New Construction

focus app

2011-12-29T18:00:00.002-06:00

Layout Templates

2011-12-13T12:51:00.000-06:00

It used to be that whenever I tried to figure out a page directly onto the big sheet of paper, there was so much erasing and so much daunting, expensive white space that I would get psyched out. But then I figured out this system of using these 8.5x11 copy-paper templates, and then there was less pressure to get it right the first time. It was easier to dive and do the "shitty first draft."

This is one of the page templates I use to figure out a page of comics. I draw most of my comics -- the "Ganges" stories, especially -- with 4 rows. When I'm starting a new story I usually print a few of these out on copy paper and sketch on them. Sometimes I figure out a page pretty much exactly right the first time, but often it takes a few tries. Or I'll just sketch scenes and characters in the boxes and not worry about where each panel is going to go until later. For a few years now I've worked this way and it's become second nature.

**** This link will take you to a .pdf of the file, ready to print out and get started. ****
(You can make your own 3 row, or whatever, templates for yourself, obviously.)

Here are some older examples of this:

I have tons of these. Here's some from the "Jeepers" era:

But this created a NEW PROBLEM, which was the tedium of translating the thumbnails* onto the large piece of paper to do the final drawing. Then only about a year ago I figured out a trick:

Scan these layout pages back into the computer, and then enlarge them to the right size (for me, a row is 10cm tall, 30cm wide). Print them out again. You can only fit 1/4 of the page on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper, so you have to use 4 sheets of paper.

So you get something like:

Then you use that to lightly trace the big, basic shapes and placement of elements on the large sheet of paper. And then I ink in the panel borders and lettering, and now all that's left is getting the drawings right.

Now, I realize that this seems like more work than just looking at the thumbnails and sketching in the shapes! Maybe that works for you. But for me it's somehow less daunting to do all this, and do the tracing. Because all of the computer stuff is so easy for me at this point, it takes less brainpower than eye-balling it. There's less erasing and mistake-making, and thus fewer chances to get frustrated.

(Looking back, I'm embarrassed that I didn't figure this out more quickly.)

There's still a lot of erasing and re-drawing and fixing to do before I have pencils that are ready to be inked, but this trick gets me quickly through stages of layout that use to give me a lot of trouble.

You may not have the same troubles.

*I call these 8.5x11 copy paper layouts "thumbnails" even though they're obviously bigger than the thumbnails of any known mammal.

Moments Strung Together

2011-11-26T16:44:00.001-06:00

"What is your story? No story? Here's what you do. String together moments - think sequence. Think poetry. Think painting. Just let the "melody" come - let your mind focus on the images that move you - the words that flow through you. Composing any story, song, anything - always involves chasing half remembered dreams, ideas, memories. How does one compose a story or flesh out a story that is already forming in one's mind?"

-Frank Santoro
(sign up for his class! see here)

another

2011-11-10T14:14:00.001-06:00

2011-09-27T11:51:00.001-05:00

Focus

2011-07-01T12:01:00.000-05:00

Homage to King

2011-05-15T13:39:00.000-05:00

My page in Kramers Ergot #7 was a homage to Frank King, who drew countless beautiful Sunday pages involving flying up and looking down on the landscape below. There are many examples just in the pages reprinted in the Drawn and Quarterly anthologies alone. I went to these to see how to draw the landscape gracefully from up above and was amazed at how many times King had his characters flying on Sunday.

Ganges #3 also is a kind of homage to the "daydreaming" Frank King pages (in both Bobby Make Believe and Gasoline Alley) with some Little Lulu love in the mix. That's how I thought of it, anyhow.

(crossposted to the Balloonist)

2011-03-06T09:34:00.000-06:00

sketches

2011-03-03T14:14:00.001-06:00

(xposted at STL Drawing Club)

2011-02-27T09:33:00.000-06:00

2011-02-21T09:32:00.001-06:00

2011-02-14T09:30:00.002-06:00

guy after Saint-Ogan

Advice

2011-01-30T13:21:00.005-06:00

For what it's worth--

A young cartoonist emailed me for advice and here's what I wrote back:

...As far as advice, here's some (not having seen your work--I mean, I don't know what kind of comics you're trying to make?): Self publish your work in minicomics you can sell or give to people. Everything that's come my way--jobs, friends, wife--directly or indirectly, has come from the minicomics I've made since high school. Putting stuff on the web is OK but does not substitute for seeing your own work in a booklet. It makes you re-evaluate and get better. Set deadlines, get things finished, and move onto the next thing. Don't get bogged down in some big nebulous project that never gets done--this is a mistake a lot of young cartoonists make. Set modest goals--a 4 page story, then another, then another--and get them done. If they're lame, it's OK, make the next one better. Then put your work in front of other people, and you'll be able to tell if you're getting across.

The most important thing is making pages of comics, and just arrange your life so that you're doing that often, and enjoying it, and before you know it you're a cartoonist, and things will work themselves out sooner or later. They say it takes 10,000 hours (about 10 years) to gather the skills for any complicated line of work. That seems like a lot, but it's not so bad, and you just have to put the time in.

Latest Focus Book

2011-01-08T12:31:00.001-06:00

This was the last "Focus Book" of 2010. It was a pretty rough year of working! Will it every get easier? No, it won't; why do you think it would? No resolutions, or anyways, same old resolutions. Back to work...

2010-10-07T12:27:00.000-05:00

Working on Ganges #4, taking up all of my time.

Above is a picture of the latest finished "Focus Book."

His Own Comic

2010-07-21T17:57:00.000-05:00

Was in Kansas City a couple weeks back and, y'know, I hit all the local bargain bins. Along with the usual First, Continuity, Eclipse, etc. masterpieces I also got some old Comics Journals. I already had this issue (#154, 1993, the legendary Woodring interview!) but I picked it up again because it was cheap and who knows, maybe this particular copy has the answers. I remember reading this issue, sitting in my high school library. O days gone by!

A belated congratulations, Chris!

Here's a page from the Woodring interview, of a rough layout:

Fig. 46.3

2010-07-17T17:43:00.000-05:00

GTD

2010-07-13T17:31:00.000-05:00

This is a doodle/diagram of the Getting Things Done system. It was very helpful to me to work through, because with no day job and few real deadlines, I can get pretty bogged down, anxious and scatterbrained. The basic form of the system is really just standardized common sense: you gather everything together, then sort through it, organize it, and then focus on specifics. It's very useful to analyze and break down a complicated project into discrete steps, and then be aware of what step you're on, and keep your focus there and not get freaked out by what's down the road. I suppose some people are able to do this easily, but I struggle with it.

Focus Book

2010-06-29T20:25:00.003-05:00

For a couple years now, I've been using little mini-comic sized books, made from scrap paper from the copy shop, folded and stapled, to keep focused each day on the day's work. Or to free-write and warm up. This is the latest one, just finished today. I haven't been numbering them, which is unusual for me! I also use the same format to write and take notes for the bigger projects. Now you know, right? What's the lesson here? I don't know. For me, they're less intimidating and overwhelming than sk.books or moleskines, and cheaper, and you get to the end faster. Also, they're conveniently proportional to the proportions of the comics pages I draw. Whatever works.

What It Is

2010-06-17T01:59:00.006-05:00

In 2007, I put together a zine called New Construction #1 because I was having a hard time getting Ganges #2 done, and I thought throwing together a mini-comic of odds and ends would help me get some enthusiasm and confidence back. There were some rightly deleted scenes from Ganges #1, sketchbook exercises, and miscellaneous experiments, like this comic strip. This last strip especially made me think about continuing New Construction as a series where I’d throw together stuff about making comics from my own perspective: a “reflective practitioner” trying to educate myself and keep myself from blocks and funks.

Issue #2 was about thumbnailing and on display were many grimy USS Catastrophe thumbnails.

My plan for issue #3 is for it to be about “Productivity” a subject I've struggled through these last few years, and I have many doodles and notes to show for it. Since there’s no reason really to keep this stuff to myself, I thought I’d put together this blog, and post New Con #1 and 2, along with first drafts of the material that’ll go into New Con #3. And whatever else. I have some ideas, and I have a lot to learn. We’ll see how it goes. This exists to help me with my own work, first of all, but maybe the public display of my slow-witted struggles can help you too. If my *real* work is going well, though, it’ll probably be pretty quiet around here...unlike now...

I’ll keep comments closed, but please write me at kevinh at usscatastrophe with corrections and comments.

Work Book 1

2010-06-16T02:54:00.003-05:00

Word balloons, square or round...

looking at Herriman...

Roy Crane...

How Things Go

2010-06-16T00:30:00.004-05:00

The Comics Table of Space and Time

2010-06-15T21:18:00.002-05:00

“Whoso partakes of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet sit at the common table of space and time?”

William James,
On Some Hegelisms

What's mistake but a kind of take?

Nancy, Solidarity, Typography

2010-06-15T21:06:00.003-05:00

Jeet Heer on Bushmiller:

"One tired jab against Ernie Bushmiller was that he didn’t draw his characters but merely rubber-stamped them on the page...

"...if “iconic solidarity” is a formalist property common to comics in general, what Bushmiller is up to is heightening this formal property by making it as blunt and visible as possible. In effect, Bushmiller’s gambit is to make us aware as possible that we’re reading a comic by taking a key formal property and making it part of the narrative itself. Hence all those twins and mirror images. This might explain why so many comics aficionados have a special regard for Nancy, which often seems to be the very beating heart, the very distilled essence, of comics itself (for those who still believe, of course, in essences)."

I don’t think “iconic solidarity” means the same thing as the rubber stamp. I think it has less to do with regimentation and uniformity, and more to do with interdependence. (The political language is maybe interesting?) But I’m not sure about that. I gave up on trying to figure out Groensteen for now.

The twinning is a great catch, though. Drawing Nancy and Sluggo almost exactly the same each time, it’s like he’s making them into a font, like he’s writing “Nancy” in Helvetica. All the drawings of Nancy are transparently Nancy the way a commonly used font will make a word "transparent." But I think saying that Bushmiller represents the “distilled essence” of comics is like saying Helvetica is the essence of the written alphabet. (What about Giddyup?) It’s no knock on Bushmiller or Helvetica, but it helps to relativize the situation, to talk in terms of use, function, and keep from away from essence-talk. If cartooning is a kind of handwriting, I'd rather say something like Bushmiller had handwriting that was beautiful, super-consistent and easy-to-read.

Nancy gets meta, like "Helvetica" written in Helvetica.

Getting a variety of letters and pictures and marks to work together, in solidarity, that's the trick. It doesn't have to be clean and easy. Everyone doesn't have to wear uniforms and stand in line. It makes it easier to do a daily strip. It's easier to read. The “rubber stamp” school of cartooning—where images and pages are handled like typography—is something I have an affinity for, but I’m suspicious of claiming too much for it.

I don't know why my brain gets so hung up on this. I'm still thinking it through. I hope I'm not being pedantic. Maybe it's as simple as wanting to keep clear the distinction between description and prescription.

Poseurs

2010-05-27T13:16:00.009-05:00

Tom Spurgeon wrote here about arguments about comics he's no longer interested in having, and suggests 3 arguments comics critics could be having. Here's one argument I'd be happy to never see again. It's not really an argument as much as it is a bad faith assumption. Here are two examples of it in action:

"Alt comics creators may be turning for cred to more respected mediums like literature and memoir..." - from Noah Berlatsky's review of Tales to Thrizzle.

"While the other pieces in MOME vol. 4 are angling for the kind of bourgeois literary respectability..." - from Marc Singer's blog.

J. Brodsky: "Flashes of Panic"

2010-05-01T16:20:00.000-05:00

I have always envied those nineteenth-century characters who were able to look back and distinguish the landmarks of their lives, of their development. Some event would mark a point of transition, a different stage. I am talking about writers; but what I really have in mind is the capacity of certain types of people to rationalize their lives, to see things separately, if not clearly. And I understand that this phenomenon should not be limited to the nineteenth century. Yet in my life it has been represented mostly by literature. Either because of some basic flow of my mind or because of the fluid, amorphous nature of life itself, I have never been capable for distinguishing any landmark, let alone a buoy. If there is anything like a landmark, it is that I won’t be able to acknowledge myself – i.e., death.
[...]
Certain this is partly an outgrowth of your profession. If you are in banking or if you fly an aircraft, you know that after you gain a substantial amount of expertise you are more or less guaranteed a profit or a safe landing. Whereas in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft. In this field, where expertise invites doom, the notions of adolescence and maturity get mixed up, and panic is the most frequent state of mind. So I would be lying if I resorted to chronology or to anything that suggests a linear process. A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of panic.

via

Souther on Procrastination

2010-04-16T02:23:00.001-05:00

Souther on procrastination.

"...after years of having a love/hate relationship with deadlines and structure, reading books on procrastination and productivity, and coming up with new gimmicks and tricks to get myself organized and on a schedule, I’ve learned there are some things you can change about yourself and some things you can’t. for the ones you can’t, you just have to learn to work around them or else embrace them and make them work for you."

GTD was very important for me, but I've come to see it isn't exactly designed for creative work. Here are some useful correctives.

New Construction #3 - 1

2010-01-06T13:40:00.001-06:00