Original Art Sundays No. 258: Ida

I'm back from vacation. Only did a couple drawings during my week in New Mexico. I did make music with some wonderful friends, including members of Gentle Giant! I played better and had great fun, as well as learning a lot, especially from drummer Malcolm Mortimore, who took me under his wing for a much-needed lesson on pacing.
The next page of Sharp Invitations is laid out and ready to hit the board, but I want to resolve a couple more pages before I go to inks on this one. In the interim, here's an ink piece.
I'm not doing the full Inktober experience. I will ink as much as possible this month. I learned a great deal last year from copying the work of people whose work I revere. I hope to expand on that experience this year, but I simply don't have time to ink every day right now, much as I would like to.
When cleaning some old files, I found an obituary of Ida Lupino, a woman whose work, integrity and singular beauty always impressed me. The obit included a remarkable photo of her, very sultry.
I've always loved that word. Sultry.
Ahem.
I've been meaning to draw from that photo for decades. Since I'm not working on the old magnum opus today, this seemed to be a good time. The finished product doesn't look like the original. I'm not even sure it looks like Ida Lupino. But I like it anyway.

Production notes: Be very careful when working with that Dr. Martin's Black Star Walnut Ink! Yes, it's a full, lush black. Yes, it flows smoothly and is fairly easy to control. But man alive, does that stuff smear if it's not set! I gave the Acrylic White and the correction brush quite a workout on this one.
There's a bit of dry brush on this. Love dry brush, but still working on controlling it. Some of the hair textures were done in dry brush.
In terms of layout, it's a bit of a shock the way the left arm fades to black, but it's effective. The lights and darks of this are so noir, so compelling. Not surprising, since Lupino was one of a handful of women to direct film noir. Her work Outrage was one of the first films to treat rape survivors with any real empathy.
As anyone who had been following my work for a while knows, hands are often my bane. I'm happy with the drawing of these.
I could have pushed the gray values farther in places, but it seemed time to step away.
Materials:
Pentalic paper for pens
Martin's Black Star Walnut Ink
FW Artist's Acrylic White
#0 Tight Spot brush
Princeton #4 Round brush (just got this a couple weeks ago, and I love it)
Princeton #4 scumbling brush
Magic Rub eraser
Next: More Sharp Invitations, if I don't do a new Tranny Towers piece.

Original Art Sundays (Monday) No. 251: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p.9

Technically after midnight, so no longer Sunday. Still close enough to on schedule that I count this as A Good Week.
I had a setback in my personal life this week. However, it only slowed down my comic work for a day or two.
I'm grateful for that, as I feel like I'm hitting a stride. I tossed that bottle of gummy ink! I may get ambitious and rework last week's page. I'd also like to go back a couple weeks and redo the first panel of the page set in Loring Park. Looking at it now, that's pretty bad and would not be that hard to fix.
Reading over these last few pages, I notice there's not a lot of transgender stuff in this part of the story. It's an overarching theme, to be sure. But if every page were about that, it would be boring. I went to the symphony with a pal on Friday, another trans woman. She asked me outright, "can we not talk about trans stuff tonight?" I was fine with that. It's part of who we are, not all of it.
In last week's episode, we saw our heroines comforting each other, taking solace from their respective pain. Of course, it didn't hurt that we were both horny as hoot owls.
And we drifted away to sleep.
Read on.

This is exactly the way this happened. No hedging on this page.
I like the way this page came together visually. Clean lines, good energy. There's almost no variation of panel position relative to the viewer on this page. We zoom in and out slightly, but it's pretty much the same shot in every panel. I'm using the old trick of leaving a white outline around figures and backgrounds/environments surrounded by large areas of heavy black.
The faces are a bit looser/ more cartoony than I usually like to use for more serious work. I tried not to overthink it, to just draw it as seemed natural.
I love detailed art, but my work lends itself to simpler lines most of the time. I have a lot of similar paradoxes in my life. My hair looks better short, but I like it better long, for example. Play the cards you're dealt, baby.
By accident, I started using a scumbling brush for filling, and found it perfect for the "slap lines" on panel three- turns it out it was ideal for dry brush, which I already knew but had forgotten.
Not using word balloons on panel four was a conscious choice. I wanted her (my) questions to be floating in the air, as ambiguous as the situation. Again, hand lettering here.
It was a hell of a thing to sit up in bed like that, shaken and worried, as she quickly and easily fell back asleep.
In terms of environments on this page, I let the bed and the dresser (with its omnipresent lamp) do the job. The dresser is present in the first and last panels, to anchor the page visually in the so-called "real world". These are also the only panels in which Delia is sleeping.
The real Delia later spend some time volunteering for the Center for Victims of Torture. Rather brave and quite healing, I think.
Materials this page:
Canson Recycled Bristol
Soft lead and lead holder
.05 and .08 tech markers
Ames Lettering guide
Faber Castell Brush Tip Markers, large and small
Dr. Martin's Hi-Carbon Waterproof Black Star India Ink (yay, love this stuff!)
#0, 2, 4, and 10 Richeson Synthetic brushes
Crow Quill Pen
Magic Rub Eraser
Next: last page of the Delia sequence, though she shows up again at the end of the Curt story.

Original Art Sundays No. 233: Next Sharp Invitation, p. 5

Two weeks today until the grant deadline! It's going to be close! I will have SOMETHING completed and printed, but certainly not the final version. Given that I hope to be working with an editor on this down the line, that's probably for the best.
Here, then, is the next page of the current story.
When we left our hapless lad, he had just gotten on the bus.

Again, I worked through several versions of this page. A couple were dialogue-heavy, but it soon became clear that wordless was the way to go with this one.
Backgrounds: sparse to nonexistent.
The space was established in the previous page and I wanted a sense of openness, a complete lack of control implied by a lack of place.
The floating jeering heads in the bottom tier are a summary of the way I felt and a reuse of a fairly effective panel from Speedy Recovery No. 1.
I would have liked the dry brush edges to be more pronounced in the final version. In re-reading some of my texts on pencils and inks, I've rekindled my fondness for, if not my mastery of, drybrush. I may give this page a fourth (fifth? sixth? I've lost track) go before the final version of the book sees print.
The borders were hard-ruled in pencil and then rendered free-hand in ink.
This is not one incident. I was tormented ("bullied" does not do it justice) by the kids on that bus for four years. The frequency and vehemence decreased, but the threat was always there. That's why I was so proud to lobby on MN's anti-bullying legislation a couple years back.
A rather bitter turn of events: there was a recent failed attempt by more conservative members of the MN legislature to introduce anti-trans bathroom use legislation this year. One of the self-righteous MN legislators talked about how businesses were "being bullied" into letting trans citizens use the bathroom of their appropriate gender. Yet another example of the abuser claiming to be the victim, I suppose.
Luckily, I have a light week at the FT job this week, and the semester is almost over, so the demands on my time from teaching at MCAD are somewhat reduced. All I need to do is summon the emotional strength to write about these painful and sometimes shameful events in my past.
And I must get it done in two weeks.
Yeah, that's all.
The upside is that I will have ample blogging material for the foreseeable future!
Next week: page 6.