Launch day!
Today is launch day for this site! I'm actually letting everyone know that it exists today. If you're one of those first time visitors to this site, you should really read the following to acquaint yourself with things:
- The first post where I layout the plan for Bosh and Bill.
- The about page.
- The first comic placeholder post (as an example of how comics will function on this site once I actually have any completed).
- All the rest of the posts.
Click around and let me know what you think via Twitter. If you really like it, want to join me in learning comics, and *really* think I should have comments too, let me know and I'll turn them on (though I'd rather just chat via Twitter and I'm considering setting up a persistant chat room for this site). Also, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed. I should probably set up a Bosh & Bill Twitter account too, eh?
UPDATE: Patrick had a great idea:
Follow the Bosh and Bill Twitter account, retweet the announcement of this post, and reply to Bosh and Bill on Twitter, and I'll mention you or even base a future character on you in the future of the comic!
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Rough script for first few pages
One of the ideas that I have for Bosh is that part of his semi-divinity means that when he (or his bodily fluids) come in contact with inanimate objects, those inanimate objects come temporarily to life. So for the first time we meet him, I intend to have him peeing on a rock in the ground (roughly sketched with this post), and the rock to protest loudly, "Stop pissing in my face!" To which Bosh replies, "You wouldn't be yapping if I weren't pissing in your face, so shut up already!"
This will be our first introduction to Bosh, but won't really occur until later in the page. Things will begin serenely with Bill in a wooded area just being goofy happy go lucky Bill and coming across something unexpected. I'm thinking either a diamond or other large jewel or a box with slight noises coming from within it. Bill picks up the diamond / jewel and smiles bigly or walks up to the box smiling curiously when all of a sudden he hears the rock yelling. He drops the jewel in the mud or loses interest in the box, and then walks over to the bushes where he heard the noise and peaks out into a clearing. In the clearing he sees Bosh peeing on the rock and having their conversation.
Bill then begins... (Continue reading post...)If you'd like to comment, you can contact me via Twitter or you can share this post on any of these services:
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Comic work as a juggling act
If you're not a regular reader of Tom Richmond's MAD blog, you should be. He shares openly his experiences working for MAD and being a professional cartoonist / caricaturist. One of my favorite features is his Sunday Mailbag series where he answers reader questions. Today's post is in answer to a question about line-weight in multipanel illustrations, but he answers the question by diving into a discussion of why he always works from a full page layout, rather than piecing together separately constructed panels. From today's Sunday Mailbag | Tom's MAD Blog!:
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Doing comic work is like a juggling act. You have to draw individual panels and make them do all the things they need to do, like illustrating a scene, the action within, demonstrating character interaction, providing an image that reinforces the dialogue spoken all the while doing (hopefully) good drawing. At the same time, you have to make each panel work with the ones about it and within the framework of the page they reside on, as well as the page on the opposite side of the gutter. You need to balance the pages and cause the eye to move across them along with the story so there is not only no confusion as to how and where the story continues from panel to panel, but so that your viewer’s eye natural moves to the next panel without having to think about it. This is a major part of good storytelling and layout.
You absolutely cannot accomplish that treating each panel like it is a separate illustration with no regard for how it interacts with the rest of the page."
While Richmond does his layout on a two-page spread to maintain balance between his various panels, since my plan for Bosh & Bill includes serializing it page by completed page on this site, I'll be sticking to one page spreads.
One of the things that I'm doing... (Continue reading post...)If you'd like to comment, you can contact me via Twitter or you can share this post on any of these services:
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It's alive!
I went ahead and moved this site design out of its hidden spot behind the "Coming Soon..." curtain that I've had up for the past several weeks. I still haven't announced that it's live yet. I plan to do that next week. Probably on Tuesday at 11am ET since that is the best day and time to launch sites (in my opinion).
I'm pretty proud of myself, as I designed this site fully in Crowd Fusion, complete with a custom plugin for all the different page types, datapoints, and tag relationships between pages and with this snazzy front end design which is my first ever full site design on my own. I also enabled caching so things should load pretty lightning fast (unless there are problems at MediaTemple, where I currently host this site).
Click around on some of the posts and check it out and let me know what you think on Twitter or feel free to email me. Check out the example fake comic to see how I plan on presenting comics on the site. And make sure you read the About page and the first post to find out what all this is about.
Now that the site's actually done, it's time to start diving into learning to cartoon. Stay tuned!
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Stay Tooned! Magazine
I think it's time for me to subscribe to Stay Tooned! magazine. I've read about it several times, and it seems to parallel nicely alongside the purpose of this site: to appreciate, better understand, and learn to create comics. And today, I see that Joe Bluhm is featured in the most recent issue:
"Comic enthusiast and artist John Read has come out with issue 5 of his great publication, STAY TOONED! Magazine. The publication is clean, professional, and pays attention to cartoonists and comic artists. This time through, I'm honored to be a part of the issue and considered worthy of being printed on pages of such great cartoonists. John does a great job, and he does it ALL himself for the love of the art, so support him by subscribing to this truly unique publication.
My buddy Tom Richmond has been profiled, featured on the cover with his incredible illustration, and does a better job of running down what STAY TOONED! offers through past blog posts here."
I'm a fan of both Bluhm and Richmond's work, so seeing them both praise this mag makes me think it'll probably be a valuable resource for anyone interested in cartoons and cartooning. As soon as I finish writing this post, I'm subscribing.
Side note: Bluhm's Sketch Infectus is a good little book of doodles and drawings from him that I purchased a while back. Check it out if you like his work.
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Nice post on doodling on newspaper...
I love doodling, and after reading this post, I'm thinking that I need to try doing it more often on magazine pages and newspaper pages, because, he's right: doodling on a blank white piece of paper can be intimidating. From The Cartoon Cave: It's Doodle Time!:
If you'd like to comment, you can contact me via Twitter or you can share this post on any of these services:"The great thing about doodling on newspaper is that it is so completely inviting and tempting. Unlike doodling on clean white fresh pages in a sketchbook, which can be rather intimidating due to the commitment of the act, sketching on newspaper is just like getting more use out of something that was destined for the recycling bin anyway. Also, there is nothing quite so pleasing as the feel of a ballpoint pen on soft, padded newsprint.
I especially like to doodle because I feel I can draw completely in my own natural style, as loose, spontaneous and free of the constraints I might place on myself when drawing for a paid commission, particularly when the client is expecting something to look a certain way. When one doodles, there is the distinct pleasure of knowing that you are doing it just for yourself, not subject to anybody else's approval nor what they would be willing to pay for it. No, you yourself are the only one to satisfy and, heck, even if you don't like it, you haven't invested much time or effort in creating it. If it's good, maybe you'll file it away for future reference, and if not, it joins the rest of the newspaper in the aforementioned recycling bin."
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comic: Just a test comic
click to view comic»
This is just a test comic post to test the layout of this site design and for me to use for properly building the comic viewer I have planned. The picture I'm using for this test is a picture of my baby son, Jackson, with laser eyes, that I made following this Photoshop tutorial. Then I faked a rough and inked version of the picture to preview what actual comics on this site will look like. Each comic will have a rough, an ink, and a final comic that should all load in the same place on the page via a little bit of JavaScript magic (based on this) once it's done. This will not be the first comic, however (no matter how cute Jackson is). It's just a test.
View the comic... (Continue reading post...)If you'd like to comment, you can contact me via Twitter or you can share this comic on any of these services:
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Seeing the Future
This is pretty cool:
"Because two minds are better than one – Howtoons has teamed up with Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam, to create a drawing and ideation guide that helps get those big ideas down on paper. This has been a huge project it is a 20 page document filled with drawing and inventing tips.
—Howtoons: Seeing the Future! A Guide to Visual Communication via BoingBoing
There's both an HTML / Flash-based version of the Guide as well as a PDF version (7.4MB Direct Link). Also, the comic Howtoons: The Possibilities are Endless! is available via Amazon.
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Mark McDonnell video tutorials: How to Warm Up for Gesture Drawing
Drawn! posted about Mark McDonnell's helpful video tutorials covering How to Warm Up for Gesture Drawing. McDonnell teaches life drawing at Disney and Dreamworks and has a book out called The Art and Feel of Making it Real: Gesture Drawing for the Animation and Entertainment Industry. I've embedded the videos below.
This is one thing I really have to focus on when sketching: loosening up enough to get some good roughs out. Much too often I want everything to be too perfect, try to jump ahead to a finished drawing, and therefore spend too much time on what should really only be a sketch, becoming frustrated with the drawing if it's not going the way I originally planned.
See the two videos... (Continue reading post...)If you'd like to comment, you can contact me via Twitter or you can share this post on any of these services:
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Bosh and Bill: The Plan
I've been accumulating things to help me work on art digitally (and therefore have enough room to work at all) over the past several years. In Christmas of 2008, I received a Wacom Cintiq 12WX from my wife, after getting myself a HP tx2500z tablet PC with Adobe CS3 earlier in that same year. I've made this Windows tablet my art computer (which is a bit odd, since I work day in and day out on an iMac and a MacBook), but the main thing here is that it is a dedicated art computer. Sure I can use it to check email in a pinch, but it's basically hooked up to my Wacom 12WX, serving as a dedicated Photoshop, Illustrator, and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro machine. This is very useful for someone like me who normally works online, as it makes me focus on drawing and cartooning on this dedicated machine rather than always having the distraction of my email, my IM, and social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
In Christmas of 2008, I also received Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel & Matt Madden. I started to go through the book and was even in the beginning stages of forming a nomad group, but nothing ever happened with it. I simply didn't have the characters or story idea yet that would keep me focused on learning to be a better comic artist. So I put working through the book on hold, and proceeded to simply draw, sketch, and doodle for a year.
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