Friday (without theme song)

Summer usually means vacation, but I seem to be more busy than usual this month of July. So busy that I couldn’t finish composing the theme song I intended for today’s post. It would have been great! Trust me! I don’t even have time to write a post that is more than a few tweets long. All I can do I pull another rejected New Yorker cartoon from my hundreds of rejected cartoons and post it here in place of a meaningfully written post. Maybe my life will have meaning next week.  bell bottom club

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Eventful Vet Visit and A Few Pirates Thrown In To Lighten The Mood

Thursday I took Stella, my dog, to the Vet for routine vaccinations and blood work. She lost half a pound and seems in good health for those who care! Everyone else seemed to be having a bad day though.

As I sat down in the waiting room while my dog was in the back getting blood draw, I was instantly hit by a fairly powerful smell. Looking down I saw the cause right between my feet. “Excuse me.” I said to the receptionist. “Someone left a poop here on the floor.” I said indicating that it wasn’t me who did it.

She was very sorry and came out to clean it up as a woman with a small dog arrived wearing torn pants and in obvious pain. On the way to the vet, she had fallen on the sidewalk and cut her knee as well as hurting her arm.

“I’m just happy I didn’t fall on my dog” She said before asking for band aids. The vet tech came out with bandages and alcohol wipes for her wounds. She often dropped these items and I had to help her here and there as her one hand hurt. She blessed me.

Then another woman arrived, crying and telling the receptionist that her dog had diarrhea. I wondered what the crying was about as dogs often have diarrhea (and yes diarrhea CAN drive one to tears). She was soon on the phone and telling a friend that her dog had diarrhea in her cousin’s house and he kicked her dog. She is living there temporarily as she just moved here for a job. The dog was active and appeared in good spirits.

“God will sort those people out.” The woman we had just patched up told her, but this wasn’t advice that would help with the current situation. Sadly none of us had any solutions for her situation as more people showed up with their dogs. One 13 year old dog with a tumor the size of a soft ball on his leg. Finally, Stella came out, overjoyed that she was free. Stella, being a cute small dog, then endures many people asking what type of dog she is, can they pet her, and re enactments of the “STELLA!” line from ‘A Street Car Named Desire.’ Yes, everyone does that. Every. Time. They. Meet. Her. I told the woman with the cut knee that I hoped she recovers okay and she assured me she would. We both wished the other woman who’s dog had been kicked good luck with her situation. We both wished we could help more so, but we had no real solution for her.

Sigh.

And…as for something completely different, just so you have something to look at, yes I’m drawing pirates again. I can’t tell you why, who or what for, but this is a little peek at a what is a whole boat load of them!  pirate bit2flat

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Friday Info-Process-tainment

As I can now talk about the Dark Horse Presents story called ‘Brooklyn Blood’ I’m working on with Paul Levitz, and I’m teaching a Summer Residency in sequential art at SVA this summer, I thought my Friday post could be about just a small teeny tiny bit of my process. Where the class I teach is mostly concerned with telling a story, making that story clear on the page, using panel layout to guide the eye, finding that story inside of you that haunts you and causes you a small bit of metal pain when you dig it up (yes we did that in my very first class), I thought I’d post something a little more basic here. How I draw a comic page! Or part of a page. Note that what you see below is just the bottom third of a page from the upcoming ‘Brooklyn Blood.’ We’ll skip the writing part as Paul did that.

Step A: After I read the script I draw several thumbnails with a black marker. I throw most of them away in disgust. You see here the thumbnail I settled on. Then I scan this winning thumbnail into the computer and place it in page template (the template being the correct proportions that it will be when printed).

Step B: I draw the rough pencils on a Cintiq (if you don’t know what a Cintiq is just hit the Googles). If you don’t have a Cintiq, many people use a light box to draw finished pencils on top of the blown up thumbnail which you can enlarge on a copy machine or computer.

Step C: Then I get back out of the computer by printing out a blue line version of the pencils on Bristol board. Blue line because I can now ink it in the real world with black ink, and when I scan it back into Photoshop, the blue line will not show up in the scan, only the black lines show up.

Step D: You can ink using a Cintiq also, but I still like using messy ink and brush or pen or wooden sticks. I personally like making marks on real paper. Too much work in the computer ends up putting me to sleep.

Step E: I scan the final black and white art back into the computer and on a separate layer from the black art in Photoshop, I add the colors! I also add the word balloons early on in the process because that does affect where the reader’s eye goes, but for this brief art example, I left that bit out! And there you have it. The exciting, amazing secrets of an illustrator! I just now see that I wrote “step A” in the text, and “Part A” on the art. That’s called a mistake. I make many of those! It’s part of the process. Brooklynblood proc 3

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