Original Art Sundays no. 364: Sharp Invitations: Esther's Hands, p. 6

 On to the next page of our story. I rather like this one.

When we left our family, Esther was starting to pull her life back together while she raised five children alone.

Now that the framework is solidly in place, we can get to the meat of Mother's story. 

Story notes: As Mother started to come into her own, so did the kids. We were finding our own voices, developing interests. Like many kids of the mid-late 60s, we bonded over TV. My sisters and I developed a fascination with The Monkees. I stuck with them more fervently than my sisters did. We often took the books, art and music that surrounded us for granted. That was soon to change. More on that on next week's page.

Art notes: The visual device of the brush stroke defining the left border of the panel will be repeated over the next two pages. I worked up a decent sketch of a hand doing a brush stroke, scaled it and printed a few copies. It will serve as a unifying narrative device. The first panel is from photo reference, with some liberties in perspective, intended to show that our lives were full but a bit off-kilter. For the middle panel, I tried 6 different layouts - Mother running out of the room, Mother looking back as she leaves, the closeup of a child's eye with Mother leaving in the eye, and so on. I finally resolved that even though this is her chapter, she doesn't need to appear in the panel at all. In fact, this page is unusual in that there are no face shots of anyone! This is almost like leaving myself out of a page. I've noted before that most graphic memoirs show the creator/subject on every page. Alison Bechdel broke this rule in her two most recent memoirs, but not in her first, Fun Home. I don't know if it's as much a rule as just the way things work out. At any rate, it's refreshing to shake up reader expectations as well as my own.

The astute viewer will note that the furniture and room layout are slightly different than previously represented. This is both artistic license and an acknowledgment that time has passed. 

For several years after Mother passed, I made small books reproducing her art and writing for the family. For the last panel, I scoured one of those books, and found a work that was period specific and had a good range of gray values. Rather than incorporating a photo of the actual painting, I opted to do a wash rendering of it. 

I'm happiest with my work when I let it flow. A solid layout is a tool, a means to an end, not an end in itself, to paraphrase Robert Fripp. I've been revising the master book, as mentioned last week. In noticing what works best, the most successful pages are those where I just explore visual ideas to advance the story. As an artist, I seem to be escaping the confines of my own expectations, whatever that means!

Finally, I re-titled this chapter from the outline. It's not about hands the same way songs like Bill Withers'  Grandma's Hands (which I love even though he sings flat) are about hands. It's not about specific things the hands are doing. I am spotlighting hands throughout this chapter. Their appearance and actions reinforce different parts of the story and character. I hope that's clear. I'm not sure how else to articulate it.

Next: the brush stroke continues.

Original Art Sundays No. 254: Sharp Invitations, Cover Preliminary

Bad news, folks. My Adobe license is down. This was discovered just now. I'm reasonably certain I can get the situation remedied tomorrow.
Until then, here's a piece to tide you over.
This is a quick painting I did on Wednesday. I have plans to add typography to it as soon as software permits. I suppose I could try doing so in Word, but it somehow seems- well, dirty.
I have two different ideas for the execution of this piece. It was originally intended as an alternative cover for Sharp Invitations, but something happened that may modify that. More on that later.
Here's the painting.

Materials:
Windsor Newton colored inks
Aquabee 80# Rough finish watercolor paper
Richeson Synthetic fan brush #8
Richeson Synthetic brushes #2, 4, 4 Filbert
lead holder, eraser
More soon. Glitch solution imminent, I hope.

Original Art Sundays (Tuesday) No. 227: Sharp Invitations cover preliminary

After a three-month hiatus, I am resuming posting art.
I've hardly been idle. In addition to the full time gig and adjunct teaching, I've been stabbing at my grant project, a graphic memoir titled Sharp Invitations. This is a memoir focusing on transgender life and on issues of poverty. Also rock & roll!
This is the biggest project I've ever attempted, and I have a very tight deadline. I do not expect the version submitted for the grant fulfillment to be the final version. I hope to get this published, ideally by one of the big guns, Fantagraphics or First Second being my primary choices.
I am jumping around in the book rather than working sequentially. This is largely because the work is so intimate and emotional that I have a hard time sitting down to work one chapter all the way though. I posted a rough of the first chapter for this more than a year ago. Each chapter will be a self-contained story, with overlapping narratives.
Here's a mock-up of the cover.

The basic layout will remain unchanged, but I might go for a more involved background than the pale blue watercolor wash. The core idea, the woman in the blade of the scalpel, will remain. I plan to do a more accurate rendering of the scalpel for the final. There's a curve to the handle, and a bevel at the start of the grip by the blade.
Materials: colored ink washes and colored pencil over inked line art. Typography done in Photoshop.
The body of the work goes much too slowly, but there is progress being made. I'm taking a week off of work in April to put the project to bed.
I currently have several pages that need to be lettered. I've committed to lettering this digitally and have included the purchase of two specific fonts in the grant proposal.
I will have more to report next week.

Original Art Sundays No. 153: placeholder: A Micmac Legend (gouache, collage)

Well, I'm rethinking figure positions on the next Cowgirls page, so either later this week or up for next Sunday's entry.
Meanwhile, here's another unused editorial piece.
This one incorporates illustration as a border element.
There are aspects of this that I really like, but in retrospect, I would have handled the type differently- nothing really wrong with it, but it doesn't have much character.

The illustration is just detailed enough. The layout is intended to draw the reader right into the text. The costuming of the lower figure is authentic, at least according to my research.
As indicated above, this was done at 100% size in gouache with elements (leaves, photos of earth) collaged into it. I'm hardly a huge fan of collage, but in this case it works.
Very hectic week at work coming up, but I hope to make time to complete that page. The top half is already wonderful; I just must make the bottom half follow suit!

Original Art Sundays no. 119: The Pirate Alphabet

The next page of A Private Myth is still giving me fits, but I think I know what's wrong now.
Meanwhile, rather than keep readers waiting indefinitely, here are some images from yet another uncompleted project.
I was working on an alphabet book based on pirates, more than a decade before the Pirates of the Caribbean films (which I rather enjoy). The book used the framework of a couple young girls gleefully talking about pirates.
Here are a couple of the pieces, done in watercolor technique using colored inks and dyes.

This piece was about Privateers, the licensed pirates of the British and Spanish crowns.
The colors are a bit off, and my control of background around people and objects was a bit lacking- still hadn't mastered masking!
And the foreground figure is a bit stiff, and the color of his coat is too close to the background sky.
So it goes.

This piece, which I much prefer, is an illustration for a page devoted to women pirates, who span all nationalities. I particularly like the one in white with the blue kerchief.
I love the subdued tones, and the interplay of inks and paper texture pleases me.
I went out of my way to get the weaponry and boats right, but I suspect I made some errors despite my best efforts.
This is another one of those "I'll go back and finish it some day" projects.  Such a big pile of those!
Then again, it may have been rendered unnecessary. The market may be glutted with pirate stuff now. More's the pity, as the relative percentage of good pirate stuff to total pirate stuff is rather low. Still, I did like the last Pirates of the Caribbean film, the one loosely based on Tim Powers' novel On Stranger Tides, even if it didn't clean up the loose plot threads from the previous film in the series.
Next week: something....

Original Art Sundays, No. 19: The World in Love, pp. 18 and 19

Our heroine is coming into her own, though she doesn't know it yet.

 

The lizard is, of course, an homage to my man Vaughn Bode', referenced here several times in the past.

In yesterday's post I mentioned my Mother's paintings. One of those, done the day before my 13th birthday, featured the Northern Lights and was an unconscious influence on this story. I was reminded of it during yesterday's shoot.

 

This painting, along with 29 others, will appear in this year's book of Mother's art.