February 7, 2012

This week: Sick week re-posting
(artwork by Rivkah La Fille)

I was too sick this week to make the tutorial I was planning, but I guess someone tipped off the universe because people sent me awesome tutorials to re-post instead.

My favorite came to me from Comic Tools reader David. I'll let him introduce it:

Hi Matt,

I really enjoy your blog and I've been following it for a few years now. Sorry this isn't related to the item you posted - although it was a good post and you make a great point. (I do think technology separates us from reality to such a degree that we have trouble making things seem believable despite the over-the-top "realism" seen in comics and CGI these days.) Anyway, the reason I'm writing is to point you to a post a did recently, detailing my building a combination drawing table/light box. I tried to give as much information as I could - particularly for the wiring part of it. If you're interested you can find the whole thing here at http://www.sneakydragon.com/daves-howto-lightboxdrawing-table.html
Sneaky Dragon is a podcast I do with Ian Boothby, writer for Simpsons and Futurama comics. Hope you find it interesting.

David
This is the table. How goddamned cool is this? This beats the Totoro inkwell, I'm afraid, for coolest reader-built tool submission:

The next tutorial link was sent to me by my friend Emily, who's writing the comic I'm working on. It's a pretty decent little tutorial on marker coloring. I hate markers as a tool, just in a tactile sense, so I don't post much about them. They're expensive, and I don't think I could stand drawing with them enough to execute a tutorial post even if I wanted to pay for them just to do such a post, so I'm happy to have this to post. Marker work can be beautiful when well done. Jamie Hewlett did some gorgeous marker colored pages for Tank Girl years back, for instance. The key is to blend them properly and not have streaky lines showing, which is not easy.

Rivkah tipped me off to French cartoonist Margaux Motin's incredibly lively, expressive ligne claire drawings. If you want to drink in a cartoonist with a true mastery of different kinds of clothing, how to use detail without cluttering a drawing, draping fabric on the human body, body language, facial expression, and a casual mastery of the human form in perspective, then grow a camel hump to hold the oasis that is this woman. I've chosen to link you to a SFW entry, but please be aware that many of her entries depict women in various states of sublimely rendered hawt nudity. (Usually followed with a deflatingly unflattering punchline, like in this example, which may be my favorite so far.)

Kate Beaton did a comic about her bad cartoonist posture, an issue we can all identify with.

Those of you who read last week's entry might have gone to your libraries to see what comics did a good job of making you really feel their environments, and which fell short. Allow me to show you a new webcomic by Ryan Andrews that conveys the changing of the seasons with great sensitivity. Look at how the light changes from summer to winter. The clothes change, the air changes, the sounds change. And yes, you can see the character's breath when it's cold. What a gorgeous, eerie work this comic is.

That's all for this week, see you next week!

2 comments:

Russel Roehling said...

David's lightbox desk is pretty awesome! I don't think I'd ever be industrious enough to build my own desk. I've got an old animation lightbox with the rotating plexiglass disc in it, which is incredibly handy for illustration work.

I agree about markers, too. I don't like how they feel, something about hard felt on paper just doesn't feel right to me. Though guys like Adam Hughes do amazing things with them, so maybe I'm missing out.

Kat said...

Holy snap! ... I must concede defeat! That light table is totally badass. I love the artist mentality of "eff it, I'll just make it myself." I can't even count the number of tools I saw my classmates invent in college to help themselves! Truly, we are the coolest people in the universe.