just found: Splash Page-MTV has a great Steve Lieber drawing on their opening page (and a nice photo of the artist too), but you only see it briefly before a bunch of text boxes cover up most of it, unless you freeze the screen like I did. Do that and get a look at it full size. Steve and i have long shared an interest in the atmospheric effects that can be achieved by mixing up the various techniques of black line art, including dot tones and white paint.

brisk report anthologies

Some evil bastard just sent this link. (no , in fact I see the page has now been removed. no, it's back.):
A graphic novel is a capture of comic book, usually with a lengthy and hardheaded of buildings storyline like to those of novels, and often expected at mature audiences. The idiom also encompasses comic brisk report anthologies, and in some luggage mechanism collections of beforehand in print comic-book series.
There's yer thought for the day, Dirk Deppey.

F rom 2000, sketch for Bacchus T-shirt I drew for Grafitti designs, with finished image. I always liked this sketch and sent it along as an illustration with just about every interview I did since then, but nobody ever used it. looks like it's drawn with a broad point calligraphy pen, plus my favourite flexible nib, finished with liquid paper dashed on in a painterly manner (i used to dilute it with the thinners till it was very fluid).


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Tha always perceptive Colman G. in comments the other day was talking about the late Guy Davenport and sent me to the Wikipedia entry for the writer, from where I cut and paste this:
He was rare among American artists in that he was not obsessed with his own image in the world. He could therefore live in perfect privacy in a rotting Kentucky town. Davenport bought Oscar Mayer bologna, fried it, and ate it with Campbell's soup. He died of lung cancer on January 4, 2005.

color me purply brown.

Iwrote yesterday's post after uncovering a pile of old artwork while looking for something unrelated. I looked over the pages of art I drew for the X-men thinking to myself: this isn't as bad as I remember it. It was during that phase when Marvel's colorists were doing everything in purple and brown, for reasons one cannot hope to guess. Here's my rendition of Wolverine:


An here he is in muscular purples and browns:


Here's a shaman character coming form the wilds, whom I modeled on Alan Moore. For those following my recent notes on markmaking, I smeared the ink into a thick gel medium and laid it on with a one-inch broad bristle brush for the effects of the tree bark (click to enlarge for closer detail.)


And here it is in foresty purples and browns:


More shimmering hues tomorrow. Watch for them.
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Mother sues doctor over twin birth

Graphic novel a brilliant way to tell a disturbing story- The Ottawa Citizen- Monday, September 17.- Yann Martel, the Booker Prize-winning author of Life of Pi, is sending a book and letter every two weeks to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.: "Maus by Art Spiegelman. Don't be fooled by the format. This comic book is real literature..."

Mini-comic vending machine.

SPEAKING
OF ODD
THINGS
TO DRAW
with.
gloss enamel house paint. dripped from a stick.
I arrived at the solution after struggling to find an organic quality, something that looked like it had a life apart from any that the author might be allowing it.

Vines are sprouting up around Bacchus while he sleeps on a Greek Island. The paint dried very off-white. The pure white on top of it was added later when I cleaned up some dirty marks that had attached to the surface over time (The piece is from 1988).
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Allan Holtz explains the history of Sunday newspaper comic strip formats. and very useful it is too. (thanks to john C. for the link)
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Program shows CIA behind Wikipedia entries.
A new identification program on the site reveals that some of the most prolific contributors to Wikipedia are the CIA, the British Labour Party and the Vatican - and they are not just updating their own entries.
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Couple tried to name baby "@". BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@," claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child...
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HERE'S ANOTHER

REALLY ODD

Thing I drew with

The dropper measuring thingy that comes in some ink bottles:
I'm sure it has a name, like every other thingy in the world. You press the top and hold it, dip it in the ink, unpress it and let the ink get sucked in. Then draw with it, occasionally pressing to release blobs of black for emphasis. This technique was used for one of my favourite logos, The Dance of Lifey Death, a book of mine first publshed by Dark Horse in 1993 (full cover), and to finish the effect I wanted to cut little feet out of one of those old style ballroom dance manuals, but instead I borrowed a rubber stamp of a barefootprint from my daughter, hayley campbell, who had borrowed it from a classmate at school. When he got it back it never worked properly again because I'd soaked it in india ink and it went hard. Sometimes I just hate myself.

THE ODDEST

THING

i ever drew with

is a rolled up kitchen tissue. I'd tear off the end and plunge it into the ink, like this:
I used it to do the panel borders in the flashbacks in a couple of Bacchus short stories, enjoying that big hairy multiplied line:


The technique even came in useful for a logo once:


That was with fantagrpahics in 1991. Their design person used it in bright red with a blue-grey drop-shadow, which you can see if you click to enlarge. A good logo should be able to withstand all kinds of variations.
But what would I know about logos? These are the experts:
Todd Klein gives a potted history of comic book logos
his hand drawn logos
made on the computer.
logos by Richard Starkings and Comicraft
The more modernist logos of Ryan Hughes

Funny thing is though, there seems to be an opinion rolling around out there that my own logos are well suited to my own books, so over the years I've had the chance to make a few. Not having a trained grasp of letterforms, I tend to make a feature of the unlikely daftness of an unusual technique, and then cross my fingers and hope i get away with it

his nibs (2)

N ow where was I up to before I had to dash across the Pacific? Oh yes, the nibs. When you use these in your regular work you need to be buying them by the gross, so that your stash looks something like this:


Whenever you get together with a colleague in the trade you say 'hey I found that this one suits my puposes, you should give it a try', and you shove a handful in the other guy's mitt. In this way I came by the crowquill style of nib via Dave Sim. This style has the cylinder in emulation of the bird feather from which it derives, as opposed to the flat reed in which the more flexible type of nib originates. This style offered me a tighter control of the linework, but with less thick-and-thin dynamics, which you can see from the selected examples below. In fact The use of this type (in conjunction with my other favourites) starts coming in around From Hell chapter 7. I had spent a week with Sim early in 1994 after which I added to my armoury the Hunt 102 crowquill, pictured in the red box.
On occasion I come across a box of a rare nib. The large Brandauer nibs above came as a Christmas present many years ago and I occasionally find a use for them. I think these are very old. (Some other gorgeous Brandauer antiques.)
The quaint abel on the underside of the box reads:
Brandauer: CAUTION: Whereas, with a view of securing the public from imposition, and of protecting our own manufacture, we have caused our Trade mark, to wit, 'an Archer in a kneeling position, with bow and arrow, to be registered according to law...etc.
A history of the Birmingham pen trade including Branfdauer and Gillott: The Brandauers remained involved with the business until the First World War, when the factory was confiscated by the authorities on the grounds that the Brandauers were Austrian, and was eventually released to the Petit family.
Examples using mainly the crowquill:

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Changing the subject, I'm leading up to a video clip which made me laugh, but we must get there via unsavoury matters, so bear with me a minute. While I was away they nabbed somebody for groping, but surely this isn't the groper I mentioned here before (which should not be taken to imply that I know anything about the matter):
Sex assaults linked to bikeway attacks?- July 31, 2007.
Man charged over sex assaults- August 1, 2007 .
hayley campbell sent a link to the unrelated incident in England:
Man sought over TV bottom pinch- BBC- Tuesday, 31 July 2007
A man who pinched a Channel 4 News presenter's bottom during a live broadcast is being sought by police. (Youtube)
Sue Turton was speaking to the camera from Oxford's flood-hit Osney Island when the man was seen on film walking past her. She said she found the incident "quite humiliating" but continued reporting. She does not wish to pursue the matter. Police said they still intended to impose an £80 fixed-penalty fine on the man under the Public Order Act.
Ms Turton said in a statement: "Many people found the incident in Oxford last week when a man pinched my bum live on Channel 4 News humorous.
I am not one who finds amusement in the puerile behaviour of annoying of ladies in public, but while at Youtube I came across this U.S. news reporter getting mad, which has nothing to do with bottoms, and had me in stitches because of the placing of the word 'violent'.

his nibs (1)

T ime for another technical post, all about the pen nibs I've used. The degree of flexibility is the primary consideration. A very flexible nib that suited my purposes is the Hunt 103, seen on the left in the photo. Something about that little florette shaped vent hole enables the tines to spread wide for great flexibility. The more rigid Gillott 209 is next to it. I used that for back up, when I needed to get in closer and turn around in a narrower space. The one on the far right is the quite different 'crowquill' style. More on that next time.


Wikipedia: Thick and thin strokes can be achieved by varying the pressure the nib is pushed against the paper. A hard pressure causes the nib tines to widen allowing more ink to come in to contact with the paper, this results in a thick stroke. Light pressure causes the tines to narrow and even close creating very fine hairline strokes. These flexible quills and later steel nibs were what led to the styles of penmanship such as Copperplate and then Spencerian. However pointed nibs are not just used for the purpose of writing, pointed quills have been utilised by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci for sketching and pen drawing. Although any pointed steel nib can be used for drawing, nibs that resemble flexible nibs but are much more rigid have been produced for pen drawing.
Below are two portraits of the real (as opposed to our fictional version) William Gull I drew from photos, using the Hunt 103, for the From Hell scripts book way back in 1994. I was always very pleased with these, but whenever they were reproduced it was always too small to notice anything about the pen technique (click for larger). I once read that the great illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (left, greatly reduced) used great big flexible nibs as though they were paint brushes, and worked standing at an easel in a smock, with his art board upright. I tried to take some of Gibson's panache on board.


However it was usually difficult to carry that quality over into the small rectangular panels of the From Hell chapters themselves. Here's a good attempt from chapter 1:


For further investigation: a display of the Hunt nibs and the equivalent catalogue for Gillott
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'I don't think bloggers read' -Friday July 20, 2007- The Guardian
Andrew Keen says the internet is populated by second-rate amateurs. He's written a book, The Cult of the Amateur, with the no-messing-about subtitle "How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy"
Until recently the Wikipedia entry for Andrew Keen informed readers that, in addition to coming from Golders Green, London, having an academic background and being an outspoken critic of Web 2.0, he was also "a child actor who found fame in a series of soup commercials". This isn't true; the sentence was inserted deliberately by the host of a Radio 3 show prior to an appearance by Keen, to show how easily the accuracy of Wikipedia can be undermined. This bit of factual vandalism remained for 12 days before it was removed - 11 days longer than an emendation from June 5, which replaced the entire first paragraph with the words "Andrew Keen IS a dumb motherfucker".
(link thanks to Mick Evans)