Here it is: the post you’ve all been waiting for. The previously promised process post. It’s the whole thang, from start to finish, for the cover of issue one of my upcoming awesome anthology, Oak & Linden.
I should say right from the get-go that you can click on all these pictures to see what’s going on a lil’ better. In the beginning all I had was a title, and I needed to make it a type treatment, or a logo, or whateva. As I often do when I want to make a logo, I started playing with Sharpie on tracing paper. This is a sketching technique I learned through Caitlin from her favorite prof ever, Charles Goslin. It really works because you stay loose, you have a really easy time seeing the balance of black and white, and you can also make changes quickly by laying on another piece of tracing paper.
I swear it seemed like there were differences between these at the time.
The title comes from a Greek myth about a couple that takes in Zeus and Hermes, who are disguised as bums. The couple is rewarded for their hospitality by being linked together even after death, as intertwined oak and linden trees. There definitely had to be some wrapping and braiding kinda stuff going on. I landed on a basic concept, and I kept redrawing and refining on various pieces of tracing paper. Then, when I finally liked one of those, I used a lightbox to trace it on bristol with a Rapidograph pen. I scanned that, blew it up, printed it out and traced it again. That’s when I realized I didn’t need to do that last part, and I could just trace directly from the print out onto the big board, which you’ll see soon.
Like so (okay, actually youse can’t blow this one up):
Having settled on the title design, I realized I just might need to draw something on the cover. I turned for inspiration to a dream journal I kept fastidiously when I slept alone, but have mostly ignored ever since I moved in with Caitlin.
What, you can't tell what's going on here?
I was most on my dream writing game when I lived in Bushwick, which is very much like living in the Caribbean, and lots of my dreams involved Carnival or block parties or fairs. There was also a running theme of small rodenty animals whose heads I needed to crush with my shoe. One time I looked closer and the beast was be a cute kitten and I loved it and gave it a drink of water. Once it was a baby panda with human hands. Usually, though, it was a hideous rat-weasel with matted fur and I really wanted to smash it. I guess what I’m saying is, I landed on a Coney Island wrap-around cover with lots of dream elements on the front, and all the characters that appear within the book on the back.
I realized that with all these foreground elements, I’d need to first get a handle on the background:
Then I put on some tracing paper and placed all the people:
I tend to work at “half up,” which I learned from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. In other words, the original art is one and a half times the size of the printed graphics. The shrinking makes the lines tighter and disguises inconsistencies and little stray marks and the like. The standard for comics is to work on 11″×17″ paper and print at about 6½”×10″ and that’s the size I’ve been working. For a wraparound cover with bleed space at this same scale, I needed to work on some 18″×24″ paper. As I said a few weeks ago, I hadn’t done that since in the days of art school. I feel like a big boy again.
Here you can see the daintily traced pencil line on the right half of the page.
Now, it should be said that I’m very bad at drawing lightly. I’ve compensated by using blue pencils (specifically the Copy-Not Non-Photo Blue and Col-Erase Light Blue, both from Prismacolor, and both with an eraser on the end) that don’t reproduce in black & white. For this project I knew I wanted to use colored ink washes instead of my typical Photoshop colors and I didn’t want blue lines everywhere so I I had to compensate for my pencil mashing some other way. So I drew everything with regular pencils on a piece of drawing paper left over from sophomore drawing class, then lightboxed the lines onto a sheet of bristol for the final product. I usually leave my pencils pretty rough and finish the drawing while I’m inking. Well, this case is different, again, because of those ink washes. I figured I wouldn’t have as much leeway as I normally do to throw white (if you’re wondering, right now I use Pro White opaque watercolor) over all the lines I don’t like, because of how the colors would react on top of the paint. Thus, I drew some pretty tight pencils. I even used a ruler for the perspective lines! Almost worthy of being inked by somebody else, like a superhero comic.
But it was inked by me. I ain’t no sellout! (With Rapidographs—if you’re in the market for these technical drawing pens, wait for the back to school sales to get the the seven piece set. Every art store in New York majorly slashes the price at the beginning of each semester.) I didn’t fill in any major black areas because I’m totally into doing that with Windsor & Newton Designer’s Black right now. It comes out really, really black, like black hole black, but unfortunately it’s a guasch, not an ink, which means it’s water soluble. So yet again, I’m compromising for those goddamn colored inks:
An ode to Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bombay Sapphire inks. Dese. Dings. Iz. Da. Shit. I really love to use em. Every time I make something that looks like watercolor, that’s what I’m using. What I especially love about them is the way you can work in glazes and build colors on top of each other. I never much liked how watercolors will reactivate once you touch a wet brush to them, leaving you with mud colors—at least if you ain’t got watercolor skills, which I ain’t got. But ink is ink; it’s permanent! The colors go right on top of each other, with the underneath ones shining through the on top ones. I really think the outcome is much richer than anything I’ve ever pulled off with paint.
I started by making the background people a nice umber type of brown, since the foreground people would use lots of primaries, especially blue. At first this scene was gonna be in the middle of a nice summer day, but soon I realized that Lawrence the Projectorhead’s Pantone blue was really close to the color of the sky. I was really terrified that a sunset purple would look corny, but once I did it, I really liked the mood it brought of evening on the boardwalk, as things turn from weird to weirder.
And here you have it, the finished drawing. Now come visit me at MoCCA Fest and get yourself a copy of Oak & Linden issue one, which some are calling the Pat Barrett Sextravaganza.
