Shoulders, Suits, Old Movies

There is a long tradition in Tinseltown of trying to look better than you actually do. In that spirit I used photoshop to cook up four pages of a 2 week sketchbook to just show the high lights. I tend to ignore my sketchbook, then rediscover it with enthusiasm - bad habit - but I think lots of artists do the same!

I like watching old movies, trying to get an impression of the folds as the figures move. It's amazing how many shots are just guys wearing suits. I tend to be obsessed with the things I can't draw over the years, and shoulders / necks / clothing has always been high on my list. Probably because it ends up so often in your framing if you storyboard live action.




I like the authority and direct drawing of these TV doodles -- I'm still struggling to be this fast and accurate when I storyboard. The figures in my boards don't usually look like this. I probably draw better when I'm not worried about the myriad stresses of an actual job...





Here is a great interview with the mighty Alex Toth, (from the Jan. 2001 Comic Book Artist Magazine ), which helped me to not be so precious with my sketchbooks...

More recent work

Here are some frames from recent freelancing I was lucky enough to get in this very lean Summer of few storyboard jobs:

Do you want to talk about NIGHTMARE jobs? Do you want to talk about the seventh level of storyboarding HELL??!! This was one of many more like it done at top speed, for a hi-res animatic, using 3D backgrounds I had to paint up, while I had a bayonet pointed at my guts... (okay, I made up part of that - the client was fairly cool)...







Various jobs, at various levels of finish. I continue to try different ways of toning the boards digitally, when I have time.


This kind of drawing teaches you that, YES, you are a commercial artist. So I guess try to enjoy the ride... I was thinking of Toth as I attempted to simplify everything.

Here I was trying to simplify a complex composition with a simple value arrangement. I spent way less time on the actual drawing than the tones. It passes the squint test, but this had the typical curse of a live action storyboard drawing: it needed to show a complex progressive practical effect, which reveals a VFX shot; we pan to show the windows blowing, one after another, to reveal the background, THEN reveal the Heros fleeing through THAT BG as the far windows blow.



I have never shown any storyboards before the film comes out, but this one is out next week, and I didn't get any artwork into the "making-of" book, so here is a page from a xerox. They didn't all look this nice, but it was a great job to work on!

Gouache!

These are from December 2003. For some reason I got it in my head to fool around with gouache on some old illustration board I had. Unlike my day job, I used reference for all of these images. I found I really liked having reference to copy - not to have to invent everything. But I've really never done it much as I storyboard - the right reference is never there if you do live action boards.
I don't look down on illustrators who use copy, as I did when I was younger. Over the years I have discovered how many of my art heroes almost always had something in front of them when they made all those great pictures; either a model, a landscape, or a photo. And even if someone can copy a photo, where is the design? The idea?
Degas and Mucha used photos a lot. Even Monet used photos at different times. Rockwell talks about secretly using photos rather that models, in his autobiography.

When I started working professionally, I was trying to emulate Jack Kirby, because of his dynamism (and legendary speed), but found that I needed more realism to work as a storyboard artist in live action. I started to study all the realistic strip artists (Alex Raymond, J.C. Murphey, Stan Drake, Paul Gillon, etc.), and the print illustrators of the same era: Austin Briggs, Noel Sickles, Robert Fawcett, etc. Basically, I gravitated toward artists who seemed to be able to draw the stuff that I couldn't.
Once I realized that they used reference for a good part of their work, I understood the difference between work for print, and the job of a sketch artist. I started drawing more from life, and occasionally from photos- just trying to get more information, more realism, into my bag of tricks. Of course discovering Alex Toth was what really bridged the gap between realism and cartooning.
But I digress; here is more fun bad painting!...


I think this is a copy of another illustrator's work - some kid's book about prehistoric life - unfortunately I don't have it now to give credit. Just a doodle, as I try to figure out the jumble of decisions about value, color, planes, etc. This stuff is a treacherous road if you are trying to learn it on your own...


This is a copy from a photo - probably from an old National Geographic magazine. I remember that I was looking at Leif Peng's great collection of U.S. print illustrators from the past, and specifically was fascinated by the gouache painters during the 50's & 60's. No blending - you have to start with a middle tone and work darker and lighter - at least that's my best guess!



This was copied from a newspaper photo - the technique is getting into the neighborhood of black velvet painting! It was fun, but I didn't have the chops to attempt the face or background.

I still really like like this one- I guess because it has the feel at first of photo-realism combined with that delicious tight-but-loose gouache technique I had been trying to copy. I copied it from a newspaper or magazine. On the head especially, the proportions, planes, tones, highlights, etc, are hopelessly botched, but it makes me want to paint more! There is nothing like real paint. What I really wish I could do is paint beautiful dames in gouache, like Robert McGinnis, but I'm not so good at drawing pretty girls yet - gotta work on that...

Recent Freelancing

Here, in no particular order, are random images from several jobs I've done in the past year - these days everything is top secret, so I can't post whole sequences online until the film is released - often a year or two after I work on it.
Bummer, because I now work 100% digitally, but my website samples are still all my old analogue stuff.
So these are some of the recent storyboard frames that I like. They are done at various levels of finish, but they all represent very sticky problems that I solved - story problems, deadline problems, presentation problems, location problems:
(which way does 5th Ave. run? Can we actually get this shot?),
logistical problems:
(which is tank work? Or 2nd unit, green screen, etc. to help the A. D.'s schedule?), ambiguous problems:
(do they really need boards, or a scatter shot of loose concepts presented well?)
- It has been a busy year, and I've been very lucky to have worked with pretty much all cool, talented people. You know who you are ;)



This idea is actually from my friend Doug Lefler - one of his many story ideas. He is an idea machine!

Actually this one is old, but I threw it in for variety...

This was the final shot of a music video I struggled through in one day (how did I do so many of these in years past...?)






This kind of VFX board can only be done digitally in my opinion - I like finding some elegant cartoon line for an effect like this billowing sand, but that won't help the 3d modelers or animators, so I do more images like this these days.

Scanned from my sketchbook on the weekend as I couldn't stop cooking up shots - mostly I end up not using them, but I like this one.



Forcing myself to thumbnail shots using a full range of values. Wish I'd done more of it earlier in my career.



I'm self taught, and TV commercials were my art school, for better or for worse. I did another one recently and it was really hard! How did I do this for so many years? Harder than it looks...


Photoshoping fun- didn't have to draw a thing!


Digital work.

Me, Mike Voz, Loomis, & Pyle

Here is a lesson in value I have been trying to learn for, oh, 20 years.
I first did this thumbnail (in Apple's simple Inkpad application). At this stage my only concerns (since this is a storyboard) should have been story continuity, and composition / readability. But hidden within this simple doodle are the seeds of my undoing!
Look closely, and you can see that I am very cleverly planning to have the upper canopy of trees cast their shadows onto only the upper parts of the trunks, and the guy's shoulders!


Here is the line drawing, done in Painter. I spent extra time on these lovely lines, and so of course I am reluctant to cover them up. I also got carried away, starting to add some of my clever shading with the linework. But I stopped myself, and moved on to the shading...


This was my finished, toned frame. I did the tones on a separate layer in Painter. I even tried to quickly show the dappled sunlight and cast shadows on his shoulders. I did a whole bunch more frames just like this. then I stepped back and looked at them all. None of them passed the squint test. They all looked like a mooshy gray mess!
I asked my friend Mike Vosburg, for his opinion.
He said: "Make the difference between the dark of the forest and the sun of the glade VERY evident. Use lots of blacks for shadows to contrast the stark light on the ground ahead. I would just emphasize your values more. Darks in the fg... If you don't get your values too close, it won't get mushy. All in all, as the great cartoonist Rowland B. Wilson intimated to me, keep your values strong and whatever you do it will work. I think in too many of your compositions you (are trying) to use one medium value in three or four shades.... instead of three separate values."



Ouch. His diagnosis is dead on. I've known it deep down for a long time, so I went back to the thumnail stage (actually Mike did a sharpie / Photoshop job just like this over my e-mailed frame). Now it reads way better.

Here is my corrected frame. It reads better, but I still kinda don't get it. I could have used the black and white on his shoulders to suggest the dappled light, without destroying the relationship of the values. And it would have been much quicker to draw!
Anyway, imagine my surprise that week, as I found this same lesson on page 136 of Loomis' Creative Illustration, as he gives us the great Howard Pyle's formula:
I was trying to put texture in the shadows (the bark of the trees) and trying to put form in the shadows (the form of the trunk's roundness, and the forms of the figure). I didn't need either in this case because it is such a simple composition. Hope I learned it this time...
Students, and those who think they are done being students - read this part where Pyle points out how difficult it is to get accomplished artists to stop exaggerating halftones, and just simplify!! I suppose Toth must've read this too...

Dogs & Kids

Once again, through the magic of scanning, it looks like I'm just cranking this stuff out, page after page!

Beach Day

Painter Fun

I have a love / hate relationship with Painter, but I finally got smart and used it for what it is good for, then went right back into Photoshop. This is the most fun I've had doing 100% digital art!

How I work (Kinda...)

Here is an attempt to show how I storyboard a scene in a film. Hopefully there are script pages when I start, which I can use to breakdown the scene. But sometimes it is just a verbal description.
Most of the time I thumbnail a sequence first, but not this finished, usually. I also do overhead diagrams, even if I am on the job before any set designers or location people, just to keep it all straight in my mind, and to be able to show the director, or whichever department head may need to know, once they are hired. They almost always change my designs, as they should, but my job is to cook up something out of thin air, so I do it.
In this case I just made up a church and exterior, and tried to make sure I chose shots and cuts that could be easily split between stage and location work, but still cut together.

Again, these are nicer than the kinds of thumbnails I usually do on a job. I was trying out different pencils, brush pens, etc. It was fun!

Very often the revision process moves quickly and is complex (after the slow period of very little input). Important pieces of information end up as mere scribbles, compared with earlier drawings that seemed to capture the scene, but are now tossed into the trash.

I create a very tall document in Photoshop, and rough out the frames...

...for years my goal has been to be able to draw directly in ink, but I still just can't really do it, so I "ink" over blue, just like my old analog process....

...I still struggle to have a clean inking style, but so far I still have this loose ratty line look... kinda sloppy perspective too, but I don't think it detracts from the point of the shot. We are story artists, not accurate "drawers", although we keep trying. You can see that I have quickly dodged and blurred the BG line work...

Here is the finished frame. I often don't do them to this level of finish.

...here is a look at the tones for the above frame, without the lines. It is much quicker to do than it looks. I just use the standard Photoshop brush called Airbrush pen Opacity Flow to do tones on a layer below the ink line. I keep moving the slider to change the value.

Purple Brush Pen

Color!

Fooling around in Photoshop, no idea what this is for!

Mike Vosburg Lecture

My friend Mike Vosburg gave a great lecture on story at my favorite art gallery, Nucleus. They have a regular Wed. night sketchbook group. Mike talked about story and writing in general, storytelling in comics, and storyboarding for both animation and live action film. I wish I'd been able to hear this when I was starting out!

Like many such talks, the discussion ended with a lot of back and forth discussions about freelancing, and business, thus Mike's hilarious response above.

Ghetto Celeb comics

I illustrated part of a book back in 2002. here it is on Amazon. My lettering still sucked at the time, so my wife did the whole thing! Even this last page that badly needed to be edited down.

Ghetto Celeb color tests

Just before the deadline, the client said they had expected color comics (they neglected to tell me that up front!, so I did this test (which I still like)...



...I then proceeded to color the first page. I sort of stiffened up on this one, and didn't like my limited color skills. It looked like Sunday funnies coloring, and Ididn't want to color eight pages of originals in one day, so we settled on black & white. Looking back, I should have compromised and done a single color wash maybe.

More Old Stuff

I did this (mid 90's?) to illustrate the concept of a commercial artist's lifelong deadline. The halftone was that cheap old zip stuff you had to rub to adhere the dots to the paper. I think you can still buy stuff like this because of the popularity of Manga. It gives a sort of imperfect-but-mechanical look. Thank God I found Wally Wood at a young age!

This was the splash page for my self published comicbook, Junkyard Enforcer, #1. I'm glad I did it, but there is no money in comics like this, so I had to go back to work. But it was fun. This was Prismacolor pencil on some slick pen paper. Then I switched to very smooth bristol, I think.

Even though the newspaper business is imploding, I still think there is a market for a daily newspaper strip about the day to day drama of firefighters. A few years back I wrote six weeks of dailies and Sundays, but realized I like freelancing, and don't want that kind of commitment. Here is me fooling around with the strip - even some old school duo-shade!

Cannery Row minicomic

This was a mini comic I wrote, drew and xeroxed in 12 hours, once when I was stuck in a hotel room on a job in Richmond, Virginia. I didn't really plan the story much, as you can see, but finally decided on only including pages 1 through 6. This was back in 2002. I have to make some time for more comics work!

I try to get to life drawing workshops when I can. It often reminds my how shaky my anatomical knowledge is, so every once in a while I copy from my books. The color keeps it interesting...

I wish I'd gotten my head around this stuff a long time ago...



Trying to get my head around a motorcycle I had to draw. This was when I first started working 100% digitally on the Cintiq, using Painter. Now I use photoshop, but I still love / hate Painter! I keep going back to it.


I do better when I give in to cartooning, instead of trying to draw more accurately. Gotta remember that.


I was fooling around with Painter and somehow got the idea to draw my friend Gerald Forton from memory. I really like cartooning and getting a likeness if I can, but it only happens once in a while.

Olmo_Funnies

Olmo_Funnies
Originally uploaded by joshsheppard

I just added all my sketchblog art to my Flickr page, plus a bunch of old stuff like this. Hopefully I can figure out how to get it from there to post it here on my blog. This was our great dog Olmo, a 120 lb. Rhodesian Ridgeback who never grew up as long as he lived. He was a lover. We miss him.

Roman on horseback.

This is the first decent horse I've ever drawn from imagination. Woohoo! I like it, but I bet I'll look at it sometime in the future and find some fault I can't see right now.

Dec / Jan

I did this gag newspaper page instead of our usual holiday card, since we couldn't get the kids to stand still for a picture. I grew up looking at all the great early Mad Magazine artists' spoofs of print culture, so this was fun. Long live Will Elder!



I'm still copying from my horse drawing books. I got a great cheap brush pen in Chinatown (L.A.). After a bunch of scut work copying horses, I rewarded myself with some inking.



I decided to start cropping in on decent drawings if the rest of the page sucks... Why didn't I do this before?



I keep trying to draw directly, without any guidelines, or underdrawing, and try new tools. This was a 4B or 6B woodless pencil on so so paper.



I make a lot of little doodles and false starts drawing the kids. Here I actually made a good little drawing, then a bad one (cropped out). I had to include the horse head because it looks good to me.



I seem stuck on this idea that I have to learn to draw from life with an accurate but alive line. Sometimes it works like this, but it usually is a very controlled picture. I can dress it up with some watercolor, and I like the results, but I think I need to start working with value more. Plus, drawing with only line is a hard way to go.

Here I'm just copying the mighty Jean Giraud, or GIR, or Moebius.




It's funny that the French outdid us with the Western comics. Vive La France!


My friend Mike Vosburg has helped me a lot with my drawing. He complimented me on this, so I've included it.

Happy New Year!

Once in a while I can draw directly in pen. Then next time it turns out terrible. I just keep trying. Happy New Year everyone!

Cactus_01

I had to take the day off from work today to do a whole bunch of random stuff, but I managed to steal two hours in the middle of the day - woo hoo! I really hope I can find more time for drawings like this - it's very relaxing.

Color

I got help filling up this small post.

Horses, etc.

I learned to appreciate artists who can really draw horses when I worked with my friend Gerald Forton - I met him on a job and watched as he drew perfect horses in action straight in ink, no under drawing! (Here is a pic of him in his studio). It was humbling then, and still is as I try to steal an hour most nights to finally learn this stuff.

This diagrammatic drawing is boring and painful, but I included it for the students out there (isn't that all of us? You can't avoid this stuff). I didn't get a good art education, so copying (and drawing from life) has been critical to me.
I can't actually draw a horse this well. These are all copied from the great drawings in three excellent books on animal drawing: The Art of Animal drawing, by Ken Hultgren, How To Draw Animals, by Jack Hamm, and How To draw Animals, by the Famous Artists School. One of these days I hope to find some time to draw at the local horse stables...

The FAC book has some drawings by the great Harold Von Schmidt, who has somehow ended up mostly forgotten compared with Cornwell, Loomis, etc. He was a mighty talent.
Jack Hamm just couldn't draw as well as those fine illustrators, but he had a talent for teaching, and he managed to publish a few thin books that cover territory almost no one else did at the time.
Ken Hultgren worked at Disney, and could really draw animals!

I switched from Prisma pencil to charcoal - not digging the results.

This page was a lousy likeness of the model, so I tried to use the rest of the paper.

Another bad likeness of a different model - I'm seeing a pattern here...

This one actually kind of looks like the model! Not gonna mess up the page with a bunch of horse butts!

Voting

Watching the election results last night was an AMAZING experience! I'd planned on doing more voting sketches, but the line was not that long.


It was my patriotic duty to draw exactly what I saw as I waited in line to vote.


This fish has nothing to do with the election.

Characters...

My 5 year old finally convinced me to dress up for Halloween for the first time in 15 years! Then she demanded I make a drawing of it beforehand -at first we were drawing this together, then, as I realized it was turning out better & better, I sort of took it over. The better the drawing got, the more pissed off she got that I was trying to distract her into coloring something else. But I made up for it by letting her draw with impunity in my big sketchbook. Such drama!


This is an old page, but I like it. I think it is mostly me copying from the newspaper or magazines, but some is outta my head. Frazetta fans will spot something I pulled from deep in my memory bank and didn't even realize it ...

Early on a show, trying to warm up at home before I have to jump in.

From Life

If you're trying to draw realistically, you need an endless supply of new information - you can't just learn the academic stuff, then ignore life around you. You have to draw from life, even if it seems like you aren't getting anything out of it. I didn't keep a sketchbook for ten very busy years while I was buried in work and I regret it - my work showed it as I plateaued. Now I'm back to it, and my work is slowly improving, but most importantly, I've got the drawing bug again! Keep drawing folks...


Kids are (for me) the hardest of all to draw - they include gesture, story, likeness, proportion, anatomy, drapery - this is the only page in any sketchbook of mine where I think I got the gesture in every pose!

Life drawing class - I photoshoped two of my more finished drawings together here. I can only find time to go 3 hours a week, but it has helped my drawing a lot. I make lots and lots of very poor, humbling drawings every week of great poses by beautiful models, and it has forced me to work on my figures after years of thinking that I was done with all that. Also, it is great to talk art with whoever shows up - so refreshing after listening to people at work discuss the opening numbers for the latest superhero crap!


Trying to get a likeness...

You can get a kid to hold still for a long time if you take home your Cintiq and set the whole thing up - it's like they're frozen!


Trying out new pencils - I like trying new ones, but lately I keep going back to wax based pencils because I'm tired of my fingers smearing delicate drawings as I flip through my sketchbook.

The Guys at Work

We have these long video conferences with New Zealand, and sometimes it takes several minutes to reconnect, blah, blah, blah. I've always wished I could do some kind of reportage type sketches - capturing the essence of a scene- I do my best while we are all waiting around...


Despite all the finished drawings here on my blog, most pages in my work sketchbook look like this. I was following the director on an endless tech scout - in and out of vans and locations - when he finally started rattling off shots in the middle of a construction site - glad I had my sketchbook.


I was going to photoshop only the good head drawings together onto one page, but since this is an election year, I'm going with honesty. I don't like some of these, because they are not likenesses, or good drawings. But I stand by the few that are likenesses. My friends, you should elect me because... -- oh, all right, I used Photoshop here and there. But seriously, I like working with these guys.


Gerardo, sorry I made you look Spock in two drawings!

TV Sketches

So, these first two pages aren't very exciting, but someone at work was asking how I learned to draw the clothed figure. These little doodles from TV are part of it. Whether from life or TV, I find it pretty easy to only try to remember a small part of a moving figure, then jot it down. Gotta get something constructive from that idiot box!

Early on, I looked at the seven fold types in Bridgeman, but it didn't help me that much - mostly because I was still struggling with basic figure drawing. Once I realized that I'm actually a cartoonist, not a painter, (who actually would have to show all seven fold types), drawing drapery got easier. I started paying attention to seams, and trying to explain a fold with only 3 or 4 lines. Also, I thankfully found Toth, and the Famous Artist Course. There is a great book on drawing the clothed figure: Drawing People. Don't hesitate to buy it - amazingly, there is no other book out there like it.


These are from last year. I like them, but I wish I could nail a gesture drawing, like the animation artists.

The kids

Lunch Line Sketches

I draw these very fast, standing in line at Subway. Usually the drawings really suck, but if they don't, I color them later.

Doodles

Someone in the office made me draw this picture of the intern from Maine. No idea...















Doodling while watching the TV











Copying from the mighty Raymond Poivet.















A tattoo design for a friend from back in the Grunge years.
















Life drawing. About every 100th drawing looks like this!

3rd Post

This ain't right. I'm drawing with the crayons, and she's drawing with my (almost) $6,000 bucks worth of kit.



If you ignore the dates, it looks like I'm just cranking this stuff out...

2nd Post

I drew this with one of those fraud proof checkwriting pens. The ink will bleed a bit until it dries, then no more. I also used a water brush.



A regular ballpoint pen, then colored w/ a tiny watercolor kit using my water brush.

First post

I finally started a sketchblog...