Lines and Colors

Lines and Colors is a blog about painting, drawing, sketching, illustration, comics, cartoons, webcomics, art history, concept art, gallery art, digital art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it’s fair game.

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Free Comic Book Day!

May 5, 2006

Update: This year’s Free Comic Book Day! is past, but you may still find this post worth reading, both for my suggestions for why comic books may be more interesting that you suspect, and my introduction to comic book specialty shops.

Here are some photos from the event at Captain Blue Hen in Delaware from the Draw! blog by Mike Manley, veteran comics and storyboard artist, who was one of the participating comics professionals.

—

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day! Hooray!

If you don’t know much about comic books, and are even slightly curious but perhaps put off by the thought of being conspicuous in a small comic shop filled with geeky adolescents discussing the nuances of how batman’s cowl should fit his jaw, Saturday is your day to check out this whole comics phenomenon without feeling uncomfortable or out of place.

With the cooperation of comic book publishers, distributors, artists, writers, and comic book specialty shops across the country, Saturday, May 6th, 2006 is the 5th annual event offering free comics to all visitors at participating stores. The smarter, more involved shops will be doing their best to turn the occasion into a local media worthy event.

Publishers large and small are publishing special titles just for the event and many shops will be giving away additional titles as well. Everyone gets at least one free comic, sometimes more, depending on the shop and the number of people attending the event.

If you don’t know where a local comic book specialty shop is, the Free Comic Book Day web site features a Zip code locator for participating shops. Or check the weekend events listing of your local paper and see if there are Free Comic Book Day events listed anywhere.

This is a great opportunity to visit a comic shop and see why so many people find this medium so fascinating. You can just wander around and look through the colorful titles and be dazzled at the array of drawings and colors, some of it horrible, much of it mediocre, but some of it absolutely wonderful (much like books, movies, music or any other medium of expression).

Why you should check out comic books

I can suggest many reasons to check out comic books. You should check out comic books because they are different from newspaper comics. They have a much longer format for telling more involved and fully developed stories. You should check out comics because they are a unique American art form and the singular combination of words and pictures telling a story. You should check out comics because comics are the only medium involving stories told with images in which you, the reader, set your own pace.

Movies and TV come at you at the speed the director sets; but in comics, like novels, you can read at your own pace, stop and contemplate, pick them up or put them down at will. Comics give you more visuals to work with than books, but leave more to your own imagination than movies. Best of all, the medium of comics is a synthesis of words and drawings that has its own language and method of expression, and can tell stories in ways no other medium can.

If you don’t know what to look at, ask the proprietor. Most comic shop owners are friendly and knowledgeable about comics and will understand if you say “I don’t like superheroes.” and will be able to recommend other options. Most shops will have many items beyond the usual superhero fare that most people associate with comic books in America. Look for wonderful reprints of classic newspaper comics and “graphic novels”, which are stories or collections in trade paperback format (which I feel is the best way to buy and read comics).

Ask about “independent” publishers or “small publishers”. The small publishers are where the most varied and interesting work is being done. The best shops will also have European comic albums and Japanese Manga (just a fancy word for Japanese comics) that will have very different stories and art than American comics.

An introduction to comic book specialty shops

Most specialty comics shops have a few common characteristics. Almost all of them will have rack of new comics, released during the current week, and most will have several racks of recent back issues from the previous few months, and then bins or boxes of older comics, often in plastic bags with cardboard backings, for the benefit of collectors. The back issues in bags are often marked up in price as collectables.

Browsing through anything not in plastic bags is usually fine. If it’s not, you’re in the wrong comic book shop. If you walk in and all of the comics are in plastic bags, including the new comics released this week, choose another shop. These shops treat comics more like collectable dolls than books to be read and enjoyed. However, they’re not as likely to participate in this event.

In the larger shops, there can be so many titles and genres that it can seem overwhelming. Don’t be reluctant to tell the proprietor that you don’t know anything about comics and are just curious. They will be delighted with your interest and more than happy to make helpful suggestions. Like good bookstore owners, they will also be happy to leave you to browse if that is your preference.

If you tell them what kind of books you like (drama, humor, mystery, romance, science fiction, historical novels), chances are they can recommend a comic book or trade paperback in a genre you like. If the shop has only superhero comics, try another before judging the medium by one experience. (Some smaller shops have such a limited budget, and/or imagination, that they only stock the best selling superhero titles and not much else; look for a larger shop.) Despite my recent rant about the dominance of superhero comics in the market, there are many alternatives out there (the Flight anthologies I mentioned in that same post are a prime example).

You’ll find a range of Free Comic Book Day participation at various shops. Captain Blue Hen Comics in Newark, Delaware is a shop in my area that goes all out for Free Comic Book Day, with signings by comics artists and writers, door prizes and events, costumed characters, charitable contributions, reciprocal promotion with the local library (present your library card an get an additional free comic, contribute 50 cents to the library restoration fund and get another), and more. It’s practically a town fair in itself.

Checking out comics is also sometimes a way to stumble across very unique stores. I buy my comics at a store in Delaware called Between Books, that features a remarkable combination of comics, graphic novels, science fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery books, adventure gaming, animated videos, manga, anime and a range of art books and children’s books hand picked by the owner. I would never have even known such a unique place existed had I not been curious about comics.

You won’t know what you’re missing until you check it out, and what better time to do that than Free Comic Book Day? At the very least, drop by and pick your your free comic book. Why not?

www.freecomicbookday.com

Categories:
Comics
Roger Dean

May 4, 2006

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

A few years before our wonderful digital art tools came into use, illustration lost one of its more prominent vehicles as LP records were replaced by digital audio CDs, and the golden age of album cover art drew to a close.

Yes, there is still nice work being done in CD cover design, but the glorious 12×12″ canvas of the LP record jacket was one of the most expansive areas an illustrator could have to work with, larger than most magazine covers, and its replacement was less than a fifth that size.

At the height of that wonderful period of album cover art, UK artist Roger Dean come to prominence as one of the most imaginative and popular artists working in the field. He did album covers for a number of bands, but is most closely linked with the progressive-rock band Yes. In fact, with the possible exception of the Pink Floyd covers designed by the Hipgnosis design studio, I can’t think of a more prominent association between a visual artist and a musician or group.

Dean’s work is often referred to as being surreal, but I’ve always thought of his imagined landscapes, with their muted colors, graceful curvilinear forms, wonderfully textured rocks and floating islands, as flights of fancy. I see little evidence of the psychological drama of true Surrealism. Dean, in fact, has said that he thinks of himself as a landscape painter.

Dean works primarily in watercolor and gouache and sometimes adds ink, crayon and even collage to achieve his effects of color and texture. There were two compilations of his work, now out of print but possibly available through eBay, Amazon or used book sites: Views, and Magnetic Storm. Dean has also released a number of calendars featuring his work over the years, the latest editions of which should still be available.

There are also several books on great album cover art including a series co-cuthored by Roger Dean; the first volume is Album Cover Album One (Album Cover Series) co-authored by Hipgnosis and Roger Dean.

Dean’s site has a store with prints and other items, including English Bone China mugs, (not your typical art reproduction mugs).

I’ve supplemented the link to Dean’s site below with an unofficial site that has larger reproductions of his work that give you a much better appreciation for his style, and in particular, his use of texture.

Like many artists, the gallery images on his official site are too small to give a real feeling for his work (meant to be reproduced nice and big on 12″ album covers, remember), perhaps with the thought that larger ones could be used for unauthorized reproduction.

However, as I often point out to artists who get overly concerned with image size and watermarks and other issues about preventing their images from being “stolen” off the web, if you have any images in print (you remember print, that other information technology), anyone with a $60 scanner can make higher resolution copies of your work than you’ll ever post to the web.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

http://rogerdean.com/
www.imageraptor.com/1/rdean1.htm

Categories:
Illustration, Watercolor and Gouache
Edmund Tarbell

May 3, 2006

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a particular fondness for painters who combine the light and color, painterly approach and immediacy of the Impressionists with the solid foundation and draughtsmanship of realism.

Examples would include John Singer Sargent, Gustav Calliebotte, Joaquin Sorolla and Anders Zorn. To that partial list, I would add many of the “American Impressionists”, and in particular Edmund Charles Tarbell.

In addition to painting landscapes and interiors, Tarbell was an illustrator and a portrait painter. He was also an influential teacher at the Boston Museum School, but the impact of his approach to painting extended to many of his contemporary artists and subsequent generations of American painters working in the Impressionist style. His influence on painting in Boston was so dramatic at one point that many of those who followed his teaching and methods were called “Tarbellites”, and the style he exemplified and led came to be known as “The Boston School”.

Tarbell’s plein air paintings of garden scenes and women in fine dresses with parasols strolling paths or relaxing in boats on sun-dappled waters are as rich with splashes of pure pigment and the dazzling play of light and shadow as many of the French Impressionist canvasses. However, Tarbell usually kept shy of actually exploding his image into the flurry of separate brushstrokes that Monet would use at the extremes of his style.

As much as I like his bright exterior scenes, it is Tarbell’s darker, more subtle paintings of room interiors that contain the real magic for me. At times they are an obvious exploration the compositions of Vermeer, showing women seated at tables, surrounded by objects like vases and paintings, immediately in front of a window that bathes them in light, like Girl Reading, Girl Mending or Girl Crotcheting.

My favorites, though, are interiors in which there is a longer view of a room, with light spilling in from windows and washing over polished wood furniture and floors, as in Mother and Mary (above).

His painting Across the Room looks as though it belongs in a series with similar “more floor than room” compositions by Degas and Caillebotte.

It’s difficult to tell how rich and extraordinary these paintings are from small reproductions on the web. I had the opportunity to see a wonderful traveling exhibit of Tarbell’s work titled Impressionism Transformed – The Paintings of Edmund C. Tarbell, organized by the Currier Museum of Art, that visited the Delaware Art Museum, and then the Terra Museum of American Art, in 2002.

There is a catalog from the exhibition that is very nicely done, relatively inexpensive and serves as a good introduction to his work. There is also a nice volume titled Edmund C. Tarbell: Poet of Domesticity by Laurene Buckley.

The painters referred to as American Impressionists are often thought of as “second string”, merely followers of the “real” Impressionists. In fact, they were simply painters who were influenced by the French movement, and adopted some characteristics of the style they admired into their own unique explorations. No one exemplifies this more than Edmund Tarbell.

Edmund Tarbell at Art Renewal Center
Edmund Tarbell at Cyberspace Gallery
Edmund Tarbell at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
Teshkeel Comics &
Rubicon multimedia

May 2, 2006

If you are anything like me, you stared in slack-jawed disbelief as you witnessed the shameful debacle of the now infamous Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

It was shameful on both sides of the “conflict”. On the side of the cartoonists involved and the Danish paper that hired them to draw the cartoons, it was a shameful example of an irresponsible publicity stunt gone horribly wrong (no, it wasn’t about “freedom of the press”, it was about shock value, circulation and money).

On the Muslim side, it was a shameful example of a few unscrupulous individuals taking advantage of a perceived “attack” on their culture and values by an “enemy culture” to promote fear and anger and whip up a wave of animosity and resentment among large numbers of people, the real end goal of which was to give those particular individuals increased political power. (Sound familiar?)

Through it all, cartoons emerged as tools of divisiveness, as waves of hate cartoons, aimed at Christians, Jews and Muslims, followed from the pens of “cartoonists” of dubious skill and even more dubious integrity.

The point to be taken, of course, is that cartoons are tools, whether in the hands of geniuses or fools, and can be well used or horribly misused like all tools.

How refreshing it is, then, to find efforts to use cartoons and comics to promote understanding between these same two cultures, which seem to have a great deal of difficulty understanding each other even in the best of circumstances.

Teshkeel Comics is the creation of Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, who is publishing Arabic language versions of Marvel comics in the Middle East and Northern Africa and has just expanded to include translations of Archie comics. (Somehow, I just love the idea of Jughead speaking other languages.)

Perhaps more importantly, Teshkeel Comics is also attempting to bridge the gap in the other direction with an original series called The 99, with superheroes conceived from aspects of Islamic culture. To do this, Teshkeel is enlisting the skills of American comic book veterans Fabian Nicieza, Dan Panosian, John McCrea and James Hodgkins. There is a preview online. Go to the main page of theninetynine.com and click on the graphic of “The 99” just under the nav bar. You can also see a preview and short article on Newsarama, but the version on the Teshkeel site has the added advantage of offering both English and Arabic language versions. It’s interesting to compare the two.

In another form of “cartoons”, in this case the 3-D style of animation that has developed out of traditional cartoon animation, a Jordanian multimedia company called Rubicon is launching an animated TV show called Ben and Izzy, about two boys, an American and an Arab. The comedy/adventure show has the support of the Jordanian royal family (apparently, King Abdullah II of Jordan enjoys watching The Simpsons via satellite).

Rubicon is headed by Randa Ayoubi, a Jordanian woman who regards Pixar as a role model for the company. Her creative team for Ben and Izzy includes Americans, Iraquis, Jordanians and a Palestinian. A promotional event for the series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York included Queen Rania of Jordan as well as Barbara Walters, Katie Couric and other American royalty. There is a good New York Times article, which includes a short video clip from the show.

I originally learned of Teshkeel Comics from an interview with Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa on the PRI radio show The World, during which he discussed the origin of The 99. Apparently, Allah has 99 names, and corresponding attributes like compassion, generosity, kindness, mercy and others, which form the basis of some of the Teshkeel Comics’ heroes and their powers.

See? I’ve already learned something about Arabic culture from comics. However superficial or even inaccurate my understanding may be, it’s a start.

www.teshkeelcomics.com
www.theninetynine.com/
www.rubicon.com.jo/

Categories:
Animation, Cartoons, Comics
Xiaoye Chen

May 1, 2006

One of the wonderful thing about digital painting is that there is a certain freedom inherent in a medium in which your work exists primarily as magnetic domains indicating ones and zeros. Digital information can be stored, copied and manipulated in ways otherwise impossible. That wonderful “undo” feature and the ability so save out copies of your work at various stages give you a freedom to experiment, and to work rapidly, unlike any traditional medium.

Concept artist Xiaoye Chen uses those characteristics of digital painting to advantage. His work shows a wonderful fluidity and immediacy that make his images seem to be constructed purely of rapid bursts of color. Lines appear almost scribbled, and shapes are blocked in with great chunks of discrete color with little blending. Areas overlap and combine to form new blocks of color, as figures, objects and environments take shape out of the shifting, almost cubist arrangements of hue and tone.

He doesn’t add the simulated brushstroke textures available in painting programs like Corel Painter, instead he seems to prefer the immediate application of color, with little concern for a painterly finish. It appears that he works mostly in Photoshop, as shown in the single tutorial currently on the site, although he does take the time on his news page to recommend a nice, inexpensive painting tool called ArtRage, which is a bit like a very stripped down version of Painter or Alias Sketch, and has a free version you can try.

His Gallery pages are divided into Concepts and Illustration/Sketches. The former includes architectural comcept art and vehicle design in addition to game concepts, and the latter includes what appear to be studies from life as well as some interesting studies of paintings by illustrators like Lyendecker and painters like Sargent.

Beyond his basic tools, and the fact that he is recommended by a number of other top concept artists, I can find very little information about Xiaoye Chen. It looks like his work is largely for the gaming industry, but there in no indication on his site of projects or clients, and the “About” section is currently not linked.

So do what I did, thumb through his gallery pages and just enjoy those nice chunks of color.

www.supalette.com/

Categories:
Concept & Visual Dev., Digital Painting, Illustration
John Bauer

April 30, 2006

While we’re still on our virtual visit to Sweden for yesterday’s post about Anders Zorn, we should stop by and say hi to John Bauer, a dramatically underappreciated fantasy artist.

Looking at Bauer’s wonderfully caricaturish trolls and gnomes, his glowing young princesses and his dark forests of ancient trees, their roots intertwined in Art Nouveau grace, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that Bauer adopted many of the stylistic elements associated with the great illustrators that embody that approach, like Arthur Rackam, Kay Neilsen and Edmund Dulac.

In fact, the influence probably runs in the opposite direction, or at the very least in both directions. Bauer slightly predates Rackham, Neilsen and Dulac and, while he was undoubtedly influenced by them, his style and subject matter also likely informed much their work and, through them, influenced subsequent generations of fantasy artists.

Bauer himself was likely exposed to the work of Anders Zorn, who was popular in Sweden at the time, but was probably also influenced by Symbolist painters like Arnold Böcklin, visionaries like Gustav Moreau and William Blake and the stylized work of the Pre-Raphaelite and Art Nouveau artists, and perhaps the graceful illustration style of Walter Crane.

Bauer achieved prominence in Sweden with his illustrations for Bland Tomtar och Troll (Among Elves and Trolls), a yearly published book of fairy tales, and illustrated other books and periodicals. His wonderfully stylized drawing style, fascinating experiments with composition and his uncanny ability to make his fairy tale subjects simultaneously dark and elegantly charming have made him a favorite among those familiar with his work.

There is a John Bauer Museum site, which I think refers to a physical museum as well as the online one, but I’m unsure.

It’s unfortunate that books of fairy tales for which he did his illustrations were not widely translated into English. Had they been, Bauer would be as familiar as Rackham.

www.johnbauersmuseum.nu/
John Bauer on Project RuneBerg
John Bauer at Bud Plant Illustrated Books

Categories:
Illustration, Watercolor and Gouache