Arthur Rackham: Illustrator

Arthur Rackham was one of the most famous "Golden Age" illustrators and went on to become an inspiration to a varied group of creative thinkers, including C.S. Lewis, Gulliermo del Toro and Tim Burton. Rackham created rich and believable fantasy worlds by applying a realistic style to fantastical subjects. His faeries, trolls, and animals all seem just one shade shy of human.

Rackham made his living as an illustrator for 47 years, and worked on dozens of books, but Rip Van Winkle, his first artistic and commercial success, was not published until 1905, when he was almost 40.

The story of Arthur Rackham's career is one of steady progress. He attended the Lambeth School of Art part time while working a day job as a clerk, then went on to work as an illustrator for a paper called the Pall Mall Budget, then switched to the (equally dull-sounding) Westminster Budget.

"...for the next seven years or so I worked as hard as I could out of business hours (9–5) to equip myself as an artist – not being able to embark on a professional career till I was nearly 25, & then for many years getting the barest living from my profession & having to do much distasteful hack work."
        -Derek Hudson, Arthur Rackham, His Life and Work 

For the most part, the work he did for these papers had little to distinguish it from the mass of utilitarian Victorian news illustrations generated before photography rendered them obsolete– but inklings of his future work could be seen in drawings such as "The Influenza Fiend."

His drawings show masterful control of watercolors and a tight, muted palette. He is known for his treatment of wood: the grain in beams of fairy-tale cottages; the gnarled, expressive trees.

Rackham worked at a time when printers were switching from woodblocks to the photo zinc process. Where previously the engraver would often reinterpret the artist's original lines to suit his own style or tools– sometimes gluing the original artwork directly to the woodblock as a template– this new process allowed the work to be reproduced identically, and left original drawings unharmed. This is meaningful, as the sale of original artwork was an important source of income throughout Rackham's career.

In contrast to the fairy tale worlds he drew, Rackham led a fairly conventional life. He was a Luddite and a family man, by all accounts happily married to his wife, Edyth, whose own paintings were well recognized in her time. Their studios were next to each other, and some credit her with helping him introduce color to his work.

His particular working method is described in Fred Gettings' 1975 biography, Arthur Rackham:


"Rackham would begin his pictures by sketching carefully with a soft pencil the broad outlines of the composition either working on card, or on a good quality, slightly textured, paper mounted on card… into this he would work his figures or emotive points of interest. This method of working– from established mass to to details within the mass– remained with Rackham throughout his life." 



"…into the general mass of the pencil drawing he would then work in pen and indian ink, and once the basis of the drawing had begun to emerge in ink, he cleaned off the pencil drawing beneath..."

He finished with an allover wash of color (usually sepia), then gradually intensified the colors with thin layers of watercolor– never gouache, as was commonly used at the time. Any lines which were washed out in this process he would trace once more with ink to keep them crisp in reproductions. He started out working at twice the intended reproduction size, and then started working a little larger as he earned more income from selling originals.

Rackham brought his fanciful style to a broad range of subjects. He illustrated operas by Wagner, and plays by Shakespeare. He cultivated a friendship with J.M. Barrie while working on Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. He even illustrated an early edition of Goblin Market, a poem so loaded with erotic symbolism that it was reprinted in Playboy in 1973.

It is a testament to how well-regarded Rackham was in his day that he was asked to illustrate new editions of The Wind in the Willows and Alice in Wonderland– two books which were already quite well known for their illustrations.



Some of the illustrations he originally published in black and white were later republished in color. But you can see here how the color is not necessary for definition of the subject- the linework stands quite well on its own.

Part of the difficulty in researching his work was that many of his illustrations were oversaturated for reprints or the web; it is difficult to find digital images which faithfully reproduce his intended hues. 




Sales of fine illustrated books lagged in England after WWI, but in the US, the market was booming. And luckily, his original artwork continued to sell briskly despite England's economic malaise.

Rackham worked at the peak of his ability right up until his death in 1939. He finished the illustrations for Wind in the Willows while suffering from cancer, driven in part by his lingering regret over having had to turn down the project 20 years prior. 



Derek Hudson's book contains this lovely anecdote:


"Slowly the drawings for The Wind in the Willows neared completion. The last drawing of all to be finished was that of Rat and Mole loading their boat for a picnic. Rackham's daughter remembers his great exhaustion and the extreme difficulty he had in getting it done. When he had, as he thought, finished it, he suddenly discovered there were no oars in the boat. Barbara (His daughter) tried to persuade him that this was a detail that did not matter, but he insisted that everything must be right, and with great labour he altered the drawing and put in the oars. After he had done this, he lay back on his bed and said: 'thank goodness, that is the last one'. And so it proved in every sense."

The ABC of it: Why Children's books matter

Attention everyone in the NYC area! The New York Public library has launched an exhibit on the history of children's books and their illustrations at its main branch in Bryant Park. Many of the items on display are pulled directly from the library's fantastic collection of rare books and artwork, providing a glimpse at some of the delicate and irreplaceable tomes which are usually locked away in a climate controlled vault.

I loved this show (despite the absence of a few of my favorite artists), and will definitely be returning a few times before it closes next March. The curator, Leonard S. Marcus, does an admirable job of tackling such a sprawling subject in a way that is visually interesting to both adults and small children. There are picture books from Brazil, comics from India, and a few hilariously moralistic tomes from the early days of print. There is original art by Sir John Tenniel (Alice in Wonderland), and W.W. Denslow (The Wizard of Oz),  as well as real-world artifacts that appear in famous stories- the stuffed animals that inspired the Winnie the Pooh stories, and P.L. Travers' parrot handle umbrella (Mary Poppins had one of a similar design). The show touches on some interesting ideas, such as the influence of Eastern art on Western illustration (and vice versa), or the way children's books in the 1950's and 60's adapted to be in direct competition with comics (which were the scourge of librarians at the time). It left me wishing the show was large enough to warrant an in-depth exhibition catalog!

There are a handful of comics included in the exhibition, but I had mixed feelings about the way they were presented. I don't know that I would classify Blankets as a children's book, and Will Eisner's Contract with God is definitely aimed at an older, more sophisticated, audience. But I'm glad to see that comics were represented, and I enjoyed the novelty of seeing a paperback copy of Blankets in a formidable glass display case next to a Hokusai manga from 1817. 

This exhibit made me want to see a deeper exploration of the role of comics in the children's market.
And while it's true that many comics aimed at children or young adults lack the literary recognition and critical acclaim achieved by some the books featured in this exhibit, that is certain to change soon. New Yorker editor Francoise Mouly has started a much-lauded imprint dedicated to comics for children, and you couldn't hope for a better literary pedigree than that.

So definitely see the show! It's free, it's air conditioned, and there are several shelves of books to read as part of the exhibit. And if any of you attend, I'd love to hear your opinions on the show in general, and the presentation of comics in particular!

How to Scan Your Comics - Part 1

For part one, I'm going to start with the basics: scanning black and white line art to create a bitmap for black and white reproduction.

A bitmap has only two color settings, black, and white. You may be thinking, "great! my drawing has only two colors, black and white", but the transition from paper to print isn't always that straightforward. You know all those photographs of movie stars with alarmingly sheer black shirts on? Well that shirt probably looked opaque until someone shined a very bright light on it. A similar principle is at work with your scanner. That scanner can only see your image as it looks when a very bright light is shining on it, and this light will highlight any inconsistencies in the thickness of your ink, creating mottled patches in areas that should be all black. Your goal is to take your scanned greyscale image, and decide which of those grey pixels should be white, and which be black.

For this example, I have chosen an antique image which is tiny, dark, and complicated, which will require a bit of fiddling before it looks good (as you'll see below).

It is possible to scan directly to bitmap - plenty of artists do, but you run the risk of losing a lot of detail. In a direct-to-bitmap scan, you are allowing the scanner to make artistic decisions for you. I tried it with the image at left, and this was the result- not exactly ideal.

Your minimum print resolution for line art should be between 1000 and 2000 DPI. 1200 is standard, 800 is doable, but at that point some eagle eyed readers will start seeing pixels.

So erase your pencils, dust off your art, and prep your scanner. I don't want to make any extra work for myself, so I remove any dust or fingerprints on the glass with a lens cloth (an old t-shirt will work in a pinch), or blast it with a bit of compressed air. If the scanner bed is really dirty, it can be cleaned with a tiny bit of rubbing alcohol on a low-lint cloth.

You'll want to scan in grayscale at highest DPI your computer can manage- preferably a bit higher then your final print resolution. Through trial and error, I eventually settled on 2,400 DPI for most images, but that's because I'm a maniac with a pile of external hard drives to store all my massive files. If you're reproducing your artwork at a 1:1 ratio, then can scan directly to your desired print resolution, but often the print size is going to be smaller than the actual artwork, and you can eek by with less. Make sure your scanner is set to jpeg, the scanner was designed primarily for photographers, and will default to the much larger TIFF file if I'm not paying attention.



As you can see, my scanned image came out much murkier than the original.

scan

photograph of original image

Now that you've scanned your images; I want you to stop, put down the stylus, and save yourself a new version of the file (I usually label them "scan" and "edit").

In fact, if you are in the midst of scanning the masterwork that took you 3 years to write and 8 years to draw, pause now and burn a bunch of CDs to mail to trusted friends (then repeat this process again with the final print files). Everyone has a hard drive horror story, and you'll be glad to have the extra backups if your hard drive expires after you've sold half of the original pages.

Now, open your duplicate copy in Photoshop, and make sure it's still in grayscale.

For this time I am  working entirely with levels, so hit command+L to bring up the adjustment panel, and start nudging the black and white arrows closer to each other. Start with very small adjustments, zooming in and out as you go.

Screenshots of the work in progress, click to enlarge

Keep an eye out for potential problem areas like fine lines, or dark areas with white highlights. You can zoom way in to see how some of the fine lines are doing.

At a certain point, those minor adjustments will become almost imperceptible on your screen, and at that point you can start getting more bold, and really move those sliders around.

When you are happy with the result, SAVE it, and re-size the image to your desired print size and resolution by going to "Image" > "Image size". Here I decided on around 8"x11" at 1,600 DPI. Leave the "resample" drop down alone for now, we'll revisit that later.

Once your image is the appropriate size you can convert it to a bitmap. Go to "Image" > "Mode" > "Bitmap", and the output settings in the dialog box should already match the resolution of your jpeg. Not click on the "Method" dropdown menu and select "50% Threshold". Hit ok, SAVE your bitmap and you're done!
 

 click to enlarge the images below.

Website redesign, plus new URL!

We're back!

I've spent the last few weeks tinkering with the website- changing the color scheme, putting up a new header, and shifting the whole thing over to a new url: www.comic-tools.com.

Feed settings should stay the same, but please let me know if you have any issues!

I will be back later this morning with an introduction to scanning your artwork for print.

Comic Tools: Latex Masking Fluid

Watercolor resist is basically just a tiny bottle of tinted liquid latex. There are a number of ways to mask out areas of watercolor and ink drawings, but I like the way the resist leaves natural brush lines around and inside the masked area.

You'll need: a bottle of "Art Masking Fluid" (I used Windsor and Newton, above), and some cheap, relatively stiff, paintbrushes. Paint the resist onto the page, in a medium thick layer, the thinner the coating, the more difficult it is to pull it up and peel it off. This latex is tinted so that you can see where you've painted.

When you are done painting, immediately dunk the brush in warm water. If the latex is allowed to dry on your brush for even a moment it will turn the bristles into a horrible, gummy, mess.

brush-ruining gunk.

You can dry the brush on a paper towel before you use it again, so as not to water down the masking fluid, but it's always best to err on the side of rinsing the brush too often. You'll still want to use cheap, disposable, brushes for this, because no matter how careful you are, the latex will start to build up in the bristles after a while.

Allow the resist to dry completely, then paint over it with watercolor, ink, or gouache. Once the paint is dry, you can carefully peel up the resist. The results are kind of magical.

This is the fun part

Try to peel, not rub, whenever possible. Rubbing at the page can cause any pigment that is sitting on top of the resist to transfer to your fingers, and from your fingers to the blank page below. If you find you need to rub off the smaller areas, the best way to keep stray pigment at bay is to wipe your wingers frequently on a slightly damp paper towel. If you're really concerned about staining your masked areas, you can wait until the piece dries, then clean up the resist areas with a small brush and some fresh water. But I rarely have the patience for that.

You can use the resist to cover an already painted area, as long as the paper is fully dry. Any dampness in the paper will cause the resist to fuse with the paper and become very difficult to remove.

Above, you can see how you get a nice continuity to your brushstrokes when you're using the masking fluid. It would be useful when blocking out characters against a cloudy sky, or to create clean areas next to any kind of splatter texture. I searched around online to see who had made amazing use of this technique, and found a few interesting results, but I bet you guys can do better. Send along any images and I will post them later!

Interview with: Josh Bayer

Comics: ROM, Raw Power, Bike Rider, The Fighter Anthologies: Rub The Blood, No Me, Secret Prison, Cake, Digestate, Henry and Glenn Forever and Ever #2, Lazer, Komicaze, Carrier Pigeon, Yeti. Editor: Suspect Device vols 1 and 2
Website: http://www.joshbayerart.com/

How did you start working on comics?
My dad came home with an issue of RAW. He always supported comics in a weird way. He grew up reading them, he loved Will Eisner and Lil' Abner.  At the time, RAW was being distributed all over the place because MAUS was so big. It was in this issue, I think it was Issue #9, where I saw some comics by Marc Beyer. He had this great, sort of primitive style, and I started drawing comics with the same kind of flattened look. I was 17 and I was great (laughs)! I was 18, 19, 20 and I was still doing it, and somehow I kind of lost the thread, I figured out a different studio practice, started doing more gallery-ready art.
As my 20's petered out I wanted to get back into comics because that was my childhood dream, and I couldn't do it anymore. I had to go back to school to figure out how make comics again. In 2005 I was 35 and taking my first comics course. 

What kind of materials were you using when you first started making comics?
My early stuff was all ebony pencils and ball point. Somebody gave me an ink set for my Bar Mitzvah– have you ever seen those cartoons where Charlie Brown trying to write a letter using calligraphy pens? The whole joke is that Charlie Brown can't even write "dear pen pal" without it exploding. That was my experience with nib pens when I was a little kid.  SVA kind of guided me into using the nib pens properly, and so now I use those a lot, but also brushes, markers, all kinds of things.


What else changed about your work at SVA?
There was definitely a shift that happened a couple weeks into my first "Comic Book Hot House" class with Matt Madden, Jessica Abel and Tom Hart.  Matt was a real hardass about students getting their work done. I remember one night when I was at home and I had a bunch of work to do. I started analyzing why I was putting it off, and I realized comics are my favorite thing to do. I tell my students that sometimes, "think about why you're avoiding the work. Is it just garden variety fear?". There was a conversation that I was having with myself that I changed, telling myself, "this isn't work, it's not labor, it's fun".
    That's one of the things that changed, but it also helped just having somebody demonstrate how to get beyond some of the basic stumbling blocks. Like when you're ruling borders with a nib pen and the ink gets sucked underneath the ruler, so the borders get splotchy. My ruler has quarters taped to the underside, which lifts it up off the paper and keeps the ink from getting trapped. Before, things like that would make me feel like fate was against me. It helps when you understand that it's a universal problem with a simple solution.
    The hardest part for me was learning that I had to blueprint out the pages. I had this voice in my head saying, A) "you're able to draw in your sketchbooks free-form without any underdrawings so you should be able to do it on the comic page", and B) "even if you can master that, it's going to take away all the spontaneity", and having somebody open that dialogue and say that yes, it's going to take away some of the spontaneity and it's a trade-off. You can always learn to put that spontaneity back into the work.

So you use blue pencil?
No, I'm talking about blue print in the metaphorical sense. I don't really use blue pencil that much, I just mean my underpencils.

Click through for larger image

Do you work mostly on your own stories?
Yeah. I worked on a collaboration for a few years with my best friend, a comic called Bam Bam and the Barbarians. It's a great script, but it's on hiatus, I got sidetracked by other projects. I worked on developing a comic that was based on a screenplay that my brother wrote, but that project is also on hiatus. I tend to finish stuff more when it's all my own creation. I think I kind of stumble into doing successful writing pieces, and it for me it's always dependent on stitching together a lot of pre-existing ideas.

Do you start with the visual ideas? Character designs, or an image you really want to use?
It's simultaneous. It seems like we all have this idea of what creation is supposed to be, and what writing is supposed to be. And when I am with my students, I'll sort of trick them into doing it. I just did this assignment where I had them all do comics based on childhood dreams. I got the idea from a Corinne Mucha comic about how when she was a kid she dreamt of flying, and she woke up thinking she could fly for an entire week. It's a great assignment because the dream will have happened long enough ago that you'll have no choice but to make up the details. You can't illustrate those memories directly.

But at the same time it's got a clear start point.
While they're working on it, I encourage them to let the ideas marinate, think about what was going on inner lives when they were young. So after they do a few pages of the dream I have them "wake up" and then show a little bit of what their life was like at that time. I did something similar when I made ROM, which was a 25 page adaptation of a old Marvel comic, the sort of thing I might have read as a kid. The whole time I was thinking, "1982, I was 12, this is what my neighborhood was like, this is what my bedroom was like". So when I was done with my riff on the superhero comic, I added the kid based on myself as a framing device.

You teach at 3rd ward?
Yeah, I'm super proud to be there.

What are the students like?
Most of them have an art school background so they've been some of my favorite classes to teach because it's so similar to my own background. But they tend to be young, 20's 30's and 40's, and there isn't as much diversity as there is at the other schools where I teach. At Educational Alliance, where I've taught for 5 years, it's more racially diverse, it's more age diverse. I've had 70 year old students there, and I've had 13 years old students.

Do you find that the people at Educational Allaince are familiar with comics in a different way? Do they have different reference points?
Actually, a lot of times it's the 70 year old coming in with a copy of Epileptic. I've heard that the demographic is changing at other schools as well, there are a lot more female students, a lot more diversity. Comics are out there now in a way that they weren't before. People are reading reviews of Persopolis in Time magazine.
    When I was 12, I found an American Splendor collection at my local library, and I never forgot the boldness of his choices.  There's one story where he's looking right at you for 16 panels in a grid. Just talking. That really stuck with me. Libraries were super important in my development as a cartoonist. My dad was a Librarian and I used to go hang out in his office, and read books about cartooning. There were two Smithsonian collections, and a book called Great Comic Book Heroes by Pfiffer. Those books weren't easy to get back then, and I was lucky my dad had an interest in comics.

So how do you do the coloring, it looks like you're doing a couple of different things?
Right now I'm doing watercolor on my pages and then using gouache on top of it. I'm also doing another project in color where I'm using zipotone. I just had a breakthrough on how to clean up my pages in Photoshop, and I'm hoping that will give me a new lease on life in terms of that program. I've always had a problem with my pages getting greasy and thumb-printed, I carry them around a lot, I do them in sketchbooks, and I've started to notice that the pages get really grimy.
    In the past a lot of my teachers warned me away from doing my colors on the inked page. Mastering that has been a steep learning curve. I go back and fourth between new techniques and my old way of working. That's how it was when I was learning how to use a nib pen. I made it sound like it was an easier transition than it was. My teacher showed me how to use it, and then I had a few days where I thought, "I can't do this, then pens are just fighting me too much" and I'd go back to using the micron again for a while. It's been like that with coloring too, I'm not a tech-y guy, I went into grad school in my 30's, on the tail end of the technological revolution. There were all these 20 year olds I was going to school with, and I felt like, on a scale of 1 to 10, they were a 5 or a 7 with Photoshop, and I was a 1. Now I'm a 3, and gradually coming up to 3.5 or 4. I just discovered the magic eraser tool.
    So I'll use Photoshop when it's a simple coloring job, with flat colors. I use a variety of things when I'm coloring right on the page. When I did fine arts, color was one of my strengths, so it's been about narrowing the gap between doing what comes naturally to me and doing it it a way that makes the images look really beautiful when they come out of the printer. Gary Panter and Laura Winestein, both have really raw styles, and both told me that they do their work with the colors on different layers when the it's meant for reproduction. That way they keep their blacks really black. but then there are cartoonists, like Vanessa Davis, who once said the idea of keeping the blacks really pure seems almost fetishistic, for her it's ok to have the blacks get a little gritty.

What techniques did you use to make your fine art pieces?
I threw everything at those. They're on huge sheets of paper, and I would do them with a lot of oil painting and layers, glazes, gluing things to the page. When I was just starting out,  my bother really encouraged me to use oil sticks. He thought that I was going to be a Basquiat type of artist, and encouraged that in me. My brother was my school for a while, I didn't go to school for art, but he had, and he was like my mentor. So with the big pieces, I'd use oil stick and then let them dry, then I'd go back into them with paint pens and markers, because you wouldn't be able to finesse the line with the oil stick; couldn't get little feather lines.  I wanted to keep it raw and honest– but that got frustrating because I couldn't embellish the line, couldn't polish it. I went through a transition where my work was caught between the styles, then I smoothed it all out. I'm still smoothing it out.
    So now I'll use an ink wash, then oil paint, then oil stick, then paint pens, then maybe some more oil paint, and then more paint pens, and red and black china marker. I'd fake it a little with colored pencils to make it look like I'd sketched underneath the original line.

Are most of your fine art pieces really large?
Most of them. But those art pieces were a full time thing for me. These days I'm focused on comics.
    I make these one page drawings that I give away to people who buy my comics. I have to do them really fast; I don't pencil first, I use a thicker line, and in a way it's like this idealized type of art. A really honest drawing. When I first offered to do it on my website, I thought, "Oh God, every time I get an order I'll have to do this", but it's ended up being my favorite part of the week in terms of drawing. I always learn something about what makes a successful piece of work when I'm done. I think "Why does this work even though I spent just four minutes on it, when in the last two weeks I've spent 17 hours doing zipotone and polishing work on this Henry and Glen comic". I can do really fast, successful, work when I need to, but I've also developed this incredibly time-consuming way of making art.

What are you using for those Drawings?
I mostly use Crayola watercolor markers on those are the backing boards you use to store comics. They're great to draw on because they have a really smooth surface.

What kind of paper are you using to draw your comics?
It's Croquis, you can carry this pad with you, it's portable, and that encourages you to draw.
I read this interview with a former Navy Seal, and they asked him how he got through boot camp, and he said "I changed the conversation I was having with myself". It's about base, ground-level transformation. Transforming the way you think about yourself, and the way you think about what you're doing.

You talked about that earlier, that you changed the conversation that you were having with yourself about getting work done.
Yeah.

And it was that easy?
Not at all. But there's a point where you remember that [your thoughts] are an important component. I don't read a lot of books on positive thinking or anything, but that being aware of that process has helped me. Saying consciously, "I am going to stop feeling this way about making art, and thinking this way about making art; I'm going to think about it in a new way".

Cheat Sheet:
Pens: Semi-flexible nib pens, Crowquills, Paintpens, Cross fountain pens, microns.              
Brushes: Roundtip watercolor brushes, Pentel or Elmers brushpens.
Ink: Yasutomo Ink
Paper: Croquis, Smooth Vellum Bristol; Stonehenge; Transparent Bond paper

Interview with: Jess Fink

Be Aware: This post contains images that are NSFW.

Comics: Chester 5000, We Can Fix It
Making Comics Since: 1997
Website: http://jessfink.com/Chester5000XYV/, http://jessfink.com/kwe/

What did you start out using when you first started drawing comics
I think I just used to draw on printer paper, that was the only ridiculously large supply of paper lying around. I started drawing in lined notebooks, stuff like that. in High school I would carry around a big binder with loose sheets of paper in it; I would draw comics on that, and then I would staple them together and make my friends read them.

Did you go to school for art?
Yeah, I went to School of Visual Arts

I didn't realize that. I also went to SVA.
You too?

I went for photography, but ended up hanging out with cartoonists a lot.
That's what I hated about that school, nobody from different majors really hung out much. I know people now who were in the animation program at the time I was in the cartooning program, and I'm like, "I guess we could have been friends in school, but we never met".

When did you graduate?
2002.

That was a ways before I went there anyway.
I had friends who were photography majors. I was amazed by how much money everything costs. It's a lot of money for equipment, and film, and processing.

Cartooning is great because the ceiling for really top notch tools is a lot lower than it is in other disciplines.
A lot of people swear by really really cheap tools– it's whatever you feel comfortable with.

What kind of tools did you try in the past did you just pick specific a set of tools and stick with them? things or did you go through a bunch of tools before you found what works for you?
When I was in school, most of our professors would tell us to use nibs, so I used a nib for a while.  I had Tom Hart, who was an awesome teacher. He really encouraged us to try different things before we settled on something. I used a brush for a while, and I did a lot of comics with a nib, but it got really frustrating, because I was always pressing too hard. I would fuck it up. I basically just wanted a pencil that would ink. I finally settled on felt tip, and then I started using microns, and I've just kept using those. Most people think microns are the crappiest things, they run out of ink really fast, and the tip gets destroyed, but they're the only thing I feel safe using.

You get a very consistent line with a felt tip.
When people use a brush they like that it's not consistent, they have a pencil drawing, and then they use the brush to transform it into something else. I can't do that, I like to have a lot of control over my lines.

Do you use microns of different sizes?
I mostly use a 03. I work really really small. Most of my pages are only six inches tall. I like to work really tiny. If I have to do a super tiny little background I'll use an 01, for regular panels I use an 03, and I use an 08 for the borders. I used to use a rapdiograph. I used to use copic multiliners because you can refill them, but the tip still wears out, so refilling them only gets you so far.

How many microns do you go through in the course of a comic?
Oh my god, so many.

Can you venture a guess?
Oh gosh, let me think. I think an .03 will last me 8 pages before it starts to die.

Wow.
I have microns all over the place because they'll usually still have a little ink in them, but I can't use them for comics because the tip is busted.

Dead Microns

I wish there was something I felt better using because it's so wasteful. I have so many pens. I used to draw caricatures, so I have this giant stash of sharpies and prismacolor markers that I'll probably never use again.

What kind of paper do you use?
I used to be really bad and just do comics in my sketchbook. All the first pages of Chester 5000  were in my sketchbook. I have them in a portfolio now, and they're all cut out in odd shapes. I used to do everything in the easiest possible way. In the past few years I've been forcing myself to get more professional about it. Now I work on big sheets of watercolor paper. I don't use the expensive stuff, everyone loves Arches (watercolor Paper), and it is beautiful paper, but I don't like the away my ink wash works on it, so I use the cheaper Canson paper.

I wanted to talk to you about your ink wash, what's your technique?
I made this little set for myself. It's just five little canisters glued to a wooden board and they each have different levels of ink and water in them. It's like a gradient starting at the top with a skin tone level, down to a super-thick black at the end. So I can just pull from that and paint with it.

Do you have specific formulas for the ink wash or are you eyeballing it?
I just eyeball it, I have a giant bottle of ink and i use test papers. I use higgins ink, but I'm not too picky about it.

Then you do the color tint in Photoshop?
yeah, I work with the levels and then the hue saturation. I have a batch action I just drag onto new scans.

What about when you're coloring other illustrations? I noticed you have a couple of full color comics, and some of the prints that you're selling, is that all digital?
I do work digitally sometimes, I used to use flash all the time. A lot of my Threadless designs were in flash.

Cookie Loves Milk on Threadless

instead of Illustrator? To do vector graphics?
Yup, when I went to school they taught us how to use Illustrator. But I couldn't just draw with it, I had to make a shape– it was more like sculpting. I just wanted to use a pencil and draw, and I got that from Flash. I never learned how to animate it, but I used it all the time. I haven't worked in vector in a long time, so now I mostly use Photoshop at a really high resolution.

There isn't a whole lot of text in your comics so far.
yeah it's silent

Can you talk about that decision at all?
I really liked these books called Tijuana Bibles, they're just these really dirty comics people used to sell in the 20's,30's and 40's. It was illegal to sell porn, so people would just draw these dirty little comics and sell them from their coat pocket on the street. They're hilarious, sometimes it's a completely new character, new story, and sometimes it was Greta Garbo, or Betty Boop– just about anybody. I think there was a Mussolini one, a Babe Ruth one.

Are those mostly silent? the tijuana bibles?
They're not, but they're just tiny black and white cartoons, and I wanted to do something small and simple like that. Then later I got into silent films and other stuff from the 1920's, because the style of the Tijuana Bibles is very much from the 1920's. Then I started thinking about the 1800s and the industrial revolution, and maybe I could do something that felt like a silent film but was set back then.

In the your interview with Sequential Tart, Suzette called it "steamporn".
(Laughs)

Was she the first person to use that, or was that something you self-identified?
Lots of people have called it steampunk porn, there's no "steam" in it, it's just a robot!

Do you thumbnail your work beforehand? or are you making things up as you go along?
For the first half of Chester I had and outline for the story, but as far as thumbnailing it and writing it, I just made it up as I went along. I knew that there were points I wanted to hit– a point A, and a point B, and an ending. Now I'm trying to be more efficient and adult in my process, so I've started writing outlines for everything, and thumbnailing in advance.

You've worked on a couple of other comics recently?
Yeah, I used to do dirty comics for Fantagraphics anthologies. I started doing some autobiographical stuff, I did a piece for The Smut Peddler recently. I also have another book coming out from top shelf, that I did a while ago.

You're talking about We Can Fix It?
That should be out next year.

Pencils, Inks, and color

How is it as a cartoonist living in Troy?
It's really cheap! It's super cheap to live here and it's really cute. I really love Troy because it's so Victorian.

I was surprised by how nice the architecture was when I went there.
I used to live on Long Island, and when I moved out here, I didn't realize that everything on Long Island is fairly new, like people started living there in the 1930's. There are no Victorian buildings, they just didn't exist.

What ended up bringing you to Troy?
My boyfriend came up here, and I pretty much realized that there was no way for me to have any kind of life on Long Island because it's so expensive. There are a lot of art people in Troy, and we have a nice art center. There's also a comics collective that my friend, TJ Kirsch, started up. He goes to the local conventions, which are usually just dudes with cardboard boxes full of comics.


That's kind of how Albuqeurque has been for the last ten years, the comics scene there is just starting to get off the ground.
I think it's hard to get comics people together. Because there are so many forms of art where it's easy to congregate around it, like dance troupes, or people who make sculptures out of Bicycles– there are a lot of those in Troy. Cartoonists are all going to be in rooms by themselves, drawing.

I've always gotten the sense that there is a lot of community in cartooning, it's just online, of it meets twice a year at conventions.
Yeah exactly. I have friends here who do comics, but it always feels like there's more of a community online. It's a solitary art form. I love having an online community, especially since I work from home.

What do you do as a day job?
I just do this, I quit my job at a video game company 2 1/2 years ago. I've just been freelancing since then, I sell a lot of jewelry and t-shirt designs.

I am always excited when I hear people can make a living doing what they love.
But I wouldn't have health insurance if it wasn't for my boyfriend.

Does he make comics?
He works at a video game company, but he also makes a comic called Rutabaga, you should check it out.

How did you get the show at the museum of sex?
The curator, cartoonist Craig Yoe, contacted me about it, so then I got in touch with the museum.

It was a group show with other erotic cartoon artists?
I probably would have crapped my pants if I'd thought about it too hard because there was a Tom of Finland across from my drawing. There was old playboy stuff, Tijuana Bibles, some Anime but not a ton, and then they had more modern stuff. It was an awesome show.

How did you end up getting Chester 5000 published?
I had printed copies of We Can Fix It and the Chester book, to sell at SPX one year. Top Shelf has always been my favorite publisher. I've read Blankets, and Goodbye Chunky Rice is one of my favorite comics of all time. I just loved everything they were putting out, but I never really thought about Chester for them because it's like, "it's dirty, who's going to publish this"? Lee Walton (of Top Shelf) had read my work before, then Chris Staros (who runs the company came by my table), and I gave him copies of both books. A week later he called me and wanted to publish them. They're really nice people. And surprisingly, they like porn.

How did you start promoting your webcomic? Did conventions play a big part in that?
Not really, it's really just word of mouth. I took out ads through Project Wonderful too. It was created by Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics), was basically thinking about regular people who want to take out ads of have ads on their comics. You can use Project Wonderful to place ads on different sites. Most webcomics I read now have Project Wonderful ads on their site. It's a pretty good way to get awareness out for your comic.

Good advice, part 2

I'm having technical difficulties this week which prevent me from bringing you your regularly scheduled content. I've got a great interview with Jess Fink, creator of the sexy (and NSFW) webcomic, Chester 5000, coming up shortly, but in the meantime, enjoy some more words of wisdom plucked from previous interviews!

Matt Haley:
Create your own comics and put them on the web, instead of trying to get a paying gig right out of art school, there aren't any, and you'll get a lot more notice for your creations than drawing someone else's characters. Draw every day, even when you're sick or you have homework. Get kicked out of class for drawing comics. learn to like staying inside. Stay away from caffeine, drink green tea instead. Exercise. Invest in gold.

Ryan Dunlavey:
Always look for new drawing tools that make things easier or faster or better looking than what you’re already doing. Use a Wacom tablet if you’re going to make art on the computer, even just coloring.

Adrain Tomine:
I know a lot of artists who use tools that I can’t stand and achieve beautiful results, so I guess it’s good to just try a lot of things. I used to think that if I “solved” the mystery of what were the “correct” tools, I’d suddenly be drawing like a pro, and that obviously wasn’t the case. I also think it’s good to not be stingy when it comes to art supplies. I used to try to save money by using cheap paper, for example, and any monetary savings were far surpassed by wasted time, frustration, etc...

Hope Larson:
Never throw anything away. Tools that used to drive you crazy may prove ideal later on!

Grant Reynolds:
When you're just getting started it's more important to make as much work as possible than to worry about whether that work is good or not. What I mean is, all the stuff like style and storytelling will figure itself out in time. The more you just do it, the more quickly and easier it will come. Experience, more than anything else, is going to make you better -- not what pens or paper or other materials you're using. And when you're finished with it don't put it in your desk, put it out. It's important to get feedback, and to see your comic as a finished product. Put it somewhere like Quimby's Comics to sell. It'll make you feel good, y'know.

MK:
Don't go out and buy a $20 brush when you don't know what a $2 brush is like. Buy the cheap stuff and upgrade when you've gotten better with them. Then when you get a better brush, you'll know what the difference is & won't kill some expensive stuff with your crappy beginnings & lack of care.
Give yourself a nice setup to work in. It makes it much easier to stay at your desk when you have a place for your tea, an audiobook loaded up on your stereo, and a stack of bristol right next to you. Also it gives you fewer excuses to get up.
Listen to audiobooks, especially long books that would otherwise take you a while to read. Music is too easy to get up from, but good stories are harder to take a break from.
Set a realistic schedule & stick to it, but don't let yourself get burnt out. Take breaks when you need to, but don't get lazy.
Be a shameless self promoter.

Kevin Colden:
Forget everything you've read here and find your own damn tools. That's half the fun!

Writing for Comics: An interview with MK Reed

How did you first get interested in writing comics?
I first got into comics by doing stuff for the daily paper at college. Some of the comics in the paper were great, Nicholas Gurewitch, who does the Perry Bible Fellowship, was running his comics in the paper at that time, but there was also a lot of stuff that wasn't so great. I looked at it and thought "I could definitely do that".

Was it gag strips?
Gags, slice of life, serialized stories, there was a crazy range of work. It was like webcomics, only on paper.

And after that, you spent a couple years drawing and self publishing your own work?
Cross Country is the only comic I self published as an actual book. There were also a lot of mini comics, and two longer stories before that that I'm not completely embarrassed to show people now, years later.

How did you transition from writing and drawing to writing comics for other people?
In 2007, after I had started work on Cross Country. My friend and writing partner, Greg Means, wanted a longer story that he could serialize in his magazine, Papercutter. Greg and I threw around a bunch of ideas I was working on at the time, but Americus was kind of a shoe-in from the beginning, since Greg is a librarian, and the story deals with books. It's very library centric. But he knew my time was tied up with working on Cross Country, so he suggested getting another artist involved.  Greg knew Jonathan Hill from around Portland, and when I saw his work I thought, "he's amazing, and we have to get him".

How did it get picked up by First Second?
I knew a few of the people at First Second from the NY comics scene, so I went by their booth at the New York Comic Con, and when I told them I was a writer, they said I should send them something. I submitted the first four chapters of Americus, which had already been drawn, and they were very interested in it from the start.

How do you write your scripts?
I always spend a lot of time working out details before I sit down and do any writing. I start out with a general outline, that includes in all the moments that are important to the story, so I can figure out roughly how long it's going to be. Then I break that outline down into chapters, and the chapters down into pages.
I write everything in Google docs. When I'm working with collaborators, it's easier to have the project online, so that I can be certain everyone has the most recent version. Each script contains dialogue, directions for the acting, and panel descriptions. When I started out with Johnathan I would give him basic page layouts and thumbnails as well, but then he'd come back with something that looked so much better than what I'd come up with, and eventually I just let him work it out on his own.

What's different about the way you work when you're writing without a collaborator?
Mainly? It takes me way longer. The nice thing about working with a writing partner is that you have someone to be accountable to, someone to make sure you finish things on time.

Do you miss working on your own comics?
I'm still working on my own side projects. I'm serializing About a Bull, which is set in Ireland. It's going to be really long and it's taking me forever, but it fills my need to draw, and to work on something that's all my own. I have other small projects as well, but I tend to put them on the back burner whenever someone wants to collaborate.

Do you read a lot of prose books, or mostly comics?
I draw inspiration from other comics, but books and movies too. It's helpful to see stories told in different forms, to see different ways of handling common scenarios. Exposing yourself to a broad range of influences is really helpful during the idea phase. But it's really about letting yourself be bored.

How so?
I spend a lot of time in front of books or screens, and on the subway I'll listen to podcasts.  But it's helpful to spend some quite time just thinking about the story. I get a lot of writing done in the shower, It's where all my problems get solved. I can't tell you how many things have clicked together when I stopped paying attention, when I was looking out the window on train rides or car rides. Just being able to let your mind water is an extremely good way to let things come together.

What happens when the artist when they're doing something in a way that wasn't what you envisioned?
I've been pretty lucky in the artists I've worked with, we've been able to talk about things pretty openly. When the drawings aren't right sometimes it's just because I left out some basic information in the script. By the end of Americus, I had a better sense of what I needed to write for Johnathan, so there were fewer corrections.

Can you tell me anything about your upcoming book?
The working tittle is The Cute Girl Network. It's about a girl whose friends are trying to convince her to break up with her boyfriend, who's kind of a dumbass.

And you and Greg are working on that together?
Yes, we finished writing it two years ago, and we've worked on a couple of projects since then. We've finished a second book that Matt Wiegle is drawing. I'm also working with Farel Dalrymple redoing one of my older stories, once he finishes his current project.

How did First Second end up picking up TCGN?
When we were working on Americus they seemed open to doing other projects, and when I sent them the script they really liked it. I've been lucky in that sense.

Any other advice for people who are interested in writing for comics?
Go be social and meet people at conventions. These people will give you feedback, and help build your network. All the opportunities I've gotten have just been from getting to know people in the indie comics scene over the course of several years.

Do you think it's as easy to break into the scene now as it was ten years ago when you were just starting out?
It's easier to break in, but harder to get attention. The scene was much smaller in 2004 than it is now, and there's a new class graduating from SVA every year full of all these amazingly talented kids. When the internet was a smaller place it was easier to get noticed in the webcomics world. But even now, sometimes you just need the right person to mention your blog to their 50,00 followers.

And there are more people reading comics right now.
It's a real Renaissance in comics right now. There's just so much good stuff out there.