How I Build Word Balloons in Adobe Illustrator

by on March 19, 2020 at 9:55 am
Posted In: Blog

I’m not going to be long-winded here. I’ve seen vids of folks making libraries of word balloons in Illustrator. I don’t do it that way. I build the balloons for each specific panel. I’m a weirdo like that.  Here’s a YouTube vid of me doing that.  Click on the expand icon to see it fullscreen.  Maybe I should add voiceover. I could. Maybe later. The thing to take note of

  1. Make an ellipse.
  2. Make a polygon with 3 sides.
  3. Position the pointer after you resize it to your liking.
  4. Using Shift-Click, choose both the ellipse and the triangular element, the pointer, and using Transform, join them. Lock that layer.
  5. Create a layer for text.
  6. Choose the font and font size you want. I use 34 pts and center the text in the word balloon.
  7. Adjust it to fit, both the text and the size of the balloon.
  8. There ya go.

 

└ Tags: , ,
 Comment 

Artie Romero and Me

by on March 12, 2020 at 4:15 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

When I was a pup, a guy named Artie Romero and I worked out the barebones of how to do comics. We were both wet behind the ears and still struggling with how this gets done. Artie was the publisher of Realm, a science-fiction and comics fanzine that published some good stuff, among them being interviews with Richard Corben and Jan Strnad, Bernie Wrightson, even Ray Bradbury. Heady stuff.  We were both in college, trying to become commercial artists. Artie became one, and I never did. After we both took a hiatus from higher education, we crossed paths quite a few times in the next decade, both in Missouri and Colorado. Along the way, we did comics and grew our hair long. Artie settled down in Colorado, and I’d visit occasionally. I finally went back to college.

 

Kirk Kennedy's Juggler

Kirk Kennedy’s Juggler

While I was learning printmaking, breathing in nitric acid fumes and engraving on copper, Artie published Cascade Comics Monthly. It featured a host of underground and New Wave comics artists, like Art Spiegelman before MAUS fame, Dan O’Neill, Skip Williamson, Rick Berry, Bob Vojtko, Jay Lynch, and the list goes on and on. Artie saw some cool stuff while churning out this little magazine in his apartment on Cascade Avenue in Colorado Springs. Artie was always an entrepreneur. Still is, and as the founder and president of ARG Cartoon Animation, he’s done tons of work in animation, a field he entered in the 1980s, and started doing full time in the early days of the WWWeb. We were both early adopters.  Back then, it was GIFS and Flash. Artie turned it into a corporation. I taught it to high school students in conjunction with Apple for awhile.

click for free GIFs from ARG!This is a link to Artie’s site, ARG!

Artie set up a unique thing, almost an academy of interns of animation, where fledging animators worked on his commercial projects. They sign contracts. Get paid. Have a reel of animation under their belt before they hit the big time. Many of them go onto major projects. ARG has worked on SpongeBob Squarepants. All of them owe Artie a lot for priming the pump. If you’re a young animator, click the link and get a real job.

 

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
 Comment 

How I Color

by on March 5, 2020 at 10:30 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

 

Today I’m going to go over how I color comics in n Photoshop. I put a slideshow of the stages I go through in the header. It’ll loop if you miss a slide.

I don’t use flats. I approach coloring digitally, like I paint. When I paint, the first thing I seek to do is get rid of the white of the canvas. Classically, painters tone the canvas with an earth color, or in the Venetian tradition, sometimes a warm or cool color. Then everything is built from that middle tone. All the major problems of a painting are solved as drawing. You can see this in the Adoration of the Magi by Leonardo da Vinci, and in Rembrandt’s unfinished Christ Before Pilate. Both are monochromatic, and I take my cue from studying these images. I place a warm middle tone over the entire page, after masking out the panel borders. I don’t use anything fancy for the masks, just a layer above the color panel and then I lay in white where I want the panel borders. Then I lock the layer.

Rembrandt_Christ_before_Pilate_Ecce_Homo_1634_National_Gallery_London.jpg

Rembrandt’s unfinished Christ Before Pilate.

Then I roughly place the desired colors where I want them. In the case of the falling flowers and pile of flowers, I remember my old painting professor told me to vary the temperature of red when used in a painting. Red is a tricky color, since it can’t be ignored, visually. I use a warm red and then a cool red, which is simply reds that tend toward magenta and veer toward orange. It has everything to do with how much yellow is in it. Pure unmitigated red has no yellow in it, but that is not perceptual red. Perceptual red is stop sign, bleeding red. Kansas City Chiefs red (GO CHIEFS!).

I’m an old school comics color kind of guy. I don’t like color that overcomes the drawing, so I try, I try, to keep the coloring a balance between the kind of color seen in Alex Toth’s ZORRO from the 1950s, and using dodging and burning, and a shadow layer above the color to give the comics some sense of volume. My pages where Grandpa Blue is out in the woods, with sun dappling through the tree canopy, uses a lot of the cool things you can do with digital layering.

After I lay in the general color scheme, I zoom in on each panel and play around with edges. I LIKE the squirrely coloring of Silver Age comics, with misregistering and goofy mistakes printers make. I also am thinking of the way Matisse and Raoul Dufy colored their paintings. My years as a painter keep coming back into my experience of doing this comics series. Sitting in front of The Piano Player at the MOMA has its effect.

Detail from page 26 of Blueboy Brown.

I learned much of the digital stuff from studying the work of Rick Berry, old friend of nearly fifty years. He began the digital illustration age in the early 80s with his cover of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. He tells me the computer he used to make the cover was the size of a fifteen-foot Uhaul trailer. This is before the Mac and desktop publishing. Did it at MIT. Who else had the hardware?

I’m glad I don’t have to go through all that. I do all the drawing that is the meat and potatoes on bristol board with a Bic mechanical pencil. Thank you Alex Toth. I owe a lot to him, including learning to read from his ZORRO in 1957. He is truly grand. My main influences in drawing are every master artist I’ve seen whose work could inform mine, but especially Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso (classical period and Vollard Suite), and Matisse’s simplicity. In comics, probably Alex Toth and Curt Swan. For both artists, IMHO, I believe their best work was in the late 50s and early 60s. I’m nuts about Toth and Swan when he was inked by Stan Kaye and Ray Burnley.

 

Curt Swan/Stan Kaye Superman daily.

Okay, so now I’m playing around with edges. I have a detail here that explains that. I don’t want perfect edges, like current digital coloring, which is great, but in my comics, I’m evoking a time over a century ago, and so I want a retro feel to it. I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and my favorite comics are from that era, Curt Swan’s Supes, Carmine Infantino’s The Flash, Gil Kane’s The Green Lantern, Ditko’s Spiderman, Kirby’s awesome run at Marvel, Dick Ayers’ western comics (big fan of Ayers). And Alex Toth, whatever he was doing was great. Didn’t matter if it was Zorro or Sea Hunt, or The Real McCoys. Toth’s the Man.

Alex Toth's Zorro.

Alex Toth’s Zorro.

So I’m also looking at the entire page. Is it balanced? Does it flow from one page to another, without the reader getting stuck, wondering what’s going on? Is the fictive dream maintained? That’s the task of both writer and artist, which is why I write my own stuff. It took a long time to get to the point where I felt like I was able to return to comics, after the dreadful 1970s. Bad time to be a rebellious crud like me, unable or unwilling to work for anyone. I didn’t get any inkling anyone thought I had promise until that Dale Luciano piece in The Comics Journal. “Major talent’? Huh? Me? I ignored it for forty years.

Back to the technical aspects of coloring. In Photoshop, there is a brush that is a pastel, which has uneven edges. I use that most of the time. Then I blend things with the same brush, but use the smudge tool. If you tap it, instead of dragging it around, it disperses the area like you’d hit watercolor with water. So it can look like a pastel drawing or a watercolor painting. I’ll do a little vid of me doing it.

Edges are maybe the most important thing you do, because done correctly, it causes the form to either stand out, or turn, fold around, which is what half of drawing in two dimensions is about. The edges should agree with the underlying drawing.
When it’s all finished, I do the lettering in Illustrator. That’s for another post.

Comments are welcome.

 Comment 

How I Do Comics

by on February 6, 2020 at 4:10 am
Posted In: Blog

Here’s how I begin a comic. I have a little leather-bound sketchbook I carry with me everywhere. I picked it up in Barnes and Noble. I do my first draft of the story layouts and dialogue there. I’ve never consulted with anyone about how to do this, but what I try to do in these pages is plan for the development of a story arc so that it ends on the left hand page and a new episode or chapter begins on the right hand page. I want certain punctuations in the story to come when you turn the page, so you get the double page spread of the Battle of Gettysburg when you turn page seven to page eight (goes against the rule, but it’s a double page spread. Can’t do it otherwise, and it hopefully works). Most new chapters begin on the odd-numbered page.

Sometimes I abandon the idea of drawing and just want to work on the pacing, so I do the script the normal way scripts are done by comic book writers, as descriptions of a shot and dialogue. If it works by the time I get to the sketchbook drawings, fine, but I do a lot of rewriting. I do a lot of redrawing too. The first four pages were completely redrawn and rewritten. Much of the material after pages 8-9 spread are that too. I do this continuously throughout the production of the book. I redrew and rewrote almost everything before page 31. New insights about the story hit me and demanded it.

When I wrote the novel the story is based on over ten years ago, it was all in first person. But one panel, where I wanted to show something important that the narrator could not have known, made me go back and rewrite the entire book. Fortunately, this happened before I got to the final drawings that were scanned and colored. It also allowed me the opportunity to structure the story better so there is a singsong between drama and comedy. I teach some of this in college classes. If you’re writing Dracula, this maybe isn’t the way to do it, but I’m not Bram Stoker.

When I get to the final drawings that I’ll scan, I do everything with a Bic .007 mechanical pencil on Dick Blick vellum bristol board. If my sketchbook roughs are good enough, I scan them and enlarge them to the size of the bristol board, 10x15in., and trace them, using carbon paper I get at Staples. I started using the carbon paper to trace drawings onto copper etching plates covered with Lascaux grounds, and was surprised when it worked fine on bristol.

Then I do a contour drawing of the tracing and after that I develop it in whatever way I fancy it needs. If the episode is stark, it suggests baroque shading and chiaroscuro coloring. Or I might happen upon that way just by chance. I don’t plan the coloring too much. I’ve been making art for sixty years and I prefer to let my experience tell me what to do. Some of the drawing is somewhat cartoony, if the subject is light, and other parts are more realistic, when the story calls for it. This is, in a way, the product of the modern era in art. Anyone who says something has to be done in a certain manner, well, we’ll see.  All the scans are imported into and developed in Photoshop. After that is completed, I save it as a tiff file and import it into Illustrator to add word balloons. Unless they are done in a vector program, the balloon edges become jaggy stairstep lines that look horrid.

I also color in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black), and make sure to avoid, as much as I can, using black in the coloring. It dulls colors and since I plan to produce these books in print, that’s the plan. I bought a book on the subject just make sure I did it correctly.

In a way, I write vignettes, little episodes that tell what this family is about, which gets you ready for the The Story. The Story is one I have been thinking about for nearly fifty years, since I was a teenager, laying in the grass in my parent’s backyard at night, staring at the stars. Ideas would float through my head, and they bear a striking similarity to the things I have learned in my long education. I believe we are all interested in why the world is so messed up, and what our response to it should be. It’s not an easy knot to unravel.

In the nine books I have planned, my aim is to do just that. Only time and history will say if I am correct.

 

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
 Comment 

Good Old Alex Toth

by on January 28, 2020 at 10:25 am
Posted In: Blog

I’ve been thinking about the difference between the theatrical and the cinema as it applies to comics. We predate each form, if you consider the music box of the Sumerians to be the first sequential art, very much like comics. Visual storytelling is the first form of storytelling that survives, in its nascent form on cave walls, beseeching the herd to let the hunters kill them. You know, be nice; that’s what you’re there for, right?

But specific forms have developed for theater that are specific to it. Early cinema borrowed from this, since much of it was adapted from the theater. At the same time, Herriman was doing Krazy Kat, doing better than the surrealists did later. He changed backdrops to the action in ways theater would do, if it had the means.  It found the means in cinema, as it were, with the introduction of the moving camera, evidenced maybe best in Citizen Kane’s opening shot in which the camera moves over rooftops and enters through a skylight, dissolving a windowpane like it was a transparent membrane. Pretty cool.

January 6, 1918

January 6, 1918 Krazy Kat

How does this affect comics? Comics started to take on some of cinema’s language, probably with Eisner’s The Spirit, but it became sort of vanguard with Steranko’s run in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. That’s fifty plus years ago, and now everyone does it. This makes for beautiful, sometimes confusing pages. I think of the phrase by my favorite comics artist, Alex Toth: “Simplify!” By this he meant “Make it readable instantly.”

Why do that?

For the story.

It is the story that drives the comic. All the great art you can shove onto the page falls flat without a great story. And a great story falls flat if is told in such a way that the reader falls out of the fictive dream. John Gardner explains that a good story brings the reader into a dreamlike state, where they don’t ask questions that don’t naturally flow from the story itself. They don’t ask why the character’s motives conflict with its actions, for they fuse together. Gardner tells of editing a book of short stories, going over every sentence, every word, for a good six weeks, making sure each word and phrase and setting matched his intentions. This kind of wordcraft is at the heart of Toth’s call to simplify. I guess I’m in his camp. I studied how Matisse did this, erasing and erasing that which did not match what he was trying to do. He did it in both drawing and painting. His gouache cut-outs of the 40s and early 50s are a product of that search that began in the early part of the last century.

Henri_Matisse_working_on_paper_cut_out

Henri Matisse, working on a paper cut out.

Picasso did the same thing in his classical period, using Ingres as his model. Rembrandt can be seen doing this in his many states he did of some of his greatest etchings.

Alex Toth's ZORRO

Alex Toth’s ZORRO

It’s a long and storied tradition I try to tap into, blended with theater, cinema, and the old Zorro comics I used to learn to read when I was four. Good old Alex Toth. How I love him.

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
 Comment