The Week – 09 March 2018

Mar09
by on 9 March 2018

LONG JOHN UPDATE

With Chapter 3 “Making Smoke” all drawn, the last month has been nothing but coloring and lettering the book, which is less frustrating than drawing and more rote busy work. It’s also at this stage where I find I really start doubting my artistic ability. Since much of this part of the process is spent zoomed close on the art, I can see where my technical acumen come up short. It’s when I’m up close where I can see my lack of patience––as well as my laziness––shine through with inking mistakes, anatomy shorthand, and flaws due to exhaustion or boredom (at the time). However, it’s likely mostly a consequence of realizing I’m closer to having a book that I will put out there in stores and on this site that people can actually see and respond to. The inherent self-doubt gets loudest at this point, which is a voice that I always have to deal with, whether here or at my day job, or running errands, or going to a party, or whatever. What helps is the memory of having done good work before and knowing I can do it again. A piece of advice I throw out to my classes now and then is something I honestly live by:

If you do your best, you can’t be accused of doing anything less.

The implied caveat being that you’re doing the best you can do at the time, but it’s still your best which will likely only get better with time. So, when these thoughts surface that try to hold me down, I tell myself that this book is just the next step for the better thing I’ll do next. Through that lens, the artwork suddenly starts to look better and I get excited again to tell this story.

With that in mind, here is the first page of Chapter 3 (any future sneak peeks will be excerpts like before):

DRAWING

Like the rest of the world, Nicole and I saw Black Panther and thoroughly enjoyed it. This last week, I was listening to a conversation about the movie and was inspired to try my hand at drawing in a more traditional superhero style. It’s quick and messy, but it was fun. I have been thinking lately what a “superhero style” drawing of mine would look like if I sat down and actually worked it out with rendering and what not. Since I drew this quickly (I felt guilty because I should have been coloring Long John instead of doing this), it isn’t my full effort, but I was surprised by how this turned out.

Ink drawing of Black Panther

Some light color treatment on the Black Panther drawing.

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The Week – 09 February 2018

Feb09
by on 9 February 2018

This week has literally been nose-to-the-grindstone to get Chapter 3 drawn, so I haven’t really had my attention taken up by other things. So, I’ll just drop another chapter 3 preview and get back to the table this week.

LONG JOHN UPDATE

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Josh Tobey inked a few pages’ worth of Chapter 3. Although I didn’t stand over him as he inked, having the final pages in front of me proved to be a very educational experience. For a comic that requires a lot of images of nature, I really had no real artistic ethos with which I approached that kind of subject matter. I just approximated to the best of my ability something that could pass as that thing. Case in point, the tufa towers in the first chapter look nothing like actual tufa towers, but you can tell in the comic that they are not smooth stone. The tree trunks in chapter two evolved because I wanted it to look more like a redwood than not, but it’s still not accurate. I don’t have a codified artistic language from which I can pull and draw natural landscapes with any sort of verisimilitude. I can do passable work that most people will think is just fine, but since this comic is so based in a specific place, I silently lamented my ability to actually capture what the Mono Basin actually looks like.

I still can’t do it.

I am, however, getting better. In the few panels he inked that were nothing but shots of nature, he crafted a scene that looked, holistically, like a mountainside forest. It all looked of a piece. I still haven’t gathered that ability fully, but, in seeing the brush strokes, I can see how these things are built, now. At the very least, I ink better trees as evidenced in this week’s preview. If I had more patience I would practice this side of drawing, but if it’s not for the story or if it doesn’t have people in it, my brain just shuts down and I cease to care. It’s a weakness, for sure, but knowing that it is a weakness I can better prepare for it and slowly––oh so slowly––get better with every attempt.

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The Week – 02 February 2018

Feb02
by on 2 February 2018

Production on “Making Smoke” charges to a close, allowing for little time for other pursuits, but what other pursuits that are pursued are chronicled here as the first month of 2018 came to a close.

WATCHING

Source: Netflix

  • Godless by Scott Frank via Netflix

Westerns occupy an interesting space in popular culture right now. When viewed from one angle, it is an all-but-dead genre that people quickly dismiss or yawn at. From another angle, it is a genre met with intense scrutiny because it desperately needs rejuvenation and, seemingly, every new entry needs to do something different, unique, and contextually progressive for the sake of survival. Godless arrived with the latter expectation as many early reviews and coverage talked about its more feminist approach with regards to its focus on the town of La Belle––a town populated completely by women after all the men were lost in a mining accident. Piqued by this, and because I’m interested in westerns that do different things or, at the very least, ones that have unique premises, I dove into Godless with curiosity.

Created, written, and directed by Scott Frank––a screenwriter familiar to most people for having written scripts for popular movies such as Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and more grounded superhero fare like The Wolverine and Logan––Godless comes across as a passion project with few restrictions placed upon the creator who came to the project with a lot of clout. It is a multi-faceted story, to say the least, with a lot of quite interesting threads and characters peppered throughout, not the least of which being the previously mentioned town of La Belle. And, I will admit, it’s in La Belle where the show is most interesting because––message and whatnot aside––it is here where the story is most unique and where the writer-side of Scott Frank really shines. We get nuanced characters that we don’t really see in a western reacting to a setting and time frame that we’ve seen so many other types of characters react to. However, instead of focusing on the town, the town is a mere part of the story––almost a side story––along with much more traditional––and personally rather boring––storylines. In fact, it seems like the show wants to play it safe and couches the new and interesting stuff behind a cartoonish bad guy (played by great actor but horribly miscast Jeff Daniels) and a by-the-numbers anti-hero hero (played by somebody) that it nearly buries what could make this show a true classic to stand among the rest, along with entries like High Noon, True Grit, The Searchers, and Unforgiven. As with any genre, it’s the attempts at breaking molds that make the genre rise to the top of public attention, and Godless has a lot going in that arena; it just feels like it didn’t trust its own possibility to the point of overcorrecting and becoming simply another western in the process.

Despite that, it’s overall a very well-made show, but there is a pervasive ache as it seems to know how good it could have been in the face of how good it already is.

LONG JOHN UPDATE

As mentioned at the top, the drawing of the book is nearly done (as of this writing, only two pages are left to draw). This week, I hit an art snag. It wasn’t a snag snag like I had with the two-page spread. It was a case of having inked a page and, only then, accepting that one of the panels was not a good drawing. While I’ll talk more about that at a later date, it brings to mind a situation where I had actually avoided such a problem earlier in the chapter, when I couldn’t really figure out how to approach a panel. I’ve learned that when that happens, my first instinct is to lean into clarity and forsake all else. However, before I started inking, I couldn’t accept the bare-bones approach I had laid out. It was the start to an important scene and it needed to be more than clear. It needed to be dramatic as well.

A trick I have slowly learned over the course of this chapter can be summarized in an axiom: “When in doubt, add depth.” I’m not the most daring nor creative artist out there. I tend to over simplify and focus on character rather than the scene as a whole. Part of the reason this chapter has taken so long is that I’ve tried to retrain my sensibilities; to step back and say, “What can I do to make this look better?” Often, I found that if I added in background or, more often, foreground, the entire scene explodes into life. So, when “Making Smoke” arrives, keep an eye out for that lean into depth that I so desperately struggled to incorporate, against all of my innate and hackneyed tendencies.

Until next week, that was The Week.

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