Summer Intensive 2009 Meta-post

One thing about blogs is that it's a real pain to read a series of posts because you have to navigate backwards. So I have compiled links in order to all of my Summer Intensive 09 posts for your ease of reading. And here are the links, in order starting from Day one:

Day one: getting started and jam comics
Day one: comics recommendations from the students
Day two: the wrong planet and Gary Panter
Day three: layout
Day four, part one: thumbs and lettering
Day four, part two: Tom Hart
Day five: work day
Day six: pencils
Day seven, part one: inking
Day seven, part two: Kim Deitch
Day eight: planning minis
Day nine, part one: finishing up
Day nine, part two: David Mazzucchelli
MoCCA Art Festival
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Summer Intensive, Day the Last, Part 2: MoCCA visit with David Mazzucchelli

The Friday afternoon before MoCCA Art Festival our students were scrambling to get their comics finished up. Still, we made time to meet up at MoCCA after lunch, where David Mazzucchelli himself met us to give us a tour of his just-opened retrospective show, "Sounds and Pauses, the Comic Art of David Mazzucchelli," curated by Dan Nadel.


What follows is an annotated selection of some photos we took that afternoon.

[reposted and slightly edited... and now featuring a jump!]

David introduces the show to the class, Jessica, and, on the right, Nick Bertozzi, who happened to be around that day. One thing worth passing along if you are going to see the show is that you can move clockwise or counter-clockwise, both ways lead you to the most recent work, the instant classic Asterios Polyp. (Heading to the right takes you via superheroes and to the left via Rubber Blanket and the Kodansha period. More or less.)


The blown-up panel that serves as the entrance to the show was painted by David himself after an elaborate transfer project involving a puzzle of 8 1/2" x 11" sheets of paper with little pieces of the blown-up image on them.


These four drawings are framed four-up because they are small, maybe 5" x 3". These drawings were used for the cover images of Batman: Year One, for which they were blown-up and colored--see the next photo:


This is an acetate overlay of the blown-up image, now something more like 10 x 15", with painted color by Richmond Lewis underneath [correction courtesy Signor Mazzucchelli: Richmond colored all the interiors; David colored the covers himself--MM]. I asked and now forget if it's gouache or acrylic. I think it's the former. David loved the effect of these covers: the simplified, gestural inking which went on to become a hallmark of his later style. You can see the progression from the earlier to later pages from that series.


For example, David pointed out how you could see increasing amounts of white ink on the later pages where he had "undrawn" detail he had put in through habit. (Click the photo to enlarge.)


Just a shot of David talking about his work with various sketches and studies in the background.



A spread and one of the vellum overlays which enabled David to work in two Pantone colors on a story which changed a lot of cartoonists' (myself included--see "Night of the Grossinator") ideas about the potential of color and printing in comics, "Discovering America" from Rubber Blanket #2 (by the way there are copies of Rubber Blanket on sale at the show and I recommend you snatch them up before they're all gone).


The final, printed spread (the red plate of the page on the left appears in the previous photo). David reiterated numerous times that the original pages are of little value to him; what counts—what is the real comic—is the printed book.


Kind of an illegible photo, but just to give you a shot of the two flat cases full of David's notes, index cards, studies, and lettering samples for Asterios Polyp. He worked out the story on index cards, then sketched small thumbs in spreads (keeping the reading flow always in mind), and only then worked up final pencils and inks.


David did a lot of "post-production" in Photoshop. Here's an example of a bunch of drawings (showing a strong, if semi-unconscious, Saul Steinberg influence) that he drew on a big sheet of bristol board and later pasted in to a page:


The printed page, in two colors.

There's tons more to say about this amazing show from one of our favorite artists but I need to leave off here. We videoed most of the tour and with David's blessing maybe some of that will make it on line at some point, maybe on the upcoming re-launch of the DWWP site.

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Whole lotta tracing going on

page 23 of Drawn Onward
click to enlarge

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Thought Balloon show in Dumbo

ArtLexis has posted some gallery views of the Thought Balloons show on their website. Click on the poster image to see the slide show.

The show is up until September 11 so if you're in Dumbo, stop by and check it out.

Here's an image of the installation of my story "The Others":

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Web links for Summer Intensive students

I've added links to students' websites on my MoCCA post.

Coming soon, a final class post about our visit to MoCCA with David Mazzucchelli acting as docent for his own show. Then I'll make a meta-post where you can click through the class posts chronologically from beginning to end (a major problem of blog organization if you ask me). Read more...

An Improvised Comic Activity

Here's a tryout for an activity we're considering including in volume 2 of DWWP. It's a warm-up exercise whose goal is to activate your drawing and storytelling muscles at the same time. I'm not entirely sure how well it works so I would appreciate and comments on what follows. Better yet, if anyone is inspired I would love to see a few more attempts at this exercise. I'll make the instructions as clear as possible. The copy in bold is what I have written for the textbook draft.

Materials:

Office paper

Brush and india ink (or a brush pen)

penciling and inking tools

Instructions:

Draw a six-panel grid on your piece of paper (in this case I'm drawing in a small sketchbook about 5" x 6"):


Get out your brush, ink it up, and, without thinking too hard or planning in advance, quickly make a single mark in each panel: a line, a squiggle, a blot, in different sizes and densities.

Rinse out your brush and let your marks dry.

Look at each panel and try to see shapes or parts of outlines in the marks you’ve made: the curve of a nose, for example, or the drape of a coat, a tree, whatever. Take a pencil (or inking tool) and add to the marks, drawing what you see in your mind’s eye. Do this for each panel.

You might notice that I decided panel 5 was too sparse so I made a few more brush strokes.


Now hold the page back and read the six panels in sequence. Is there a story implied there? Look for suggestions of a narrative thread and tease it out by adding to each panel: backgrounds, new figures, dialogue, sound effects. One of your marks may lead to the creation of a character who becomes your protagonist. In that case you may choose to re-draw him in other panels to give the story better continuity and flow.

The spot in the third panel and the general barren-ness suggested by the scant marks led to me sketching a figure standing alone in a sun-bleached desert. My earliest doodles (not recorded) had the mark in the last panel as a bushy eyebrow of a full-panel face (The influence of that brow can be seen in panel 2). After a while—and looking for some kind of narrative development—I realized that mark could also be a storm cloud, suggesting an opposition to the sun dominating the other panels. The squiggles I added to the fifth panel, a zig-zaggy sort of movement, then began to suggest a rain dance of some sort.


I started to ink in my outlines with a pen (Rapidograph, but it shouldn't matter for this exercise) and to embellish with a brush pen. The backwards C shape in panel 4 eventually led me to give the character a mohawk.


This being a warm up exercise, I tried to do it as quickly as possible and as you can see noted below, I did all of this in about half an hour. I had a correction pen (a really neat one I got a Muji which I'm afraid they might not stock in NYC anymore) that I used for corrections but I tried not to be obsessive about it.


Here's a scan of the finished comic. I adjusted the levels for crisp blacks but I don't think I did much if any correction to the image:

If you decide to do your own take on this exercise I hope you'll e-mail it to me or post a link in the comments field.
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Summer Intensive: MoCCA Art Festival

MoCCA Art Festival was this weekend and the six students who finished the class all showed up with completed—and highly polished-looking—minicomics (I should add that the two who had to drop the class are still planning on finishing theirs, too):

clockwise from top left: "Adamantly Amorous" by Brian Lam, "Acetate vol. 1" by Jack Sjögren, "Wife Hunter" by Lisa Lim, "Men Flu" by Mie Lee (Ya Ting), "Danger Mom" by Kelly Wonder, & "Sheila The Zombie Cheerleader in: Chickens!" by Stephanie Ruble

Jessica and I were in and out both days but it seemed like the SVA table had a pretty steady flow of visitors and the book sales were solid, not to mention lots of trading. A few of you mentioned you had been following my reports on the blog so a special thanks to all of you for reading and for taking the time to go see the the results. I hope we'll be seeing some reviews of these comics in post-MoCCA coverage. Let me know if you see any mentions.

Charles Hatfield and Gene Kannenberg stepping up to be the first customers of the weekend.

I'll try and do more posts like this about classes in the future if I can make the time. I'm taking a break from teaching until the fall, then I'll play it by ear. And incidentally Jessica and I are working on a relaunch of the DWWP website which will eventually feature more content like this from us and other educators.

Finally, we will definitely be offering Summer Intensive 2010 so stay tuned...
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MoCCA Art Festival Notes

The SVA Continuing Ed gang (Summer Intensive class plus any students of mine and other CE teachers who show up) will be selling their minis at table #904 or 903—it doesn't matter because the other number is mine and Jessica's. And in the same row will be Cartoon Allies, the SVA undergrad cartooning group, which will also have a lot of cool stuff to sell and give away.

Jessica and I are juggling schedules to take care of our daughter so tomorrow I'll be there all day and Jessica will show up with Aldara around 3. On Sunday we'll swap roles. We'll be using the table as a home base and will be selling copies of Best American Comics 2008 (Lynda Barry), 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, and La Perdida along with a few minicomics. (DWWP and Life Sucks will be on sale at the First Second booth.) As usual we will be happy to sign and doodle in your books (the ones we wrote anyway).

We will have a few current and former students helping/hanging out at our table, notably Jude Killory, who has a couple great minicomics; Lydia Roberts (Sunday only) who is trying to finish up a mini in time (she has older stuff as well, all worth checking out); and Nic Breutzman who should have his first honest to gosh book, Yearbooks, just out from 2D Cloud, a new publisher out of Minnesota, who is also going to be at the show (you may have seen their anthology, Good Minnesotan, for which Nic has done covers).

Finally, I'll be tweeting my whereabouts as well as any interesting stuff I come across. Read more...

Summer Intensive, Day the Last, part one

So Summer Intensive has come to an end and tomorrow you can see (and buy!) the results.

For now, just a few snapshots of students putting the final touches on their artwork...

...and trimming their printed copies...


...and getting feedback from David Mazzucchelli.


We had a great visit to David's show at MoCCA which I will post about next week when the dust settles. Read more...

Summer Intensive, Day Eight

Quiet day in the classroom on Thursday as students plowed away through their inks. A few stayed at home or only came in for part of the day so the room looked pretty deserted at times.



Here are a few pages we haven't seen much of yet since Stephanie has been doing a lot of work at home. Her story—which ended up being 12 pages long—is about a zombie cheerleader character of hers (the cover threatens copyright violators with having their brains eaten), who find herself being followed around by a pack of... chickens? Read the mini and you'll find out why!
What we see below are her pencils on the top left which she has traced and inked on the right. (By the way, brain eating aside, her art as well as all the other art on this blog are copyright their respective authors.)


Jessica got students thinking about the last major step of this class: making a minicomic. First she reviewed the minicomics appendix in DWWP and had everyone make imposition guides (which help you figure out what order to paste up your pages). Some people will be doing their layout on computer but it still helps to do this part manually so you can visualize what your book will look and feel like.

We also have a large pile of minicomics spread around the room which people have been studying for format ideas, materials, cover designs, and so on.


Tomorrow's the last day! Jessica will show up in the morning and I'll join her at mid-day for a wrap up of the class. Then as a special treat, David Mazzucchelli will be giving us a quick tour of his new show at MoCCA and then will do a final critique of everyone's stories and minicomics layouts.
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Summer Intensive, Day Seven: part two

Wednesday afternoon Kim Deitch came to class to talk about his work. He started with a brief but entertaining overview of his career. He left no doubt that he and his peers were very aware of the importance of what they were doing in the 60s. He seemed genuinely annoyed that people dwelled on the sexual content of UG comics to the detriment of the leap forward they represented for our medium. He also says none of this would have happened—at least not to the degree it did—if it weren't for the influence and example of Robert Crumb.


Kim brought along a big portfolio full of all kinds of documentation of his creative process for a particular work, "No Midgets in Midgetville." He read about Midgetville in the New York Times years ago and saved the clipping. Eventually he went to the town in New Jersey and took some polaroids. Slowly a story developed featuring Waldo the Cat. The biggest non sequitur of the day came when Kim revealed that he got the idea to make it a romance after seeing the movie Shakespeare in Love (he said he's into Shakespeare and love but he hated the movie).

He also had all kinds of sketches and stages of his work, as in this penciled opening page which he traced and inked (on the right):



He also told us about a interesting and unusual creative habit he has: he'll often pencil entire one-page comics about a character or and idea he's developing. These are unplanned, improvised vignettes (though as you can see they achieve a significant level of polish) which help him understand his characters and expand the creative universe they live in. Usually these stories don't even end up in the final work, though he often comes up with panels or new characters which he later incorporates:

Kim was eager to see what everyone was working on and graciously took the time to read almost everyone's comics and give them thoughtful—and frank—feedback. At least twice I heard him remarking (kindly) something to the effect of "yeah, do a 100 more pages like this and you might turn out pretty good!"

This is just a sampling of what he talked about (see my Twitter feed for a few more tidbits). He's got a ton of great ideas and observations to share and his passion for the medium impressed the class (and me, once again) deeply. Read more...

Summer Intensive, Day Seven: part one

We spent the first part of Wednesday inking. Most people were at least started on inks so we went down to the library on the 2nd floor and photocopied reductions of a few pages. There are two reasons to do this and I think they're a crucial step in the process of finalizing your pages:

1. You get an idea of how your work is going to look reduced to print size. Often you'll see that you need a heavier line but you might also find that drawings that looked wonky while big sit nicely on the page once they're reduced a bit
2. If you have your lettering and your basic line art done, now is a great time to make copies and test out details like spotting blacks and adding tones.

That's what we see in these first two photos: a reduced photocopy of one of Kelly's pages with blacks roughed in with a brush...


...and Kelly more carefully transferring those ideas onto the bristol board. (She's planning to draw those stars in panel three in white ink.)


Ya Ting had been drawing with a thin pen line but after looking at her photocopies she switched to a brush for a slightly thicker line and solid (rather than scribbled in) blacks:


Richard had finished a complete pass on his inking and was working on refining and clarifying some drawings as well as making corrections here and there:

A few students are still working on their pencils—inevitably everyone has their own pace and working style even disregarding external factors that might come into play—but they are determined to finish in time to make their minis and I believe they'll pull it off. Read more...

Summer Intensive, Day Six

Today's class was mainly me moving from table to table and looking over people's progress, trying to solve drawing problems, making sure everything reads smoothly, and looking ahead to inking. I did a very quick demo of nibs and brushes toward the end of class but I would have liked to have had much more time to talk about inking before everyone dives into it. Most students are well into their pencils and will be ready to ink this evening or tomorrow morning and a couple (as you'll see below) have already gotten started. All the stories are really shaping up, though. Let's take a look, it's time to start whetting your appetites for this weekend:

Here you can see one of Jack's pages with the thumbnails taped for reference to the top of the drawing board. His story is a kind of fable about a character on a two-seater bicycle who is looking for the right person to sit on his second seat. It will be laid out horizontally--oddly, two students out of eight in the class have chosen this atypical format.


Yating's story is a riff on the hysteria over swine flu. In her comic, the disease is contracted by kissing pigs and the main symptom is that when you kiss someone, their noses turn into pig snouts. As you can see, her pencils are very confident and polished. This led to a discussion of how many comics are now printed in pencils, with no inks at all. We looked at some slides of Amanda Vähämäki and CF. The class talked about it and decided that "Man Flu" might be a more mellifluous title.

Brian is working on a comic about a guy who becomes so stressed out with his life that he develops migraines and shingles. He therefore decides that he needs a girlfriend to make him relaxed again. Sound a little ass-backward? Read the comic and find out! Above you can see Brian's extensive revisions, which include dialogue written out in script format, numerous passes of thumbnails drawn in lined notebooks, and pencils/inks which he is drawing on office paper. He had a nice description of the art style he is aiming for: "somewhere between stick figures and Calvin and Hobbes."


Kelly is doing a story about two sisters teasing their mom about how over-protective she was, only to reveal (to the reader, NOT the mother) the kinds of outrageous behavior the two have enacted over the years. You can see here that Kelly is taking advantage of tracing paper and the big light box we have in the classroom to trace photos and refine her drawings.


Lisa is the one student who has already done some comics before, having taken classes with me, Tom Hart, and Lauren Weinstein at SVA. She's using this class as a way to produce a new comic quickly and it's coming along wonderfully. This one's about a guy she met in Japan who would regularly have sex with lonely housewives--a "wife hunter". Lisa's style is non-linear in every sense of that word (I was teasing her the other day about her constitutional inability to draw a straight line) so the inking and especially her increasingly bold use of black go a long way towards guiding the reader's eye through the story.
Lisa was thinking about a full black bleed for her minicomic but I suggested a 1/2" black border for now since bleeds are a real pain in the butt to deal with when you're dealing with photocopies. With minicomics, it's good to keep it simple.

Richard did something here that I always recommend: it's a labeled, orthographic view of the child's bedroom where most of his story takes place.

Finally, an array of nibs and holders that these guys are going to get quite familiar with in the next few days. (Note the excellent nib suggestions on the Post-It!)

I should point out that not everyone is using nibs and fancy brushes. Several students are inking with Microns or other more disposable tools, and that's fine. When you are making a mini, time and efficiency are important, so do what works. However, our larger ambition for this class is that students will produce whatever kind of mini they can come up with given the time constraints while at the same time taking a first pass through all the basic skills you should know to bekome a Klassik Kartoonist.

And tomorrow, we've got none other than KIM DEITCH coming in to share his wisdom! I'm very excited about it.

Boy, this is a long post. If any of my more blog-savvy readers want to explain to me how to do that "after the jump" stuff, I'd appreciate it. Read more...