Genteman Beetle

Design for one of the main characters of a children's chapter book I'm working on.

Now Officially Official!

Also, now it is officially official! I'm on the Red Fox Literary site!

Click Here!

Thanks again to my new rep, Abigail Samoun!

Fred Rogers, John Waters and Self Esteem in America

Fred Rogers' message in Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, first and foremost, was for children to accept themselves, and to accept others. That everyone was unique, and special, and of worth. This implied an acceptance not only of the self, but of diversity in general.  He had a unique talent to speak to children, and he was very conscious of his audience. The message was directly to them. He addressed not only the need to accept yourself and to accept others, but he acknowledged the feelings of children. In his song “What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel?” he sings,

“What do you do with the mad that you feel, when you feel so mad you could bite

When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong

And Nothing you do seems right?”

On the cusp of the punk movement, John Waters expressed his anger through his films. His films weren’t an endorsement of the behavior he portrayed, but they satirized the absurdity of what society rejected. Society rejected difference. The characters in his film reveled in that difference and rejected society’s rules, taking this rebellion to its ultimate extreme, as Waters acknowledged that rebellion too can be just as absurd when taken to great lengths. It wasn’t a rejection of rebellion, but a self awareness of it. Rebellion is necessary and healthy, but rebellion for the sake of rebellion is absurd.

As Waters emerged, so did the punk movement. The punk movement too was about a rejection of society’s rules, and the DIY aesthetic was all about existing outside a dependency on that society.  It was this kind of rebellion that Waters both satirized and embraced. He had a great affection for those who rejected conformity, but he also recognized that rebellion was not an end in itself. In romancing this rebellion, the punk movement formed a parallel culture that in its way was just as conforming. Hand painted leather jackets, Doc Martens and band pins became a uniform. The punk ethos became competitive--who could be more punk? All of this lost sight of the true origin of the movement. It became rebellion for rebellion's sake, much like what Waters illustrated in his films.

But Waters understood and embraced a similar core Ethos, and his heroine was the embodiment of it. Devine was not only everything that society rejected, but she was rejected by another emerging parallel culture, what was rapidly becoming the gay mainstream. To the more conservative side of gay culture, she was an ugly caricature. To Waters she was beautiful. She was beautiful because she embraced and celebrated who she was. Society couldn’t tell her who she could be. Waters was saying in his films, in effect, that Devine was special just the way she was. 

Devine: Special Just the Way She Is

Though the parallel shouldn’t be taken too literally, Lady Elaine Fairchilde was Rogers in drag, his own version of Devine. Like Devine, she could be abrasive, she could be loud, she could be a mischief maker. She was Rogers' vehicle to express this side of himself, but like Devine, it was an affectionate portrayal. Just as Rogers loved each and every one of the characters in his Neighborhood of Make Believe for their individuality, Waters loved each and every one of the characters in his films for the very same reason. The only truly unsympathetic characters in Waters' films were authority figures, or those who caused shame in others. While Roger’s taught you not to be ashamed of who you are, so did Waters. He exaggerated and satirized shame, and showed the absurdity of the people responsible for imposing that shame.

Rogers in Drag?

Both Waters and Rogers approaches were (and in the case of Waters, continue to be) largely uncompromising. Rogers approach in many ways was as much gorilla theatre as Waters. The sets are simple and spare, some of the performances by the cast could be amateurish and unpolished. Like Waters dialogue, sometimes Rogers songs are a little blunt, and hit the mark a little too square on the head. This uncompromising approach was also an evolving one. In the early years, before Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, Rogers incorporated religious songs into his repertoire, and initially, when he was asked to exclude them, he refused. Later he accepted that the addition of these songs could narrow his audience. In Waters earliest films he didn’t always behave in the most responsible, or humane (I think some of you might know what I’m talking about) way he could have. In more recent years Waters' has explained that he's no longer as angry as he once was.  But I don’t want to take this parallel too far. I’ll just end by saying that both men have had an enormous impact on our acceptance of diversity and individuality, and the world is a better place because of them.

The Best Three Zombie Movies You Haven't Seen!

What has been great about my relationship with Reg over the years is that slowly she's begun to love my nerdish enthusiasms. Superhero movies, Doctor Who, and more recently, zombies. It all started with Shaun of the Dead. I couldn't get Reg to watch a horror movie of any kind, until Shaun of the Dead. We had watched the BBC series, Spaced, which she loved, and I told her that Shaun of the Dead had much of the same cast and was made by the same people. Not only did she love Shaun of the Dead, but she said she wanted to see a real zombie movie. So we went through the canon: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, and newer ones like 28 Days Later. I knew I had fully corrupted her when I warned her that there was a zombie birth scene in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, and she said, "we have to see that."And we did. And she thought it was great. Now The Walking Dead has just ended its second season, and she's starved for good zombie entertainment. If you're in a similar boat, here are a few recommendations.

Pontypool

 A "shock jock" radio host has lost his national radio job and is forced to work at a radio station in the small Canadian town of Pontypool. Of course, there's a zombie Apocalypse...

The entire film takes place in the radio station, as it begins to dawn on the radio station staff that they may be the last people in the town who haven't caught the bug. The bug, in this case, in a very novel twist, is language itself. Somehow this zombifying disease has imbedded itself in the English language as spoken by the townspeople, and the more they are exposed to certain words and phrases, the more they are at risk of zombification. It could almost be a play, but this stagey quality doesn't prevent it  from being very tense and very scary. Great writing and great performances by all.

The Signal

In this one, the vehicle for zombification is a signal sent  through radio, TV and cell phone broadcasts that makes people go homicidally nuts until they slowly become mindless homicidal zombies. Some are able to resist the signal. Some are only able to sort of resist the signal. It's not always clear by how much. So people are in various stages of confusion, bizarre behavior and homicidal intent, and some people who seem OK, aren't exactly. Or maybe they're just a little OK. It's this ambiguity that makes the movie so much fun. The three sections of the story are written and directed by three different auteurs, but it's not an anthology format. It's all one story, centering around a couple who are trying to reunite in the midst of the disaster. There are lots of scares, but at times it can be truly hilarious, especially the second of the three parts. The tone of each part is a little different, and some people have complained about this, but it didn't really bother me. Again, it's a sharply written, well acted and genuinely scary movie. 

Dead Set

Technically not a movie,  Dead Set is an English mini-series that has one of the most self evidently awesome concepts in the history of zombidom.  There's a zombie apocalypse and the only people who haven't realized it yet are the cast of Big Brother. I haven't seen Big Brother (without the zombies, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to), but  I read that the general set-up  of Dead Set is much like the real English Big Brother series. We've only seen the first three of the five episodes of Dead Set, but so far it definitely lives up to its premise. This one is a lot harder to find, and I don't think it's available on DVD yet, but it's worth seeking out. 

Hope you enjoy, and if you have any recommendations of your own, please leave them in the comments below!

The Figure in Movement: Points of Stress

Points of Stress and Movement in Inanimate Objects

In drawing from life or from a realistic subject, you want to capture the subjects essential character; what is the essence of an apple that makes us read it as an apple? In the figure, the best way to describe movement is to accentuate or exaggerate points of stress.

Anything that's flexible has movement. Every fold of drapery suggests how the drapery is resisting and surrendering to gravity. A force meets another force and there's a fold. Gravity acts as another force and there's a dip in the fold, or part of the cloth rests on a surface or another fold, generating more folds from that contact point. Each point where these forces meet is a stress point. 

Here's a drapery study by DaVinci:

Here, I've tried to illustrate in the same drawing where the points of stress are, and how those points of stress effect one another:

#1 and #2 indicate points where tension converges. #3 indicates a point of stress where gravity rests.

Points of Stress In The Figure

Drapery is a complex subject, but I just want you to get a sense of how something essentially inanimate can be dynamic. Here's a gesture drawing I did from the live model, about a 5 minute study: 

Here I've tried to illustrate the points of stress. The arrows represent the movement towards these points.  Think of a point of stress as that point when a branch is about to break, or a car is about to crash--it's those points of tension before the finish of the action that demonstrate movement, even if that movement has no ultimate destination. Bones don't have to be about to break to show the tension of the muscles or the distribution of weight.

Here's another figure, also a 5 minute study:

The arrow at the center is the center of gravity. Points of stress are all about either resisting, or surrendering to gravity. Points at rest surrender to gravity. Points of tension imply a resistance to gravity. Both points at rest and points of tension are stress points, points that, if given emphasis, describe the most movement in a figure, but the points at rest are just as important as the points of stress. The rest points give us a sense of weight and substance. The stress points give us a sense of suppleness and texture. 

Texture and dynamism in portraits

To get a sense of an object or figure's texture, there has to be a force playing against it. We can't tell visually if a rubber ball is very hard or very soft, or very heavy, or very light unless we see how weight or gravity acts against it (though light too, is a significant force at play in describing texture, but that's another subject altogether). In the same way, the muscles act against the flesh. If there's no points of tension in a figure, the figure will not look dynamic. It will tend to look stiff and inanimate. Even in a portrait, tension and release of tension describe expression, even if that expression is a placid one. There are still points at rest that can be emphasized. Lines on a face, relaxed or tensed describe how flexible the face is. Elderly and wrinkled faces show gravity, how the skin is softer and less elastic, but this is all expressed through stress points.  Here are some longer studies from life:

The portrait is of my dad, but the rest of these drawings are from one of my favorite models who models for us at The Davis Figure Drawing Group, Steve Savage.  A really dynamic and great model! Thanks for reading.

50 Monsters Mock-Up Cover

So here's the mock-up wraparound cover for my unpublished book, 50 Monsters to Give You the Creeps. It's in dummy form right now--a dummy is the roughed out version you present to the publisher. I'm pretty happy with it.

Moebius, 1938-March 10th, 2012

My First Embarrassing Encounter with the Great Jean Giraud (AKA Moebius)

Moebius had more influence on me than any other artist in my teens. He died today before I got a chance to redeem myself for a very embarrassing meeting when I was 13, at The San Diego Comicon, back when Comicon was actually about comics. I just couldn't help myself. I waited in a line to get him to sign my book, and when I got to the front of the line I had a complete nerdgasm. My friend Josh's mother was there with her camera, and I posed for a picture with him, and so somewhere there's this picture of me pointing at Moebius with an ecstatic smile, looking like I'm about to have a psychotic break. I wish I could take it back, but I went completely nuts. My fantasy was that the two of us would meet for coffee some day, and I would show him my work, and he would admire it, and I would tell him how I felt about his work, and I would tell him about that first meeting, and we would laugh about it, and we would find that the two of us shared a deep inner connection, that we two walked the same spiritual plane. Of course that will never happen now. Not that it ever would have. 

This was the book I had him autograph:

I loved everything about it. The simplicity of the drawing style, the fluid line, the colors. It was this wistful fantasy story originally written to promote a French car called the Citroen. Here's a page where Stel and Atan, the two bald-headed protagonists, have driven their Citroen across the desert of the planet they call "pool ball" to encounter a group of aliens from different worlds who have all formed a shantytown around this huge crystal pyramid, that, for some magical reason, they have all been drawn to:

I still have my copy. It has ink stains on it, and is a little worse for wear, but it still has Moebius' signature next to a sketch of his signature character, Arzach. He drew a drawing for every single person in line. Here's Arzach:

Le Garage Hermetic

My second discovery was a book called, The Airtight Garage:

In French, it was called, Le Garage Hermetic, "hermetic" meaning both airtight, and esoteric in French, so that part was lost in the translation. The Airtight Garage was this completely improvised story that Moebius started kind of on accident while trying to meet a tight deadline. He simply made it up as he went along, page by page, each time giving himself some impossible challenge, having no idea how he was going to tie up all the loose threads. And believe it or not, somehow he managed. It all made an odd kind of sense in the end. It has got to be my Favorite Moebius story by far.

I have another well worn book called, The Art of Moebius. The center spread had an image he did in collaboration with an artist named Geof Darrow.  Darrow did the drawing and Moebius Moebiusified it. I looked at this thing for hours.

Moebius Owns Science Fiction in Hollywood


You may not realize it, but just about every science fiction movie in hollywood since Blade Runner has been inspired by Moebius in some way. Including Blade Runner. I don't mean to downplay the contribution of Syd Mead, who may well be just an influential, and who did design much of the look of Blade Runner, but first there was a story by Moebius called "The Long Tomorrow" that looked like this:

And was written some time in the late 70s. Moebius, in the French Magazine, Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal in the US) made the future that has dominated sci-fi for the last thirty or forty years. Everything new and novel about science fiction movies and imagery of today started with Moebius.

Moebius also designed much of the look of Tron though Tron might have looked a little cooler if they stuck to Moebius' original designs:

The recent Sequel to Tron not only borrowed everything from the original, but it missed the point. They took Moebius' elegant simplicity and turned it into, well, Blade Runner. 


The French Avant Garde director, Jodorowsky, gathered together some of the best designers and illustrators of his time in the late 70s, with the intention of making a film based Frank Herbert's Dune. It fell through, but this is how it might have looked with Moebius' costume designs:

Instead of the black Jumpsuits and sepia palette that they ended up with in the Lynch film. Here's one of Moebius' many contributions to the otherwise mediocre The Fifth Element:

And he kept working, and inventing. This is from a book that features a series of drawing inspired by the New Mexico dessert. This is Moebius putting his pen to paper and just letting it do his Moebius thing. Like The Airtight Garage, no sketches ahead of time, just a pen and paper:

But I'll never get to meet him as a less spazzy adult. I'm positive he couldn't have possibly remembered me anyway, but still, I wanted to impress him, and impress upon him, that I was no longer that kid. But now it will never happen. I can't believe he died. He's younger than my dad. It's simply not fair.  He will be very, very missed.

Edit: I forgot to mention the very sweet and modest thing that Moebius AKA Jean Giraud told me at the San Diego Comicon. I told him he was my favorite artist, and he responded, "Then you must not know very many artists." And he was right. With so many egotistical artists out there, (particularly cartoonists) the remark was honest and generous. Speaking of artists less than modest, I once read a cartoonist's remark about how he was affronted when someone told him that he was their second favorite writer. To me, it sounded like a high compliment. We can't all be Van Gogh, or Picasso. We can't all be Dostoevsky. But Moebius remains close to my heart. 

Australopithacat

Another monster from my monster book, the fearsome Australopithacat, the ancestor of the common house cat. The dummies finally complete! I'll post the cover soon.

Leaping Springaloris

Another monster. Getting closer to finishing the cover for my 50 Monsters book dummy. The interiors are already complete, so it won't be long now. I think I started this project 3 years ago, and started with about 70 monsters, then chose my favorite 50 and came up with names and descriptions for each of them. Each description is a sort of cautionary narrative, or represents a particularly annoying sort of person, though some are just silly and don't represent anything. It was a good time. Hopefully it will be a real book some day!

Skippidus Dippidus

Another monster, this one's a little timid. Another for the mock-up cover I'm working on, the last step for the 50 Monsters dummy.

A Hairy Who

A monster not entirely accidentally named after the Hairy Who movement of Chicago. Call it a tribute.

Lummox Galumphus

A new monster with finished inks:

Stachioptrics

And ink drawing of one of the monsters for my monster book.

Yet More Monsters in Action!

Here are some more monsters doing their monster thing. If the last one isn't clear, those are little eyeballed tentacles coming out of the brush. It makes more sense in the book.

Some Random Monsters

Some incidental rough illustrations for a work in progress, my big monster book. 

When does Dr. Seuss Merchandise Become a Doctor Seuss Book?

Well, never. Not really. Believe it or not, this:

is not written by Doctor Seuss. It's called The Cat in the Hat, but it's written by Jesse Leon McCann and drawn by Christopher Moroney. It is based on the movie that was loosely based on the book.  Through some Amazon snafu, when you click "look inside" you get sample pages of Seuss' actual book. You also get reader reviews of the book by Doctor Seuss, not the book by McCann and Moroney. Here's the same book repackaged as a Little Golden Book: 

On Amazon you'll also see reviews of this one, but they're a little less enthusiastic. Once again, not written by Doctor Seuss or published in his lifetime, but it's not so easy to know the difference if you're not careful. And here are a few more:

Doctor Seuss, the real Doctor Seuss, as in Theodore Seuss Geisel, had nothing to do with these books. But The Cat in the Hat is a brand. Doctor Seuss is now a brand. These are, in the commercial sense, "Doctor Seuss Books." If you want to buy your kid some "Doctor Seuss Books" these will fit the bill, but what they are is merchandising, licensed products. This isn't an unusual practice--there have been books and even comic books licensed by Charles Schulz of the Peanuts characters that he had little if anything to do with creatively. These Seuss books aren't entirely different than what Schulz did, but there is a difference, however subtle, beyond the fact that they were all done after Seuss' death. These books resemble books by Seuss, but are not books by Seuss, and they are presented as interchangeable with the original classics. They are presented as more of the same. Do you like One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish? The Cat in The Hat? Then you're going to like, I Can Name 50 Trees Today. Apparently the over 50 books that he wrote aren't enough. 

It's not really worth getting worked up about merchandising and the original creator's intentions. There's plenty of horrible sequels and merchandise licensed with the full knowledge and permission of the creators of otherwise great work. Maybe they needed to send their kids to college? Or in the case of Schulz, keep his ice skating rink open. It's not for me to say. Eventually everything gets appropriated. There are a million different interpretations of Shakespeare, and I hope there will be a million more.

This said,  it seems like Seuss' work has been more bastardized than most. His widow seems to have said "yes" to everything, including several horrible movies. But the books, the books I just don't understand. Maybe they're not even that bad, but they can't be anything like the books that I grew up with and continue to treasure. They're something else that has nothing to do with good literature, and that's what Seuss' work is first and foremost--some of the greatest children's literature ever written. Kids often choose their own books, and it's a disservice to them to camouflage these books as books by Seuss. It's hard enough to find good books for kids to read, but books as merchandising only make it that much harder. 

When I was a kid I had my heart set on a Little Golden Book that was a merchandising tie-in with Donny and Marie. I liked it because it had a robot in it. My Dad was a little appalled. He said, "do you really want that?" I really did. So they got me the book. I liked it, but it didn't stick with me like the truly great books from my childhood. Kids will always choose books that aren't exactly the ones you would choose for them, and if you want them to be good readers, you should encourage them to read whatever interests them. Even Donny and Marie. Even fake Doctor Seuss. But you can also make good books available to them. If you have good books in the house they'll be discovered. Kids have pretty good taste in the end, and they will find the good stuff, but the good stuff has to be around for them to find. 

Edit:

Apparently, there are over 70 commercial tie-ins with the new Lorax movie, based on Seuss' environmental cautionary tale, including and SUV and disposable diapers. Ahh, Seuss merchandising as its best.

Piecing It All Together, and What I Learned from Barron Storey

I've mentioned before that I ink pieces of my images separately and then combine them later in the final image, and I think this may have been a little confusing, so I thought I'd share a little more detail about how this works. Often I draw each figure in a scene separately much larger than it will appear, so in the case of a big figure like Blackbeard, who dominates the image, I drew him about 18x24 inches, scanned him in pieces, then pieced him back together on photoshop. Here's the figure in pencil, already cropped:

 I added in the background later, but this is how I went about inking the figure. On photoshop, once I pieced him together, I cut him up again, this time in pieces that will be easier to ink. I make the pieces as large as they will fit on a piece of watercolor paper or bristol board trimmed to 11x17, the largest size that will fit in my printer. Then I blue line the parts, and print them out for inking. Here's the blue line:

And here's the inked hand. I inked it this large so I can get more detail where more detail is required, while still working fairly loosely. 

This gun is a small detail, but it's such a specific piece of hardware I inked it very large so that I could get it right. I inked the whole thing, even though only two thirds of it are seen in the image. This allows me to move it around if I want to make a few subtle changes, but it also helps it to look more consistent--the inks don't stop on one side of the belt and start again on the other--the strokes are continuous, giving more of a sense that the gun is actually behind the belt.

The torso required the least amount of detail, and I actually ended up inking it smaller than scale.  The belt I did separately. The buttons and button holes I did with white gouache. 

                                     

And here's the head:

Again, I inked it as large as I could blue line it. Some of these took more than one attempt, and since the original drawing is preserved, I can print out as many blue lined versions of each part as I want until I get it right. This not only provides a huge safety net if I screw up, but it allows me to take more risks with the inks. In general it allows me more control over the overall outcome, even when I'm using a medium (dry brush) that's very unpredictable. I count on it being unpredictable--it's the little accidents that provide interest--but I don't want it to be so unpredictable that it doesn't do essentially what I want it to.  For dry brush--a rendering technique that uses less moisture and more pigment on the brush--I use whatever works, usually cheap craft brushes, and usually paint in a mixture of india ink and brown acrylic ink. The brown ink is mainly to fool me into using bolder blacks, since when I work in black ink I tend to be more timid with blacks. Once I scan it I turn it all black anyway, or I can turn the line any color I want to in photoshop. 

One of the Many Lessons I Learned from Barron Storey

The materials available to you, in a lot of ways, determine how you're going to work. I'd love it, for instance, if my computer could print  in 18x24. Then maybe I'd ink my portraits larger than life! But the best thing to do is use these tools as an asset rather than a limitation. There's more than one way to skin a cat!

My teacher, Barron Storey once showed us an image he did for National Geographic. There looked like there were a hundred different animals in the picture. It was filled with detail. It seemed like an impossible thing to draw. Then he showed us something that to me, was a revelation. He took a little drawing of a monkey that was drawn on tracing paper, saturated the picture with fixative, and pasted it on the image. The paper disappeared and all you could see was the monkey! This is how he had done every animal in the picture. They were all a bunch of little pictures collaged together!

Storey once told me that he didn't think he could paint. This didn't make any sense to me. He did portraits for Time and other magazines that looked like paintings to me. He showed us the originals--they were made with just about anything he could get his hands on--colored pencil and markers and ballpoint pens and somewhere in there, paint too, but he used whatever he needed to get the job done. The message that a lot of his students took from this was: mixed media is the way to go, but mixed media wasn't the point. The point was problem solving. What do you want to achieve, and what's getting in your way of achieving it? You don't have to follow someone else's path to achieve what they do. It's not cheating to find your own way. You don't have to draw every monkey in the picture if you're afraid you're going to screw up. 

Using the computer to assemble my images from scanned watercolor textures and ink drawings, I get to make more choices and take more risks along the way. I can push the color in different directions. I can be more bold with my inks. I can't control everything--you can never control everything, and you don't really want to--but I can make discoveries that I would have never been able to make otherwise with different tools. I think the computer is great, but it's not the only reason why I'm able to solve these problems the way I have. Without the computer I would have found a different way, would have made different discoveries. I would have used tracing paper, or magic markers, or toothpicks, or whatever worked, but the tools aren't important. What's important is that you use your assets to overcome your limitations in whatever way you need to. Be inventive! You might not find my way easier, but find what works for you.

 I would stay away from the spray fixative though. Thanks to digital airbrushes and other digital substitutes for effluents, we contemporary artists stand to have a lot fewer respiratory problems. God I hope Barron has stopped smoking...

Oh, and if you missed it, here's the finished pirate.