A Final Word on Lettering...

...that probably should have been the first.
Courtesy of Richard Starkings's Comicraft:

This is all absolute gospel! 

I only add that a too-fat pointer or tail is a lot better than a too-thin one, and could be legitimately be a part of a style. Oh, and that pointers should stay off the characters as a (very) general rule and should point to the source of the dialog, often the mouth. Oh, and that tail-less balloons are weak-ass, a copout, most of the time.

Otherwise, nothing to add!

JH

Illustrator's Pay

I have no idea if this is correct but I just saw on this art jobs site that SF illustrators make about $36/ hr. Hmm! Not bad. Hey, no one ever promised you wouldn't have roommates till your 40s.
JH

Famous Artists Cartooning Course

Oh my gosh! I found a site where you can download the famous Famous Artists course for free. Its copyright has expired, so it's all legit.

You're not gonna love every cartoonist, but there are many, many artists and styles represented, and a lot of them were heavyweights back in the '50s, when I assume this came out.

And here is where I presume you are adult, and can divine for yourself which instances of stereotyping are inherent to good cartooning and which are artifacts of a less sensitive and less aware time.

That said, download away and enjoy! A lot of this is timeless and golden.

JH

Lettering

Here, courtesy of DC's excellent series of books, The DC Comics Guide to... is a brief but very helpful rundown on how to letter in Illustrator.

From the excellent The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics 

by Mark Chiarello and Todd Klein

Please click to enlarge and save them! Very useful. Note that one page above, 131, is in a different aspect ratio and may be very easy to overlook as you click on each. It does come after p. 130.

JH

Scribble Method!

Hi, you guys.

Thanks to Charles, April, Dee and AiLing for coming today.

So it's called the Scribble Method, not the "Doodle Method." Here it is demonstrated by John Buscema and Stan Lee in the indispensable and inexhaustible resource How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. Click on these to enlarge.

And here is my own attempt at showing the same idea to a student of mine:

Again from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, lively and lovely illustrations of the idea of Line of Action, herein referred to by a different name:

Finally, examples of playing straights against curves in the outline.

Note: Now in reality, these outlines are probably entirely made of curves, but if you were to draw these figures, your drawings would look cooler and stronger if you made the "S" segments straight and the "C" segments decisively curved. I believe that if the "underdrawing" is successful, you can simplify, elaborate, stylize--whatever--the outlines and end up with a solid drawing.

Hey, out of respect for your fellow students and me, please try to arrive on time so I don't have to keep starting over.

Assignment for this week:

Doodle for half an hour WITH NO ERASING!

See you Saturday!

JH

P.S.: Since I'm already exploring the educational power of near-naked pictures, here's some exaggerated runway contrapposto to make the idea crystal clear. Ba-BOOM.

"Why Action Scenes Suck"

Hi, everybody.

This upcoming Saturday, our focus will move away from head construction back to storytelling fundamentals. And so, to that:

Movies and comics are two different things, duh, but with often-similar priorities: Making stories clear, exciting and involving, even if it's just two people talking.

This video races through some of the ways this can be accomplished. Its focus is upon action scenes, but there is a lot of essential truth about all kinds of storytelling being told here, at a breakneck pace:

Link to video: Why Action Scenes Suck

Your challenge as a storyteller is to give viewers a reason to care, whether your story is epic... or personal... or a mix.

To do that, know your characters and have them act and react in character. There's a good example of this in the video, when they show the Hulk vs. Iron Man action scene. Yes, the shots have the longer, more continuous action these guys justifiably prefer. But just as important is what happens when the action stops and there is that terrific pair of facial closeups that brings our attention back to the two personalities in conflict... personalities that were well established earlier in the film. Showing who your characters are means knowing them first.

I hate to be sexist, but I find that female cartoonists have an advantage in this area. Their stories tend to be based on a few key relationships.

One of the glories of the Avengers films is that so much tension and humor comes from Whedon's exquisite knowledge of the relationships of those characters.

Odds are you have a few characters you've made up, whose relationships have a definite character in your imagination.

It all starts with that act of imagining.

BTW, consider how effective it is to show Hulk from above in his tooth-spitting closeup: It gives us Iron man's (briefly) higher--more dominant--vantage point, nicely setting up the continuation of the fight. Hulk is "down," but that look, and the tooth, turn the moment on its head, letting us see he's definitely not out.



JH