Original Art Sundays No. 286: Inktober 2021, Part 1

HI all;

Next page is nearly done. Rather than post late or skip a week, here are my current efforts for Inktober. 

Day one:

 We start with a swipe from the cover of a swing album I discovered on Apple Music, Naomi and Her Handsome Devils.

More stylized than my work usually is, but such fun! 

I played with BIG brushes filling in the background.

I always love the geometric elements associated with this era, as anyone who recalls my Speedy Recovery and His All-Girl Orchestra comic will attest.

Day Two: 

A pretty straightforward swipe of a panel from Dean Motter's Mr. X.

I'm re-reading this and finding new stuff in it. The design paradoxically feels like both 80s-90s and 1920s.

I adore his facial expressions!

So vibrant with just a few well-placed lines.

Day Three:

Charles Mingus, in Walnut ink. From photo reference.

I didn't quite capture his majesty or exreme coolness, but I like this one anyway.

I was privileged to see Mingus live once. In the middle of the set, some guy in the back yelled out, "Do it, Charlie!"

He peered over his sunglasses and replied, "Ah, do what, man?"

Day Four:

One of my favorite panels from the Don Rosa classic Life and Times of $crooge McDuck.

Honestly, this whole sequence is just so powerful, but this panel, with him chained by his evil rival, as he is ridiculed and informed that his mother is dead, is just so perfect.

I've tried to explain the virtues of funny animal stories to the uninitiated, to no avail. I fear it's one of those things where either you get it or you don't.

Day Five:

A mocking Big Cat from Craig Russell's adaptation of The Jungle Book. 

Russell is another one of those artists whose work leaves me breathless. There's a classic elegance to his work, but when you look at it closely, his lines are almost breathy. I wish I could afford to get some of his video tutorials! I learn so much from such things.

Day Six:

Very loose pen and ink rendering of the sadly demised jazz great Emily Remler. We lost her to heroin some years ago. Her style was her own, but based in the work of Wes Montgomery.

This is deliberately sketchy. I wanted some quiet energy on this one.

Mixture of ink and marker.

Day Seven:

Now this was fun!

There's a little concrete warthog on a stair post in front of a house near MCAD. We all know it and love it. It became a character in my only Surrealist Cowgirls cartoon, now lost to the ages. But it elicits such warm feelings as you walk by!

This is brush work. The background is crow quill, and the background is loosely inspired by Jim Woodring's work.

I have a couple more, but I'll save them for the next posting. The next page will be posted in a couple days, and I'll just sneak in more Inktober throughout the month. I've been crossposting my Inktober work on Facebook and Twitter, if you just can't wait.

Original Art Sundays No. 285: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p. 20

 Now that the chapter on surgery is complete, we're going back to the Curt narrative already in progress. 

We had 19 pages of our heroine (me) meeting Curt, developing a relationship and having, ahem, intimate moments with others. There was more of that, but rather than make the waters any muddier, it's time to move on, in every sense.

I left out a couple details, and a few events are not quite in the order in which they occurred, but that doesn't disrupt the veracity of the story.

The temp job was much less sophisticated than I made it look here. Nice people and fairly easy work, but pretty mindless, doing document recording and retrieval at an insurance company.

Several things about this page are quite deliberate. The only face the reader sees straight on is Curt's. This is a story about abuse, and like most such narratives, it builds slowly and becomes largely about the abuser.

 Time is very condensed here. This page represents three months. The art is serviceable, but no more. There are some obvious and deliberate exaggerations, like the hyper-extended U-Haul.

I had hoped to add a wood texture to the door, but Photoshop was missing some patterns. Rather than dink around with it, I went with a solid gray for the door.

Design consideration: to give the page a bit more weight, I used the old Terry Moore trick of adding a solid black behind the panels. In a moment of inspiration, I used his How to Draw book as a template for the shape! Just lay the book on the page and make a black outline, fill it in, and you're golden.

The tools for this week are very straightforward. Entirely Micron pens! But I haven't forsworn my beloved inks.

Tools:

• Canson Bristol
• T-squares and straightedges
• Lead holder, #3Bl leads, and erasers
• Micron .005, .2, .3, .5, .8, 1.0 and brush
• Photoshop
  

I'm also doing Inktober this year. Last time I did that, I didn't make it through the whole month, but I have high hopes this year. I have been posting my inks daily on Facebook and Twitter and will post them here weekly.

That said, next week we continue the Curt story. Current plan is to resolve this part of the narrative quick and clean, four or five more pages. Then two or three more short chapters, some hard editing decisions, and we're done with this project. I have two more comic and illustration based projects in the wings, and two text projects in the works.