Joel's Super ArtBlog '76

He is... Skeego-Monkey!

2008-05-22T19:39:00.001-07:00

I may have posted this pic before. I'm certainly not going to go back and check. I don't know where the inspiration came from, but here he is. I call him Skeego-Monkey, and I envisioned him as an enigmatic, slightly sinister presence in some weird vignette about a kid preparing for bed.

At some point, she gazes out her bedroom window and Skeego-Monkey is floating there under a tree.

The kid would shudder, feel a small thrill of fear. But mostly Skeego-Monkey would remain an enigmatic phenomenon. Jarring and alien against the mundane backdrop of a suburban nocturne. She'd sleep with the light on, with her head under the covers, the way I used to whenever my imagination became too much for me to face a dark room and the ability to see out the window at what might be hovering there in the night.

Gene Colan's Family Needs YOUR Help!

2008-05-21T16:16:00.001-07:00

I just read that Gene "The Dean" Colan is having severe health issues and his family is facing some major financial burdens. This is heartbreaking. I'm all about Gene Colan, have been ever since I was a teeny little kid and picked up How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, with Stan the Man's hyperbolic prose and John Buscema's hyperbolic pencils... plus lots of gorgeous Gene Colan/Tom Palmer panels by way of illustrating just how to make your comics more compelling, more dramatic, flat-out better.

Gene Colan's panels imprinted themselves on my young psyche. They're still there, flashing in my mind as I type these words. Go look at the book again. You have it, right? Of course you do! And go look at Tomb of Dracula, the Essentials version. That's within easy arm's reach, right? Sure it is!

Check them out. In How to Draw Comics, the unusual worm's eye view angles, the dark shadows, the sinister, gothic atmosphere make them stand out even among all the other samples from giants like Jack Kirby, Neal Adams and Buscema himself. Read in its proper sequential context, a Gene Colan panel makes you dream of mystery, horror and noir. The first time I read How to Draw Comics, I didn't know Gene Colan's name, but I recognized his art by sight each time the new comics came out until the day came when I realized I was...

A Gene Colan fan.

After that, I had to possess as many examples of his work as possible. Whenever a new comic graced with his pencils appeared, I thought, "Wow... Gene Colan! Gotta buy it NOW!" Buy on sight, no hesitations, no reservations. Daredevil. Batman. That ever-lovin' Tomb of Dracula, baby. That's my kind of poison. Even John Kricfalusi loves Gene Colan... the proof is on his blog!

You can read more about Gene's troubles on the Journalista! blog, which also gives a couple ways you- yes, you, the comic fan now reading these words- can give a little something back to Mr. Colan and his family in their time of need. Tom Spurgeon has more information at The Comics Reporter. Heidi MacDonald also chimes in at The Beat, and her report comes illustrated with some super-sweet Gene Colan Escapist artwork and a Dracula sequence where the Lord of the Undead's bats attack the Capitol Building you really have to see. Not content with just talking about it, Clifford Meth has organized a super-pro benefit. Check out the names involved. It's a WOWZA! list. Unless I'm mistaken (and I often am but I'm fairly certain I'm not this time out), I think he did something similar for Dave Cockrum. I like this guy a lot!

And Adrienne Colan's letter about her husband's health can be found here. I like this blog post especially because it includes this address, which I'm going to steal and post here in case someone reading this isn't much for clicking links:

Gene Colan
2 Sea Cliff Avenue
Sea Cliff, NY 11579
USA

... where you can send cards and letters and get well wishes. And following that, there are some lovely pro-Gene Colan comments.

All Mrs. Colan is asking for is patience from people who commissioned artwork from her husband (and she mentions some fabulous upcoming projects he was working on before illness struck), but I think we can all do better than that. Journalista! includes a simple way to donate via PayPal to help defray the Colans' mounting medicals costs and another way that's maybe somewhat less simple but no less effective and perhaps nets you some of Mr. Colan's artwork. I already sent something (too little, far too little, I'm afraid) and a note telling the Colans just how much I've appreciated having a life with Gene Colan's shadowy chiaroscuro-filled art in it.

Last, but certainly about as far from least as you can get, Mark Evanier has a personal tribute to Gene Colan. Evidently, Mr. Colan is not only a giant in terms of his art, but also one of the nice ones.

I know this blog doesn't have any juice in the comics world, but if you're passing by and happen to read this- if you love comics, especially the good comics, the ones with gorgeous art- at the very least send a positive thought or a prayer winging its way towards the Colans.

Jen Yu...

2007-11-24T22:10:00.001-08:00

A digital style I flirted with for a time. It started as a sketchbook page and I "inked" it laboriously, point-to-point in Adobe Illustrator. Then I colored it the same way. It's a competely vector drawing! During the coloring stage I also spent hours adjusting every little line to get a better likeness... looks like a paint-by-numbers kit gone horribly wrong! Wow... I will NEVER do this style again.

Zhang Ziyi is the most amazing person on earth.

Grab Ya a Slice of Cheesecake While You're Here!

2007-11-24T22:07:00.000-08:00

This is a sketchbook page featuring a J-Pop singer. I think that one little face in the area above her left shoulder is Hirosue Ryoko again. This drawing looks like the poor man's Steve Rude. The face is wonky and I'm not so sure about the body proportions, but I love the lightly-sketched image on the left. That one's so much more alive.

The Delightful Giant Ant Disaster!

2007-11-24T21:58:00.001-08:00

I did this as a t-shirt design for a band whose music I really liked and whose bassist I liked even more! Aww... I had a li'l crushy-crush. They specifically requested a giant ant destroying buildings, so I gave them this. I drew the ant based on a Drew Struzan poster, I think. My friend Frank is breaking the picture plane illegally. You see, he's in the middle-ground and so shouldn't be able to overlap the frame as if he were ahead of Jerry Lewis there in the lefthand corner, but I did that deliberately as a visual joke.

The girl bent over laughing at the hilarity of it all is Hirosue Ryoko, a Japanese actress/singer/model I also had a crush on at the time.

Despite not having the desired effect (of course the bassist didn't fall madly in love with me), there's a nice coda to this image. I sent it via email to Hate artist Peter Bagge and he sent me back a nice compliment. Which is probably more than I deserved, but it definitely made my day.

Peter Bagge is awesome.

Oh yeah, I later did another shirt for this band, this time featuring a charging rhino crushing their name. That one sold like hotcakes, so I'm told. Do hotcakes really sell that well? Are people so into hotcakes that we had to create a simile to convey the wonders of hotcake consumption? I wish I had an image of that shirt, though. It was great.

Note... I just realized this is the second time I've published this in this blog. Blast! Well, it's good enough to show again I suppose.

The Busy Composition/Ugly Coloring Cluster Bomb Atrocity Drawing!

2007-11-24T21:55:00.000-08:00

There it is, for all to see. It's a sort of Charles Burns/Mike Allred rip-off as well!

FRUiTS-Cute!

2007-10-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of FRUiTS girls. FRUiTS magazine is a goldmine of interesting styles and people to draw. These are secretly influenced by the amazing Katie Rice.

Secretly because her art is so vastly superior anything even remotely resembling something she would do is hidden underneath a layer of crapola.

I'm guessing I didn't win the Miho Hatori contest...

2007-01-12T06:45:00.000-08:00

Oh well. At least I entered. That's something. Here's some more art by me that has nothing to do with Miho Hatori:

I entered the Miho Hatori T-Shirt Contest at Brickfish!

2007-01-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

Here's my entry... in color and B&W:

I've seen the other entries, of course, and some of them are much better than mine. Still, I like it. My yardstick is, "Would I wear this on a tshirt," and I have to admit... yes, I would.

I sold yet another Kenny tee...

2006-12-12T06:32:00.000-08:00

Wow. That's like 3 in a week. Nice. This is the blog that got no love from anyone. So I'm celebrating its Oliver Twistness by posting this picture:

An ugly drawring of ugly high school kids from the 1980s.

And My Favorite...

2006-12-10T05:18:00.000-08:00

And once again, no she's not anyone you know. Pencil drawing, scanned, "inked" in Illustrator, then taken into Photoshop and digitally airbrushed. She's a sort of half-assed Bruce Timm rip-off with coloring badly copied from and inspired by some Spumco stuff.

Now that I've seen some of the Golden Book art, I might approach this drawing differently if I were to re-do it. But I'm not going to. I want to work on new things. I'm not destined for a job in the animation industry, it seems.

But I can still create my own comic book stories and illustrate them.

A Double Shot of Your Bat-Boy's Love...

2006-12-10T05:12:00.000-08:00

This was my initial drawing:

Then I scanned it and fooled around with it in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop until I got this:

More sales at CafePress!

2006-12-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

I've sold 11 shirts on CafePress this year. At this rate, I'll receive a commission check sometime in early 2008. The bulk of them have been this shirt:

I get $1.00 a pop. And actually, I've sold 2 shirts in one week. Which is my new all-time record! The other shirt that sold this week was a girly-girl shirt for the womanly lady type fashionista chick:

My Spock Characterization is Spot On!

2006-12-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

This was done as a sketch, scanned, opened in Adobe Illustrator then painstakingly "inked" to have a slick, cold finish. Impersonal. Sort of clip art-ish, the artist's hand seemingly removed. I was into that then.

It's an outgrowth of a non-digital inking style I was using in graphic design at UGA, especially on some stuff in my Concepts class. I was never happy with my shaky hands, though.

Colored in Photoshop. I was into flat colors as well.

An old fave of mine...

2006-12-08T09:32:00.000-08:00

This was a design for a band t-shirt. If you know me you know the band and you know why I offered to do this. If you don't know me personally, I won't tell you the band name but I will tell you their bassist was this really cool young woman I had a major crush on.

I would've settled for being mere friends but in the end she wasn't particularly interested in even that, and that's cool. Some people are going to be into you and some are not and you can't let it bother you when you don't click on any level.

But damn she was awesome.

I'm less embarrassed by my schoolboy crush on her than I am by the really bad coloring job I did on it after the fact. I wish I still had the original so I could rework it using some of Art Lozzi's color ideas and the stuff John K's been preaching about.

Copying to Learn...

2006-12-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

There are two amazing art lessons on John Kricfalusi's blog right now. John K is giving away a world class art education and all you have to do is read his blog and practice, practice, practice. I guarantee it's better than the one you might get at the University of Georgia... and I know that from experience.

The first is by Art Lozzi, a background painter for Hanna-Barbera back in the day. He has a beautiful style that made the H-B cartoons in their heyday warm and inviting to look at.

Also, his how-to commentary is a must for any artist, working in any visual medium. Well, maybe not photography, but maybe you ace photographers out there can find some applications for it somehow.

It's clear, concise and practical. Nothing ephemeral or mystical about it. Just smart plain-talk you can understand and put to use. It's stuff you can read and then immediately run and practice, hands on.

I may not be a painter, but I'll probably keep doing some color work and I know I'm gonna be stealin' from this modern day master.

Another one is by John K. himself, where an artist he's worked with copied a painting from a Flintstones Golden Book. She's already so good (I think her drawing rocks) and yet she's still pushing herself to get better. Which is how it should be, because once you become complacent in what you know you are finished, Jack. Finished!

As good as dead.

John gives her a critique that like Lozzi's explanations is specific and immediately useful... very reasoned. It's strong and based on valid, concrete principles.

Clarity. That's what I like about it. Clarity and specifics. John first gives her the good news, then tells her exactly what she did wrong. And she takes it like a pro. You just know her next effort is going to be lightyears ahead of the first one... like I wrote, she's that good!

"This is wrong, this is why, try this instead."

I wish more teachers were into that kind of thing. I had maybe two in my art school days. One was a former army helicopter pilot/Vietnam vet. Maybe being in an actual war eliminated a lot of the touchy-feely indirectness. He could detect bullshit in art. And I know because several times I turned in bullshit and he called me on it, telling everyone in class what I'd done and how. It wasn't telepathy; it was knowledge.

After that I loved his class. I felt I was finally really learning something. Almost everyone else hated it, including his teaching assistant. Art was only felt to them, not something with order or rules.

What people should understand is, this kind of criticism isn't saying you're bad at drawing. It's a learning tool to become better!

Another way to learn is by... guess what... copying. That's right, copying the work others have done as closely as possible. That was part of the point of John K's exercise with this young artist- she'd taken it upon herself to copy a certain piece of artwork exactly, to learn it and master its lessons.

I copied Alex Toth here... and botched it. But
I learned from it. My next effort will be all the
better for having tried.

The resistance to copying as a learning tool? This idea you can't learn anything by imitating what you see, that you must start by being original? That's mere foolishness.

For one thing, there's nothing you're going to do EVER that's completely original. Unless you are some kind of superhuman genius which more than likely you aren't. Sorry to be the one to break the news to you.

And I know I DEFINITELY am not.

For another, every art technique has a precedent that's identifiable. You have to learn them in order to use them properly and that requires copying in some way, shape or fashion. When you're learning shading, more than likely you're trying to shade in some way you saw in a picture you admired, no matter how much you tell yourself otherwise.

It's unavoidable. If you're an artist, you must've at some point seen art of some kind. It's in you. You don't come up with this stuff in a vacuum. There's a saying about not trying to reinvent the wheel, an old cliche. But it's a true one. You don't have to invent it if it's already there.

People forget that in all the "art is subjective" talk, the tools and methodology of art are objective. They exist in history as a body of knowledge to use and learn from. No one goes out to build a house without having first learned how to hammer nails and saw wood and take measurements. And they learn these things by copying what other builders have done. They learn this stuff as a science in a class filled with practicalities.

No one questions it. So should it be with art. Learn what works from people who do things that work. Use what works to then do your own thing. But first principles, baby.

Writing too. If you've read something and it inspired you to become a writer, chances are you're going to imitate it somehow. Rod Serling said all writers start off copying someone. He said he himself started off as a third-rate Hemingway imitator. "Everything I wrote began with 'It was hot,'" Serling said.

Copy in order to learn. It's not that you have to plagiarize or reject what you think are new ideas. It's just that first you must master the basics, the rules. Doctors, athletes, lawyers, cops, pilots, architects, acountants all do this. They learn it until it's internalized and then they do their own thing with it. And people bow to their expertise.

Only the most assinine self-satisfied of idiots would try to perform brain surgery without having gone to medical school and learned the science of it, the nuts and bolts of the profession and how the human body works. We'd slap his ass in jail if he tried it on us or our loved ones.

But every joker with a word processor or pencil in his or her hand thinks they're a genius, inventing new worlds. In effect performing that brain surgery without text, a pilot flying blind, a lawyer with a fool for a client.

They're making their jobs that much harder than they're fooling themselves. Use what the experts have created for you. Don't be afraid to stand on their shoulders.

Copy in order to learn. Put in the time and effort to learn and improve. You can do it. I know you and I'm pretty certain of this. Dammit!

But don't plagiarize. That's a different animal altogether.

I'd forgotten about these guys... meet the Yardmops!

2006-12-04T06:19:00.000-08:00

This drawing took maybe 5 minutes. Probably in ballpoint pen, but after 6 months in Japan, I can't remember. I can't even remember what I was thinking about when I drew it.

Ehhhhhhhhhh?!!?

"The Yardmops? Who the hell are the Yardmops?
Are they related to Orange Range or Asian Kung
Fu Generation?"

My Charles Burns ripoff piece...

2006-12-03T03:38:00.000-08:00

I did this a while back for a portfolio I put together, hoping to get a job in Hollywood! No responses, though.

It's a character from the novel Geek Love, which I recommend you read. The original drawing... well it doesn't exist. I freehanded the whole thing in Illustrator, painstakingly to create something cold and formalistic. Like Burns' work, which creeps me out in a good way.

I declare this to be a semi-success.

Yabbadabbadoo!

Welcome to my all-new all-art all-the-time-blog!

2006-12-01T20:50:00.000-08:00

Here's Rika to get you started:

It's an inking test... working on my drawing style for my big-ass comic book I'm working on. She's not a character from it, although she's a partial inspiration for one. Rika, the bassist from Melt-Banana is who she is. And she shreds the bass, baby. Shreds it!