The Stanta Claus, 2009!

Last year because of a typo I made I did a drawing I used as an email signature, "Stanta". Which I can't find. Over the years I have done relatively few Santas. This year I decided to have some fun and do a few more. The first one, above, was a quick run at another email signature image. I had in  mind a photo my old studio partner had of a a New York City cop, dressed as Santa, loading his revolver.

I was not going to do a comic book version, I had done that for the local paper some years ago.

The first Stanta for 2009. Just a quick drawing in Sketchbook pro, that turned into a Sean Connery. The main goal with the Stanta's was to have fun. I wanted to do each in a different style or technique and play around with the look of Santa.

There is Hillbilly Stanta,

 

  Snoop Stanta,

 

and Jazz Stanta

Only got four done. Not bad, each is somewhat of an experiment. I had fun and learned a bit. Hope people got to enjoy them. I think I have a new Holiday tradition.

Stanta 1 : Stanta Connery

This didn't start out to look like Sean Connery, but hey, none the worse. I stopped here because I accidentally screwed up the Sketchbook Pro file.

This is just a test: March of The Stantas

This is a sort of live test, but I will be posting all my 2009 Stantas!
Stay tuned!

It takes a Village…

It takes a Village to get me back to my blog! I find myself going to the blogs I frequent and seeing no new posts, then I say, "Man, why no new posts!?" Then I realize that I have a few followers who might be saying the same thing. So here we are! I have been working. Most of it has been on secret or proprietary stuff that I can't show, yet.
One project I did, again, Top Secret storyboards. (not in the film sense, more in the business meeting sense.) It was so secret that I didn't know where I was going until the morning of the meeting, no topic, no names until I was on the road. The pay was good and so was the food, as was the location. I drew for 8 hours, with a lunch break, uploaded my files and was done.
Another job was toy presentation art, that's anew one. The toys do not exist and there were no real drawings of them, just sort of "napkin" quality doodles from which I had to create "almost 3-D" drawings.
Then there's training comic book for medical professionals/technicians. I'm inking that in Illustrator. At some point in the project I should post about how I'm inking digitally. I love a real brush, but I have inked several illustrations in Painter, Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro and Illustrator. Each app has it's good and bad points. Which brings me around to The Village…Voice that is. I'm still doing the Robbin's column, so let's roll on the one from last week.
I start in Sketchbook Pro doing a few roughs for concept. I can email from the app or call the Art Director to discuss concepts. The topic for this was a fund scandal involving the city comptroller and Peggy Lipton, "Julie" in the original Mod Squad!
There are/were three major players in the scandal, but they only wanted to focus on two, and I HAD to draw the pose "Link" (Link, Pete and Julie! get up on your Mod Squad!) was in! So…After the rough I move to Painter, where I "ink" the art. I still do love inking conventionally, but I have a thing for what I call "The Impossible Brush." The ink never runs out and you get to Command Z any messed up strokes.
Then, over to Photoshop for the colors. I could color them in Painter, but Photoshop is better and faster at total image manipulation, and I'm used to the interface.
Colors and textures are added and for this an additional mod background and type.
The type was done by "The In-House Art Director" and is in the same style as the Mod Squad opening credits. A soft drop shadow helps it separate from the illustration. The blue-ish color is kind of 2000-ish, and not fitting with the TV show, but I used it to differentiate from the previous weeks illustration.
It's not as "hip" as I wanted. Looking at it now, some oranges and yellows would have been nice. Perhaps a solarized or posterized look. This concept was a straight ahead mash up of what is and what was. (Now that sounds Mod.)
For the NYC Tugboat Strike the concept was more metaphorical. My original idea was to use a version of Tommy the Tugboat, or more like his New York cousin, who's on strike. The AD didn't think there was anything funny in the article so we were going to go with a straight shot of a tug with a strike banner. I though the banner would be too small to read and then had the Eisner-esque idea of putting it in the water.
Whompped it up in Painter with "The Impossible Brush"……and then colorfied in Photoshop.

I'm trying to break myself of the horrible tendency to work zoomed in. You wind up putting in to much detail, making "hay" and wasting time. I like to look at the finish as the file icon in my finder window. I use a reducing glass when I work conventionally.
Just finished this coming week Village Voice illustration, another Bloomberg. I'll eventually post them all here I think. The next project to finish is the comic book inked in Illustrator, that and yet another secret project!

Village Voice Illustrations, It's New York time.

One of my first real gigs I got excited about was illustrating for the Village Voice. I was just little ol' me in Tacoma, doing section covers, spots and feature illustration for one of the hippest, toughest, newsweeklies in the country. I learned to work on New York time. It helped that I was fast and worked well in the morning. I did a lot of stuff, airbrush, line art, all really nice black and white. People moved on, design regimes came and went. I stopped illustrating for them but kept in contact. I like to think I got better and faster (and stronger, like the Six Million Dollar Man) Three weeks ago one of the Voice art directors contacted me. It was Thursday afternoon, they had a column (written by long time political reporter Tom Robbins) that needed an illustration. Sketch by Friday, finish by Monday, end of day… New York time. Well, yeah, I did it!
The first illo was of Mayor Bloomberg, "King Mike". The column was about term limits and a possible meeting with Rupert Murdoch. The Voice liked the way I handled the art on The Flitcraft Parable, and wanted the same look. I took the same file and added the new line work. We went with the image of "King Mike" in repose with a NY Post cover urging him to run.

Next illustration was of New York Congressman Nadler, a big, big fella. He was to look friendly, but imposing, not cartoonish or caricatured. There's not much about ACORN in the illustration but they are an important part of the article. We thought subtlety was best.
In contrast to the pre -email days of my first Voice work, these are all done digitally. Sketches and roughs are done in Sketchbook Pro and emailed directly from the app. A very cool feature! The roughs are imported to Painter and inked with brushes I created, then the line art is colored and texture added in Photoshop. Save the whole thing as a jpeg and it's small enough to email!
Man that's fun!


Back to Bloomberg. What took the longest in this image was designing a bag of chips! The design is based on Bloomberg campaign graphics. When I had added the color I thought it was all too much. My "In-House-Art-Director" suggested changing the bag color to white and shifting the type color. Then I knocked back all the other colors and things came into focus. The Illustration had a clear visual priority.
Working on the same Thursday-Monday Schedule (yet to work the weekend on these.) I still did two versions by Monday end of day… New York time.

More Storyboards

Finished yet another storyboard project. Similar to the last, all top secret. I did make good use of Sketchbook Pro. All the line art and roughs were don in Sketchbook Pro, the color was done in Photoshop. I could have done the color in SBP, but the look I wanted was easier to do in P-Shop. At least as far as I know. Sketchbook Pro has some cool features, including a rotate feature that you can do thru the interface or in set increments with a key command. The brushes have been expanded and are customizable. This may all be held over from the previous version but it's all new to me. It's not as fast with straight cutting and pasting and I have yet to find a way to really transform objects. But for basic drawing, it's faster and more responsive (at a speed) than P-Shop or Painter. Now Autodesk can send me a check.

Storyboards End

The illustrator and teacher Cherry Brown, who along with her husband Dick Brown founded The School of Visual Concepts, once told me to draw something every day.

Storyboards are the wind sprints of illustration. Short, quick, you do a lot and they can be very tiring. However at the end you definitely on. Even though they might not be the best drawing you'll ever do, a little bit of careful attention to each one can have great results for your skills in the end.

Hey Kids, Comics!: The BTS Master

Well now, where I…
This comic was done as a direct mail advertising piece. I've done ad comics in the past (at least two for Microsoft!) and most often they are on the safe side, given what they have to do and the toes that must be avoided. This was born of an ad, the art for which was also used as the cover (shown above). At the time of doing the ad the heroes had no specific relationship, one was just telling the other something about the product, the BTS Master, a device that tests and analyzes cell phone tower transmissions. The characters were done with more attention to the expressions that anything else.
Later it was decided to do more with the comic theme. Originally, the project was a four panel newspaper format comic strip. I was pushing for a two-tiered "Star Hawks" format. That would have been fun. I had convinced the marketing/creative director to let me write it since it was short and I know the format so well. Just then, the project changed. For a reason I can't remember, they decided to make it a five page mailer, and the four panel strip became a five page story! I convinced them to let me flesh out the story without adding to it. I was writing, lettering, coloring and drawing a four panel story in five pages of space!
The cover art was essentially done (see my roughs above, done for the ad illustration). I added title lettering under the helpful eye of The In House Art Director. Then I began the pages.
The story was pretty simple, monster/villain wrecks tower, female lead calls in heroes, they show up and save the day using product X,( hilarity ensues, roll credits). But with the extra space I could really set a nice pace, and have it not feel like an ad.

In page one, top panel we see the monster, Irk, because he's irksome, chomping on a cell tower. I did my research on cell towers believe me! In drawing Irk I kept thinking of the monster in "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", part monster and part gremlin. A corner-of-the-eye thing, well not so much in the end! He has cooling rods in his back (ouch!) a hammer, which shows he does damage, and feet that allow him to grip and scamper up towers. At the bottom we see Vicki, the female lead. I wanted to have a character that would interest the readers (mostly male, tech, engineer types) and act as a counter to the main hero. I based Vicki on Tina Fey, Geek sex symbol. In the bottom panels she observes Irk and calmly calls in our heroes. A color note; the action starts at night and ends at sunrise. As we all know, monsters and gremlins (and freaks) come out at night. The change in light sets a definite time period and pace for the action. Also, this allowed me to do some subtle color stuff.

Page two introduces our heroes, Doc and his sidekick Volt, and sets up their characters. This would not have been possible without the extra pages/space. This page is a complete luxury. The only essential panel is panel one, which shows the heroes flying in. About the dialog; I read up a bit on the actual technical jargon and from there created super-jargon and tech-speak for Doc and Volt. So, somehow, what they are saying should really make sense. Vicki's dialog reflects the real problems the product is designed to test and solve. In panel two I show Doc as being the cool thoughtful hero while Volt, my favorite, is the hot head, giving off electricity. His dialog is more aggressive. Their costumes riff on the difference between Silver Age heroes and Image era heroes. Doc echos Space Ghost if you look hard. Panel four has more reality than it appears. Volts dialog, the machines in his hands and the rack unit behind him were heavily referenced, and reflect what may really be done and used in a similar situation. Well I mean not if you had a monster on a a tower but just a problem with the tower. The color palette is pretty limited and I feel I did a decent job of restraining myself to a tasteful level. I tried to create a sense of light from a definite source and color.

Page three starts with an unusual beauty shot of the product and our heroes, and goes into a harder ad pitch. All this followed by Volt blasting off to take care of things the old fashioned way! Which is what the product offers a streamlined alternative to. Panels three and four are just a little humor that I thought alleviated the hard sell of the piece and added a bit to the characterization while keeping the story moving right along. Doc is drawn an bit more cartoonish and breaks the panel border to add to the effect. It also lets the reader in by breaking the Fourth Wall.
Page Four takes two panels to develop Irk. He's just a simple, hungry monster with a desire to be his best. Even though Volt took off first in Page Three, Doc is first up and everyone takes note of how well Doc handles the situation using the product. I'm not all that happy with the color on this page. I think the light coming from Irk being zapped should have been the main/stronger light source for everything on the page. I remember struggling with the colors in Irk. In hindsight it seems pretty clear what to do. The grass and concrete texture are made from using a scan of one of my airbrushed illustrations.
Page Five has Doc take a little credit, basking in his superior intellect and promoting the BTS Master even more. You can tell now the sun is rising by the colors in the background. Irk is now more of a cute lil' gremlin. pointing to the happy light-hearted ending. The last panel has dialog the explains what would actually happen, the limits of the product, after it's use. Vicki's dialog shows her relationship with Doc, and Volt's is a double entendré. Both of which I thought would get cut, but didn't.
Clients who use comics often get excited about having a comic book created for them, and about their product. Issues arise when the story and art wind up being less than what is hoped for. This is usually solved when objectives for the comic are made clear up front, and competent, experienced creatives are left to come up with a solid comic book. This client needed a comic that introduced the BTS Master in a fun, quick non technical way, to a comic savvy audience.
In the end everyone was happy.