Original Art Sundays No 373: More Inktober

 Well, now that the hectic semester is done and my first Kickstarter goes live soon, I can devote more time to posting art.

FYI, the Kickstarter is a Surrealist Cowgirls 80 Page Giant! 

Here are a few more Inktober pieces from this year.

 Another one for the guitar book- good old Judy Jetson! Done on a backing board. Combination of ink and marker. Fast, loose and fun (the art, not Judy).

My stab at doing The Spirit. Always fond of this character. Eisner's work on this helped shaped my perception of everyday stories being told in comics. Almost all freehand, lots of ink and brush and just a bit of marker.

Oh, I like this one! This is Marie Severin, based on a painting by Johnny Craig. The painting ran in the book Marie Severin- the Mirthful Mistress of Comics. I think Marie's work was sometimes stronger than her brother John's work, and that's saying a lot!

Another one for the guitar book. This was based on a drawing on the inside cover of a Harry Chapin album. Harry's albums often had eloquent illustrations of the lyrics. I could have pushed this farther, but I was happy with where it stopped. Did a quick underdrawing and just went with it, correcting as I went. Lots of Micron markers on this one.

Took a couple stabs at this one. Obvious shot from The Prisoner, a perennial favorite series. It's tricky because of star Patrick McGoohan's almost complete lack of eyebrows! Marker for the mechanical lines only. The rest was nib and brush. The astute observer will note more drybrush at the base of the image.

Thomas Sondegard, artistic director of the MN Orchestra. I haven't gone very much this season, and I do miss it. This was a copy from a promo mailing. I took a couple minor design liberties. This is almost all brush work.

Original Art Sundays No. 293: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p. 25

 You know, I didn't think I'd make it this week. It's a good page, but the content... well....

Remember all those times with Delia and Sara before our heroine moved in with Curt? Well, turns out these things are almost always revealed eventually. In the vernacular, I was busted. In most cases, that's the end of the relationship, or the beginning of counseling. In this event, it was the death of my 1972 Picador guitar and my first exile from my new home, with almost no money in my purse and only the clothes on my back.

This was a very difficult page to create from an emotional standpoint. We're starting to get to the really ugly stuff in the relationship. I'm not interested in painting myself a hero, but I do want to show what happened as clearly as I can.

The first layout for this was pure exposition, a talking heads page. Boring! I played with slicing it up in different ways, doing some work with jagged panel edges and lots of little slice panels, but that had no impact. 

This is a big dramatic moment, with lots of action. I realized that his actions had to dominate the page, so settled on the two-column full figure layout. I took some license with his stomping my guitar. It really happened, but it wasn't quite as destructive as shown. He just put his foot through the top and stood there leering shards of the guitar and broken strings tangled stupidly around his foot.

For background consideration, I opted for a simple gray on the panels with me in them, which is repeated in the last panel, to anchor me to the visual space. I referenced the TV, door and windows seen in previous pages showing this space. The gray value comes from ink wash and not a Photoshop solid or texture. I wanted it to look a bit uneven, to echo the emotional content. I like the word balloon effect in the second panel of the right column, the dotted line inside the solid line. I think it emphasizes the smallness of my voice in that moment. I went with a heavier border than usual, again for emphasis. Curt's cast shadow in the last panel was a last minute touch, possibly superfluous, but I don't think it hinders anything.

I still miss that guitar. I've looked into replacing it a few times, but they're very hard to find. I do have other guitars now- more on that in a subsequent page.

The emotional toll of these pages is heavy. The only way I can do it is by focusing on the craft and circling back to be sure the final result isn't too analytical, too cold. Even then, it takes a day after finishing the page to recuperate.

Tools are pretty much the usual with a couple interesting additions:

• Canson Bristol board
• Lead holder with 3B leads
• 3B Castell pencil (good old greenie!)
• Ames lettering guide
  
• Castell eraser
• Micron numbers .02, .05, .08, 1.0 and brush tip
• Dr. Martin's Black Star Ink
• FW Artist's Acrylic White
  
• Round 10 well paint palette (for ink washes)
• Crow Quill and nib
  
• Brushes: Blick No. 2 and No. 6 synthetic
• Tight Spot for corrections
• And our old friend Photoshop 2019

Next: aftermath

Original Art Sundays #74 : Midnight Lightning

As promised, something a bit different this week.
As I may have mentioned here before, ever since my Mother passed, I create a book of her paintings for my siblings as part of a communal Christmas present.
Mother gave us all the same thing every Christmas, and it was always this odd melange of stuff. For example, one year we got a book on Biblical mathematics, a pound of Basmati rice, a kitchen fire extinguisher and a roll of silver dollars, all in a stainless steel stock pot.
When she died, we agreed to keep doing it between ourselves, for each other and in her memory.
My contribution has been the books of her paintings, most of which were left in my care.
This year, it was a book of her portraits. Last year, some of her abstract and surrealist imagery.
Since she did a Hendrix paining for a family friend, inspired by the cover of Midnight Lightning, and she shared a birthday with Jimi on Nov. 27, I decided to do a recording of Hendrix's Little Wing and create a short video of her work.



So in hope for the new year and in memory of Esther Bender, enjoy.