Getting Over the Hump

Howdy Hootie fans. This post comes to you from scenic Conway, NH where I am on a little tour of New England with my mom & her husband. It’s early and nobody is up yet, so I’m at the kitchen table in a lovely old farm house having a coffee and writing this post.

We’re coming up on two years of Hootie Comics, and I feel like I’ve really gotten over a hump with my drawings. I’m not struggling so much anymore, and I’m able to get what I want. Dave Sim of Cerebus fame says you have 1000 bad pages in you, and you have to get them out. In my case, it was closer to 100. But the only reason it was even that many is because it took me too long to realize some things. Here’s what I learned, and I think it’s generally good advice for any undertaking.

Don’t skip steps
I tend to record new Hootie ideas as little thumbnail scribbles, rather than written text, because the gags in Hootie are mostly visual. Then I would try to go directly from these to the finished pencils. Big mistake, because the pencils would usually not come out how I wanted them. So I inserted an additional step in between, where I do what I call a “layout”. This means rough-drawing the strip using simple shapes like a child’s blocks. In the layouts I work out frame composition and shadow placement:

Be a perfectionist. Erase more.
I read an interview with Tanino Liberatore where he said something like, “For me, the drawing hasn’t begun until I start to erase.” And I thought, if a guy who draws that well says something like that, I’m not erasing nearly enough.

I had this weird reluctance to erase things that didn’t come out quite the way I wanted, partly out of laziness, partly out of fear that the attempt to fix it would be even worse. Be picky about what you want and use your eraser. You don’t have to erase all the way, you can stop erasing when the old image is still faintly visible. That way, you can use it as a guide.

If you’re not sure, work it out in pencil
Don’t leave surprises for the inking stage. If you’ve done it 100 times before and you know what to do, fine, but if you’re not sure, pencil it.

That’s all, folks. Now back to the sketchbook.

Failed experiments and other follies

Hootie Comics are my little forum for comics experimentation, which is one of the joys of not being syndicated. However, many of these experiments are things that I have since decided don’t work. Because of the lag time between when I draw a strip and when I post it, several of these experiments-gone-awry are coming up in the queue. Some examples are:

Failed experiments 1 and 2: Brushed-in fur, and real grey wash

I was trying to reduce the labor and wrist strain of drawing Sodie’s fur by doing it with a fan brush. I don’t like the way this looks, it’s kind of dirty-looking and doesn’t suit funny animal comics. I’ve since settled on a technique of suggesting fur without drawing every single hair. Also, the grey wash here is real diluted ink, applied with a brush. The result looks cloudy or foggy; maybe OK for a noir detective story, but again, not for a funny animal cartoon. Digital grey wash is much more even and cartoony-looking. Although I prefer traditional media, like Doug Tennapel says, I’m a purist until it doesn’t work. Both effects are combined here for a pleasing fur tone that doesn’t involve carpal tunnel surgery:

Failed experiment 3: stock backgrounds
As I mentioned in another post, using stock backgrounds doesn’t work because background elements always seem to end up in the wrong place, interfering with the characters. You can use Gimp to make the background lighter, but this just looks weird and processed:

Failed experiment 4: hand-drawn balloons with computer fonts
My hand lettering sucks, so I’ve begun using a font, but I don’t really like computer-generated balloons. So I’ve been trying to do the balloons by hand, and the letters in Gimp:

The problem here is that it’s hard to anticipate how big the balloon has to be. Sometimes it ends up too big, other times, too small. The solution is to use the Gimp path tool to make the balloons, instead of the oval select, which makes perfect ovals:

It looks a little vector-graphicy, which it is, but I don’t think it looks bad, and it gets the balloons to fit.

So that’s it. This is a process of continual experimentation and improvement for me as I keep the stuff that works, and jettison the stuff that doesn’t. Stay tuned…

Crayola Rocks!

Some of you may remember my post titled Black and White Rocks, Color Sucks. The basic gist was that I had decided not to do any digital color, because I don’t enjoy sitting in front of a computer. Hootie Comics, for me, are as much about the process as the outcome. I’m doing this for fun; if the tools aren’t fun, I’m not using them.

Since then, I’ve been wondering off-and-on if there isn’t a medium that can be used to color line art that is actually fun to use. Watercolors are fun, but messy, and the colors aren’t vibrant enough. Then I got an idea: what about crayons? Crayons might be just the thing to give Hootie that whimsical look.

My first impression was, I like it. The colors are brighter than watercolors, that’s for sure.

I think crayons might just be the world’s most underrated medium. I don’t notice a huge difference between crayons, pastels, and colored pencils. Crayons are harder to blend than pastels are, but the washable crayons will blend, more easily than the old wax ones, if you grind with your thumb. And anyway, Crayola makes so many colors nowadays that there isn’t much need to blend them.

Portrait artists, take note: they even have what they call a multicultural set, which is an entire box of different skin tones.

Plus, there’s nothing to set up, break down, or clean. You can put them down anytime and pick up right where you left off. And most importantly, crayons are fun! Thanks Crayola, you rock.

The Hole of Tank Girl!

The first sign of getting old must surely be when you begin deriving great joy by collecting things from your youth. I gave my small comic collection to a friend some years ago to dispose of as he saw fit, because I was entering a period of wandering and I wanted to lighten the load. I held back some of my favorites, but I got rid of some stuff that I now regret: Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor anthology, Roachmill, Batman Killing Joke, and Tank Girl. So I’ve begun collecting again: the Tex Arcana anthology from Heavy Metal in the eighties, Jeff Smith’s Bone, and now, joy of joys, Tank Girl.

This massive anthology is worth every penny of its hefty $90 price tag. Re-printed in hardback, at huge size, on thick glossy paper, is every Hewlett and Martin episode of Tank Girl ever made. There’s far more stuff in this book than I ever had in my tiny little collection, and the print job is much better than the originals, the color far more vibrant.

So I have Tank Girl, Booga, Camp Koala and the gang back in my life with their violent, drunken, absurd antics.

This anthology is extra special since Jamie Hewlett has no interest in drawing comics anymore, so the book contains every Hewlett Tank Girl that ever has existed, or ever will exist. Not to take anything away from Rufus Dayglo, who is a brilliant illustrator in his own right, but I have a soft spot for Hewlett’s art. If you’re thinking about buying this, I give it a hearty two thumbs up.

Thinking About Inking

Partly to avoid thinking about the recent bombing of the Boston Marathon quite so much, lately I’ve been thinking about inking. Ink only has four values or so (black, white, and maybe two shades of gray), so there are fewer choices than with some media, but even the choices that are left still seem overwhelming. So as a little experiment, I did a quick pencil sketch, printed out four copies, and inked it four different ways, to see which one I like best. I’m going to rearrange the order, because the order I did them is not the order I want to discuss them. Here is a detective coming through the door and spotting something on the floor, perhaps a body:

This is a style you frequently see in comic book illustration: just black and white, no gray. It really needs color to soften it up by adding some mid-tones. In black and white, it looks harsh and strobe-lit, like Frank Miller’s Sin City. Which is good for noir crime dramas, but perhaps not much else.

Here is the same thing, but instead of filling in the black with a brush, I’m outlining the black areas with a fountein pen, then filling them in later (perhaps even digitally). It’s hard to tell at low resolution, but this makes the shadows look flat and stylized, like a bad Mike Mignola imitation. The brush feathers things in a way that outlining can’t. Maybe not critical for web comics, but at 300 dpi it might make a difference.

Here is the same thing, but instead of black, the “black” areas are scribbled in. This looks washed out; it fails to use the full dynamic range of the medium. This is how a guy would look if he were across the street. Maybe it’s a good effect for background objects.

This is the way I like to do things in black and white; black, white, and mid-tones. Looks nicely 3-D without being muddy. But I think it would look muddy if you colored it. If you’re going to add color, you need to leave some room for the color to fill in the mid-tones. Once you hatch in the mid-tones, you’ve committed to black-and-white.

So my initial instincts were right, but now I know why.

Blast from the Past…

I found this big honkin’ feather in my yard the other day, so I decided to satisfy my curiosity about feather quill pens. Supposedly they are way more flexible than steel dip pens, so I heat-treated it in sand and carved the tip using instructions I found online:

However, as soon as I made the slit, the tines sprang apart slightly, making it unusable. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong; maybe it’s the wrong kind of feather, but I just couldn’t get it to work. But while I was in a retro mood, I cut a piece of bamboo from the yard and whittled it into a reed pen like the kind used for traditional Arabic calligraphy:

Then I did a little doodle with it:

This one shows promise. It has an appealing kind of crudeness to it; a primitive quality. The reed pen doesn’t hold much ink, and when it runs dry, it makes some interesting textures. It’s also hard and angular, not soft and rounded like a brush. Maybe I’ll have to play with this some more.

My philosophy on drawing with ink

Some of my favorite pen-and-ink illustrators, like Vincent Locke and Sean Gordon Murphy, seem to do their crosshatching haphazardly, without much apparent planning. It looks OK, though, because they have a lot more talent than I do. My discovery of Vincent Locke as a teenager was particularly unfortunate, because I mistakenly came to believe that, if I filled my drawings up with little lines, that would make me as good as Vince. For years afterward, my drawings looked like black, dirty paper. Things seem to go much better for me when I think about where my light is coming from, and figure out where I want my shadows and my mid-tones. So placing lines haphazardly and without forethought is probably not generally good advice.

There are only so many black marks you can make on a white page before the page turns into a muddy black mess. Each mark you make is a little whitespace you will never get back. So I like to think of making black marks like spending money; it’s not that you don’t want to spend money, it’s that you want to spend it to good purpose. So you have to economize your black marks. Each one has to justify its existence.

You wouldn’t think my drawings reflect this much at all. I ink with a kind of spastic, splattery freneticism, with jagged, splotchy lines and dense pools of black. I do it fast; I am not careful. I want the inking to be spontaneous; I don’t want it to look labored-over. That’s why all the labor goes into the planning phase. Anything I’m not sure of, I work out first in pencil.

And that, kids, is how you get decent results even though the gods did not see fit to grace you with buckets of natural talent.