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!