Monday, November 01, 2010

All thumbs

I never seem to scan any of my art and when I do I'm not even sure I pick the right stuff. But here's what I'm working on lately...







This is some rough art for a new comic I'm working on. I've been doing pencils on some layout paper from where I work. It's a small print shop which still does some paste-up (actually, to my embarrassment/horror they still do a lot of it)! They have these awesome 11x17 pages with blue line boxes for every inch and pica. I draw on the back and can just see hints of the blue lines through the paper so I can better eyeball my straight lines and try to eliminate using a straight edge. One of the pages has the main lines already inked.

On this project my goal is to just let my art be ugly and gritty- it fits the ugly nature of the story which really tries to get at the core of the decay of morality in our society (and I don't mean that in the conservative God and gays sense but in the liberals- look how the rich are fucking us all- sense). Our model is Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." One of my problems as an artist is that I try to polish the turd and draw too "clean." I get tight and attempt to draw too much like Charles Burns or Dan Clowes instead of Paul Pope or Eddie Campbell- guys who embrace their stray marks and construction lines. I need to try to draw like Gilbert Hernandez instead of Jaime Hernandez.

2 comments:

  1. I like that you want your art to ugly and gritty--it's what i go for too. many of my characters are average-looking and even unattractive, done that way deliberately counteract all the comics loaded with overly beautiful people. I want to see more of your stuff.

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  2. Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I like the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness to make each have more impact than it would on its own. This story is pretty raw so I'm trying to push the grotesque aspects even more than usual.

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Sorry but due to recent spamming I'm going to have to turn on word verification. Half the time I can't tell what those damn letters are supposed to be!