Grace Allison had a busy weekend at Anime Central! Check out a few of her con sketches.
I did a boatload of commissions at ACen this year! Here are just some of them. My favorites were Madoka Ultimate from Madoka Magica, Kohaku from Wish, and the original character couple snuggling.
Artist Steve Lieber talks about how writers can better deal with their artist collaborators, including debunking the old myth: “Comics have an unlimited budget.”
“Have you heard this aphorism: “Comics have an unlimited budget?” Remember it, because it’s wrong and you’ll want to humiliate and belittle anyone who brings it up. Your artist has to draw the stuff you are writing about, and his or her available time is your budget. Comics are drawn on deadline, and there are only so many hours in the days between when you send off your script and when the artist has to complete the story. If she spends all those hours drawing the 30 separate bicyclists you describe on page 1, she’s not going to have much time left for the alien armada on page 22.”
It Girl & the Atomics #10 is out TODAY!!! Jamie may or may not have written in some High School Musical Easter eggs for me… :DDD
Actually, I’m really curious to know whether or not people can guess which of the 5 new characters is my favorite…Send me your guesses and I’ll shower you with love if you get it!
Here are the Madoka Magica girls, fully finished!
Grace Allison draws the girls from Puella Magi Madoka Magica! This will be available as a print at ACen this weekend, table 037.
In case anyone is curious about my digital inking setup, here’s a little behind the scenes! I recently upgraded from a Cintiq 12 to a Cintiq 13HD. The two feel a little different, but mostly the 13HD just feels like an upgraded version of the 12. If you have a newish version of the Wacom driver, it includes the ability to adjust your pressure curve.
I like mine to be a little slower right at the start to get delicate lines, but then pick up faster towards the middle, and then hit max at a lower threshold than default. This lets me get thin lines when I need them, but not have to clamp down and mash my pen into the screen to hit the thicker lines, sparing my poor hand/wrist from further heading towards repetitive stress injuries.
The above example features three different brushes that I dig.
The first one is a basic Photoshop round. Smoothing is on, and Spacing is down to 5%.
The second one is part of Frenden’s Photoshop Penicling and Inking Tool Presets, found here:
http://frenden.myshopify.com/The third is from Kyle Webster’s Ultimate Photoshop Brush Pack 1, found here:
https://gumroad.com/l/DqhZHappy Inking!
I spent a few moments today walking with the ghost of my old life drawing teacher Ben Ruiz. He asked me a question. “In a line drawing Steve, when describing form—that’s form, not light, texture, or pattern— what are the three reasons for using a line?”
It’s been a while since anyone has asked…
I wish I was joking, but I really did this to poor Myq Kaplan. Thank god he was a comedian who could laugh it off and continue the conversation like nothing happened.
A @tallychyck faux pas.
Really, the New Yorker magazine? Marvel Entertainment drew that image? Not Jack Kirby and Don Heck? Really?
Sure, your art department was happy, having ironically depicted the goofy, clunky, first comic book appearance of Iron Man to illustrate the review for the new-fangled, shiny, 3D movie version of the hero-robot. Sure, the legal department cleared it because, yes, a court of law has upheld the fact that a corporation created this art. But your massive fact check department let an attribution like this slide?
When every other week your back pages feature an “illustration” or two that’s nothing more than some Photoshop fun with stock photos, the person doing the shopping gets credited as well as the people who snapped the pictures and the syndicate who bought them. Why couldn’t the same respect be extended to one of pop culture’s most tragically under respected creators?
A couple years ago a Harry Bliss cartoon appeared in your caption contest which was an homage to Kirby’s cover to Tales to Astonish #39. It features a typically lumpy and dumpy Kirby monster scaling the wall of an apartment building, and a typically upper-middle class New Yorker cartoon character talking on the phone and sipping red wine, completely unaware of his impending doom. There was a bit of a tizzy when the denizens of the internet pointed out that the cartoon was based mostly on a Kirby drawing, and Kirby wasn’t credited. Although I think an “after Kirby” note probably should have accompanied the new drawing, I’ll never begrudge a cartoonist for appropriating existing work. Especially when the very meat of his joke is taking a hokey comic book monster and putting him into the context of snooty, high-brow Manhattan everyday life. But this is different. This straight-up is a Jack Kirby drawing. Of Iron Man. Illustrating a review of Iron Man 3. With no credit.
The New Yorker has done so much for comics. You give cartoonists who think in terms of one-liners a chance to actually make a career of it. With the influence of Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, you’ve helped to legitimize alternative comics among the literary elite. Please stop treating Jack Kirby, who those few of us who are more interested in comics than in superheroes call “King,” like nothing more than a finger in the hand of the corporate master he once served.
DISCLOSURE: I know some people who work at the New Yorker, and happen to be madly in love with one of them. I’ve also been madly in love with the magazine ever since I was a little boy flipping through each issue once it arrived in order to find all the cartoons, swears and boobs within.
Yeah. Say it’s © Marvel, sure. But credit the actual artists.
Marvel just released a couple more pages from Steve Lieber’s first issue of “Superior Foes of Spider-Man” to accompany an interview with the writer Nick Spencer. Here are the pages, along with the reference he shot for that all-important ad on the back of the Daily Bugle.
What is the secret of Boxcat? Steve will not say.
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