Posts Tagged ‘illustration’

6 results.

Artist, Illustration and Comic Forums

by Jason Brubaker on January 28, 2010 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Making Graphic Novels

Which Forum is right for me?

When I first heard about artist forums and online communities I was totally lost. I had no idea where to look and how to find them. When I did a google search, I typed in "Illustration Forums" and the only one I found that seemed legit was IllustrationMundo.com. I didn't realize the forum was a separate part of the site and I never got anywhere because they didn't want to include me in their artist portfolio database. I assumed they were all a bunch of snobby artists who thought they were God's gift to mankind so I marked them off my list.

Months later I was talking to a another good friend, Jason Scheier, who suggested I try out CGsociety and ConceptArt. I immediately signed up and finally saw what a forum was all about. I was still very lost and didn't really know where to begin. They seemed so big and complex and I wasn't sure if my art would fit in so I put 'em on the back burner as well.

Months later another friend told me about the Flight Forum. I signed up with Flight, which seemed more my speed and subject, and posted some old pages of Phobos to test the waters. The next morning I had a few comments from other members. Suddenly my eyes were opened. I began posting comments on other threads that I found interesting. I started getting friends and began following other comic stories.

Later I learned about PencilJack and signed up there too. This forum is mostly comic artists both pro and amature.

Each forum is tailored specifically to something. I've been learning that it's good to find one with your same taste or niche. Here are a few things I've learned about specific forums and I suggest getting involved if you haven't already. But no need to join all of them as I have. Just find the few that specialize in what you want to do.

Art, Illustration and Comic Forums:

 

  • ConceptArt.org - Over 180,000 Members.  This is my favorite at the moment, especially the SKETCHBOOK threads.  I can spend hours digging through the sketchbook threads.  I started one here where I post panels every now and then and the response has been overwhelmingly good.  The rest of the forum is not really my taste because it's more about paintings for games and stuff. But this one will keep you busy once you start. Every second someone is posting something new. It's crazy.
  • PencilJack.com – Over 16,500 Members. This is a great place for posting comic art.  Both professional and amateur artists post here so it's great for everyone.  I've gotten really good critiques and comments on how to improve some of my panels and it's really solid advice too.  There may not be as many users on this forum but the participants here really love comic art. If that's your niche then jump on the wagon.
  • GutterZombie.com - Over 3600 Members. This is a very professional forum specifically for comic artists and even more specifically for comic colorists even though anyone can join and post work.  Some of the art here is amazing and the feedback is very extensive and helpful. I've gotten some great advice here about lettering as well as finding a flatter. If you want to color comics then drop everything and goto Gutterzombie!
  • FlightForums - Over 2500 Members. This is a very niche forum for small press comic artists.  It's a good one to start with because it's slow paced and very friendly. If you're making an indie comic or want to show off 8 pager then start here.
  • CGsociety.org - Over 407,500 Members. This forum is more for 3D art and paintings but there are some interesting areas.  I haven't posted anything here yet mainly because I'm not sure where to start and I don't really think it's right for my style.  But you have to admit, this one's a monster! Almost half a million members? Dang!
  • IllustrationMundo.com - Over 2,100 Members. For serious illustrators.  I started a thread (finally) in this forum and waited a few days.  When I finally got some comments, they were good and helpful but very catered to the tastes of designers. This forum isn't for me but if you want to specialize in illustration then go for it.
  • DigitalWebbing.com – Over 34,000 members. I just found this one and I really like what I see here. There are specific talent showcase sections for Creators, Artists, Sequential Art, Inkers, Colorists, Letterers, Writers and more. If anything, it's a ton of specific information for comic artists as well as a bunch of niche threads you can post in. Remember, find your niche and post there.
  • TheWebComicList.com – Over 74,000 members. I haven't tried this one yet but I plan on it in the near future.  It looks like a good niche forum for webcomics.
  • ComicBookResources.com – Over 54,000 members. This one was introduced to me by Drezz from iDrawDigital. It's a pretty big community that I've only started posting in.  Another great one for getting to know others who work in comics. Professional and amateur.
  • WhiteChapel – I don't know much about this one but I have heard that many people like it. [edit] WhiteChapel is a forum associated with comic book writer Warren Ellis' blog. It's a bit different then other forums out there in it's thread structure.

Does anyone know of other great forums helpful to graphic novel artists?  I'm sure there are plenty more I haven't found. Hope this list helps.

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Making Comics in Your Free Time – Time Management Tips

by Jason Brubaker on May 6, 2010 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Blog, Making Graphic Novels

Making a comic or graphic novel is quite the undertaking. Making one while having a full time job and family is ridiculous.

Although it can seem like a daunting goal, there are ways to achieve a project of this scale in a reasonable amount of time. To make more sense of my following points, I need to first bring up Parkinson’s Law.  It goes something like this:

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

In the years that I’ve worked freelance I can definitely say that this law was in affect. In fact I’ve had commercial storyboarding jobs in which I was given 3 hours to finish 26 frames. That amount was usually a full days work for a storyboard artist. I was also considered a fast storyboard artist in the agency that represented me. I honestly think I was considered fast because I was the only one to accepted the fast jobs. Other artists would just turn them down saying they were impossible. So, in turn, I became the fast artist. Any impossible storyboarding deadline would immediately get sent to me before anyone else. This was good and bad. Good in which it brought me plenty of work but bad because it was all crazy deadlines that drove me nuts.

The invaluable lesson this taught me was simple; work doesn’t need to take as long as the status que says it does. I applied this thought process to all my personal projects from that point on and because of it I’ve been able to accomplish tons of stuff in my limited free time. If I thought a project would take a full day in a studio environment, I would give myself three hours. And guess what? It usually would get done in three hours too. Maybe four.

It wasn’t until a month ago that I learned about Parkinsons Law. I never knew it was a specific term for what I was doing, only that it worked for me. I have to admit, if you work in this fashion long enough, you will be mentally drained of all your creative juices. There is a limit to how far it can be pushed. As long as I only apply it to my personal work every other night and not my full time day job then I can usually keep my energy tank full for when it really matters. My day job pays me to work at the status quo speed, which in a corporate environment is an extremely slow pace. So this works out well for me in my current situation. If I was still doing storyboarding at lightning speed then I would never have the mental energy to go home and do more, which is one of the main reasons I got out of storyboarding.

I don’t believe you can just jump in and start doing this from the start. If you don’t have a good understanding of anatomy and perspective and other fundamental skills then you will spend more time focusing on learning these things then you will on getting the job at hand done. So if your just starting out then take your time to learn your skill. I’m also not suggesting that you only focus on speed and only produce sloppy crap. It’s not a race. But if you can achieve the same level of quality in half the amount of time then why not learn to do it. We are talking about quality AND quantity here and I think it’s achievable. After all, my dream is not to spend 24 hours a day locked in a room doing my art.

Here are a few tricks and programs I’d suggest if you want to push yourself to get work done in a shorter time.

1. Remove distractions

This is important for me. If my office is cluttered with all kinds of other things that are more interesting to me at the time then I will space off and think about all the other stuff I could be doing. The internet is the biggest distraction of all time to me so one method of removing this distraction is by…removing it. Below is a link to a simple program called Freedom in which you can turn off your internet for a specific amount of time. It’s pretty awesome if your like me and want to check your email every five minutes. You can set it for the amount of time you think it will take to get your piece finished and the only way to get back onto the internet is to restart your computer… or wait until your set time expires.

Freedom – a great program to turn off the internet when you need to focus. There is a free donation version too.

2. Set a Timer

The best way to push yourself to speed up while staying focused is to get a simple kitchen timer and put it next to your desk. Think about how long it will take to complete a small task and then set the time to half that. You will be surprised how many times you will catch yourself getting sidetracked and then noticing your time is ticking away and jump back to work. Even if you don’t finish by the time the buzzer goes off you have at least started training yourself to think this way.

An alternate approach is to download a timer for your computer that will count down. I found a really good one for the Macintosh that politely beeps every 5 minutes to remind you that you’ve got work to get done. Trust me, if you do this long enough, you will be amazed at how much work you can generate in your free time.

Chimoo Timer for Mac

The timer combined with locking off your internet can do wonders in crunch time. And lets admit it, the time we spend at home after work is definitely not long enough to be filling every second with more work. Remember, work expands to fill the time available for completion.

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T-shirts and Postcards

by Jason Brubaker on May 10, 2010 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Blog

Here are pages 52 and 53 of reMIND. Click to enlarge. Right-click to open full size in a new window.

This was a fun spread not only to show off the crazy ideas in my head but also because it has a interesting composition. I really wanted to push the way the panels were laid out in an open book. If you divide the two pages exactly in half you will notice that the fold is going to be cutting through the large left image. I’m not sure if this is done a lot in comics or graphic novels but I’ve been consciously doing it every now and then in reMIND just to make an interesting looking book. There’s also something about all that empty space in the bottom of the last frame that really makes me happy.  I wish I could give a more in depth analysis of these pages but its Mother’s Day (the day I wrote this) and my wife needs more attention then this blog so I gotta get to the point and cut this short.

I’ve got some cool tutorials in the works on how I color this graphic novel. I’ll have more info soon once I get it all together but from the looks of it, it will be a 7 week set of tutorials to cover the whole process.

T-Shirts and Post Cards

The T-shirts are in and looking sweet. Here are some pics of my personal collection after they were washed. The second picture is the back which says “reMIND a graphic novel”.

One thing I realized while printing up this first batch is how much I don’t know about T-shirt sizes. For instance, I only printed a few sizes in XL and this is about the second most popular size request. That’s what I get for assuming everyone is a weak little wimp like me. From now on the shirts will go for the fairly standard price of $15 plus shipping($4.00 for US residence). So the new total is $19 for a shirt. No more gorilla packs for $10. Sorry. That was just a pre-order deal but I might offer something like that again for the next shirt whenever I get around to making another.

I also printed up 100 high quality postcards to hand out at comic stores and pin up on bulletin boards. I’m putting a few in each gorilla pack too. The cards are getting here on Wednesday so it looks like the Gorilla Packs will be sent a few days later then I thought. Sorry about that. Here’s what they look like.

Only a few more shirts are in stock which are:

Small – Sold Out

Medium – 6

Large – 5

[EDIT] My paypal button isn’t working again so instead just use the donation box to the left. Make sure to make it for $19 (this includes shipping) and include your address and shirt size. If you want a shirt sent outside of the US then add whatever amount you think will cover the extra shipping costs. ONLY MEDIUM AND LARGE SHIRTS LEFT.

I’m going to be selling some of these to friends at work so grab them while you can. I’m not sure when I’m going to print more but I guarantee I will make some XL and XXL next time. Thanks for all your support in buying the Gorilla Pack pre-orders and being willing to hang up fliers and cards for reMIND in your little hubs.

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Making Comics – Thumbnails

by Jason Brubaker on May 13, 2010 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Blog, Making Graphic Novels

Page Layouts and Thumbnails - How I Started

Planning out pages has been the most challenging aspect of creating reMIND and when planning a good set of pages, I always start with thumbnails. I’ve mentioned it before in the past assuming everyone knows what I’m talking about but since every artist is unique with their workflow I figure I should show the early stages of mine. I also noticed many young artists visiting here, trying to make heads or tails on how to start their own comic or graphic novel so hopefully this can shed some light on the subject enough to get the ball rolling.

After I finish a loose script (and I mean loose. No dialogue. A script with the main plot points. About a chapter per page) I started my thumbnails. Thumbnails are super small drawings just to get the initial ideas of composition and page layouts out of my head and on paper. Sometimes I have a clear idea in my mind but most of the time I don’t. If I have absolutely no idea where to start I force something out, however crude it may be, and this usually gives way to ideas that eventually start to gel.

I usually don’t like to show my thumbnails because they are so sloppy and bad. In the case of the pages above, you can really see where I struggled to figure out what to do. There are a few rehashed versions of the same things. Now days I like to draw my thumbnails with ink. This forces me away from little details. If I mess up then I have to start another one. It keeps the ideas fluid and loose.

Thumbnails can easily get really messy and scattered here and there and lost on small random pieces of paper. To battle this bad habit I’ve learned to keep all my thumbnails in nice tidy sketchbooks. I learned this working with many commercial directors. Many would keep similar hard bound sketchbooks clearly marked for each project in which they could collect all their random thoughts.

I started doing this for reMIND long before it was a graphic novel. The top book with the Fuel sticker is full of storyboards and concept art when I was planning on making reMIND an animation called “Vittles”. Most of these pages are full of clipped sketches and thumbnails, taped down to keep organized. I’m glad I did this otherwise I would have lost track of most of it.

This is the first image of Victuals (Vittles at the time) that I liked. I cut it out and taped it to the front page. Yeah, that says Tender Vittles 3.2 for some dumb reason. I just like that cat food name. I don’t have a cat…really. I don’t even really like cats. I just like drawing Victuals.

Above are some storyboard thumbnails for the animated version in it’s extremely early stages. The yellow panels were sticky notes that I later taped in the book. The lower left page is the first sketch of a lizard man. Sonja was going to be a boy at one point and above is a sketch.

Anyway, that’s my way to develop ideas. I’ve got to keep it all organized or I never get anything finished. And hey, it’s fun to look at later on…or put in a blog.

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Coloring a Graphic Novel – Part 3

by Jason Brubaker on July 1, 2010 at 5:00 am
Posted In: Blog, Making Graphic Novels

Part 3 – Art Directing your Graphic Novel

For those of you who just want a bunch of quick links to get free textures, here are a few I’ve used before.

CGTextures.com
mayang.com/textures
bittbox.com

But for those of you who want your project to be truly you own, it’s not as hard as it seems and the end result will be something unique to you. The textures you use are just as much your art as the pencil lines, character design and dialogue.  I encourage you to take it seriously and put in the extra day to make your own texture library that nobody else will be able to easily download and use. I use the above sites all the time for work related projects, but the texture library that has been the most invaluable to me is the one I created myself.

When you make your own textures, you can really art direct your graphic novel exactly the style you want. For instance, when I was trying to figure out what kind of coloring I should do for reMIND, I was walking around the San Diego Comic Con back in 2006 looking for inspiration.

It was hard because everything looked the same. Every book was bright, smooth, flashy and Photoshopped. Sure, back in the 90′s when comic coloring started going digital it stood out on the shelf and was unique and impressive. But now EVERY colorist uses Photoshop, throwing lens flares, motion blur and bright blue rim lighting over everything accentuating every bulbous orifice in all it’s shiny and clean glory. It’s so common now that it’s boring to look at.

There’s a great quote I just heard, “If everybody’s thinking the same thing, than nobody’s thinking very much.” – David Morgan of Silver-Investor.com.

That quote is about investing, but it applies to much more than that. In fact, I’m going to change it a bit for the sake of artists to go something like this:

If everybody’s doing the same creative things, than nobody’s being very creative.

This is the biggest reason I suggest making your own textures and art direct your colors AND textures. Don’t just copy what the majority is doing (unless you really love that style). Find something unique and inspiring and try to imitate that instead. We are in charge of creating the next stylistic wave.

After scouring the convention, the three books I found back in 2006 that inspired my decisions were Youngblood, WildC.A.T.S. and Spawn. Haha! Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Seriously, I loved the coloring of Spawn and WildC.A.T.S. back in THE NINETIES WHEN IT WAS UNIQUE AND HARD TO GET A COPY OF PHOTOSHOP. Notice I didn’t say I loved Youngblood. That’s another story. Check out this blog.

The three books I found back in 2006 that inspired my coloring decisions for reMIND were:

Mouse Guard by David Petersen – This little comic totally shook up the world of comics as far as I’m concerned. It’s totally unique in content, color, characters and even size. David was a no name artist when he started it.  It blew up. How awesome is that!

Sky Between Branches by Joshua Middleton - These are some of the most beautiful comic pages I’ve seen in a LONG time. Joshua is now one of my top favorite artists of all time. I can’t get enough of his sketches and he’s the one who gave me the idea to not ink reMIND. From what I can tell, he either uses pencils as his final lines or just draws on a Cintiq. Anyway, the coloring of Sky Between Branches really stood out to me as the level of quality I wanted to produce with my colors.

LA/SF by Christian Schellewald – This is not a comic but I came across it at the convention. It’s an amazing art book full of quick sketches and gauche paintings of places in California. This is the single biggest influence of how I wanted the textures to look in reMIND. I studied these pages over and over to try to understand why it looked and felt so nice. The details were so sloppy but it didn’t matter because the paints had such energy. My decision to make all the sky color a solid white in reMIND is also because of this book. Christian has a genius approach to compositions as well as negative space.

Orange / Koji Morimoto / Scrapbook – I found this one earlier in the year, but it also inspired a lot of the decisions I made. It’s the best sketchbook I’ve ever seen! I absolutely love this book.

With these four books I found my key inspiration for coloring, compositions, pencils lines, textures and negative space. I had officially figured out the art direction of my book. Now I needed to deconstruct what made it tick.

I scanned some textures from LA/SF and used them in an experiment to see if this kind of painting worked with my line art. At the time, I wasn’t planning on coloring it myself so I asked a designer friend, Jonathan Kim, to take a stab at coloring a page with these scanned textures to see what would happen. Here’s what he came up with.

This got me really excited and I realized I was onto something. Now I just needed to create my own high resolution textures to convey this mood and feel.

Obviously I’m not suggesting you scan other peoples work to use in your own art. It was merely a test for myself to see what it might look like if I were to go through with it for my book.

I had a bunch of Acrylic and Gauche paints from a long time ago, so I decided to have a painting party with my friends. I brought my paint and some large sheets of watercolor paper into a studio where I was freelancing at the time and we all (3 of us) just spent the morning creating a giant texture library. I had my books open in front of me and I tried to recreate some of the same colors and paint strokes. Between the three of us, we must have created 50 painted textures, which I spent the rest of the day scanning and cleaning up for digital use.

I narrowed it down to about 10 quintessential textures that work best for reMIND and it only took a day. I’ve been using these same textures for 4 years now and people still don’t know how I do it.

Until now.

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Coloring a Graphic Novel Series (How I color reMIND)

Part 1 – Multiply and Flatting

Part 2 – How I use Flats

Part 3 – Textures – Art Directing your Graphic Novel (You are here)

Part 4 – Creating your own Texture Library

Part 5 – Adding Textures to your Flatted Page

Part 6 – Masking and Applying Gradients

Part 7 – Light Source and Shadows

Part 8 – Dialing it all Together

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Wallpaper Preview

by Jason Brubaker on September 1, 2010 at 5:00 am
Posted In: Blog

Well, it’s the 1st of September and I have a new goal.

Every month TopWebComics resets and all your hard earned votes go back to zero. So, I decided to be serious about voting this month. To prove how serious I am, I’m going to try to update the voting incentive twice a week to spur everyone to vote for reMIND. Today’s voting incentive is a new wallpaper I made for anyone who donates. To be fair to the donators, I’m only showing a medium sized version when you vote along with a watermark.

My goal with the incentives this month is to try to get into the top 25 on TopWebComics. Getting ranked high on this list is better than any advertising because most people only click on what seems popular before wasting their time digging down a long list. When I got into the top 50 a month ago, I started seeing around 25 new visitors a day from TopWebComics. The only way they could have found me was by digging through the top-list because I wasn’t advertising at the time. I have to admit, I’ve clicked on all the top 50 webcomics before just to see why they got so many votes.

Anyway, I promise to make an effort to update incentives this month if you keep voting. So here we go.

Today’s incentive is a preview of my sweet new wallpaper.

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