the cast shadow of the edge of the “deck” falling on the pipes.

But, if you study and understand as much as possible about these rules of light and shadow, then when you invent lighting and arrange it for artistic purpose, it will have the conviction of reality behind, a flavoring of truth. Fortunately, the “rules” of light and shadow are not impossibly complicated. In the real world, when regarding multiple cross-combinations of light sources and cast shadows, there can be an appearance of great complexity; but behind all this are simpler basics repeated many times. When you have a working understanding of these basics, you are free—you are no longer fettered to a model or a photo, although those can undoubtedly be helpful. You are free to experiment, to arrange your light and shadow deliberately and with awareness, striving to find the solution which will best express your artistic vision. In the accompanying diagrams, I am concentrating first on the more technical side of how light falls. In a subsequent installment I will deal with the more artistic aspects of employing light and shadow, such as using light to create mood, arranging light and shadow for a focal point, etc. But the first goal is to have a solid base in the real world, before getting into the editing process. The artist must have a working sense of the boundaries of believability, or else he may unwittingly violate them and create visual impossibilities. A sense of these boundaries can be gained by accessing reliable reference. Once you start looking for it there are many sources of information about light and shadow, which will reward close study. First and foremost is the world around us. Once you grasp the basic principles behind how shadows fall, for example, it can be quite fascinating to study any given lighting you see around you, and analyze why and how the shadows and tones display themselves as they do. It is easy and very useful to make small aids to study, which simplify the analysis of light and shadow and make the variables easier to control: for example, one can get ordinary index cards, or similar rigid white pieces of card or thick paper. Under a point light source, you can turn the cards at different angles, experimenting with casting shadows on each other and on a paper cylinder, cube, etc. You can make a shad-

PAUL RIVOCHE

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PAUL RIVOCHE

ow box to simulate the interior of a room with a window: simply set up four “walls” of paper around a “floor,” and in one of the walls cut out windows of whatever design you wish. Then shine a small light source in the window, moving it around, and studying the way shadows play across the planes of your miniature “room.” None of these small experiments are difficult or time-consuming; and you soon discover they are worth the effort invested, because they largely eliminate frustrating guesswork when it comes to placement of light and shadow. These are some of the more “technical” factors/variables which are considered in setting up lighting on a design:

• Time of day (if natural light) = angle + intensity of light • Type of light source, whether natural or artificial: is it point source or diffuse? • Number of light sources, position • Relative placement and distances of light source(s), objects of composition, surfaces on which shadows are cast, etc. • Type of materials/surfaces: shiny, smooth, textured • Any other atmospheric conditions: smoke, mist, rain, fog, etc.

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HOSPITAL DOORWAY: Lighting effects can sometimes be very complicated and “interactive,” with multiple light sources influencing each other, and sometimes extremely simple, depending on the mood you wish to create. This scene took place at sunset, which dictated some of my choices. Sunset light is at a low angle of course, and I decided that it would be a bright sunset, not overcast. The window which is the light source is not seen, being behind the door, but its light bounces around a lot inside the room and then passes through the small window in the door. This in turn creates a bright reflective “flare” on the underside of the door frame, floods the left hand wall, and even reflects faintly onto the floor. The left-side wall light in turn flares on the reflective metal surface of the door handle. There is even a soft bounce light on the ceiling.

PAUL RIVOCHE

DRAWING AND DESIGN

(BELOW) CITY PAN: In this scene, the lighting treatment had to indicate that it took place in the afternoon. That dictated certain choices. For example, the overall light was from the upper left, showing that the sun was still up in the sky, but not vertical as it would be at noon. To show that the light was still bright, the contrast was kept strong between the front and side faces of the buildings. However, the fact it is afternoon is shown by having the cast shadows of buildings visible on the more distant ones, by having the tone on the ground plane taper away as if a lower angle light was hitting it, and by suggesting a few more diffuse cast shadows playing over the buildings, such as on the distant buildings at the extreme right of the image.

(ABOVE) MAXIMA’S CHAMBER: This interior pan design drawing had two major focal areas, the stairway at the right and the elevated pool at left center. Diffused spotlights were placed to create a soft atmosphere, highlighting these two areas of importance. The scheme was to have high angle lighting, which tapered off quickly into moodier shadow areas just beyond the spotlight edges. Cast shadows on the draperies were used to define their volumes and relative placements in space, with reflected light on their undersides to keep them from feeling too heavy. Careful management of tone allowed the two stairway areas to be silhouetted, making for more drama as characters moved up and down them. Emphasis was placed on contrasting stone and metal surfaces. The bright highlights from the stone-imbedded technology gave some relief from the darker tones which predominated.

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PAUL RIVOCHE

DRAWING AND DESIGN

HALL OF JUSTICE: A brightly-lit scene, which meant that there would be a lot of reflected light bouncing around acting as secondary light sources. On buildings covered by the cast shadows from other buildings—for example, the building at the left of the image—the roof received less bounce light and thus ended up a quite dark tone, which made it look dramatic. It’s fascinating trying to image various interactive lighting effects such as these. All the while, in addition to trying to accurately predict where shadows would fall, the artistic effect must be kept in mind. To give one example: in this scene I had to make sure to balance the dark masses created on the left and right on the tops of the buildings. Whatever tones were dictated by the laws of light had to be modified by the artistic need to make sure the blacks in the image did not end up unbalanced by having too much on one side or the other.

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Next installment: more details on shadow construction, plus more discussion of the ins and outs of “editing” light and shadow for artistic purposes. email me at privoche@yahoo.com

PAUL RIVOCHE

DRAWING AND DESIGN

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DRAW!’s CRUSTY CRITIC’s Online Art Supply Stores Index ONLINE ART SUPPLY STORE UPDATE

ONLINE REFERENCE SOURCES

MISTERART.COM One of The Critic’s favorite sites. Misterart offers an amazing array of supplies at decent prices. The site is fairly easy to navigate, with an excellent search engine. Shipping prices are average. Additional discounts for V.I.P. members.

Need a picture of something, or reference for a comic or illustration? Maybe you’ll find it here:

DICKBLICK.COM They’ve been in the catalog business since 1911, and they run a good web site, as well. Easy to navigate and search. They offer a lot of useful products, including the Raphael brushes, with reasonable shipping costs.

Free Foto –Tons of FREE photos for reference! http://www.freefoto.com/

ASWEXPRESS.COM (ART SUPPLY WAREHOUSE) I find the layout of the site a bit confusing, but they have a pretty good variety, along with good prices. Shipping costs are pretty high, and you need a Yahoo ID to check out. CARTOONCOLOR.COM Specializing in animation supplies. They offer excellent cel paints, as well as storyboard pads, animation cels, etc. OMOCHABOX.COM Specializing in anime supplies. An excellent source for markers, pens, and dot screens. DANIELSMITH.NET Good all-around site, with wide variety of supplies. Daniel Smith also makes their own products, which I have not yet tested. Decent site layout and fair shipping costs. ITALIANARTSTORE.COM I often order my Raphael brushes here. Competitive prices, and fair shipping (free on higher orders). Unusual site layout, but effective. UTRECHTART.COM They make a lot of their own supplies, and I haven’t tested them. The site is good, and they offer a wide variety of materials. Shipping is reasonable, and free on orders over $150. CHEAPJOESCATALOG.COM The site is a bit dizzying, but they seem to offer a lot of products. Prices are reasonable, but shipping is a bit high. REXART.COM A good site offering competitive prices and reasonable shipping. You only have to spend $100 to get free shipping. SCRAPBOOKSUPERSTORE.COM A scrapbook specialty store which carries Zigs and Pigmas. Product ordered—5-pen set of Zig Millenniums. Forms of payment accepted—Mastercard, Visa and Discover (no American Express) Order arrived in 6 days. JOHN POOLE PEN NIBS john@poolej.freeserve.co.uk http://www.poolej.freeserve.co.uk/homepage.html 16, Brookfield Crescent, Harrow, HA3 0UT, England PHONE/FAX: (44) 020 8204 5315 Order by mail order via fax, email or even snail mail. A unique collection of pen nibs many of which can only be obtained from them. COMICTONES.COM They specialize in tone screens and markers, seemingly catering to the manga market. Product ordered— Neo Piko pens. Forms of payment accepted—Mastercard and Visa Note—They included a nice T-shirt free... a bit tight on this critic, but nice, nonetheless. If you have a favorite online vendor, let The Critic hear about it at: ande@mchsi.com

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City Skylines References Links to various city skylines http://www.rgimages.com/location.htm

Free Logos in Vector Format Thousands of free logos in vector (.ai) format, for PC or Mac... many major western corporations, also Russian ones http://www.logotypes.ru/default_e.asp Law Enforcement and EMS References Supplies and Gear http://www.safetyl.com Medical Supplies References pics http://www.tvmsonline.com Taxi References http://www.checkercabs.org/pics/ Vehicle References Lots of images for various vehicles http://www.motorcities.com/main_vehicletypes.html Dinosaur References Links to tons of dinosaur sites: http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/1638/plinks.html History References Brief info but broad: http://www.historyplace.com

OTHER COOL SITES ON THE WEB DELPHI FORUMS: A comic related forum where a lot of professional cartoonists hang out and post. http://forums.delphiforums.com/Draftingtable THE US GOV COPYRIGHT OFFICE: Everything you need to know about protecting your rights to your artwork. http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright GRAFIX: The makers of Duoshade and Unishade widely used by cartoonists, illustrators and artists to highlight and enhance drawings with shade and tone. http://www.grafixarts.com/duoshade.html MIKE WIERINGO.COM: The official home page of comic artist and fan favorite Mike Wieringo. http://www.mikewieringo.com/ POLITICAL CARTOONS: Dan Cagle’s swell Internet home page collecting political cartoons from all over the world. http://cagle.slate.msn.com/politicalcartoons/ PACIFIC COMICS CLUB: Tony Raiola’s swell company which reprints newspaper strips of the Golden Age from Johnny Hazard to Dick Tracy and more. http://www.pacificcomics.com/ KING FEATURES.COM: The online home of King Features. Read up on your favorite comic strips from Popeye, Blonde and Bizzaro to Tiger and Spider-Man. http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/ MIKE ZECK.COM: The web site of Mike Zeck. Get a commission or buy some art. http://www.mikezeck.com/index.html ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE.COM: The super cool mag on illustration! http://www.illustration-magazine.com