Periscope's Tumblr sketch blog series continues this week with a Mad Men theme. Sarah and I are actually just watching the series right now, so it would've been madly lame to not contribute, especially since I love the early sixties.
I needed to do a little polishing on my GN for the publisher last night, so I whipped this up while waiting for inDesign files to render.
I don't know what kind of BB gun Mrs. Draper actually shoots on the show, but I'm sure someone will correct me soon enough. Looking down the page, I'm seeing a theme of ladies in sheer things. Must change up my game.
I've been making another editorial pass over my book, Dear Creature, (formerly Sea Freak) for the publisher. My brains are awash with m-dashes and hyphens. Must make consistent. Must organize.
From the thumbnail example here, you'd never think punctuation inconsistency would be an issue for me, would you?
Work is getting crazy 'round here! I'm juggling a storyboard job, finishing one graphic novel, polishing another, and getting yet another primed for production. I'm feeling a little dizzy, like this illustration I did a while back for Jeff Parker, as an ode to his terrific Agents of Atlas series.
Today, I head down to LA to visit a good friend and show him what I've been working on. He was a great help on editing the script for my first book, so I'm very excited to be sharing my latest material. This morning I spent some time out in the field (which is a necessary part of this new work) gathering locational data and images for different places around my home town of Portland.
And, even though it's not officially announced yet, that first book my friend helped me with just got a little write up in Publishers Weekly! Here's the link. Second paragraph for those in a hurry.
Today I'm finishing up an outline for a graphic novel, and having a great time with it. I have two books slated for publication this Fall; one original to me and one for which I've done artwork... The latter has taken up most of my work time this last year, but at least one day a week I've been writing and developing my next personal book, which I look forward to sharing soon.
So, when you can't talk a lot about any of your projects, what do you talk about? Tools.
A cool program I stumbled upon recently is Celtx, a preproduction software suite that's open source (i.e., FREE). It streamlines script formatting in a big way, which is mostly what I do with it. It knows to say Page X, Panel X, Character X, every time I hit return, which is a beautiful thing after using Word for years. It also does storyboard layouts, film and animation workflow stuff, cloud-sharing... a lot of things I'll never use, but are pretty nice to find in an open source product.
Here's a character design for a story I did with writer Sara Ryan. The comic was part of the Comic Book Tattoo anthology that came out a couple years ago. I've always liked rough watercolor fills- I'm doing my best to replicate them in a digital process.
A while back I had a job for the Addams Family Broadway Musical where I needed to precisely emulate a Charles Addams cartoon in a digital, multi-layered format. In the process, I discovered the wonderful Nagel series brushes for Photoshop... They do a good job of emulating natural watercolor washes. Here's one of the more splattery examples:
...And here's the original Addams cartoon, plus my hi-res, all-digital copy. The original here isn't the copy I worked off of, so the contrast levels differ, but it's still fairly close:
So there's my first counterfeit job, approved by the Charles Addams estate itself!
Definitely give the Nagel series brushes a spin if you're looking to emulate real world watercolor effects. They're free, there's lots of them to try out, and it saves you the time of engineering your own brushes from scratch (which is admittedly fun too).
We're well into our time here in the lower half of the earth, and tempers are riding high. Just kidding. The Kiwis are, of course, as delightful as you've heard. Hotlanta agrees. He decided he needed to tag along on this trip, and everyone's been having a better vacation as a result, I'd say. Here he is with our new friend Luke, who, incredibly enough, knew everyone's favorite acorn-headed warrior on sight. That was a thrill. Luke spent some time introducing the big H to his lambs, one of many kooky adventures caught on video for the next installment of Acorn Minutes... in fact, there are enough kooky adventures being had that we may just need multiple installments for this one. We'll see.
This coming Monday, Sarah and I are heading to New Zealand to visit my folks. I plan to get a good bit of writing done for my next book on the 48 hours of plane/airport time, and a few sessions while we're in country. The spectacular landscapes should be a source of inspiration. I'm looking to incorporate a lot more study of the natural world into this next project, so the ecological diversity of NZ will be fun to explore.
The plane time is rough, no doubt about it. The last time I was on a plane for that long was my honeymoon... I sat next to a drunken Aussie-American loon who literally thrashed and bellowed through 7 of the 11 hours from LA to Fiji. On a red-eye. The last 4 hours were dedicated to my recovering from being sleepily groped between the legs by the same out-of-his-mind co-passenger. At any rate, I have that to reference whenever I take a trip anywhere, and thereby feel at ease with my slim chances of going through something worse.
No more down-notes though. Bring on the merino wool, colossal squids, and venison!
Here are the completed advent illustrations. In order: Zechariah's prophesy over his son, John (the Baptist), the Magnificat with Mary and Elizabeth, John the Baptist doing his thing, and the presentation of Jesus at the temple.
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Here is another sample of an advent illustration. This time the Magnificat with Mary and Elizabeth... moving back in time a ways from the last illustration, with John still in the cooker.
I think once I finish all of these, I'll post the un-cropped versions.
I'm going to be doing a series of Advent illustrations this season, and this is a detail of an upcoming piece- Zechariah prophesying over lil' John the Baptist.
I've avoided spiritual illustration up to this point. It's been done by all your favorite Renaissance personalities, and anything else looks pedestrian. Maybe one day I'll have the ability and time to produce something with the right balance of passion and objectivity.
For now, I'll just post this and curl into the fetal position.
I read Winnie the Pooh over the weekend, and realized what a brilliant piece of work it is. It's concise in its language and scope, but communicates this huge love for some pretty rough-around-the-edges characters. It's very comforting.
At the age I should have been reading about the silly old bear, I was watching Apocalypse Now with my dad and older brothers. Weird stuff for an eight-year-old, and pretty much as inverse to Pooh as you get. Beyond the content difference, there's just the narrative style discrepancy. Apocalypse Now takes its not-so-sweet time.
I remember inviting my third-grade friends over to watch Martin Sheen traipse through the jungle wonderland for three hours, in search of the slow talking bald man. These friends got bored and started wrestling about 30 minutes in. Channeling Brando's God complex, I chastised them and directed their attention back to The Horror.
I watched the movie again this weekend, the same time I was reading Winnie the Pooh, and I completely forgot about the video mashup of the two properties I saw a few years back. Something must have been going on at a subconscious level this weekend... At any rate, someone was kind enough to put the content of my brain on Youtube:
I rarely take photos of work in progress, but in the case of my painting for Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett'sBoilerplate book, I needed to be able to show where things were headed. I took snaps of the pencils, midtones, and the final piece.
This was done in acrylic, like most of my recent paintings.
If you haven't picked it up yet, Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel is an incredible piece of work, with some of the best photo manipulation you'll ever see. Check it out.
