CHOCOLATE DONUTS & GRAPE SODA

Pen & Ink on 11x15 Warm Press

Original Creation Date: June 18, 2014

G.I.Joe. The 80's. Like most men my age, there was a natural transition through the Reagan years from Star Wars to G.I.Joe to the Transformers, and then finally onto girls and junior high and all of that mess.

But man, I was a Joe kid. At this very moment, somewhere in my parents' attic sits boxes and boxes of vehicles and figures, presumably their rubber-ringed pelvis suspensions all rotted and broken. Where I differed from so many other guys from my generation was my opinion of the cartoon.  The G.I.Joe show was always second-rate to me; it was like a serviceable dilution that promised to be so much but never quite delivered.

It always fell short in comparision to the comic.

Marvel's G.I.Joe was a fantastic series. Sure, it was too much of a promotional tool to sell toys, and there were too many characters to really develop stronger personalities... but what'd I care? I was the one buying those toys, and even when I reluctantly gave them up I still followed the stories. Larry Hama. Herb Trimpe. Great stuff. For a long time, if I recall correctly, it was Marvel's best selling title. I think there was a perception back then that this was only a result of its crossover success from the brand itself... but I disagree. This was a great comic book with cool characters and compelling adventures.

I thought I'd pay homage to one of my favorites... the infamous master of disguise, Zartan. Zartan and his men were so much cooler in the comics (I think in the TV show they were just buffoonish comic relief), and they were written more as the unruly thugs and gang members they were intended to be. They caused trouble. They broke the rules. They partied.

However, it was also a comic book being read by a lot of kids. So, presumably, Jim Shooter or someone in those circles instructed Larry Hama, the legendary mind behind G.I.Joe (he's the guy that wrote all those file cards you cut out and saved in your rubber-band encased stack), that they shouldn't be having TOO MUCH fun. No drugs, and no booze.

So instead, Zartan and his boys had a thing for grape soda, and chocolate-covered donuts. Works for me.  I've depicted Zartan here returning home from a trip to his local grocer, complete with his famed bow, some healthier necessities, and some treats for the lads.

I LOVED drawing this, if only for the nostalgic value. I might get around to color at some point.

WEREWOLF

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock
Original Creation Date: May 21, 2014

I have a concept for a graphic novel... It's somewhere between the final plotting and scripting phases of completion. To be completely honest, the sheer idea of a graphic novel is one of the most intimidating things I can think of; the scope, the massive scale of work, and most importantly, the huge sacrifices necessary to make it happen. And to do it right.

So, for the time being, I'm inching closer to the day where I have to decide: do I shelve the whole book, or do I sit down and start drawing?

At any rate, this book would indeed be a werewolf story... but one that never has been told like this.

The above was an ink test for what would most likely be the title character.

COMPULSIVE DETAIL vs. RESTRAINT, or INKING ANGELS AND DEVILS

Yes, that's a picture of me inking, with a devil of sorts on one shoulder, and an angel on the other. If you look closer, however, you might realize that one side of the drawing is inked in an entirely different manner than the other. The devil, or my inking devil, as it were, is Arthur Adams, probably the single biggest influence on my entire pursuit of comic book illustration and just a huge influence in general since his big-league debut in Longshot #1.

Arthur Adams's Man-Thing

Arthur Adams is a beast for detail, to the extent that he's developed it into its own medium-- he seems to use ludicrous detail the way other artists wield acrylics or oils. He's taken it to an entirely different plane over the years. And, not surprisingly, he's had a reputation of sorts for not getting his books in on time.

Now I'm not going to go so far to presume that I draw, ink, or even wield detail to the extent that Mr. Adams does. But his work, and my longtime fascination with it, has inspired me to develop a style that really puts down a lot of ink, usually in small, and not always clean lines in hatching.

My Own Daredevil, with plenty of hatching

In the Daredevil piece above, you can see me sort of getting carried away with the inks, almost not knowing when to stop. The hatching is intended to develop form and promote the illusion of mass in his body, but very often I'm only flattening things out. In other words, I ink to the point of excess.

And I've recently acknowledged it, and am trying to stop.

--

The inking angel depicted above is, sadly, a real angel. The super-talented and super-nice guy Mike Wieringo tragically passed away in 2007 in the midst of a celebrated career as a comic book artist, and left a multitude of loyal fans to wonder what might have been. I met Mike in Baltimore a few years before his death, and I found him to be friendly, accommodating, and honest.

Mike Wieringo's Fantastic Four

Mike's own style certainly had its share of detractors, but he was also on my short list of artists to watch and be inspired by. And unlike Arthur Adams, Mike's style was greatly reserved and simplistic. There's no hatching, no heavy and laborious working, and seemingly no effort. Quite simply, he's the day to Arthur Adams' blackest india ink night.

Since I've gotten back into this style of artwork just a few short months ago, I've really struggled to find my own voice or signature style as an inker. I love the Adams look but certainly don't want to just mimic it-- plus I worry about becoming an artist who just can't work quickly enough because of all the detail. On the other end of the spectrum is Wieringo, who draws so differently than I do that I'm not sure how good such a simplistic style would look over my pencils. Either way, I think there's a fine balance between the two to be found, and I've spent some time recently exploring that balance.

My Own Flash, with no hatching whatsoever

In the Flash piece above, I laid down the law to myself:  NO HATCHING. NONE. And I think I still tried to cheat in a few places. But, as a professor, one of the greatest things I've learned in art projects is that by withholding certain practices or techniques, a student can learn to appreciate, execute, and better identify the need for other techniques. So I turned the tables on myself here, and learned quite a bit from my temporary ban on hatching. Mostly I learned how natural it was for me to just overwork things, and HATCH FOR THE SAKE OF HATCHING. Not good, and certainly not necessary.

I anticipate this to be an ongoing battle as I settle in to a more comfortable style. But I thought it might be worth sharing the struggle between the angels and devils.

WOLVERAMPAGE!! Inked

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock
Inked on Date: May 7, 2014

So much for exercising restraint during the inking process, right? I guess I just saw exactly in my mind how I wanted this inked, and I executed it faithfully to that vision. I did manage to resist the urge to keep adding detail in an effort to separate the figure from the ground-- I'll admit the inks sort of blend into each other a bit here, and it lacks a proper focal point-- but I've learned that this is best left to the discretion of the colorist, and attempting to overwork the inks to compensate is typically excessive and tends to only hurt the final result.

Color will come. It's too late to turn back now.

DARRELL

Pen & Ink on Standard Stock, Digitally Colored

Original Creation Date: Ink Completed Mar 26, 2014

Color Completed May 2, 2014

It's fair to say that in the past, I have had a problem with detail. Things just weren't finished until I added in extraneous details and obliterated large areas of white space. Sometimes I would throw in the occasional Easter egg for a watchful eye, or an inside joke for my friends, but mostly I would just add in this excessive detail into my pieces. As if the blank page was just a hapless village just waiting to be razed and pillaged. I just couldn't help myself.

Let's call it "Compulsive Detail."

Of course, this is not a good thing. During the creation of this commissioned piece the issue really emerged as a problem. I couldn't stop adding detail in the inking, which only served to flatten the piece out, and hindered the magnitude of the focal point. For the colorist, also myself, it became harder to work with, and also stretched out the entire process. As I've said many times before, every drawing is a lesson to be learned, but this one really taught me much about what I do, why I do it, and the consequences my decisions make on other steps of the process.

I let the compulsion issues play themselves out here, and as you can see in the final ink above, the drawing lacks clarity. It's flat. Once into the coloring process, I was able to create distance between foreground and background with color temperature contrast, but the final result was still too bright, too splotchy (see bottom left). So I brought down the saturation in the background areas, which not only helped push the hero further towards the viewer but also added a nice gloomy feel which suited the Walking Dead nicely. I even considered doing some selective color (see bottom right), but thought the whole thing just kind of reeked of bad wedding photography; It might have looked nicer had I originally colored those areas as grayscale, but post-converting the original color job just didn't work out. In the end I employed a healthy dose of my old friend Gaussian Blur to the background areas, and the piece finally announced that it was complete.


Lots of good lessons learned on this one. As I said, this was done over the course of the past few weeks, and many of the conclusions I'd come to on this piece benefitted other drawings already posted.
Yes, I've certainly been diagnosed with Compulsive Detail, and the prescription is Restraint Inking.

Also, who doesn't love Darrell? I'll probably do another one of him again, most likely more of a character study and less of an environment.