You know, I think Rapidographs get a bad rap in our little community of cartoonists and illustrators. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe they get held in higher regard than they deserve. But mostly I think people badmouth em. Like, the other day I even found myself saying, “They’re a pain in the ass to maintain, but…” That’s the consensus talking, man! They’re not a pain in the ass to maintain! More recently, I was lovingly cleaning two of my pens out, and I thought, this is nice, it’s meditative, and it means I care about the tool I’m using.

You know what’s a pain in the ass to maintain? Try maintaining disposable pens! They run out before you’ve done like four drawings, or more likely the tip splits and you haven’t even gotten your money’s worth of ink. Or, try maintaining the ink on a page after you erase it.

Plus, none of them are color-coded for the size, so you have to search out a number on the barrel or the cap every time. On the worst, and most commonly used, technical pens, Microns, the numbers wear off and you have to compare all the tips side-by-side to figure out how big they are. Talk about a pain in the ass!

And then, when they wear out, you go and dump another piece of plastic into a landfill to sit for thousands of years, taking up space amongst decaying poisons. And then! Even worse! You have to get your ass to an art store and buy another one! What a pain in the fucking ass!

That being said, I give you a drawing of my jambox. It’s been with me for seven years or so, and the other night at a raucous good time at my house, I thought I’d lost it to the ages. But it turned out the CDs just got stuck in a space in the tray, and I just needed to open it up, take them out, and put it back together again. Praise Somebody! A month before that happened, I realized it looks like a cute little imp, and I drew it. With a Pentel Pocketbrush. Not Rapidographs.

Alrightch’all, I know I’ve only been giving you dribs and drabs lately. Hell, just a bunch of sketchbook doodles. I know. And I’m sorry. It’s time we got to some meat and potatoes. Or at least some seitan and wild rice. Would you like to see how I made another cover drawing, with colored inks and all? Well tough noogies, ’cause that’s what you’re getting!

I was asked by fellow CCSer/Springsteen fanatic Nomi Kane to draw the cover for an anthology she edited featuring stories set in a fictional Arizona town called San Papel. It was inspired by a papercraft kit assistant editor Jon Fine was assembling at the end of last semester. Despite these humble, cute beginnings, Tales from San Papel is filled with some pretty tough stories of predatory people in the mean, wild West. And some talking animals.

I’m not gonna go into as much detail concerning tools or the sketching process this time as I did with the Oak & Linden #1 cover, but I’ve got lots of pictures to show you, and lots of them you can click to see bigger. Suffice it to say that the pre-production was long and tortuous, with lots of different concept scribbles, and lots more of monogram sketches that I didn’t use for anything.

Then I spent a day making a big chunk of Victorian Arts & Crafts-y text, only to scrap it because it took up too damn much space (plus all the creators are credited in the table of contents, their individual pieces, and a contributors page at the back, so this would probably be some seriously narcissistic over kill on the cover).

I tried to make up for time I’d lost making that by rushing headfirst into the actual cover drawing, with little more than a doodle of a coyote twisted up in some barbed wire to guide me. That was a mistake.

I suppose it isn’t terrible, but I felt like it needed more breathing room, that the image wasn’t clear, that the coyote’s body should have more of a sense of twisting and bending over itself, and that the page design could use some bolder shapes. So then I did some actual thumbnail sketches, flipped over the piece of bristol I was drawing on, and drew the following.

Now for the inks, with a good helping of white out. I drew the ear at least three times before I liked it, and the coyote’s back I eventually had to paste-up with some new paper. This is more what my inks usually look like (as opposed to the Oak & Linden drawing, which I was crazy careful with because I did inks and colors on the same piece of paper). You can see I keep my pencils fairly loose and make a lot of changes at this stage (check out the buildings and mountains, and the coyote’s head). I don’t know if this is artsy-fartsy talk, but I think it keeps some spontaneity in the line.

Then I drew the title, on a separate piece of paper, which is unusual for me. In this case, I did the cover drawing at print size. I wanted to draw the lettering at “half up” so I could give it the detail that it deserves. So I did.

I put ‘em together with Photoshop, and here it is: the cover in glorious black & white, trimmed to eighth-inch bleeds.

Now, this time I tried an old-school comics coloring technique I’ve learned here at CCS. I printed the inks in 50% cyan on a sheet of watercolor paper, and then colored on that. The true old-fashioned technique is to to also print the inks in black on a transparency which you can use to see what the color will look like with the black over it. I don’t have any transparencies for my inkjet printer, and I didn’t want to face the below-zero winds of Vermont to get down to a laser printer at school last night. So I did without. I did have some trouble. When I wet the paper, I lifted a lot of the cyan ink and spread it everywhere. I don’t know if I should have waited longer to put water to the thing, or if inkjet ink really hates printing onto sized paper, or what, but consider yourselves warned if you plan to try this sort of thing. Anyhow, here that is.

Put ‘em all together and whattayou get?

At the CCS Visiting Artists Blog there are some doodles, perpetrated by fellow toonies and me, of the great folks who came by last semester, including Seth, Allison Bechdel, James Kochalka, and others. Check check!
[ Update: Aw gee, I guess I'll post the ones I drew here, too–Pat "Aims to Please" Barrett ]

James Sturm

James Kochalka

John Porcellino

Allison Bechdel

Dash Shaw

Seth

David Macaulay

It’s great to be back at CCS, where people love comics, beer, pot, soccer, and Mario Kart. What can I say, I’m flying around in a fuckin fantasyland! Although, that ol’ demon money keeps tugging at me like some sort of devilish ballast and crashing me back to reality! The less you have, the more it ways you down. Oakley Hall’s Landlord is my anthem. It’s about how Pat “Papa Crazy” Sullivan’s great-great-grandfather murdered his landlord, and then bucked the system by sewing an iron collar into his shirt so he wouldn’t die when he was hanged. And how that same Irish anger is flowing in Crazy’s veins today and he wonders if his landlord really wants the rent so bad? Love it so much.

And speaking of songs I love so much, I think its hilarious to think about any of the Jim Steinman Meatloaf lyrics literally. Such fraught, overwrought metaphors! Like this one.

…I think winter is especially magnificent to look at. In New York, the buildings become stark geometry, light in front of shadow, shadow in front of light. It’s fantastic! And then in the country, well-defined shapes strike against each other, in white, pale blue-gray, and lavender-brown. Woops, it looks like those years of painting class snuck themselves onto me! Better show you a picture of

another BIG DICK!!

…how would you like to see some doodles of monsters and wangs? With some ampersands, of course. I’m keeping this shit classy like Brighton Beach. Oh and tits. Tits too.

Yesterday I was explaining the premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm to somebody, and today I watched a bunch of clips on YouTube. The thing that Larry does best is end his seasons with a serious kicker–it’s the punchline for the uber-joke that was being told for the last couple of months. Like, what about that third season?? Or the sixth season (which I still haven’t seen, but have heard enough about to feel like I had)??!! And then, through watching clips, I came across this LD-Marty Scorsese stuff. And it’s funny. It’s a great sendup of gangster movies. But it doesn’t look at all like Scorsese shot it. Then I thought about how HBO shows tend to look cheap. They’re written wonderfully, and with terrific acting and directing, but most of them look like they’re shot with a camcorder in a basement. A couple exceptions are Flight of the Conchords and especially Sopranos. (And I know there are others, but I’m not about to do the kind of research that it takes to write something well! So deal with it!!)

Maybe this low-budget style makes it easier to pay great actors, and allow great writers to take as long as they want to come up with something. And maybe it’s essential to the improvisational, or live performance, quality of Curb and Tenacious D. Anyhow, once streaming HBO exists officially, all I’ll do anymore is watch it.

My friends, the long vacation is coming to an end. It’s very bittersweet to be packing up and getting ready to hop on the Vermonter tomorrow morning. For one thing, I’ve apparently attributed mystical, magical powers to “my” drafting table, “my” computer, “my” scanner. I feel magnetically compelled to get back and excersize my studio equipment fetish. At any rate, I can’t seem to get anything done in this post-holidays Brooklyn squatting. I wish I could say it’s because I was doing so much and seeing all the sites, but really I’ve been sitting with the cat and looking at the internet for the last week. So, I don’t even feel like I’ve been reading cause I’ve only been reading on screens. Anyhow, it’ll be nice to feel settled and stop living out of a suitcase. From Charlotte, to Connecticut, to Brooklyn, it ain’t easy saying goodbye so many times in three weeks! And of course, as the deadline for Brooklyntime has come hurtling toward us, I’ve been seeing more of my friends and doing more interesting stuff, and it makes me never want to leave.

Blah blah blah, Alien, you know, from Alien?

It’s a time of transition, isn’t it? Just because some weirdos decided it would be better to start a new year at the winter solstice instead of the spring equinox? I don’t know. I just know that everywhere I go, peeps are itching to move onto something, or someplace, new. South America, Asia, California, New York, Vermont, anywhere but here. Maybe this makes sense, meteorologically, after all. Winter, even though it can look so lovely, and crisp, and pristine, is a real drag. So a person starts to think, man, I gotta do something else with my life. Which makes sense, because basically the thing you’re doing with your life at this point is sitting inside watching TV and playing video games, eating too much chocolate, sleeping late, and trying to maintain feeling in your fingers and toes. So then, come spring, you either really do something new, or you don’t. Now is when the idea is germinated. At any rate, it seems that the early twenties New York City recess is coming to a close for many of my college chums. Then what? Maybe I should move to Dublin, or London, or something.

New year, new beer, y’know? I’m trying to figure out the best way to set up a “shop” on my site, are you excited? Thinking I should probably find something without so many fees as Etsy. I have Oak & Linden issue 1 camping out there and so far it has cost me $4.00. Does anybody have any recommendations? How many questions can I squeeze into one post?

And yeah, I’m gonna keep these doodle posts going for another week or two.