Painting my Old School at my New School

If there's one thing I learned in art school, it's get paid!

But, if I learned two things, it's I hate painting.

I do. I hate acrylics, it's like painting with toothpaste. The only thing I hate more is oils. Like painting with butter. I hate not being able to wash my brushes with water. And I don't really care for airbrushing either. (Actually, I'm okay with watercolors, but just barely.)

But, in my second and third years of art school, I had to do a fair amount of that. I took a painting/color theory class with Joel Naprstek, a talented artist, wonderful painter and great guy. As opposed to other teachers whose names I won't mention here, Joel actually worked with you. I can't say I liked painting, but under his auspices, I got better at it.

As I recall, about the same time I went through a breakup and kind of threw myself into my work. One classmate of mine remarked on my improvement and said "You need to get dumped more often." Ah yes, pain, the great motivator.

It does work though. Later, after getting back together with that same person, we broke up again, and I threw myself into getting work on the Warner Brothers comics just to spite her. (She was a WB cartoon fan.) And, yes, I did wind up lettering three books for them. So, you know, win.

Anyway, this is one of the paintings I did that actually looked decent. It's of my home church, Immaculate Conception in Willoughby. It's where I went to school. You may also recognize it from Love and Capes #12, as it's the basis for the church in which Mark and Abby get married.

It's weird looking at it now. Part of this assignment was to work off a photo, and take a piece of white cardboard with a small square cut in it to isolate areas of color. This way you were looking at just the color and you could try to match it and learn how color worked. I remember thinking I did a good job, but that something was off.

Now, I can look at it and say "the front of the building is way too cool". I know exactly how to fix it. In fact, I've done so here if you want to see it.

Sometimes, it's good to see how far you've come and that you have really made progress. But I'm still not planning on doing any more painting anytime soon.

Wayback Wednesdays: Hulk Sad

Wayback Wednesday is back! I've dug up some new stuff with which to horrify and embarass myself.

This is a Hulk illustration I did for my Methods and Materials class in my first year at Kubert. Mark Pennington was my teacher, and I really wanted to learn some back anatomy drawing this. Clearly I didn't. I can't count how many things are wrong in this piece.

I don't remember the specifics of the assignment, or if I had a storyline in mind where Hulk would be at Banner's grave. It just seemed like a cool visual. I do know it was inked with brush and pen, and colored on a photocopy with Dr. Martin's Watercolor Dyes.

The big reason I show this off is what I did with it in my second year. One of my second year teachers gave us an assignment where we had to pick a title off of a lost and do an illustration from it. I picked the title "Sing Me No Sad Songs", and took a copy, lettered that on the top, and presto, reused it in the second year.

Hey, that was the year that I worked at Arthur's three days a week and was definitely overworked.

I tried to go for the hat trick and reuse it in my third year. I had an opening, but it was for the same teacher as second year, and I thought he'd remember it. Too bad. Would have been a nice capper to the story, wouldn't it?

Wayback Wednesday: Tylinter

I've been bad about Wayback Wednesday, I know. Hopefully I'll bank another couple of months to carry me through summer convention season. Things have been busy, and that's good, but it also gets in the way.

That said, here's today's installment. After Geauga Lake wrapped for the season, I tried freelancing for a couple of months. It didn't take. I didn't have the experience or the track record to make it work. A few years later, though, things obviously changed. But, until then, I found a job at The News-Herald, where I started off as a production artist. One of my co-workers there needed a caricature done of the owner of the Tylinter company in Mentor. (I think he was the owner. It's been a while. He may have just been a higher-up.) They were having a party, and it was to be his gift.

This is one of my first freelance assignments. I remember after the party, my friend said "His wife loved it. She said that she guessed it had cost a thousand dollars."

It hadn't. I'd charged $35. I was just starting out, didn't know what to charge, and priced what I thought was fair. I considered it a fancy amusement park caricature. Now, his wife was wrong about what I could have charged. I don't think this was a four-figure piece, but I probably could have charged more. It was a lesson in pricing. And trust me, if you want one now, it will cost you more.

But, I wasn't upset. I charged what I thought I should and got it. I was happy with that. And it was my first step on a journey that led me here to this studio. No looking back, only looking forward.

Wayback Wednesdays: Elephants and Whales and Rhinos, oh my!

Like most stories, this one starts with a girl. I was dating her during the summer of '91. I was working doing some signage at Just Closeouts, and that was the extent of my art work that summer. I wasn't particular satisfied, job-wise. So, even in my personal work, the apathy lead to hacking. It wan't bad, but it wasn't inspire, either.

My then-girlfriend asked me to draw an elephant for a friend of hers at work. The lady really liked elephants, I guess. But my girlfriend, picking up on what I'd been saying, said "You can just hack it out."

See, that's a line. I get to say that I hack. Nobody else gets to. She didn't mean anything by it, I'm sure, but the result was a Shakabuku moment. I decided to up my game, just out of irritation. I've got this theory that the "why" you do something isn't always as important as the "what". Sometimes I work out because I want to, sometimes because I have to, but the important part is that you work out, right?

So I went to the library and got some childrens' books, leading to my conversation with the section's librarian:

Librarian (noticing I was an adult with no kids with him): Can I help you?
Me: I'm looking for books on elephants.
Librarian: Are you looking for something in a… remedial… reading level?
Me: No, I'm looking for something with lots of pictures.

You kids today don't realize how great you have it with your internets and your Google image searches.

Later, armed with two kids books on elephants, I had this. It's really atypical for me. It's inked with rapidiograph, not brush. It's got an angular, almost scratchy, style that's not like me. I was really happy with it. I used it on promotional postcards for a few years later, and it's one of the rare pieces from art school that I can look at and not wince.

The work friend liked it. The girlfriend liked it. And then she broke up with me the next month. But that's another story altogether, and one which doesn't need exploring at this juncture.

I was happy enough with the elephant art that I did a couple more in the "series". I drew a whale for the next one (which I colored for a Kubert assignment), and did a rhino for a third. When I did the rhino illustration, though, it felt uninspired again. The pose and the style was becoming repetitive. So, I moved on to other things, but had a new style to tuck into my toolbox.

Wayback Wednesdays: Sweet Baby James

When I was at the Kubert School, one of my least favorite classes was caricature. I just didn't think that I was very good at it. I did get good enough that, in a bout of cosmic irony, my first job out of art school was doing caricatures at the Geauga Lake Amusement Park. And doing live caricatures at parties and events has been a chunk of my income ever since.

This was a third-year assignment in caricature class. We had to take a famous person and merge them with an object. I don't remember my other classmates' concepts, but mine was to take James Taylor and blend him with a musical note.

I picked Sweet Baby James for a few reasons. I really like his music, and had just seen him in concert in New York City at the Paramount Theatre (and he rocked!) so he was on my mind. But, in those pre-internet days, getting visual reference was always a hassle. You had to buy these things called magazines and books, rather than Google image search a name.

Stone knives and bearskins, I tell you.

And since I was a fan of James, I had a few CDs that I could use as reference.

This is one of the rare pieces from art school that holds up well. I really like the inking on the face, and the sharp lines on his bottom jaw that really get the angles on his face. The dimensional musical notes are pretty good, I think the font works well, and the rainbow music staff adds some needed color. The only thing that bothers me is the 4/4 signature that's a little off. Odd that the lettering, always my strong suit, would be the weak thing on this one.

And if you ever get a chance to see James Taylor in concert, especially if it's an outdoor venue like Blossom Music Center here in Ohio (about which he supposedly wrote "Got your baby/Got your blanket/Got your bucket of beer" in That's Why I'm Here) do go. He's just amazing.

Wayback Wednesdays: Superman Cover

In my third year of classes at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, we had a class taught by Joe himself. One of our assignments was to do five pages from a comic, as well as a cover. I decided to do a Superman book.

Big surprise, right?

I've got the interiors somewhere, but I couldn't dig them up. What sticks out in my mind was the cover. I got this idea to impose two characters over a three-point perspective background. This was back in my George Perez crazy detail phase.

Backgrounds weren't my favorite thing, and while I understood perspective, using it in a panel always seemed to trip me up. So, I drew a complicated background on a separate sheet of tracing paper, and blew it up to ink it. But, when I made it larger and put the characters in front of it, I thought it looked cool as it was.

But, the assignment was to ink the cover, so I inked the background on a sheet of vellum. When I showed it to Joe, he said "You know, the pencilled version looks better. I'd keep that" So I went back to the enlarged pencils.

Happy accidents, I guess.

What always got me about this assignment was some fellow classmate who didn't like the cover. He said he didn't like those tight three point perspective covers where the buildings were so close to each other that there was no room for streets or anything. I thought it worked. In fact, I had ideas of drawing stock backgrounds like this and dropping flying characters on top of them.

So I was surprised and a little validated when I saw DC do a series of covers for the Superman books featuring the same idea just a couple months later. (And no, in no way am I suggesting DC borrowed my idea. They never would have seen it. It was more, as noted philosopher David Addison once said "Mediocre minds think alike.") I can only find one of the covers online, so my memory may be off. But I'm pretty sure that all the Superman books that month used that idea.

Wayback Wednesdays: The First Slider Project

Back in 2001, I was pitching the Cleveland Indians on doing a Slider comic. Eventually, it would morph into the two page comic/puzzle page that I did for them for five years. But my original notion was do a three 24-page comics that could then be traded up into a graphic novel for sale at the Cleveland Indians Team Shops. This was back in the day when the Indians were a great team, and I think it would have been a great promotion. I couldn't convince them to do it, but I think it would have worked.

Well, aside from the slide the Indians took into lousyness the following year. Gone were the total sellout seasons and bleaker times prevailed. So maybe it all worked out for the best.

Along the way, though, I did an 8-page plus cover sample that I figured could be folded into the final product. I actually wrote all three issues, each with three stories apiece, and drew the first eight page story and cover, even designing a logo. Apparently, I had a lot of free time back then.

Still, it was a learning experience. This was the first big coloring thing I did with my newly purchased Wacom Intuos tablet. Apparently, I had a lot of extra income back then, too. Once I started using the tablet, though, I never looked back. It was one of my better purchase.

This was probably the last project for myself that I lettered by hand on the boards. I hadn't yet converted completely to computer lettering. I hadn't started doing my Photoshop composited heavy art yet, either, like I do on Love and Capes. So these boards look, largely, like the finished pieces. I like the process now, but I do miss having original finished art.

The invisibity effects in the story were created by drawing Slider on a separate piece of board and dropping him in later. I was also experimenting with doing colored lines in some places, and think it worked really well here.

If you look closely, too, you'll notice that the Wacky Professor character looks a bit like the Indians' Chief Wahoo. In fact, his name is Professor VaHoo. Oh, subtlety, thy name is Thom.

Click and embiggen on anything!

Wayback Wednesday: The Pajama Game

I was a pretty driven kid, all things considered. I've known all my life I wanted to be a cartoonist. And I actually made sure to take assignments to teach myself to draw on a deadline. I took jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do, or weren't in my wheelhouse, just to train better. Doing a more realistic style wasn't my strong suit, but I tried it here on my high school musical's poster for The Pajama Game.

Design-wise, and especially on the logo, I think I did pretty well. In actual drawing, oh Lordy is there a lot to wince at. Bad figures, deformed faces, steroid-induced bodies. But you get better by doing, right?

I also was in the stage crew for that musical, which was a lot of fun, and I wished that I had done that sooner. I waited until I was a senior and had a girlfriend in the cast to get involved. But I loved my time on that show, and still have one of the sewing machine pieces (lovingly referred to as the Satan Desks) that I designed for the show here in my house. I can't bring myself to get rid of it.

Wayback Wednesdays: Schooltones

Let's go back to high school, my days at Lake Catholic. I did the comic strip for the school paper. It was an odd gig for me at the time. The paper came out every couple of months, so it was more a magazine than a newspaper. I was a Bloom County fan, as mentioned before, and deep down wanted to do a four panel strip with recurring characters. Unfortunately, the schedule didn't let you build anything like that. So, I had to do a straight-up gag strip.

I sed to say that it'd take me one month, twenty-nine days and 22 hours to write the strip, and two hours to draw it.

The name of the strip was "Schooltones". Lake Catholic, you see, didn't have bells, it had tones. A high b-flat if I remember right. So, instead of School Bells it was SchoolTones. Man, was 14 year old me clever!

The problem was, at the time, I wasn't funny at all. I hadn't taken John Troy's humor class at Kubert, which taught me the important lesson of lower your standards. I wanted to do laugh-out-loud classic comics, and I wasn't good enough. But if I just tried for a smile instead, I could learn and build to something better.

Occasionally, I did a good one. I leave it up to you whether this one was one of those. Here, in the height of the 1988 political season and Halloween, I took a pretty obvious shot at Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle, the Rosetta Stone of comedy at the time.

In the background is someone dressed as Dr. Crusher, because I always tried to throw some hidden Star Trek reference in my strips. You'll also notice my old signature, a Klingon"R" lookin' thing that was my attempt at a TZ. My family had a couple artists in it, and there was a family signature. In my youthful quest for indivduality, I tried to carve my own out, but I was never satisfied with it. Eventually, I went to the familar family sig, and I'm very happy and proud that I did.

Wayback Wednesday: Bloom County

Here's another Joe Kubert class project. Here, we had to ape the style of a comic strip. I've mentioned before how huge a Bloom County fan I am, so it's no surprise I did Berke Brethed's strip. At the time, Clarence Thomas was being grilled by the Senate at his confirmation hearings on the way to becoming a Supreme Court judge. I thought this was a perfect topic for my strip.

I tried to do things like Brethed did. I inked with pen instead of brush. I used the photocopy/photo thing on Ed McMahon's picture. I even signed my name backwards the way he did.

The Sunday strip was out of continuity, as many Sundays were. The reference to Kent State's nursing school was a call out to a high school friend who was attending that program (and later graduated and became a nurse).

Of course, if you want to see Bloom County done right, be sure to check out IDW's beautiful Bloom County collections. The first one is out now, and the second one is soon to follow.

If you want to see it done by me, click and embiggen!