No-Rights Productions

On Painting

I bought some paints recently and a number of different surfaces to work on. I haven’t done much actual painting since college. I had a bad experience with a prof that caused me to turn away from the medium for awhile. I got the urge to do some digital painting and, after completing one in Photoshop, (CS3, mind you, so the blending capacities were limited) I thought I’d try some physical painting again. I still had some brushes and a couple of colors, a 2 pack of canvases I never got around to using. I grabbed a 3 pack of canvas panels, some more oils, couple more brushes, and an artist’s panel.

Oils are my preferred paint. Whenever it comes to mixing paints with water things always get runny for me and I found acrylic like painting with plastic. Really painting is like working in any other media. You try to create an image, you work to refine it, and you try to make the things you used to make the image disappear into the final picture. We’ve all seen the artist who has one trick up their sleeve they pull out in every piece. I’d see it in music classes, too. When somebody’s given room to improvise a solo and they keep going back to this one thing over and over. Guitar players who think finger-tapping makes them awesome, trombone players who think a gliss is always the answer, trumpet players who always end things with a shake. I recognize these things when I see people doing them a lot and I see it in myself when I’m making art in one form or another.

Practice and repetition will only get a person so far. The hard part is always stepping outside of the work you’ve created and objectively seeing what you need to change. I remember in reading The Inner Game of Tennis that the author would place a mirror in front of his students and have them swing. Once they were able to actually see themselves doing the motion they could compare it with what they thought it should look like and correct themselves much faster than if he told them what to do. Sometimes artists get so hung up on the process of making the work that they can’t look at it and realize the changes they need to make to improve. They can get so into rendering the highlight on this character’s face that they don’t see it doesn’t match the rest of the piece. They can get so wrapped up in the mixing of colors that they aren’t thinking about what works best for the finished image. Other times they pull out their bag of tricks and get offended when somebody tells them the picture’s not done.

I’m not sure just what I’ll paint yet but I have a few ideas. My own interests lately have circled around pulp novel covers, scifi/horror/film noir movie posters, and other stylized artwork of the early twentieth century. (Art Deco, Art Nouveau, early comic strip and animated cartoons…) In the future I’ll do some biographies on my favorite artists and how I found their work influential. I recently picked up a copy of Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist, which is a very interesting and helpful book on studio practices for studying and rendering images from the mind. I’m also diving into researching references. Sometimes you’ll find an image or a concept that will just set off your imagination. The key is to cast out a wide enough net that you’re able to pull enough things in.

On Web Surfing

Looking up references brings me to the next topic I wanted to blog about. Maintaining reference files over the years has driven me a little insane. These days I bookmark things rather than saving them because, honestly, I don’t have the HD space and there’s usually several different versions online now anyway. I’ve been using Xmarks to sync bookmarks across browsers and computers, even putting them online should I ever need to get at them from another computer. Very awesome system and I recommend it. But I’ve still been frustrated with sorting and managing those bookmarks. Sometimes I’ll have several different pages open in my web browser full of tabs. It becomes a real balancing act trying to keep track of them all. Certainly somebody’s developed a better system for this, right? It’s 2010, I can see somebody doing it. Well, somebody did do it and it’s in development. Check out TabCandy for Firefox.

It’s in alpha right now (which I found kind of confusing to set up) though there’s an outdated addon available until it hopefully gets put into Firefox 4. I’ve been primarily a Safari user since FF has traditionally been a bit of a CPU hog. However something like this could get me to switch. I also hope it’s something that gets picked up by other browsers. It’s really the next step in tabbed browsing. Being able to sort groups of tabs at a time, visually, just makes sense and it’s about time somebody put it together.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Site News

Watch the video for the general news update. Scroll below to read some specifics.

We’ve gone through some changes under the hood you’ve probably noticed already. This site will become my general blog/news page as well as a hub for all my creative endeavors. Lil’ Reaper Books will become the store site where I’ll eventually be stocking merch. Towniescomics and Grim & Saddam have their own sites again. I’ll customize them when I have the time for it. Right now I need to focus on drawing comics.

Where’s 2071?

2071 is a special case. It exists in it’s own universe story-wise and I want to have a site where I can add stories that come before or after it in the timeline. I haven’t settled on a new domain that fits the entire series just yet. (And the most obvious domain right now is taken) So for now you can read the archives here. I’ll post the last page of sub-chapter 1.0 on the new site when it goes live.

What’s NoRightsTV?

Lately I’ve been feeling the “productions” in No-Rights Productions has sorely been neglected. The idea was always to start with comics and transition into doing films and other multimedia as well. I consider myself an animator at heart and I have plans for a number of film projects. The only way I’m going to get into posting and editing videos is to actually do it. So you’ll see video blogs, interviews, tutorials, reviews… pretty much anything I can think to add there.

Site News

WordPress 3.0 is currently in Release Candidate which means the final version should be dropping soon. Webcomic 3 is also on the way shortly. Once they’re both out I’m going to simplify the site a bit. I don’t plan to spend very long on it as I’d rather have a site that’s functional and updating as opposed to wasting my time playing with bells and whistles. The goal is to make things load fast, look nicer, and to make it all more navigable. I’m mentioning this mostly for the folks who manage their own sites but the casual visitor will probably see the changes as well. I don’t expect it to be drastically different but I’ve been holding onto things from older versions and now I’m just gonna start fresh.

Comic News

I haven’t forgotten about 2071, (Or my other comics for that matter) I’ve just been busy with other projects. I’ve been sorting out some freelance and, if you’ve been following my twitter, working on some digital painting. I have a pretty decent knowledge of Photoshop, I just never spent much time painting with it. I’ve mostly used traditional media and Painter for that.

I still have one more page of Chapter 1.0 to put up, which will serve as a proper cliffhanger. I think I know what the process is going to be like for working on that chapter and I’m pretty excited about it. This comic has always been a bit different and bigger scope than my other work. I’m treating it more and more like production work on a movie as opposed to a simple comic.

Today I’d like to walk you through the process I use to create my comic 2071. Once I’ve written the script and done a thumbnail of the page to lay out the panels I move onto penciling.

Penciling

I settled on this size so I can use half a sheet of 11×14″ bristol board for the finished inks and regular printer paper for the pencils. Then I can redraw a page as many times as I need to to achieve the proper composition. I sketch with red and blue col-erase animation pencils and like to go over things with mechanical pencil if I have time so they’re easier to see on the lightbox. Also this constant going over evolves the details as I get more confident with the finished drawing. My pencils these days are pretty tight as I want to develop the page as much as possible. Lots of artists keep their sketches loose and save details for inking to keep them spontaneous. I feel more free to change things while penciling as ink feels more permanent, even though I could always touch the inks up digitally later. (I usually have to, anyway)

Penciled Page

The next step is to tape the pencils and some bristol board to my lightbox and go over it all with drawing pens.

Inking

Pens give a colder feel than brushes because their lines are more solid and mechanical. Brushes create more organic lines with varying width. Since the story is set in the future I wanted a fairly streamlined and technical feel. Plus I’m kind of heavy handed and split the tips of brushes pretty easily.

Raw Scan of Inks

At this point I was still trying to white out mistakes before scanning. I usually have to go back in and fix them even after the automated cleanup process so I might as well save corrections for that stage.

Cleanup

Scan After Automated Cleaning Process

I made an action that follows the steps laid out in How to Make Webcomics. I run it to convert everything to straight black or white in bitmap mode and save in .tiff format. Then I go back in and clean lines up.

Page of Inks After Fixing

The changes at this stage are mostly for the print version. When it’s shrunk down and in this jaggy format you don’t see a lot of the things you would once it’s printed. (Save the occasional redrawing of a line or something) I save this and then convert it to grayscale and copy the panels into a template with proper page margins.

Coloring

Initial Flood Fill of Colors

I duplicate the panels onto a multiply layer and remove all the white so only the inks show. Some folks just leave it a normal layer, which is fine. I’ve just had issues with non-black spots getting onto my ink layers in the past and setting it to multiply keeps that from becoming an issue. Flood fill with the paint bucket and pencil in any hard to reach spots on the lower layer.

Layer with Shadows

I then duplicate the colors layer, set it to multiply, create a layer mask and invert it, painting out areas for shadows. Lower this to about 50%.

Layer with Highlights

I duplicate the colors again, set it to screen, create a layer mask and invert it, and start drawing highlights. I keep this layer at 100%.

Layer with Benday Dots

The colorist for Evil, Inc. had an article on Webcomics.com (Before it became subscription based) about making a strip look like a newspaper comic. I came up with a variation on that I liked.

Layer with Aged Paper Texture

Next I add a layer with the aged paper texture. I lower the opacity of the colors layer so some of the splotches bleed through them.

Layer with Lighting Effects

Before I render the intense light of futuristic jet engines I focus on the effects of the falloff color on the rest of the objects in the panel.

Layer with More Lighting Effects

Some things would probably be easier to render if I didn’t draw them in the inking stage (Like shapes for flames, highlights) but I like having them there if I decide to color their lines or just paint over them entirely.

Layer with Even More Lighting Effects

Finally I paint in the white-hot areas of the flames. I like layering the effects to give them a more developed look rather than just dropping a simple effect in. I’ll play around with layer modes, opacity, and layer effects until I find something I like. It’s important to me that the overall page looks balanced. The drawings need to be developed and detailed enough while the rendering needs to be subtle enough to work. It’s very easy to make effects look too “Photoshop-y” and stand out glaringly on a page.

Layer with Panel Border Enhancement

I make a one-pixel stroke around the panels and add a stroke effect to the layer. It frames them better and differentiates the panels from each other. Some people use rules about how wide your borders should be based on your thickest line in a panel. I find a setting that works and leave it.

Layer with Text

After laboring over the art I hate to cover it up with text so I tend to wittle the script down to absolute necessities. Dialogue placement impacts how you read it and I like to think the shape of a sound effect changes how you hear it in your head. It’s also a visual element so I want to compliment the drawings underneath. The fonts add to the aesthetic I’m going for by being simple yet elegant.

Layer with Word Balloons

Keeping with the slightly mechanical and less organic idea I made the word balloons rounded squares rather than oval shapes. (Automated voices use sharp square balloons while voices being broadcast use another closed balloon shape) This harkens back to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and other early 20th century strips as well as conserves space. Copper influenced me to make the panels rounded so making the word balloons match makes sense.

Page with Saturation Layer

This is the last step before flattening, resizing, and adding the URL for the web. I fill a layer with black, set it to saturation, and lower the opacity. This makes the colors a little less pronounced and adds to the aged feel. Movies today tend to desaturate their color palette, too. Compare the original Superman colors to the ones in Superman Returns. I was originally planning on rendering in color and then dropping it down to grey for print but the color version is just too superior.

Art is an interesting thing. There are many different kinds of art and many different opinions on what is or isn’t art. My goal is to find ways to create things and generate a livable income from that work. You’d imagine that would classify me as an artist. However there are plenty of people who wouldn’t call me that. There are plenty of people who make a living off their work but they identify themselves by different titles. I imagine part of it’s to avoid any stigma associated with the term or to specify their trade beyond the generic. Some folks make things like jewelry, furniture, plush dolls, all sorts of things, and consider themselves crafters. Some people like me draw talking animals or funny caricatures of people and call ourselves cartoonists.

The Myth of the Starving Artist

If you open a book on making a living creatively these days you’ll find some opening chapters dispelling the myth of the starving artist. This is the public perception of an artist. Somebody who toils away in obscurity, poverty, struggling to survive while laboring over their masterwork that will only bring them fame and fortune long after their death. Why is this myth so pervasive in our culture? There’s lots of reasons. It’s a romanticized vision based on misconceptions of what a living artist’s life is. Many folks who don’t know anything about the art world and many artists themselves fall for this stereotype. It seeks to make the artist altruistic and above monetary concerns or even concerns about surviving at all. If you’re an artist, all you should be thinking about is rendering some supreme, ultimate truth onto the canvas and nothing else. That’s how it’s done, right? No, that’s not how it’s done. If you paint for yourself and make a living through some other means, that’s fine. But working artists should concern themselves with finding work.

“Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime!” He was also seriously mentally ill. He was a great painter but I wouldn’t recommend anybody pattern their life after his. In fact I’d argue against patterning your life after anybody, successful or not, because everybody’s life and circumstances are different. Some things can’t be repeated by everybody and it’s best to find your own path to the mountain using others’ as a rough guide. Is it better for the artist to never sell their work and die penniless than to illustrate based on what their clients want? Is “selling out” really that big of a fear? Apparently it is for some people.

Another sub-section of this myth is that artists, being poor and destitute, should accept any offer that comes along from people willing to give them the time of day. Anybody with Photoshop can do what you do, why should I pay you an honest wage or at all? Shouldn’t you be satisfied with the exposure my project gives you? Isn’t seeing your work printed or used in some other means for my profit good enough? There are plenty of people looking for artists to work on speculation. They want the artist to donate their time to something on the promise that, should this thing make money, they’ll get a cut of it down the line. Imagine a plumber only getting paid that way. Picture a heart surgeon haggling with some guy who says he’s used knives before, how hard can it be?

Modern Art

Ok, title of the post, better make this good. Well first I want to address that people use this term wrong. Modern Art was art made roughly between 1860 and the 1970s. Modernism is a movement that some scholars argue is still going on even though we had Postmodernism emerging in the 1980s. When I hear people complaining about the pointlessness they see in art news today, they’re usually referring to contemporary art. Artist using elephant dung? Artist photographing a crucifix in a jar of his own urine? Lets just call it contemporary since it’s going on now. Movements should be named by historians. Ever listened to a bunch of people in bands sitting around trying to classify their sound? We’ll stick with contemporary.

Shock Art

Art can be controversial, that’s fine. However some people seem to only want to make art that’s geared towards offending somebody. These people exist outside of the art community. Look at the success of reality TV and shows like Jackass. Now I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. (Lord knows I can’t look away when an episode of Jackass comes on) But we should look at the intention of a work. We should see what thought went into it, what the artist is trying to say with it, and why it can be seen as upsetting. I love how some people don’t consider editorial cartoons relevant today and yet some are still controversial enough for the cartoonists to get death threats. Cartoons say a religion is violent, people respond by threatening or committing acts of violence, I’d say somebody’s not getting the point. Entire discussions could be had around the opinions behind those cartoons before even mentioning the reaction to them.

Whenever people discuss performance art I like to bring up Chris Burden. He was the guy who had himself crucified to a Volkswagen and had himself shot in the arm by an assistant. It all sounds crazy out of context but if you read up on him, his history, and what he was trying to say, you understand him a little better. This isn’t to say you totally get the meaning and significance behind it or that you magically approve of his work. It just means you can see where he’s coming from and can make a better educated argument for or against his art.

Simple Art

Often people will criticize art for it’s simplicity. Jackson Pollock made art of splatters of paint dripped onto a canvas. Piet Mondrian made straight lines and blocks of color. Mark Rothko made streaks of color. Georgia O’Keeffe made abstractions of flowers. Andy Warhol made pictures of soup cans. Each of these artists has a story. Each of them has a history that explains why they started making art the way they did and why it’s important. A big part of being an artist is being able to explain your own relevance and convincing people to believe in it. If you’ve seen the film Art School Confidential, you’ll recall a scene where a professor is asked, “How long have you been doing the triangles?” and he replies, “I was one of the first…”

Conceptual Art

Some artists make pieces where the object itself isn’t the art but rather your perception of it is. I recall hearing about one piece where the display was a series of egg shells where the yolks had been blown out. Often during transport some of the shells broke. When that happened the curators got some more eggs, blew the yolks out, and the show continued. Another artist had bags of trash during a show and one of them got thrown out by a custodian who assumed it was trash. The artist simply gave them another bag of trash to replace it. There’s also the concept of Found Art where the artist literally finds an object and calls it art. Sometimes these displays are poignant. Sometimes something we see every day will take on a different look when you see it in a gallery. What is a portrait but another painting of a human face? It’s the perception of that face, the significance of who it is, how it’s rendered, all sorts of different factors. That is what separates the Mona Lisa from Elvis on black velvet. It’s also what separates a blown out egg shell from a Fabergé egg.