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.

Captain's Log

So here's my latest Stupid Idea. I've mentioned incessantly my love of "process" stuff. My latest foray into this being the awesome Art of Toy Story 3book. But one of my favorites is the Deep Space Nine Companion, which goes behind the scenes of the tragically-underrated series. You get to see what plots were, what they became and why.

So I've decided to do this for Love and Capes.

I'm working on the second issue of the new IDW Love and Capes: Ever After miniseries. So I'm keeping a journal of sorts that will go page-by-page, explain how I wrote the jokes, call out geek references, show sketches and layouts and things like that. It's designed to be something I can photocopy and sell at conventions, and maybe I'll make the PDF available too.

So, my question is, do you think anyone be interested in this?

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?

If Love Were a Red Dress

I love tackling other characters, but it's always a treat when someone actually wants one of mine. Here, the requester wanted Abby, specifically in the red dress she wore in issue #2. This was a lot of fun to do.

Insert Clever Backwards Title Here

Zatanna was really popular at Charlotte this year, including having a set of Zatannas be the artwork models at the charity auction. It's always good to see Zee, but I thought it was particularly cool to see this George Peréz 80s-version.

Here was my run at the character, harkening back to her live magic stage show. This was done at the table at Charlotte, and then taken back home to color.

Black Cat Scratch Fever

This commission came across my website. He wanted a picture of Spider-Man's ex-girlfriend the Black Cat. I haven't done a lot of pictures of her, and didn't know her costume was revised until I started looking for reference. I think this one came out really well.

My Drawing Board

Between cons and my website, I've been taking commissions. It's one of my favorite parts of doing conventions these days. I just completed a bunch of them, so I'll be posting them the next few days.

Here's the first, a Power Girl commission. The request here was to "show her defiant but not ticked-off". The commissioner was pretty happy with this one.

Building My Own Mousetrap

I do a lot of conventions to promote Love and Capes. I love doing the shows, but hauling my gear to shows is always an effort. For shows I can drive to, everything fits (albeit snugly) in my convertible. The worst for transport is, of course, Comic-Con in San Diego, where I have to ship things across the country. The biggest hassle, to my mind, is shipping my wire display rack. It's too large to fit into a suitcase so I have to ship it in a big box. The box isn't so much heavy as it is unweildly, but just its size makes it expensive to ship. I've been trying to find a better mousetrap, as it were. I haven't been able to find one, so I decided to make one. Here's what I wanted my design to do:

1. Fit into a suitcase, flat.
2. Be light.
3. Display a decent number of books.
4. Be sturdy.
5. Be disposable, so I can leave it behind if I want to.

Here's what I came up with. I'll need two of them to display the Love and Capes ouevre, but that's fine. It folds down to about 17" x 27", which does fit in my suitcase. And it's even got an area for signage at the top, where I'll put a price list. I think it came out really well, and I'm a little proud of myself. My Dad is awesome at building things, and it's nice to know that I've got a little bit of that in me when I need it. I'm also going to share it, under the Creative Commons act. I've had people say that I could sell these, but honestly, I'd rather make comics than stands. Besides, not everything's got to be about profit, sometimes you should just release some good into the universe, you know? If this design helps someone else, I'm happy to help. Here's a link to a PDF of my blueprints. I figure each one takes about $10-15 in supplies. You need a 40" x 60" piece of foam core board, an X-acto knife, a long ruler, and a piece of tape or Velcro. It probably takes 30-60 minutes to build. I laid out and marked up the foam core. Here's what the flat piece looks like. (Click any picture to see it larger.) Then I scored it so that the front panel becomes like a set of stairs. I scored the side panels so that it will fold up flat. You have to be careful while making your scores, though. The design has a lot of weak points while you're trying to fold it, although once it's complete it's pretty solid. I stress tested it for a day and there were no problems. It also has a slight lean to it, by design. This puts the shelves at an angle so that gravity can help keep the books in place. The stair shelf doesn't hold itself down at first. You need the books to force it into place, but after a couple of hours, it starts to hold its shape. And I put some Velcro on the back panel to make the final connection. You could use tape, too. You just need to have a knife to cut it when you're done if you want to reuse it. Here it is folded flat. And here it is with books on it. Pretty cool, eh? Oh, what the heck, how about a little shilling? Hey! Love and Capes: Going to the Chapel, the second Love and Capes collection is available in comic stores this Wednesday! Foam Core Display Stand by Thomas Zahler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.thomz.com.

Domestic Bliss, Superhero Style

The Big Busy continues as I'm packing for my trip to Kids Read Comics and taking care of some last minute clienty stuff. But I wanted to share a new image of Love and Capes. I can't say what it's for, at least not yet. But I think it's a pretty good an indicative image of the new arc of the series.

It's Mocha Time!

Whew! What a week. And there's still a weekend left!

I did HeroesCon in Charlotte last week. Stories will follow, seriously, but I also needed to finish up the first issue of Love and Capes: Ever After. Yeah, it's not due out for a while, but it'll come out monthly, so I need to get way ahead.

So, today I finished the first issue. It was an odd process this time, as I took some tracing paper and the grid sheet… the same one I've used since issue #1… down to Charlotte so I could pencil pages at my table. Over the three day show, I did the three pages, so that I could bring them back and ink them on Tuesday, and start coloring thereafter. And now it's done. Yay!

I'll be starting on the next issue next week. After I appear at the Kids Read Comics event in Dearborn, Michigan this weekend. If you're around, come on by. It's my first year, but Top Men who have been at the event have raved about it. I'm looking forward to it.