sketchbook sunday: a trip to the amazing arizona comic-con

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amazing arizona comic-con, Chris Claremont, George Perez, hero initiative, Rob Liefeld, sketchbook sundays, volunteer

Amazing Arizona Comic-Con was well underway by the time I showed up for my four-hour volunteer shift. Holly gave me a volunteer t-shirt and sent me off with Amy, who had an assignment for me. From the original description of the volunteer position, I expected to be moving fifty-pound boxes around all afternoon. But Amy explained to me that Mat Nastos was scheduled to moderate the Chris Claremont panel on the main stage, and I was going to watch his table for him!

I’ve never been to a comic-con in my life, so this was quite an unexpected way to spend my first hour. Mat told me to feel free to sketch, and pointed to his bag of pens and markers. It held several Sharpie markers and one of the same Pigma micron fine point pens I like to use. This launched a discussion of brush tip pens in which Mat showed me his refillable Pentel brush tip and told me about a refillable kuratake pen from Japan with a sable tip, not synthetic like the one I’ve been using this year.

As if having a chance to discuss tools of the trade with a professional wasn’t fun enough, I then spent an hour on the artist’s side of the table instead of the fan’s. Thanks to my bright white volunteer shirt, only two people mistook me for the real Mat. Everyone else I greeted with a smile, asked them how they were, and let them know Mat would be back at 4 p.m. Several of them stayed and chatted with me about Mat’s artwork and prints on the table, or indie comic books, or a new tattoo, or that it was their first comic-con, too.

But what most impressed me in that hour was the unfailing enthusiasm Rob Liefeld showed each and every fan in the massive line waiting to meet him. Rob’s table was the next one over from Mat’s, and I have never seen anyone so genuinely cheerful to be posed and photographed over and over and over. I was in awe of his ability to project a positive energy and make every fan feel like he cared.

From Mat’s table, I also had a view of the other biggest line that afternoon: the one to meet George Pérez. Once Mat got back, I got sent to “float” for a bit and check on other volunteers, see if they needed anything, and lend a presence to any lines that needed tending. After making a few loops around the hall and chatting with people, I relieved the volunteer who was watching over George and his fans.

George’s table had no merchandise or books on it. He only had his sharpie markers, pads of Bristol paper, a donation jar, and flyers for the charity he works with: The Hero Initiative. That’s it. It was explained to me that people had numbered tickets in this line, and we were accepting them in numerical order, and anyone without a ticket could get in line but there was no guarantee we would get to them.

Neither the ticketholders nor George were in any hurry. This line barely moved, because each and every fan got George’s full attention. And I realized that made their wait worthwhile. In the meantime, whoever was in the front of the line got to chat with me about things like Perez’s work on Crisis on Infinite Earths and Teen Titans. One fan told me he had been in line for six hours, and laughed when I suggested that instead of a sketch he request a full-body Sharpie tattoo.

George was gracious and cheerful, and even addressed one fan as “my son” when posing with the sketch he had drawn for the young man. Fans brought up entire stacks of comics for George to sign. One fan had a large Bristol paper full of empty panels, and George drew Batman in the center panel. He signed a two-meter-wide Marvel poster one fan had collected many signatures on. One fan had George sign a huge plastic infinity gauntlet. One had his comics bagged and boarded, but with areas of the bag sliced out and bordered with electrical tape so George would know just where he wanted a signature on the cover. And George delivered sketch after sketch after sketch after sketch. For hours.

I have never seen anything like it in all my life.

Before the night was over, everyone with a numbered ticket did make it through that line, and the donation jar was full. In honor of the tireless joy and attention George and the other creators at the convention showed their fans, consider donating to the organization George was promoting: The Hero Initiative. Funds for Hero Initiative are raised and disbursed by comic book artists and industry leaders to comic book artists in need, especially aging artists who need major medical treatments or surgeries. Please visit HeroInitiative.Org.

sketchbook sunday

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art, drawing, pen and ink, postcards, sketchbook sundays, static x, wayne static

I didn’t get any sketching done this week but I stamped and addressed a ton of these Wayne Static postcards. Friends and readers of MWSNM will be receiving these in the weeks to come.

If you haven’t seen Wayne in your mailbox by the end of February, it means A) I don’t have your mailing address, or B) you live outside the USA and a single postcard stamp isn’t enough! To get on my wonderfully anarchistic mailing list, just go to the Contact Page and drop a line.

A friend of mine bought the original Wayne Static drawing (framed and matted) from me last year. If you dig Wayne Static or his band Static X, you might like to order this drawing as a print, t-shirt, shower curtain, or whatever else your heart desires.

Oh, by the way. I turned 43 in January, and my sister sent me this sweet mountain lion mug. Mountain Lions Forever!

sketchbook sunday

Tags

art, brush tip pen, drawing, pen and ink, sketchbook sundays

The portrait above is based on a photo I saw after googling “flock of seagulls haircut.”

Below are two sketches based on drawings my friend Brian did for a comic book we made a few years ago. These beasties will be models for the “dragons” in the Meteor Mags stories.

Here are the brush tip pens I’ve been experimenting with this year.
You can get them cheap on Amazon.

sketchbook sunday

Tags

art, drawing, ink, meteor mags, pen and ink, sketch, sketchbook sundays

I got this cool pen last year. It has some kind of synthetic fiber brush tip. I didn’t get a chance to really test drive it until this week, but I quickly came to love it as much as my trusty fine-point pens.

sketchbook sunday

Tags

art, drawing, ink, pen and ink, sketch, sketchbook sundays

It’s time to pollute more perfectly good blank paper!

Guitar guy is Michael Gira of Swans, using a video still as a reference. It might be fun to do an 11×17 on bristol board.

The Marvel Value Stamp of Electro (in the top pic) is a rough for an idea of doing a Value Stamp Series as 11×17 pieces. Then again, it might be more fun to do a series of 11×17 Meteor Value Stamps, with characters from the Meteor Mags stories instead of Marvel classics.

It’s time to start picking poses for the next series of Meteor Mags illustrations, so we’ve been trying out some different things. This silly tribute to Church of the Subgenius made it onto the refrigerator.

The first printed copies of Red Metal at Dawn arrived and they look great. And, proof copies arrived for two music albums to be released on compact disc this month. They look good, too. Once Amazon gets them set up to buy, we’ll take a look at them here.

sketchbook sunday

Tags

art, drawing, music, sketchbook sundays, venus flytrap

Making art quickly makes chaos out of your walls. Things get hung at random and, over the course of a year, lose all sense of order. Closing out 2015 required a bit of wall patching, cleaning, painting, and re-hanging.

Yesterday saw the arrival of the proof copy of a music album I’ll be publishing this month. The CD looks and sounds great, but I found the volume to be too low compared to most of today’s music. I plan to return to my master files, crank the volume a bit, and resubmit the audio before making an official release. The artwork, which I designed using scans of an acrylic painting and an ink drawing, came out really nice. I’m excited to get this album and one more music album published before the new semester begins. 

I don’t do the tree thing in December, but the art studio desperately needed some suitable greenery. Here in the desert, we get ordinary house flies all year long, even in the winter. Otherwise the weather is so nice you can open windows and doors and let the cat come and go as she pleases and enjoy the sunlight and play guitar on the porch and… then the flies. It doesn’t take but a couple in the house to drive me mad. But, when life gives you flies, grow Venus flytraps.

Nothing says seasonal festivity like a carnivorous plant. I ordered this one on eBay from “Joe’s Carnivorous Plants”. She just ate her first fly yesterday. I was so proud. The leaves are thin enough that when the sun shines on them you can see the pesky little fly trapped in there.

That should keep the freshly cleaned and organized sketch room from devolving into pestilence and infestation for another year! Go, little flytrap!

sketchbook sundays

Tags

animals, art, drawing, fine point pens, frog, frogs, leaf, nature, pen and ink, sketchbook sundays

Oak Toad on a Leaf
Micron 05 and 01 fine point pen

And that’s it for my drawing pad of 6×8 paper! Though I have a couple other blank sketchbooks waiting, I might get another 6×8 pad to have around. I like working in this size for several reasons. One, it takes less time to go from concept to completion than it does with a 9×12 drawing. Two, the dimensions make it easier to crop to a 5×7 aspect ratio for custom-printed greeting cards. Three, I can find mats and frames for a much more reasonable price at this size, compared to the relatively exorbitant cost of matting a 9×12 to an 11×14 frame. And four, since I draw all my mid-tone lines by hand without a ruler, it is less challenging to cover large areas of the drawing than it is in a 9×12. Just try drawing hundreds of straight lines across a 9×12 sheet of paper sometime, and you’ll see what I mean!

Like last week’s damselfly, this toad had as its photo reference one of my mother’s recent nature photographs. She’s taken some especially crisp and detailed photos of small animals lately, and it’s been fun using them as inspiration for opportunities to practice inking with fine point pens.

sketchbook sundays

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art, damselfly, dragonfly, drawing, fine point pen, pen and ink, sharpie marker, sketchbook sundays

Damselfly
Micron 05 and 01 fine point pens and Sharpie marker.

You can tell this is a damselfly, not a dragonfly, by the folded wings. A dragonfly at rest would hold its wings out flat. Damselflies fold their wings above their thorax like this.

We might get it printed on a 14×14 throw pillow. Matting and framing the 6×8 original will be our little project for this afternoon.

Mom deserves credit for taking the original photograph this drawing is based on. We don’t think she’ll mind if we share it with you here:

Our little pad of 6×8 drawing paper is nearly empty now, so we cracked open our pad of 11×17 bristol board to do a quick ink study. Though we’ve painted on much larger canvases, we haven’t gone bigger than 9×12 for drawing. We broke the ice with a Diatryma based on a smaller study from a year or two ago. We’d like to do a whole series of 11×17 prehistoric animals in marker and pen, but working in these dimensions will take a bit of getting used to.

sketchbook sundays

Tags

1978, art, drawing, Kirby Krackle, pen and ink, robbie robot, sharpie marker, sketchbook sundays, Tomy, toy robot, wind-up toy

Toy Robot
This wind-up toy dutifully marches through a sky filled with Kirby Krackle in tribute to the 1978 toy created by Tomy. For a photo reference, we used a picture taken for our eBay listing which sold this robot a few months ago. This black and white drawing was created with Micron 05 fine point pen, various Sharpie markers, white gel pen, and black pastel. 5×7 aspect ratio, from a high-resolution (300 dpi) scan of original art.

sketchbook sundays

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art, drawing, ink, painted dancer, pen and ink, sandra rose, sharpie marker, sketchbook sundays

This week, we recreated an ink drawing from last year. The paper size on the original was slightly irregular, so we wanted to make one that would perfectly fit a 6×8 mat in an 8×10 frame. The dimensions on the image above are 5×7, a convenient size for printing cards, but the original is 6×8.

Then we wrapped up this portrait of Sandra Rose from last week. Sandra loves metal and metal heads and dreams of uniting the people of the world in one giant mosh pit. Starting with her photo reference, we gave her a black rose tattoo based on some anarchist symbolism, the pirate’s jolly roger, and some bottles of booze, cards, and coins in the background.

Clicking the images above will bring up the pages where you can buy them as prints. This summer, we anticipate framing 10-15 of these 6×8 pieces and listing them on eBay.

Revisiting an earlier drawing gave us a moment to reflect on the role these weekly postings have played in our development, that luxury of the blogging world which our friends at Longbox Graveyard jokingly call self-indulgent navel gazing. But recently, someone mentioned they “didn’t get” blogging. Having kept a number of journals, dream journals, sketchbooks, musical recordings, and blogs over the years, we can say there is a definite benefit to making journal entries regularly, especially if you are artistically-inclined or working on a project.

When we started doing 4×6 ink drawings last year, they were coming out pretty rough. We were merely exploring possibilities with our new pens. But recently, and with the addition of mats and frames, the 6x8s and 9x12s are starting to look pretty good on the wall. Visitors say nice things about them, a few of them sold, and even our landlord says we’re starting to get good lol. Having a weekly check-in for ‘sketchbook sundays’ has helped us keep improving. More than once, we have caught ourselves on a Saturday with nothing drawing-related to show for the week, and it gives us a push to get into creative mode. It isn’t like anyone who drops by our anarchic little blog is going to send us hate mail if we miss a week, but little checkpoints each week have helped us stick with it and pursue our illustrative fantasies.

sketchbook sundays

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art, black and white, drawing, frog, ink, pen and ink, sketchbook sundays

This little frog revisits a 4×6 drawing we did with our very first set of fine point pens in March, 2013. The original 4×6 sold on eBay. This one is bigger at 6×8, though the image above is cropped to 5×7. It uses more solid black in the background than the original version did, but the frog is pretty much the same.

We didn’t post it last week so here is a new illustration for one of the Meteor Mags stories. It was fun to produce. It began with posing for the shot, so yeah it’s sort of a self portrait. But with more awesome hair.

This was the first time we used a white gel pen to put some stars in the sky. For a guide, we studied the stars on the cover of Iron Man #215, shown below. That’s a book we bought at the drug store in the mid 1980s, and maybe we’ll feature it here sometime.

sketchbook sundays

Tags

art, drawing, pen and ink, sketchbook sundays

 
Every so often we do a study of this old comic panel from Weird War Tales. As our inking improves over the years, so do the studies. One of these days we won’t screw up hand-lettering this piece so badly that we have to paint out all the words and re-do them digitally. Here we used the Brian Bolland font purchased from Richard Starking’s Comicraft, a company you may be familiar with if you ever read Elephantmen.

sketchbook sundays

Tags

art, cards, cute animal cards, digital photography, drawing, Jack Kirby, meteor mags, pillows, postcards, sketchbook sundays

 
For today’s Sketchbook Sunday, let’s take a moment to spotlight these cute animal cards Mom sent us. In 2010, Mom had never had an email address. We encouraged her to get one, and then she started discovering the joys of Google – especially for finding images and materials for her preschool classes. Last year she took her first online course, a class in digital photography to support her animal photo enthusiasm. Now she is having her own cards made from her digital pictures. Pretty cool! Here are three of our favorites, below.

 

 
Readers of Mars Will Send No More may recall how we collaged our table with pages from old Jack Kirby comics a few years ago. The Kirby table has served us well, fueling our inspiration and filling our life with Kirby Krackle as we paint and eat. But now, it is time for a little refinish.

 

 
Love those panels of people freaking out in a morass of cosmic crackle! But as you can see, the well-loved surface is now a disaster, and it’s impossible to even tell if the thing is clean enough to eat on or not at any given moment.

 

 
So, we sanded down the big chunks with some 60 grit and a palm sander, then gave it a black and white starry cosmos finish with some old spray paint from a box of leftovers in a friend’s garage.

 

 
This week, our pillows arrived. Below you see a 20×20 throw pillow featuring the image of Meteor Mags playing piano in her black dress and silly pirate hat.

 

 
The pillows are nicely made with a sturdy outer cover. The image is printed on both sides. They have a zipper on one edge. It opens to reveal a polyester pillow. The pillows in the 20×14 products are much cuddlier than the 20×20 products. They are stuffed more. The 20×20 is beautiful, but the 20×14 pillows are more snuggly.

 

 
And that’s all we have time to share this weekend! Thank you for dropping by ~ and happy sketching!

sketchbook sundays

Tags

art, drawing, fine point pen, frames, meteor mags, pen and ink, puma, sharpie marker, sketchbook sundays, wayne static

The fox cub throw pillow arrived just in time for our sister’s birthday this week. She sent us this photo of the finished 20 x 14 pillow.

It came out really well, she reports. It’s pretty wild seeing Micron 05 fine point pen lines enlarged to this size thanks to a high res scan.

We got these cards with a bee on them and have been sending them out on birthdays with the terrible pun “happy bee-day” inside. We need to touch up the source image, clean faint noise out of the white area, and upload a new source image to the printer, but they look pretty neat.

The latest 9×12 Mags portrait may or may not get stars in the background. We need to practice stars first. Here she is in a temporary frame for safe keeping. Sorry about getting the ceiling fan in the shot oops.

We picked up a few 8×10 frames and mats for our 6×8 drawings. Here is a 6×8 version of an 8×10 puma drawing we did last year.

The frames are “country red” which means sort of reddish brown, with black mats. Here is puma framed.

Wayne Static got himself a frame, along with a few others we will photograph before listing for sale.

We’d like to find something similar for our 9×12’s but then shipping becomes a problem. These 8×10’s are LARGER than 8×10 on the outside edge, obviously, so they just fit in a medium flat rate Priority Mail box or the Fed Ex equivalent. A 9×12 piece of paper fits in one of these, but once you figure in the outside edge of the frame, the box is too small. So then you jump up into a more expensive shipping tier. If you have any brilliant solutions to shipping 9×12 framed art, send us a message please!

Until then, happy sketching!

sketchbook sundays

Tags

art, drawing, eBay, pen and ink, sketchbook sundays

This Sketchbook Sunday, let’s take a trip down memory lane. We made an auction listing for the last surviving remnants of our sketchbooks in the 1990s and early 2000s. We’ve scanned and reworked some of them into new art, and we’d like to re-do a few with our fine point pens. But even though some are pretty ragged by now, we’re pretty sentimental about them. Maybe they will find a new home.

[Update: They did find a new home! SOLD.]

sketchbook sundays: dream journal nine perfection

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art, comic book collage, comic book dreams, dream journal, dreams, painting, sketchbook sundays

Sometimes you have those dreams where everything feels perfect. As a tribute to the numerous dreams we’ve had flipping through boxes of never-published comic books, the colors and textures of Dream Journal Nine contain vintage comic books in their depths.

 

 
This little 8×10 canvas has been a companion in the painting studio for two years, the object of many small-scale experiments we would later apply to larger canvases. It was once a light-hearted collage called “Perfect! The Master Will be Well Pleased!”

We’ve had much time to consider the idea of perfection, and we have a new perspective on it now. Perfection is a process, not a static state. Perfection is a verb, not a noun. Perfection is how we shape the world ever closer to an ideal we have in our minds. In reality, nothing is ever truly perfect, but that should not disappoint us too much. We are not trying to attain a state of perfection; we work to perfect our less-than-ideal world and make it more ideal.

On the flip side, you have imperfection. The crackled textures of Dream Journal Nine suggests cracks and imperfections. In dreams, the imperfections sometimes alert the dreamer that yes, this is a dream. You notice something that doesn’t seem quite right. And when you pause to think about it, it becomes clear you are dreaming. The imperfections of the dream world make perfect signposts on the road to lucid dreaming and greater awareness in the dream.

Dream Journal Nine could just as easily bear the title Imperfection, for perfection and imperfection form two sides of the same coin, two halves of the same whole.

We recently published three years of dreams from our dream journals in a 148-page paperback, and also Kindle format, called Three Years Dreaming.

sketchbook sundays

Tags

art, drawing, meteor mags, painting, sketchbook sundays

This week’s edition of Sketchbook Sundays is all about works in progress. Between cranking out research papers at the end of the semester and a sudden influx of writing, editing, and book design gigs, some of our art projects have just had to get set aside for a bit. So, here’s what we have in progress here at our little outpost on the martian frontier.

Above, this new drawing of Meteor Mags is coming along nicely, but we need a background. Yes, we should probably plan backgrounds first, but we get caught up in inking gasmasks and stockings and then kind of fill in the details later.

Below, our seahorse painting awaits a final phase of rendering and highlighting. Considering that the next Mags story features a seahorse, it might be time to wrap this one up soon.

Below, our first attempt at painting Mags dancing has proven challenging but fun to work on. She needs her star and anarchy tattoos completed, at the very least, plus some attention to lighting and shadow. And who knows, we might put in some sea creatures before calling it done.

All that, plus we’ve plotted out the next Mags story but haven’t had the mental space to write the dang thing yet. We really thought our break between semesters would be mostly down time, but this has not been the case. Can’t complain though – it’s nice to have the work! Perhaps after this coming week gives us a chance to wrap things up in the business world, we can dive back in and get lost in some artwork.

Keep on sketching!

sketchbook sundays

Tags

art, Big Eyeballs, camera, cameraman, drawing, eye, fine point pen, pen and ink, sharpie marker, sketchbook sundays

 
Camera Man
Micron fine-point pens and Sharpie marker

Buy a huge acrylic wall hanging of it for no particular reason.

sketchbook sundays

Tags

animals, bee, drawing, ink, pen and ink, sharpie, sharpie marker, sketchbook sundays

 
Bee
Micron 08 fine-point pen and Sharpie marker

Buy it as a framed print or greeting card.

While looking for a poem in our archives this week, we recalled a scan of a bee that we never got around to using as a photo reference. The poem received an edit and the bee enjoyed an evening in the spotlight after all this time.

sketchbook sundays

Tags

art, ink, pen and ink, sketch, sketchbook sundays

We did this 4 x 6 inch ink drawing with fine-point pen for a friend this week.