Original Art Sundays No 290: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p. 29

 Taking a break from Comics History class prep to post this week's page.

This one came together pretty quickly and went pretty well.

As you recall, Curt reluctantly agreed to therapy, provided he get tapes of the sessions to review afterwards for "inaccuracies and lies". Needless to say, this arrangement wasn't conducive to good therapy and led to this.

This is common in an abusive situation. Abusers take perverse joy in manipulating someone's thoughts, making them doubt themselves. Why are people so shocked after the fact to learn that it worked?

Again, aside from being a trans woman's story, no overt trans content on this page.

Lots to like about this page. Sometimes I really struggle with pages, but this one just fell together. The layout device is inspired by several things. I thought the story was getting a little claustrophobic, with all the interiors (physical and mental), and I wanted to break it up a little. It's also important to remind the reader that even in this confining situation, the rest of the world is still out there waiting. It makes the denial of the world to the abused all the more poignant.

I wanted to play with rendering parks in gray scale after reading Alison Bechdel's Secret of Superhuman Strength (which I'm teaching in Graphic Novel class this semester). And I'm not sure where I encountered the idea of slice panels inside a larger panel to imply a motion path, but I like it. The borders of the primary panel were rendered in pencil and drawn freehand with a brush tip marker, a device I used on A Private Myth about a hundred years ago.

The bottom tier is all about expression and pose. I always want more heavy blacks than I end up using in such situations, but it's working. Minimal Photoshop corrections on this one.

More and more, I'm coming to think of my poses and characters as Hitchcock actors. Hitchcock is famous for saying he trusted his actors would know to move and act like their characters. So it is with my art. I trust that as long as I give them my best, my characters will look and pose the way they should. A bit disingenuous, but useful. Trusting your own art is vital.

Tools used:red

• Canson Bristol Board
• Lead holder, tech pencil, solid lead #3B and Ticonderoga pencil #2
• Kneaded eraser and Faber Castell dust free eraser
• 10 well inking/watercolor dish
  
• Dr. Martin's Dark Star Matte black ink
• FW Artist's Acrylic White
• Brushes: Princeton #10 Round Synthetic, Blick #6 round synthetic, Renaissace Silver Sable #2 Cat's Tail
• Tight Spot Detailer for corrections
• Photoshop 2019
  

Next: closer to the main event.

Original Art Sundays No. 289: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p. 27

 As promised, here's a fill-in page to clarify some stuff from the last page.

After my page discussion, I will re-post the three pages in this scene in proper reading order. I should probably do that more often anyway. A week is a long time to wait to see what happens, and we all have full lives.

When the story left off, I had agreed to return to Curt. One of the things that came up was the possibility of therapy, which leads us to the events of this page, followed by the events of the page posted last week.

For this layout, I wanted the page to feel off balance, yet be legible. Hacking off the edges, first alternating, then both, seemed an effective tool to accomplish this. It's a straightforward dialogue page. I kept it visually interesting by just moving the "camera" in. I dropped Photoshop gradients in the first two panels. The astute reader will note the continued absence of my mother's art and the presence of a replacement guitar.

This page got really messy! I don't mean the art itself, though that was hit and miss. For some reason, the art itself got very smeared and dirty. A bit frustrating, since I didn't work it any differently than my usual process. Ah well.

I kept the facial expressions very simple. While I like complexity, my style does seem to lend itself to simplicity. No overt influences on this page, just telling the story.

Here are the three pages in proper order.

Well, I hope that clears things up. I don't often step back and look at the book in progress. It's actually helpful.

Not much brush work on this page. Tool list:

• Canson Bristol board
• tech pencil, #2B lead
• Ames Lettering guide
• Lead holder, #3B lead
• Good old Ticonderoga #2B pencil
• Straightedges, triangles, curves
• Micron pens .005, .02, .05, .08, 1.0 and brush tip
• Pen nib and holder
• Dr. Martin's Black Star Matte ink
• FW Artist's Acrylic White
• Faber Castell eraser and kneadable eraser
• Blick #6 synthetic brush
• Tight Spot brush for corrections 
• Photoshop 2019

Next: a stroll through the park.

Original Art Sundays no. 296: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p. 28

 Here we go again...

The astute reader might notice that I skipped a page in numbering the story pages this week. Last week was p. 25, and this week is p. 27. I showed this page to a Beta reader whose opinion I respect highly. It made no sense to her. I realized that I left out a significant bit of exposition. I will do the missing page for next week. If I can manage it, I will do an extra page for next week as well. We're coming up on a crucial event or two, and it's vital to have things coherent, especially when reporting on an incoherent time. But I'm still eager to resolve this book.

When we left the story, I had agreed to return to Curt in the hope of entering couples therapy and healing our relationship. Read on.

So much to unpack here. First, layout and design considerations. I have wanted to do a reversed out page for some time, and having just finished Alison Bechdel's The Secret of Superhuman Strength, was also reminded of the device of overlaying slices on a master image. I don't think I've done that before, so like you think, you do. This is hand work as far as the reversal- just ink and ink and ink. I wanted to give a sense of the darkness of the time and of his bleakness. The slice panels may be a bit too simplistic, but I didn't want much detail on them. Some of my hand lettering went south in the third panel, so was redone in Photoshop. I considered redoing all the lettering digitally for consistency's sake, and decided against it.

One of the slice panels has a line texture background, and the others are washes. I don't want to overuse wash backgrounds as a crutch, but they work here. Simple guideline: larger panels, more detailed environments. Smaller panels, not so much. Next page (the missing page) will be three banner panels, so more of a chance to explore the environments. After the Curt chapter of this ends, there will also be a chance to draw some outside stuff. So much has been indoors!

Again, I've condensed some events for narrative flow, but everything I'm showing really happened. Him telling a therapist to drop dead was a shocker, even for him. Other than it happening to me, no overt trans content this week. 

One thing a lot of readers ask is why I went along with his demands. So many years later, I still don't have a good answer. I may never have an answer, other than primal emotions. He played on my fears of solitude and being undesirable, and I let him. No excuses, just fear and stupidity.

Pretty bleak, huh? Well, like I told a friend who was learning about this for the first time through this work, it gets a lot worse and then it gets better.

Tools for this page:

• Canson Bristol board
  
• Mechanical pencil
• Ames lettering guide
• Lead holder and #3B leads
  
• Kneadable and Faber Castell dust free erasers
  
• Pen holder and nibs (breaking in a new one - fun!)
• Misc. triangles, t-squares and straightedges
• Micron # .02, .03, .05, .08, 1.0 and Brush tip
• Dr. Martin's Black Star Matte Ink
• FW Artist's Acrylic White
• White colored pencil 
• Plastic paint palette for washes, 12 wells
  
• Brushes: Princeton Synthtetic  round No. 10, Blick Wonder White Synthetic round No. 6, Silva Renaissance Sable Cat Tongue No. 2, and Tight Spot for corrections

Again, the astute reader will note some small amendments to past tool lists. I allowed myself a small pilgrimage to the art supply store and was glad I did!

Next: the missing page, then on into the fray.

Original Art Sundays No. 295: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p. 26

 Hi, all. I hope you got something out of the little piece I did on 1/6 (arguably as important as 9/11, both days when our proud nation was attacked). We're back into it with a challenging page.

At the end of the last page, our heroine was evicted from hearth and home. Read on.

I may have made this page harder than it needed to be, but I'm fairly happy with the result. I played with numerous layout options before deciding on two tiers with exposition block in between. The one drawback is the last panel on tier one comes before the exposition. But I decided there was sufficient context to pull it off.

Strategic considerations: the challenge of land line phones! Though the first hand held independent phone unit was patented in France in 1917 (!), they weren't in common use until many years after the events chronicled here happened. So I used the old saw of phone cords and answering machines, hoping there is sufficient visual context for a modern reader. I also had the issue of showing a missing painting. I opted for a blank wall space with dotted outline. In reality, it didn't look anything like that. I know this page minimizes the impact of someone deliberately destroying family art, or some destroying art in general, but we must choose our moments in this drama. In the third panel, I used the conceit of popping in one of my favorite Surrealist Cowgirls characters. The area needed some weight, so I opted to have some fun with it. The weight in the bottom tier mostly comes from Photoshop patterns and fills. My emotional response to the suggestion that he would have me committed after we were married was not that drastic at the time. I was becoming convinced he was right about me. But I just LOVED Sara's response, just hanging up on him! He made 5 or 6 more calls not included in this page. Going into meticulous detail over such things would bog down the narrative.

The initial panel strategy for this page was so boring! Head shot, head shot, head shot.... blah... then I was re-reading the first run of Paul Chadwick's Concrete, and found a page of phone conversations that used some brilliant and simple visual devices (page 19 of The Complete Concrete). Inspired, I created new layouts for panels 3, 4, 6 and the text block, and popped them in using Photoshop. So this page took two full pages to do! I'm going to tweak a couple little things before this book goes to press, as we used to say.

Not as much pen and brush work as on some pages, but it's always about balance and doing what the page calls for.

Tools used:

• Canson Bristol (2 sheets)
• Nib holder and pen nibs
• Lead holder and no. 3B leads
• 4B graphite stick
• Magic Rub eraser
• Micron No. .02, .03, .05, .08, 1.0 and brush tip
• Tight Spot for corrections
• FW Artists White Acrylic 
• Doc Martin's Black Star Matte India Ink
• Photoshop. Mountains of Photoshop.
• Renaissance # 2 Sable Cats Tongue Brush

I picked up a few new tools while I was preparing for next semester's classes, and am eager for the next page, despite the dire place the story is going.

Original Art Sundays (Thrusday) No. 294: Never Again

 I rarely talk about politics here. My politics are hardly secret, but this is not a forum where I usually give them voice.

But this goes beyond politics. This goes to the heart of our nation. 

Many conservatives seem to hold that we liberals hate our country. Quite the opposite. We really love it so much we want to recognize its faults and correct them. One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Thomas Jefferson: "The purpose of democracy is not to make the nation perfect. It's to make the nation better." I'm unable to find a specific citation, and am working from memory, but the principle is the vital thing. Democracy is a fascinating experiment, a work in progress, which will probably never be completed. And despite everything, we were making progress in fits and starts, until a year ago today.

As we are on the anniversary of the January 6 attempt to overthrow our government, this is very much in my heart and in my thoughts. I am usually a champion of restorative justice over punitive justice. Not in this case. I believe everyone who acted in this shameful attempted revolution should be tried and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We must also safeguard voting rights. I am forced to agree with Bill Maher that this remains a slow moving coup, which will only be stopped with our vigilance.

I took to Photoshop for a quick work to try to express my passion on this crucial matter. A few simple steps and here we are.

So many of the "patriots" who joined in this disgrace have been claiming innocence, saying they were deluded, brainwashed, or generally disavowing their craven acts. I say some things can't be forgiven. Not many, but some. 

This is one.

We won't heal as a nation unless the body politic is strong enough. That won't happen unless we deal with this. As the American writer Poe contended, "A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser." So must we do for the strength of our nation.

All for now on this.

Next- back to our story.