Sunday 10 June 2007

covers-Eyeball kid: One man Show

When I made the simple black line drawing above (1) I wouldn't have intended to use it for the finished cover. It looks like the sort of character-sketch that artists do at conventions. But the reason I know it wasn't intended for the finished cover is that it's drawn 'same size'. I would always (at least up till this time) draw finished art at 'A3' size, which is the biggest size that will fit in regular photocopiers, and more importantly, in a regular Fedex box. Go bigger than that and you're making problems for yourself. Reduction from there to comic book size is about 63%. I recall my fellow cartoonist Glenn Dakin once explaining for the young 'uns on a letters page the arithmetical formulas for scaling artwork up and down, at the end of which he wrote "Or you can just be like us; get a comicbook and draw round it." So, never mind your specially blue-line printed art boards, for the solicitation and preview art I would always just grab the nearest comic book, usually last month's issue of Bacchus, and draw round it with a pencil. I coloured it with pantone markers, and then to fix some misjudgement I introduced gouache on top of that.
MIck Evans ran with that and made up a rudimentary cover that we used for promotion, but it wasn't quite coming together (2), with too much of a candy box look about it. At this stage I probably thought I was still going to have to get my head down and do a painting, as I'd done on the previous volumes. However Mick took it away and injected the kind of energy it needed (3).
*******
linkety split:
I'm interviewed at Wizard. It's a phone chat where the interviewer, Kiel Phegley must have had his work cut out compiling my jostling monologues into regular sentences. At the end of it I reveal some new info about The Amazing Remarkable Mr Leotard.
Brian Talbot's Alice In Sunderland reviewed in the Guardian (link via ben Smith)
Allan Holtz shows two more 1906 Herriman political cartoons from the LA Examiner. he is doing us a great service here. I hope you appreciate it.

Canadian Prime Minister doesn't want to meet Bono.
HEILIGENDAMM, Germany (Reuters) "I've got to say that meeting celebrities isn't kind of my shtick, that was the shtick of the previous guy," said Harper in a dig at his Liberal predecessor Paul Martin, who met Bono regularly."

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6 Comments:

Blogger James Robert Smith said...

I used to buy original art from the Disney artist William Van Horn. He does his art on really big paper--maybe the "twice up" stuff? At any rate, when he's done, he has to cut the page in half, down the center, to ship it to the printer/publisher.

10 June 2007 at 00:08:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Andrew Hawthorn said...

I'm afraid our PM is a bit of a putz with or without Bono.

10 June 2007 at 12:14:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Steve said...

Ah, you make me want to make comics all over again. Just draw round them. So damn simple. I like the cropping you did with cover three, it seems to work better without the thumb. By the way, there was a Monet exhibition over here, I don't know if you spotted it on t'internet, it was all his drawings, caricatures, that sort of thing. They had his only pen and ink drawing he did for a magazine article of one of his paintings, I forget which now, that was a treat. Also nice to see even he cocked it all up and redrew stuff. They had some of his sketch books, and it makes me wish the old bugger was alive and on the convention circuit so I could pester him for a duck or two, man could he draw ducks. They never do the little postcards of the things you want, do they.

There was also a magazine of the time's article on Monet, purportedly to show some artists redwaring of one of Monet's artworks, maybe a shot of Waterloo Bridge, I can't remember, I was too busy tickled pink by the disdain with which the British art establishment held for Monet. I'll paraphrase, but it was something like "most followers of modern art are aware of the noise a certain Claude Monet has been making in French and American circles, but we here have yet to see anything that would raise an eyebrow to English art followers..." Probably doing a hideous disservice to some well educated man earning a crust back then, but you had to laugh.

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/monet/

10 June 2007 at 14:31:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Eddie Campbell said...

Steve,
thanks.
thanks for the good words.
Usually when I make pronouncememnts about simple shortcuts somebody will say, yes but that's all right for Eddie campbell. The rest of us have to make a living.
... (I started in here on a anecdote about a guy who once phoned me about what paper to use... then i thought i should put it in a main page article... So I deleted it..., later)
I linked to an article about the Monet exhibition back on april 14. You should look in more often :)
best
Eddie

James,
yes, the way my eyesight is going i may have to get larger

Andrew
'good to hear form you as always

Eddie

10 June 2007 at 16:47:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Unknown said...

~ Why not give all the housemates mobile phones … except they can only dial each other, non-external calls.… We, the viewers, get to read their text messages, see their photos, and listen in on their phonecalls to each other. Conspiratorially, and maybe very spooky. Competition winners could then phone in live-ish maybe.

Keep on sailing,

Louis Boukman
Herzog & de Meuron Architects London offices

10 June 2007 at 23:30:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Eddie Campbell said...

you've got too many windows open on your desktop.
eddie

11 June 2007 at 00:29:00 GMT-5  

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