I've been neglecting the blog again, something that is too easy to do when busting ass.  Too many pots on the stove, all of them wanting to boil over all at once!

Here's a peek at the halfway point between pencils and inks:

Christmas is coming, check back in and see what I bring you.  Thanks for reading!

Cover process for Scott Sigler's Infected (part 2 of 4)

I usually do thumbnails followed by rough pencil layouts before moving on to finished pencils and inks. It's an extra step in the layout process, rough pencils, one I will eventually eliminate with experience.  But at the moment, it's an extra step of close examination of design meant to catch any errant problems that I missed in thumbnails(or, in this case, a pretty extensive reworking of the design)

So, without further ado, layouts!

This is the fun part of comics, at least for me.  This is where the design problems are solved and where heaps of life and energy exude from rough pencils and gesture sketches!  Alternate approaches are explored and the bulk of where your education in art comes into play.

I started out with a list of what I wanted included on the cover and roughed out some simple thumbnails, the  best of which you can see at the bottom of the scan.  I also included some notes on a color scheme, if you can call areas of "warm" and "cool" colors an actual color scheme.

I liked the original sort of major character, Perry Dawsey, looking over his shoulder from a low angle that was originally done in the pitch cover.  It gives a deceptive and dark look that really works for me, but in the original he was wearing a jacket.  Cool jackets are fun to draw, but they mask the physique underneath, so it's just Perry's gorilla arm on display in a form fitting T-shirt.  Light coming from his back, shadows almost masking part of his face instead of hair.  The angle isn't quite low enough, there is a bit of an eye confusing tangent where Perry's forearm meets Dew's left arm, minor corrections made in the finished pencils/inks(next post). Much improved!

From the thumbnail to the layout pencils, Margaret Montoya is still on the right, looking a bit concerned,  but now joined by a pensive Amos, both in their BSL4 hazmat suits.

Dew Phillips is taking a less active pose than in the thumbnail, more reflective of his character, who looks before he leaps, something that allowed him to survive beyond his twenties and thirties in his line of work.  Complimenting Dew is his reactionary partner, Malcolm Johnson, who isn't quite as savvy as Dew, and pays the price early on.  Fittingly, Mal is a little more emotional, striking an actiony pose bearing a look of angry determination.

Behind them is a swath of fire, smoke billowing up, drifting left.  The Brewbaker's funeral pyre?  Perhaps, but it lends a bit of warm backlighting to the center of the image, bookended at the top and bottom with the cool colors of snow and winter.  Two massive oaks silhouetted at the top against a cold night sky(an important location element that bookends the entire story).  Warmth of the fire fading to cool tones of the powdery snow below, where the body of Alida Garcia lies, blood pooling behind her like butterfly wings.

Room is left for the logo(designed by the talented Michael Keller), which Perry will float in front of, trees framing it from behind.  There's room left for additional writing or a UPC at the bottom.

Overall, a pretty solid design, very influenced by the sort of collage approach of Drew Struzan.

Next post:  Pencils and inks!

Cover process for Scott Sigler's Infected (part 1 of 4)

This is part one of four posts covering the process behind designing and creating the cover(or one of them) for Scott Sigler's graphic novel, Infected.

Originally, I knocked out about six or seven interior pages and a cover as a sort of proof of concept to pitch to a publisher.  The cover for that was pretty cool, but also a little rough.  Some interesting ideas, but didn't quite get to where I wanted to go.  But for the sake of your entertainment, I include it.

In the original, I still hadn't nailed down the look of Perry, but I liked the idea of a lower angle shot of him looking over his shoulder at the viewer.  It gives a sense of deception and dominance, a look that I brought over to the new cover(which you will see in the next post).  I punched it up a bit by giving him a knife to hold behind his back.  It was effective, and overall it was the best part of the cover.

I also included Dew, aiming his gun off to the left, the direction against forward progress.  Awkwardly, I might add.

Equally awkward, another shot of Perry, cutting into his arm.  Besides Perry being on the cover twice, it also gives a bit more away than I want for the first image you see.  As I said, I still hadn't cast a look for Perry, so his face is obscured by a mop of his blonde hair, which actually looks kinda cool.  Anything that covers a face adds a bit of intrigue and mystery, maybe that's why it's done to so many comic book characters.

The background was a cool idea in my head that didn't really play out well on paper for a couple of reasons.  Essentially, there are two people in hazmat suits trapped behind glass in some CDC lab, one desperately pressing his hands against the panes bearing the CDC and biohazard logos.  The two problems with this are, well, it's all taking place behind the logo, and the smaller guy in the far background just looks like a doofus.  As a stand alone poster or ad, maybe it works, maybe it's kind of dark and moody and cool to look at, but as a cover with a traditionally placed logo, kind of a fail.

This got the ball rolling, though, and that's really what mattered.

Next post: Layouts for the new cover.

Another Infected sneak peek!

It's been a bit since I posted, just letting everyone know I'm still alive!

We just bought an apartment in Sydney, sorted out some immigration paperwork and acquired a dog(a whippet)!  Things are beginning to settle down, I have a place to sit down and work again, so thing will be getting back to normal.

That said, here's another sneak peek at Scott Sigler's Infected!  Just a couple of scientists having a back and forth conversation in the lad while conducting a post mortem on one of the infected!  Sort of a boring page, but I still think it more or less kicks ass, as far as squints yapping goes.  Stay tuned, and keep an eye on Scott Sigler's iTunes feed!

A bit of Illustration

Something that's NOT in a comic book.

My Aunt asked me to make an illustration/poster for her, something related to her work.  She had a poem, I believe it's a kid's poem of some sort, the author is unknown to me.  Anyway, I thought it would make her happy, so I knocked it out.  I heard it will be hanging in the lobby of some hospital somewhere, hopefully people will get a bit of enjoyment out of it.

I wasn't there when she received it, but I'm told it made her VERY happy, to the point of tears.  That made me smile, too, so I thought I would share.

Here's the poem, I didn't write it:

TICK TOCK

ONE OCLOCK

POWERPOINT

ELECTRIC SHOCK

TICK TOCK

TWO OCLOCK

FERRY BOAT

SAFE IN DOCK

TICK TOCK 

THREE OCLOCK

LOTS OF TEETH

ANGRY CROC

TICK TOCK 

FOUR OCLOCK

FIRE WOOD

ON CHOPPING BLOCK

TICK TOCK

FIVE OCLOCK

LET ME IN

THE DOOR UN-LOCK

TICK TOCK

SIX OCLOCK

COM-BI-NA-TION LOCK

TICK TOCK

SEVEN OCLOCK

CAR WITH MOTOR

ENGINE BLOCK

TICK TOCK

EIGHT OCLOCK

CHAINS AND LINK

THEY INTERLOCK

TICK TOCK

NINE OCLOCK

SAFETY FIRST

DONT THROW THAT ROCK

TICK TOCK

TEN OCLOCK

ROUND THEM UP

THE CATTLE STOCK

TICK TOCK 

ELEVEN OCLOCK

HAVE YOU FOUND

MY BUILDING BLOCK

TICK TOCK

TWELVE OCLOCK

ITS LATE SO GO TO BED

PHEWWWWWW

This Is The Place... Infected pg4&5

Page four is largely about the physical journey, the toll on Alida's body while she carries the burden of regret, stricken with powerlessness while somehow enduring more than any normal person would believe possible.

Akira Kurosawa was known for these long lens shots of action, often with that eastern sensibility that utilized depth over panning, with axial cuts during action to demonstrate longer passages of time.  I thought about that, and his favoring of cutting from these long lens shots to aspect shots detailing some essential mechanism and back again.  It gave a sense of time and scale to those beats that I enjoyed and really seemed to intuitively work for me.

With that in mind, I waded into page four with a long shot, Alida trudging through the forest.  I had a western audience in mind, so the action progresses left to right instead of foreground to background.

The next set of three panels, I was trying to play with time again, buttressing  the internal mechanics of her mind against the shots of her travels.  The removal of the gutters is meant to be an indication that it's all happening now, but in her mind, done without the conventional cloudy word balloon, which is effective, but a bit hokey for this sort of story.

Alida is still moving, attacked by the weather, attacked by her memories, attacked by the infection growing within.

The last panel, after being mired in her own mind, oblivious to the physical struggles in the real world, she is suddenly compelled to stop, suddenly sure she has arrived at her destination.  Two large oaks dwarf her, she looks up them as they reach like lovers for each other.  This is the place.

Kurosawa also used weather a lot, sometimes as almost a character on it's own.  I tried to push it a bit within the prologue as an antagonist, inspired by his work, but also trying not to over do it.  I think M Night Shyamalan tried to make his film, "The Happening", in that same direction, maybe believing that combining Kurosawa's nature/weather sensibilities with his surprise twist ending formula would make his film work with the brainy crowd as well as the plebeians. I think all he wound up doing was proving you really can take a good technique or formula too far and thoroughly butcher a movie with heavy handedness.  So, I try not hit the reader over the head with this, instead just quietly build the conflict.

Page Five:

That fight comes to a head on page five.

Right away, after arriving at the end of this odyssey, the moment she realizes this is the place, she abruptly commits suicide.  The protagonist dies on panel one.

In the book, she puts the gun to her temple and pulls the trigger, I picture a lot of angst and torment, maybe some screaming as she pushes hard to force her finger to pull the trigger, fighting the cold, fighting the infection, fighting her own survival instinct.

But I thought that story had already been visually told with the previous four pages, so I made a minor change, Alida puts the gun to her heart instead, a choice suicidal women often make, and she quietly ends her own life.  Less bang, more whimper.  I decided that it would be more interesting if, after suffering the duplicity of her mind led by the influence of her infection, after domination by those paranoid inner voices caused by her parasitic invaders, she was able to hide something from them as well.  Hidden was some untapped reservoir of strength and hope, powering an intent to foil the "triangles" by killing herself, their vessel, before they could do whatever it is that she was brought there to do.

The weather takes over, an incessant force of nature with endless patience, and with the passage of time, it washes away everything, Alida, the parasites, her tracks, any evidence of the struggle(minus a gunshot wound to the tree, which hold court above).

Did any of it even matter?  She still dies, she still loses, but the conflict for control is more pronounced, maybe humanity has a shot, maybe not.  Check out Scott Sigler's INFECTED if you want to know what happens next!  Look him up on iTunes for the FREE audiobook or check out his site or your local book store for the print version.  Or, stick around and find out more about the graphic novel!

This Is The Place... Infected pg2&3

Page two is difficult to discuss without also taking a look at the opposing page, which was designed to work alongside it.  Looking at them as a pair, I had a few ideas that I thought I would try out, things that in my head made just so much sense!  But what works swimmingly in my head makes other people's head swim, it turns out, and several ideas fell flat.  Let's hope I continue to learn these lessons and failure doesn't become a theme.

The first thought I had involved gutters, or the removal of them, making these four sort of super-panels that contained an emotional or physical bit of acting close up on the face, and a corresponding tall claustrophobic panel of physical acting.  Removing the gutters should mean the removal of time, and conversely, wider gutters would equal additional time.

Makes sense, right?  Sure, but it wasn't intuitive to the reader.  I had to explain it, which means it didn't come off well.  The tighter zooming was also meant to tie them together, but it was only marginally effective.

The second thought I had was having Alida jump off the first page and sort of roll to the bottom of the second, unconscious, with these flashbacks or maybe dream sequences playing out at different timelines in her head.

I've seen Scott Hampton pull it off, I think, though I forget where.  He quite effectively utilized wide gutters to show passing time, but time was linear, so it was intuitive.  In my instance, it was bouncing around in time, so it just doesn't feel natural.  It still functions, the story comes across, so I'm stuck with it unless I want to revisit the pages again, which I do not.

So that's the bad, it's out of the way, I learned some lessons, let's take a look at what worked.

Page two:

What I wanted to accomplish on page two was to demonstrate that even the quiet times on this miniature odyssey, the times when Alida should be at rest, are still fraught with the troubles of the physical struggle going on within.  The next page, when she is unconscious, you get a taste of the past, the origin of the troubles within her mind.  Followed by page four, more of the tough physical journey and actual manifestation of guilt over the events established in the flashbacks, the contrast to this page, the mental struggle within instead of the physical one.

In panel one, I figured I'd just do an aspect shot of the wheels on the train, a little motion blur, and the same sound effects from the last panel of page one, the clack-clack noises a train's wheels make against the seams of the metal tracks.  It is wide, giving the sense of a new environment, an establishing shot, without taking up valuable page space and hitting the reader over the head with what was foreshadowed on the previous page.  It's also cropped so close that it has the tiniest bit of claustrophobia, the beginning of a theme for the infected.

These next four panels, panels two through five, are meant to be a two camera shot, each zooming in as the action progresses, helping the reader along with the empathy that close-ups promote.  The second tier also moves the character upward and to the right, actual forward progress. Panel two, time passes, snow billows about.  Panel three, sickness, vomiting blood. Panel four, some associated pain followed by something grabbing Alida's attention. And finally, panel five in the sequence, Alida is up and at the edge of the boxcar door, gazing out into the cold, aspect shot of blood in the foreground.

Panel six is an inset panel, a close up of Alida's eye grabbing an image of the forest in front of her, making a reflection of a predatory maw complete with gaping incisors, her make up smeared from tears.

The next panel Alida is flying through the air and plopping down into the snow, harder than she intended, a bit out of control.

Page three:

This page was meant to show some flashbacks before picking Alida up off the ground and resuming her journey.  It's what tainted her mind and begat the internal struggle for control and maybe even Alida's soul.

Panels one and two make up the first flashback scene, back at her home, back when the real trouble started.  Luis is already dead, three shots to the chest and blood everywhere.  You get the sense that maybe Luis didn't go down easily and there are bloody footprints leading off to the background, where Alida lurks, wrapped in shadow.  You just missed the action, a moment too late, the hooror will be played out in the mind of the reader(where Hitchcock fans usually believe it's the scariest).  The next panel, the reader is a moment too soon, Alida towers over the helpless baby, gun in hand.  What happens next is implied, but the metaphoric five horses in the mobile hint that the baby isn't long for this world.  The horses, of course, meaning the senses, a little homage to the Q Lazzarus song from Silence of the Lambs, "Goodbye Horses".  Creepy!

The next tier is Alida grabbing a car, killing a random stranger in the process.  Pretty straight forward.  I deliberately kept the faces of the victims small or concealed, saving their empathetic close-ups for the next page.  This is just where the internal horror comes from, it's not the actual burden.

With wide gutters between all three tiers representing wide passages of time(another theme the infected deal with, passing out and waking up sometimes days later, time either severely muddled or completely oblivious to), we arrive at tier three.  Alida wakes up, feels the thing growing inside her, and presses onward.

This one came a long way in terms of storytelling.  My initial thought was some kind of weirdly shaped and fractured panels for the dream sequences, something to reflect her fractured personality or state of mind, but thankfully, my editor pulled in the reins.

The initial art was rough, too, sloppy storytelling.  It's been ages since I looked at these pages, and I'm amazed how much better I've become over such a relatively short span of time!

More to come!

Infected, This Is The Place...

Spoiler alert!  If you haven't read Scott Sigler's book, Infected, you probably should stop reading here, because I'm about to analyze the crap out of it.

Page one:

Scott Sigler's book, Infected, begins in medias res, a prologue of just two and a half pages of text in the actual book.  But it's a compelling and brilliantly written two and a half pages that neatly delivers the entire narrative of the story, telling you everything you need to know  about the motivation of the antagonist, the mindset of the protagonist, conflict and resolution.  It's an entire tragic story compressed into the tiniest and maybe most important bit of the book.  It's what sold me on the story and, coupled with how much of it takes place within the mind and the confined apartment of Perry Dawsey, it would be a challenging project I knew I wanted to make into a graphic novel.

My approach for this is, I wanted to tell the whole story visually, without relying on text to convey what is in the mind of Alida Garcia, the prologue protagonist.  So much of her story is about regret, about her shortcomings, and her inner struggles with both the demons in her past and the demons literally growing under her skin.  

As an illegal immigrant, her whole life had been a struggle, getting physically north across the border and establishing herself, with her husband.  Having her baby, an anchor baby that meant salvation for her relationship with Luis, her finally being able to live without fear from the INS, or "La Magra".  Her struggle with classes, moving up from poverty to a middle class life, the American Dream.

But then she became infected with another child of sorts, this strange infection that brought alien thoughts of paranoia, predatory insanity, with a northerly migration, mirroring Alida's during her early struggling years, of it's own driving it and her into some unknown part of desolate Michigan forest in the biting chill of winter, an environment quite alien to her warm Mexican upbringing.  Like a new male lion taking over a pride, it killed off the rival males and her cub, laying claim to her body and everything she was.

All that in two and a half pages!

I started out writing down everything I wanted to cover, all the events, all the emotions, then plotted out how long I wanted to spend on each bit, deciding how long I wanted the reader to dwell on this first beat.  I arrived at five pages of pretty dense storytelling.  A beginning, middle, and end, with three acts.  It could be a movie all on it's own.

Page one, I wanted to cover all the major points, the epic journey, the emotions, the paranoia, the almost schizophrenic nature of her inner struggle.

Panel one starts with Alida  trekking across the snow, missing a shoe, disheveled, she's fallen to her knees and is looking over her shoulder for something or someone chasing her.  We look down on her, this lesser pathetic and weak thing.  The branches of the tree above her come between us, the viewer, and her, the protagonist.  They spread across the page, from left to right like an infection.

The next five panels, four insets and one big one, demonstrate largely through close ups the struggle going on in her mind and in her body. 

We start with scratching the wrist until it's bloody, noticing the infected hand is holding a gun.  I was thinking of what it takes for a coyote to gnaw off it's own paw when caught in a trap, something that must take the most immense inner strength to do for the sake of survival.

Panel three, Alida sheds tears.  Regret, panic, fear, she's ready to give up, she just wants it all to end.

Panel four, the engagement and wedding ring on her left hand that symbolized everything she ever wanted in life, her family, love, the ability to afford such luxuries in America, to have enough money to buy gold and precious stones, and the pride of overcoming such gargantuan obstacles.  If not for the regret, it would certainly be inspiration.

Panel five, a suggestion from my editor, Bob Pendarvis, "I kinda wish one of the faces might've used a hand or two. nothing like adding a hand to a close-up to increase the "acting" quotient. like, maybe she's cradling her head in the third face, but then turns head behind her in the last, eyes peering between fingers"   It was a great suggestion that added a lot to the panel, where she demonstrates the evil has taken over, she has a gun she isn't afraid to use, and she is partially hiding her face, an act of deception.

This all culminates in a stylistic panel six, Alida looking over her shoulder, angry and paranoid, maybe at the viewer, maybe at the beginning of the next part of her journey, the train.

And finally, panel seven, a more realistic view of the train meandering down the tracks.

There's a world of difference between how the page started in thumbnails and where it wound up, here is my very rough first take layout to go over with the editor.

Next post: My approach to how the art is portrayed and why, techniques, materials, scanners and resolutions.  Followed by a page two analysis!

A Thick Skin and Honest Critique

For seven years, from when I was in year twelve in high school,  I was fortunate enough to be employed as a graphic designer at a great little firm in Florida.  I spent time making art by hand or in the computer,  learning to design logos and tshirts and billboards and anything else(minus web design) under the sun that could be printed.  I cut my teeth on photoshop and Corel.  For a couple years, I was also the Art Director(which really just meant I was salaried, I was responsible for everyone's work, and I went from working 40 hours a week to 60 hours a week for a very minor raise that washed away when I worked overtime).

When I was still so young, I have to say, it felt pretty fantastic to just be making art for a living.  And it's hard to imagine a better way to get your feet wet than diving right into the deep end of the pool, sink or swim.  But I like that sort of thing, the challenge of it.

What I learned was, in the end, that I didn't want to be a graphic designer.  That was the single biggest lesson I walked away with, and I consider it time well spent.  I also learned little things along the way, how to deal with customers, I learned not to fall in love with every little thing I did(because the customer or art director, regardless of the reason or benefit of it, always wanted a little change to great work, almost like adding their own little immortal bit or signature to the creative process).  I learned the value of a client and what it cost to lose one, I learned how process printing works, screen printing, embroidery, offset presses, I even learned automotive paint.

But the second most important lesson I learned was the value of critique.

Sure, we all enjoy praise, it feels warm and fuzzy.  Wow, that sure looks great.  I can't believe how good that looks, you're amazing!  Again and again, it never gets old, receiving praise feels good.  Damned good. Great, even.

But what purpose does praise really serve, in the practical sense, to an artist?  In it's essence, it's positive reinforcement which, logically speaking, is designed to get you to repeat a pattern of behavior.  How does that help an artist grow, retreading the same old path with repeated behavior?  The words "good enough" come to mind.  And how depressing must it be to become "good enough", call it quits, to mentally check out and coast the rest of the way through life?

To me, all life is can be summed up in a single sentence; Life is the pursuit of perfection.  That's it.  Once you achieve it, well, crap, you are the dog that caught the car, now what do you do?  A dog chasing cars seems kind of dumb, but it's the same thing we as artists do, we hone our artistic craft the way the dog hones his hunting craft, endlessly chasing perfection down the road, the closer we get, the more dust is kicked in our eyes and the more alive we feel.

If you want to grow as an artist, it doesn't help all that much to know what you got right, it doesn't help you to know it's the best work in the room.  What you need to know is what is wrong with it, what doesn't work.  Michaelangelo said every block of stone has a sculpture inside, it's the task of the sculptor to discover it.  In your work, the deeper you get into it, the harder it is to have perspective, what rough bit of stone needs to be cut away to really free the sculpture inside?

That's where a good artist is well served by a thick skin and honest critique.

If hearing your perspective is off, your composition looks thrown together, not thought out, and your anatomy sucks makes you feel like a lump of crap, you probably need to rethink how your brain is wired.  Whoever just told you that awful stuff about your work, the work you spent hours laboring over, that you lost sleep over, that you missed TV shows to work on, that you neglected relationships to slave at, that guy is one of the best assets you have.  That guy that you want to knee-jerk react to with a frown or a dirty remark under your breath, he just gave you more insight than all your formative years of praise from your mom and all who gazed in awe at the kitchen fridge magnet art gallery.

To be clear, "that sucks" is not critique.  Neither is "I don't like it", or any flavor of blather that doesn't speak about specific issues within the work in question.  That's not delivering critique, that's being a hater.  Learn to spot the difference.

If you can get a small group of honest people willing to really trash your work in your entourage, if you can restrain yourself from hating those guys for their tactless delivery, your work will grow in leaps and bounds.  If praise should be handed out, mete it to those guys, that's where positive reinforcement belongs, that's the sort of behavior you want repeated.  One of those guys is worth a thousand groupies lavishing shallow praise.

I had the good fortune to work with honest people who paid me for my work.  They expected a lot in return, they didn't tolerate mediocrity. They told me what was wrong and where and why, and if they could, how to fix it.  And rarely, if ever, did I hear praise for my work.  And it was the best time of my life in terms of artistic growth.

The Protagonist Brain(partIII)

Any expression of idea is wide open for interpretation, and in a collaboration, interpretation is inevitable. In your own private inner mindscape, the protagonist is always your own brain, the antagonist is every communication obstacle between your idea and it's understanding by the reader.

When considering your approach to storytelling, it's far more complicated than merely showing a procession of progressive images that illustrate a story.  Film is a medium best suited for showing action, a novel is best suited for describing thought, but sequential art contains limited text and limited imagery, leaving it somewhere in between.  Does that make it better or worse than the other two mediums that bookend storytelling?  That's a tough question that is largely determined through execution.

It's the artists job to sort out what the book is going to both show and tell you.  Compound that complexity when you start throwing color into the equation.  It's up to you to make the collaboration of text and images mutually beneficial, leaving them leaning on each other, supported by one another.  In that same way, the art and color should serve to improve and inform it's counterpart.

So here I am, I have these grand ideas of how I see the book in my head. I hammered out the approach for one aspect of the story, the scenes involving the "infected". The first samples I get back look great, some minor tweaks need to be made to fine tune my art style with the colorist's sensibilities.  Maybe that was just beginner's luck.

Now the second approach is tested, the parts of the stories told through bare line work, no moody ink washes, just line and color. I was looking for a similar flatter look for the foreground characters, and a more painterly or textured background to make them pop. I deliberately left some very sparse line work on the page, and eagerly awaited the first samples to return. And when they did, the departure from expectation to reality really snapped into focus.

On the right, it's one of my first attempts trying to convey my vision to the colorist, and as you can plainly see by way of revisions, I pretty well butchered it.  Back and forth, again and again, because I wasn't clearly communicating my ideas either visually or verbally.  I wasted a lot of time that you normally don't have to squander, so I needed to figure something out, a better way to communicate and fast!

I am now including some very basic lighting guides, no longer leaving it entirely to the colorist to divine where the light is coming from.  I'm also adding a lot more texture to the backgrounds, which is sometimes a major chore, but it's beginning to come across.

This is an ongoing work in progress, my intention is to document the process, my thoughts and views on the work along the way.  I'm quite sure there are many lessons to still be learned, but I've come a long way in figuring out a way over or around many of the larger hurdles involved in making a comic, from start to finish.  This is a collaboration, open to interpretation, from the people I work with down to the ones who will finally be reading it.   I hope you find an angle you find interesting within this blog, as a fellow creator, as a fan/reader of comics, or just someone looking to rubberneck at the train wrecks as they happen!

The Protagonist Brain(part II)

Professor Paul Hudson taught me a lot of things during my time in the sequential art building at SCAD. He was a meticulous man with an incredible eye for detail, accuracy, perspective, anatomy. All things he brought to his amazing work, taught to his students, and imparted into their techniques. Invaluable technical knowledge that greatly informed and improved everything I've done since taking his classes back in 2004-2005.

But the single most important thing I soaked up was his endless pursuit of perfection in everything he does, under the mantra "A day without mistakes is a wasted day, as you learned nothing."

A healthy attitude to couple with a dislike for your own work. It keeps you from becoming bitter and drives you to continually reinvent your approach, refine your tools, explore alternate techniques. To generally try your damnedest to make daily progress towards the mirage on the horizon that is perfection and the complacency that would come with it. It's the recognition and the satisfaction that comes from looking at the work you did yesterday, seeing the faults and being pleased with finding them or having someone point it out(if you are so lucky).

Working on Scott Sigler's graphic novel adaptation of his book, "INFECTED", I thought a lot about my artistic approach, trying to keep in mind how the brain works, it's desire for simplicity and the clarity that can come with it, and the beauty and fascination you can impart with realistic perspective, details, lighting, everything you see in reality but usually lose in the process of making comics.

I decided upon a two pronged approach for the story, which, all characters and their various motivations aside, really has two opposing points of literal "view". The view of the infected, and the view of the uninfected.

The approach for the infected seemed like an easy enough problem to solve, throw in some ink washes, be a bit messy, impart some energy into the brush strokes. Some vertical panels to promote an overall sense of claustrophobia as the paranoia sets in and infection begins to cloud their minds, taking over.

For the uninfected parts of the story, I figured I would lean a bit more on clean line work, more intrinsic detail, a more traditional comic look.

For the uninfected, though, this posed a bit of a problem. How do I maintain a sense of unity with the art if I didn't come up with an alternate way of handling things to match the rich texture that ink washes can impart? Further, how do I make it as simple as possible for the reader to recognize the action, the characters, the moving parts of the story within each rendered panel equally?

I thought a bit about the work of Josh Middleton, who tries to remove all the unnecessary lines from his work, paring it down to it's essence, relying more on his colors to fill in the work. He does all his own colors, and the collaboration of mediums works really well together, as they inform each other, and maintain the same exact direction and goal in the hands of the same artist. I liked the idea of it and decided that the moving characters in both parts of the story, infected and uninfected, would share a more simple look, devoid of spotted blacks, intricate detail.

The backgrounds can be handled very differently, one with rendered washes with these stark characters popping out, the other either leaning on color or dealing with more richly illustrated backgrounds, with the bright, simple looking characters standing out equally.

It solves the problem of lending unity to two different looks within the same book, and helps the brain along in recognizing the characters, the movement, the energy of a scene that you might otherwise lose with a heavily detailed style.

But this would cause some crippling problems of it's own, as I would soon find out.

The Protagonist Brain(part I)

American philosopher and literary theorist, Kenneth Burke, defines man as "the symbol using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection."

The brain is one big pattern matching machine. It views the world through expectations, categorizing things into larger groups for easier and faster processing. Ask a child to draw a tree, you'll likely get a brown vertical line in crayon with a plump green circle on top. It's not an actual tree they are picturing in their mind, it's shorthand for one, it's a hyper effecient symbol for a tree.

You would think that a photo of something is the fastest and best way to represent it, but it turns out, it may not be. Somehow, symbols, the simpler the better, have worked their way into our minds and form the basis for how we perceive and process all reality. You can extend this logic in many directions, street signs, logos, numbers and letters, silhouettes and even names, but they all boil down to an essence of communication.

Alex Toth was one of the 20th century's best examples of distilling comics down to the barest essentials of visual storytelling. His work was always elegantly clean, clear, free of clutter and devoid of non-essential detail. He spent his life chasing the intellectual perfection of the perfectly told visually conveyed story.

In comics, the more detail you cram into something, the harder it is for the brain to make sense of it. All sense of energy becomes lost when you burden the reader with an abundance of minutiae, making it feel more like freeze frame photography than a kinetic explosion of movement.

This is one of the most essential things to consider when approaching your style, your storytelling, the pacing, how you want the reader to view your work and exactly how fast.

Getting Started...Light and Emotion in a Cup of Coffee

There's never a perfect place to begin an unfinished story.

So, diving right in, lets see some art.

This was part of a page I did in college, after reading a little about Will Eisner's "dirty water" technique. It's an easy technique that can allow the artist a lot of control over light without reliance on heavily spotted blacks. It would influence much of my later work.

When composing this page, I wanted to tell a simple story, someone having a cup of coffee, and how it made them feel. Three wide panels with two insets.

The three wide panels establish the story, at least as I saw it then. The morning ritual of preparing, pouring, then enjoying coffee. The two insets being close up facial reactions showing the human side of the story.

The two inset panel shapes took some consideration. I wanted them to convey a little something extra without hitting you in the face too terribly hard. So, knowing the western eye views everything from left to right, like how we read, I simply narrowed the first one, to imply a narrow outlook coming from the already grim and grumpy expression within. The second, with the coffee kicking in and life looking good, widens. A pretty simple trick that was fairly effective and wasn't terribly distracting.

I also wanted light to play a part, and it remains dark throughout, until the last panel, which is full of light, silhouetting the protagonist who is facing the day ahead, now that he has had his fix.

It's a solid page, but if I were to do it again, the first wide panel would have been a little earlier in the process of making the coffee, maybe grinding beans or something along those lines. Punch up the anticipation a bit more so the payoff feels a bit more important. I would have used an espresso machine, something more visually appealing to look at, done a little more research, looked a little further than my own kitchen for a model. I'm sure ten years from now, I will have a lot more problems with it, the road to perfection, mastery of the craft, it's a long one.