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brianmichaelbendis: "To See Naples" by Moebius
// Hyperwave
"To See Naples" by Moebius
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Sunday, December 3, 2017
brianmichaelbendis: “To See Naples” by Moebius
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brianmichaelbendis: "To See Naples" by Moebius
// Hyperwave
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Alternativity, Bethelehem - Banksy
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Alternativity, Bethelehem - Banksy
// this isn't happiness.
Alternativity, Bethelehem - Banksy
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How Frank Miller’s Sin City Got the Deluxe Treatment
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How Frank Miller's Sin City Got the Deluxe Treatment
// Print Magazine
Frank Miller is most known as the bold, masterfully skilled and innovative artist on DC and Marvel titles such as Batman and Daredevil, honing his considerable skills within the tight restrictions of these corporate cash-cow characters. In the 1986 release of The Dark Knight Returns—the first and most revolutionary and accomplished of his famed trilogy—is a major milestone in the history of the medium. (My personal fave within Miller's oeuvre is the 1987 Electra Assassin, exquisitely and imaginatively drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, but that's another story.) And as he moved into 1991, Dark Horse granted him the independence to realize his graphically groundbreaking and perversely nasty neo-noir, Sin City.
Many Sin City enthusiasts already own the series in original pamphlet, trade paperback, and/or deluxe slipcased volumes formats. And now, they can indulge in the next best thing to owning the original art for the first—and most important—of these graphic novels with Frank Miller's Sin City: The Hard Goodbye Curator's Collection.
Curator's collection. Collectors' edition, artist's edition, studio edition. Whatever. You know what they are, those coffee table-sized hardcovers of original comics illustrations, scanned at super-high rez, scaled as close as possible to full size, and meticulously printed on premium paper to pick up pencil underlays, blue lines, white-outs, crop marks, marginal editorial notes, and every other nuanced detail. So forget about checking them out on your iPhone. Indeed, with their ample dimensions and heft, they're not even very lap-friendly. Personally, I'm most comfortably when I'm leisurely sprawled out on my living room floor, where I feel transported back to the glory days when cities had multiple daily newspapers with multi-page broadsheet four-color Sunday funnies.
Despite being expensive and physically expansive, collectors' editions have also been thriving and expanding over the past decade. Once considered the domain of Sunday Press Books and IDW, Now Dark Horse—the country's largest independent comics publisher—and a variety of others have entered the race for comics aficionados and their disposable income. Between this past September and early next year, we'll have seen 12" by 17" devoted to the cartoon art of Frank King, Walt Simonson, Bernie Wrightson, Ross Andru, P. Craig Russell, Gene Colan, Joe Kubert, Sam Keith, Simon Bisley, and um, maybe Jim Steranko. Maybe not. Still, Fantagraphics alone is putting out a 14.5 x 19.5 Charles Burns Black Hole edition, a 17 x 24 Hal Foster Prince Valiant, and a 12 x 15 Jaime "Love and Rockets" Hernandez retrospective. And then there's Hermes Press's 15 x 22 Ghita by Frank Thorne and a 12 x 16 Jim Davis Garfield. Wait, what, who?
So: okay, Frank Miller's artistic skills—to say nothing of the increasingly repugnant values represented in his stories—have been on the downslide for a while. But "The Hard Goodbye" is among the pinnacle points of his distinguished comics career. Indeed, the art and text of that story also contributed to the success of his 2005 Sin City film—co-directed with Robert Rodriguez—a landmark lesson in how comics visual narrative can translate to film. (And yes, the less said about Miller's dispiriting direction of the 2008 Spirit flick, the better.) But moving forward, we can now be extremely grateful for FM'sSC:THGCC.
Of course, we should also be appreciative of Kitchen Sink Books, helmed by pioneering underground comix publisher Denis Kitchen and book designer/editor John Lind, under Dark Horse's president/publisher Mike Richardson. As their first release in this format, it's got an intro by Rodriguez, an afterward by Richardson, and quotes from fellow comics artists such as Neal Adams, Geof Darrow, and Paul Pope. And "Scripting, Sweating, and Bleeding"—an eight-page illustrated interview in which Miller provides analysis and insight into his artistic processes—will be of particular interest.
As the book's designer/editor, Lind deserves special credit for sharing with us the meticulous care with which Miller executes his dynamic compositions and deep chiaroscuros. And in the following interview, he shares his intimate knowledge of collectors' editions, his collaboration with Frank Miller, and insights into the processes that his own Curator's Collections achieve their success. He also gives us a special preview of his newest, upcoming collection, for Will Eisner's A Contract With God.
Limited Edition cover
Without Further Ado, John Lind on Collectors' Editions Formatting and Editing
The basic format is essentially the original artwork scanned at high resolution and reproduced in four-color at 1:1 size. This result is books that don't fit on standard shelves but are amazing to behold. I've been a fan and collector of all the various "artist edition" books since editor Scott Dunbier pioneered the format at IDW with Dave Stevens's The Rocketeer back in 2010. Scott really did a tremendous service to comics—and to the history of this art form in general—by championing this type of book. Since then, some really terrific projects have come out from a number of different publishers. And this format really needs to be experienced to appreciate the value of the work that goes into its assembly. Bob Chapman, in particular, is doing these incredible vellum inserts in some of his Graphitti Designs editions.It's deceptively simple-looking, but getting vellum to work is an art in itself.
With the editorial direction of the Curator's Collection series, I made a conscious effort to include additional essays and commentary. for context. They round out the experience and help solidify these books as mini "time capsules" of how these landmark graphic novels were created. This is something that wasn't really being included in other publishers' versions of this format. Being on the creative side myself, probably the best part of my job—which gives me the opportunity to work with great illustrators—is getting to hold their work and learn about their process. So, the core addition of interviews with living creators—specifically about creative process, and shown alongside images—moves this format a little more into "art book" territory for me. In the case of a deceased creator, the aim is to augment the work with essays by select creators or historians who were uniquely influenced by this material.
Lind on Sin City's Design and Production Processes
There are a number of challenges in doing Kitchen Sink Books' Curator's Collections. For books of this size and scope, the first step is evaluating the quality and importance of the material being presented. For Frank Miller's original Sin City tale, "The Hard Goodbye," I had access to what I consider one of the most important comic books of the modern era, and our publication date coincided with the 25th anniversary of its original publication. Of all the Sin City "yarns," that book is well-deserving of this type of treatment. And Frank retained a good amount of the originals or gifted them to associates who were willing to lend.
Frank's experimentation with his art style and storytelling resulted in something that really inspired and shaped the path for future creators. Add to that the timing of a creator of Frank's standing. He was coming off a string of successful mainstream projects, and taking this book to Dark Horse at that time changed the landscape for independent comics of the 1990s. And it also helped fuel creator-owned projects in general. Although Dark Horse has reissued it in various forms, seeing it in this format is an entirely different type of experience.
On all the books with which I'm involved, I do as much of the overall production myself as possible. My office scanning setup has become pretty intense over the past few years. The scan quality I'm able to achieve and maintain is quite high, so I try very hard to consistently scan any originals that become available. As much as my interest in these books is all about the printed form, if you look at the digital version you'll clearly be able to see how much work goes into the reproduction.
Sometimes you get collectors who'll simply not lend the original art to be scanned, or they insist on scanning it themselves and can't get the quality level acceptable on their consumer-grade scanners. So an alternate approach is necessary. I've substituted high-quality line art, scanned from stats, for the few pages for which originals were not available.
The Sin City book had only about eight stat replacement pages out of 200 pages of original art, which remained under what I've set as a firm ratio of original art to reproductions on the Curator's Collection books. It becomes difficult to find projects for which all the art has remained intact decades after initial publication, so some art detective work—combined with luck and art collectors willing to share their treasures—is required.
Post-scanning, I'd describe the production part of the process as roughly 30 to 45 minutes or so of adjustments and corrections per piece to get some of the subtleties to come to the surface so they'll actually be noticeable in reproduction. I want as much of the white ink corrections, erased pencils, and blue lines to be as visible as possible without being overpowering.
When Frank and I first reviewed some of the scanned pages from Sin City, he pulled one aside and said, "You can see details in some of the scans where you can tell what the humidity was like when I was lettering because you can see the smudging from my hand." That type of reaction represents the level of detail I'm working hard to achieve with the production.
On the design side, I study the project's own aesthetic and try to augment—and not overwhelm—the content, while still creating something that feels new. The overall production value that Dark Horse has allowed for this series has been very high: a three-piece case with a printed cloth spine; additional UV on the front and back covers; and, in the case of Sin City, a 15″ x 21″ trim size. Our publisher, Mike Richardson, has been very understanding about the value of this series, and that's enabled the final projects to be presented with a certain aesthetic and feel worth the higher cost. And for that I'm grateful.
Lind on the Lasting Importance of Comics Collectors Editions
I hope people understand the value of these types of high-end projects, and I want to stress that this format should not be viewed as a fad or a type of gimmick—it's an incredibly valuable format for fans, art collectors, historians, and creators. For fans, this is as close to holding the original art as many will get. For historians and creators, all the secrets are there.
Granted, there probably is a saturation point in terms of merit and selections that should be deemed worthy of this format, but the format itself is very important for buyers—and the comics industry—to support. The high price point for these books is reflecting the costs going into production and printing. They're just expensive to produce, there's no way around it. That said, I think if you collect graphic novels or art books of this type, they are well worth it.
The Curator's Collection editions that I and my partners in the Kitchen Sink Books imprint—Denis Kitchen and Mike Richardson—collectively deem worthy of this treatment have been few and far between. I like to think of these editions as the Criterion Collection version of some of the most important graphic novels of our era.
Since I traditionally handle both the editorial and design on my projects, I'm good for about one or two of this type of books per year. They're intensive to assemble. And as I mentioned, there's a list of criteria that I want a potential project to meet before I'll seriously consider it for inclusion.
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Lind on the Future of Kitchen Sink Curator's Collections
There are two Curator's Collection editions currently planned for 2018.
The next project in this format that I'll be editing and designing is Will Eisner's A Contract with God Curator's Collection. We've been working on this for about ten months, tracking down and scanning original art and commissioning text pieces. The format for this will be a deluxe two-volume slipcased set. Volume One will be the entire book reproduced from Will's pencils, which are mostly very tight and have some variations from the final work. These pencils have remained largely unpublished. Volume Two will be reproduced from the original inks, and we've tracked down and scanned almost all of them. In addition to text from Dave Gibbons, Denis Kitchen, and me, several Eisner Award winners will be contributing short appreciations of this work.
I consider this to be one of the most important projects I've been involved in to this point, and I'm treating the overall production as such. The result will hopefully provide a direct insight into how one of the most well known early graphic novels was crafted from start to finish, with the goal of being viewed as an important resource for future historians and creators in the field. Again, there's no experience like being able to reference original art from masters of the form, and having Eisner's key work presented should prove significant.
Mark Schultz's Xenozoic Tales will also be assembled as a Curator's Collection. Randy Dahlk, who's designed most of the IDW Artist Editions, will be working on it as well.
I'm also evaluating a few more projects for inclusion past 2018. So we'll need to talk again!
Frank Miller
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The post How Frank Miller's Sin City Got the Deluxe Treatment appeared first on Print Magazine.
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How to THINK when you draw FEMALE HAIR tutorial taster
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How to THINK when you draw FEMALE HAIR tutorial taster
// The Etherington Brothers
This week's tutorial for The Phoenix is How to THINK when you draw FEMALE HAIR, here's a taster!
PLUS!!! GO HERE to get 4 weeks of tutorials, plus 140 pages of incredible COMIC for £1!
Lorenzo!
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Your soft skills inventory
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Your soft skills inventory
// Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect
The annual review is a waste. It's not particularly useful for employee or boss, it's stressful and it doesn't happen often enough to make much of an impact.
If you choose to, though, you can do your own review. Weekly or monthly, you can sit down with yourself (or, more powerfully, with a small circle of peers) and review how you're shifting your posture to make more of an impact.
Some of the things to ask:
What am I better at?
Have I asked a difficult question lately?
Do people trust me more than they did?
Am I hiding more (or less) than I did the last time I checked?
Is my list of insightful, useful and frightening stats about my work, my budgets and my challenges complete? And have I shared it with someone I trust?
If selling ideas is a skill, am I more skilled at it than I was?
Who have I developed?
Have I had any significant failures (learning opportunities) lately, and what have I learned?
What predictions have I made that have come to pass? Am I better at seeing what's going to happen next?
Who have I helped? Especially when there was no upside for me...
Am I more likely to be leading or following?
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How did you prepare for your career?
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How did you prepare for your career?
// Gurney Journey
A writer asked me a few questions about becoming an artist.
I had a general liberal arts education before I went to art school. I graduated first from UC Berkeley with an anthropology major. This turned out to be ideal preparation for doing archaeological illustration for National Geographic, though I didn't anticipate that when I was choosing a major. I was just taking classes that interested me.
I went to art school after my liberal arts education, but I left after two semesters, for three reasons. 1) It was expensive and I didn't want to be in debt. 2) The school I was attending wasn't teaching the information I was hungry to learn. 3) I started finding paying work in the movies and publishing that was much more challenging and interesting than what my friends were doing in art school.
As a result, I'm almost entirely self-taught in art. I signed up for a membership to the zoo and sketched live animals twice a week. I drew skeletons at the natural history museum. I developed my own curriculum of self-teaching based on the Famous Artists Course from the 1950s, How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way, Andrew Loomis's book Creative Illustration, and the teaching methods from the 19th century French academy, which involved fairly detailed anatomy and cast drawing. All this self-teaching from books was combined with daily outdoor painting which became such a passion that I ended up coauthoring a book on the subject for Watson-Guptill called The Artist's Guide to Sketchingin 1982.
2) What are the most important skills to practice and/or master in your artistic genre?
I think traditional drawing and painting skills will always be valuable—things like anatomy, perspective, caricature, and multi-figure composition. Those skills transcend styles and fads and they're surprisingly rare these days.
My main influences were from before my time. Norman Rockwell was my childhood hero. As a high school student, I learned how to do hand-lettered calligraphy, and made my first income from designing wedding invitations. I got a job doing engraved line illustrations for ring ads in the newspaper. It wasn't paying the bills. My big break was getting a job painting backgrounds for an animated film called Fire and Ice, co-produced by Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta, and released in 1983. It was a marathon of painting, because I had to paint about 600 paintings in a year and a half. Whenever I have needed new skills for my career, I just teach them to myself.
1. If you put together a portfolio, show only your best work——eight pieces at the least and sixteen pieces at the most. Start and finish with your best pieces.
2. Don't rely solely on electronic media to make contact with people in the business. Try to meet the art buyer. Go to conventions. Take workshops. And don't overlook mailing traditional paper letters and printed leave-behinds. Since so few people do it these days, you might get your work up on someone's bulletin board.
3. Always express a can-do attitude. On your first job, do twice as good a job as anyone would expect, and deliver it early. Make every published work your very best, regardless of the deadline or the budget. Then be sure to deliver more than you promise.
4. Some parts of the arts industry are more competitive than others. Fewer people think of scientific illustration or toy design, for example, compared to movie concept art. And within the field of concept art, many more people try to break into character design than environment design. I don't think young artists should worry about standing out or developing a unique style. I think it's more important to be able to draw nature faithfully and express visual ideas clearly without calling attention to style. Too often art schools push young artists to develop a distinctive style before they've even begun to master the basics.
5. Finally, to make a living by your art nowadays, you don't necessarily have to worry about winning the approval of the traditional gatekeepers (such as art directors, galleries, and movie studios) anymore. Thanks to Kickstarter, Gumroad, Patreon, YouTube and other crowd-based publicity and monetization strategies, you can assemble your own crowd and they can support you directly as you make your art. Start your own studio! Publish your own stuff! You can make art in the intersection of what you love to create and what people want to buy. That's why this is potentially the best time to be a young artist to enter the art world. But it takes persistence, grit, determination, flexibility, patience, and an understanding "significant-other".
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For tips on developing your social media strategies, check out the post: 72 Tips for Sharing Art on Social Media
For the best books to use for self teaching, check out: Best How-To Art Books and Art Students Survival Guide
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Mesmerizing Ad-Infinitum Drawings
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Mesmerizing Ad-Infinitum Drawings
// Fubiz
Benjamin Sack is obsessed by infinity, and his drawings of architecture are amazing intricate mazes and fractal spirals, in never-ending metropolis. The fitness and the complexity of his creations are outstanding and mesmerizingly full of details.
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Thursday, November 30, 2017
A wonderful read from Brain Pickings
Big Magic: Elizabeth Gilbert on Creative Courage and the Art of Living in a State of Uninterrupted Marvel
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/23/big-magic-elizabeth-gilbert/
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https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/23/big-magic-elizabeth-gilbert/
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Wednesday, November 29, 2017
A Study In Edges
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A Study In Edges
// Artist Daily
Where Lines and Strokes Matter
Maybe you'll know the feeling I'm describing. The feeling when you are painting and you keep thinking, "What am I doing?" followed by the internal response to "keep going." Again and again it happens until that moment when you see your lines and strokes and colors turn into something? Then it turns into magic. Edges are like that too.
I hardly pay attention to edges as I create them. I see the lines and strokes I put down, but not the edges they result in. Not until they become part of what I'm painting and then, edges become a big part of the magic.
Daniel Gerhartz is a prize-winning artist and workshop instructor, and he has brought us some great info on squinting, and today he's coming to us with a lesson on the magic edges. Enjoy!
It Can Be About Edges
Often as I survey a model's appearance, I look for the one key visual aspect that initially catches my eye and make it the focus of my study. This can be an elusive, fleeting quality of light that lasts only moments or a lyrical rhythm of line.
In essence, all these characteristics are variations of line, harmony, tone, color, or edge. In Mr. Johnson, my focus was a study in edges as I strove to convey the power of the form and drama of the subject.
Find the Relationship
The key to painting edges accurately is to truthfully observe how they look in proper relation to each other and then paint that relationship. Before I set my brush to the canvas, I find it very important to take an assessment of the subject in terms of the extremes in value, color, and edges, and organize my thinking around these from the outset.
In this case, as edges were my focus, I squinted down at Mr. Johnson, and made a mental note of the hardest visible edges. These are circled in red.
Squint to See Hard and Soft
Why do I squint? If I don't, everything appears to have a sameness of edge. By gently closing my eyes about half way, the forms are simplified and the variety between hard and soft edges becomes more visibly evident.
You will notice in the circled areas that the edge quality is razor sharp in some spots. This is how they looked when I was squinting down! It is so important to paint these areas just as they appear: razor sharp!
See the difference between the sharp edge circled between his eyes and the edges of his brow line as the eye sockets rounded up into the forehead or the hard edge of the hat visor compared to the softer edges on the cast shadow on the forehead from the hat.
Neck Meet Chin
Another area of great edge contrast is on the area of the neck beneath the chin. Notice the extremely sharp edge between the neck and shirt compared to the softer edges of the cast shadow of the chin on the neck.
Also, an area that I often see painted too hard by students is the edge quality of the transition between the top plane and the bottom plane of the nose. Observe the very soft quality of this turning form.
Broad Brush
Early in my development, I admired many of the "broad brush" painters whose works I studied. I was seduced by the bold sweeping strokes they made as they rendered a head or figure.
But those "beauty strokes," as my friend Scott Christensen so aptly calls them, should not destroy the form or take away from the sensitivity with which you paint the subject. What I failed to notice was the painstaking attention to the accurate rendering of the form that was always beneath the bold surface quality of these artists.
Look for Sharpest
So the next time you have a subject before you, carefully assess the subject, squint down and let the sharpest edges emerge. When beginning a work, establish the sharpest edges as early as you can in the painting so that you can use them to compare against. This is critical!
As you progress, hold onto the sharpest edges as reference points and notice the how all of the other edge transitions relate to them in descending order. It is this great contrast that will give your work new dimension!
For more of an edge education, sign up for Paint Along: Landscape Painting, All About Edges. You'll find out how to capture a vast and lovely landscape on a two-dimensional surface with the correct manipulation of edges — and in this online workshop, master professional landscape artist, Johannes Vloothuis, will give you the keys to achieve this, and will reveal many other valuable landscape painting tips along the way. Enjoy!
The post A Study In Edges appeared first on ArtistDaily.
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