Valente @ the drawing board

2011-03-09T03:30:00.001-08:00

www.valentepencil.com

sister midnight

2010-07-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More noir

www.valentepencil.com

2010-07-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

(photo of MA expo open day by Charlotte)

2010-07-08T03:07:00.001-07:00

Jeff Jones

2010-07-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

the protagonist and the audience

2010-07-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

Above: In the opening sequence of David Lynch's Lost Highway, before we see the protagonist, we see his reflection, we see his perception of events.

...

Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption

2010-07-02T00:22:00.000-07:00

Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption
Edited by Paul Gravett, John Dunning and Emma Pettit

"A selection of pieces from Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption will be exhibited at the The Jam Factory in Oxford, alongside the winners of the November ’09 Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption comic strip competition.

In September ’09, Ctrl.Alt.Shift ran a competition asking people to create comic strips on the theme of corruption. The winner’s work was exhibited in the Lazarides Gallery in London in November ’09 alongside a retrospective look at how comics and satire have been used throughout history to highlight political important issues."

http://www.ctrlaltshift.co.uk/event/ctrlaltshift-unmasks-corruption-comic-exhibition

photo: Olivia Flint

technology

2010-07-01T09:32:00.001-07:00

above: layout and digital lettering with Adobe InDesign on an Imac.

It is nice to finally be able to use a functional computer... The artwork was completed using traditional art tools and then scanned at 600dpi and cleaned up in Photoshop. The final artwork is prepared for print with the final layout adjustments and text completed digitally using InDesign. I have also experimented with the sequence of the pages using small thumbnails and importing the scanned artwork into non-linear video editing software. Lettering the comic digitally has allowed for the text to be edited and altered with non destructive edits to complement the artwork. For the lettering, I have been using comic fonts designed by Blambot as my focus is on illustration rather than typography, using pre-existing fonts allows me to focus on the sequential design of the artwork.

http://www.balloontales.com/tips/tails_joins/index.html

2010-06-28T01:52:00.000-07:00

Digital comic lettering tests with Manga Studio

work in progress

2010-06-25T06:07:00.000-07:00

ink on paper

writing with pictures

2010-06-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

perception versus reality

2010-05-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

a scene from 'Stranger on the Third Floor', Dir. Boris Ingster (1940)

-------------

the exhibition that never was?

Alejandro Jodorowsky's 'Dune': An Exhibition of a Film of a Book that never was Curated by Tom Morton 2 April - 16 May

Plymouth Arts centre

Based on the top result from a Google search, cult film director and author, Alejandro Jodorowsky was deemed enough of a draw for curator, Tom Morton to use his name on posters and host an exhibition in the Plymouth Arts Centre that promised more than it delivered. His Google search research uncovered an English translation of an interview with Jodorowsky from a c.1977 issue of Métal Hurlant (#107). The French publication was found, dissected, placed on a table, covered with glass and displayed as the centre piece of the exhibition.

The ripped up magazine and a book on Jean Giraud/Moebius's art borrowed from the local library were the only trace of Moebius's pre-production artwork. Prints of concept art by Christopher Foss and H.R. Giger faced the table displays. There was little else of interest to anyone visiting the gallery that had already done a quick search on the internet for information. What the exhibition did feature prominently were the recent illustrations and sculptures of the curators friends, loosely linked to Frank Herbert's novel, Dune, by their titles or having randomly selected lines from the book scrawled onto illustrations. All you need is a magazine, a Google search for a famous name and a pair of scissors and you have an exhibition - and don't forget to bring your friends along for the ride.

Jodorowsky and Moebius created thousands of pre-production storyboard sketches and designs for their intended film adaptation of Dune before the project was taken away from them. Jodorowsky relocated to Paris and changed to the medium of comic books and effectively continued to make films on paper, moving away from film studio interference. His concepts for Dune are present in the Metabaron's series of bande dessinée and he has used the comic book medium to juxtapose text and image in a challenging and visceral way that he was not permitted to explore further through the medium of film. Jodorowsky was not interested in a straight adaptation but in experimentation, revealling in the magazine interview, "I did not want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me Dune did not belong to Herbert as Don Quixote did not belong to Cervantes, nor Edipo with Esquilo." During his talk, on 6th May, the curator, Morton sidestepped a question from the audience about Jodorowsky's input saying simply, "We talked".

The crumbling Plymouth art centre had a lot of character, the floor creaks and the paint peels and it played host to an exhibition that could have been great. From the presentation talk given by the curator, Tom Morton it was revealed that his main inspiration for the show was a google search and finding out that Alejandro Jodorowsky does not own the rights to the Dune project.

Jodorowsky's anecdotes of his struggle with the material, and his first impressions of Pink Floyd, were regurgitated by the curator to an audience. His google search led to a translation of a Métal Hurlant magazine article that documented Jodorowsky's struggle to get his version of the film made, the magazine itself was prominantly displayed on two tables under glass. This was the extent of the promised pre production imagery by Moebius from Jodorowsky's work on Dune. The walls had prints of Giger and Foss. The original work on show, modern responses to Dune, were revealed at the talk by Morton to be illustrations made with a distaste for the original text and depicting lines chosen at random from Herbert's novel. Having seen a video interview with Jodorowsky in his own library, flipping through a hardbacked book that contained Moebius's pre-production storyboards and costume designs, I expected at least a glimpse of the existing artwork. It was a long way to travel for a torn up magazine and some prints.

Having dismissed Jodorowsky's 'cult status' and Herbert's writing as being not to his liking, the curator himself seemed unsure of the audience he was aiming for. Those in attendance at his talk seemed to have wandered in to a private party. Using Jodorowsky's name to display a few prints and throw together a few illustrations was a very conceptual, modern take on the adaptation which is exactly what Morton wanted, but exactly the opposite of what the audience wanted to see.

Allegedly 5 books exist that hold the storyboards and conceptual illustrations for Jodorowsky's treatment of Dune and none were present at the exhibition. The comic art that realized concepts originally intended for Dune also exist somewhere... just not here. The exhibition was a missed opportunity.

Here is the top listed item in a Google search for Jodorowsky's Dune; http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky.asp

The website goes into detail on Jodorowsky's vision for Dune, translating the Métal Hurlant article and further information on the Dune project can be easily be found online and in the 2006 book by Ben Cobb, 'Anarchy and Alchemy: the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky'.

What the exhibition did show was the importance of research in the creation of a project. Used effectively, research can make the outcome a lot more successful.

analogue art

2010-04-26T00:53:00.001-07:00

"Currently, I’m back to painting or drawing most all the artwork, and scanning in any and all pieces and working on them on my computer before sending off the final version on disk. Original art may be one piece of artwork or a composite of twenty separate elements. So I suppose the fact that the work is done by hand helps
it look more 'human'.”*

-Bill Sienkiewicz

* The Education of a Comics Artist: Visual Narrative in Cartoons, Graphic Novels,
and Beyond, edited by Michael Dooley and Steven Heller(2005) New York: Allworth Press

---------

Traditional art tools: drawing board, pencils, white acrylic paint, brushes and a dip pen with Gillot 303 nibs and a lot of Indian ink. I currently have a drawing board in the hall and another in the living room with 2 pages set up on each board... I pace around a lot and then find myself in front of a new board and continue sketching like I'm stuck in an old ping pong arcade game. I also acquired some toy cars and a door viewer to use for distorted macro photo reference.

Influenced by Moebius's experimental 'comic without a script', The Airtight Garage that continued to be published in Metal Hurlant magazine from 1976–1980 and the well received recent stream-of-consciousness comic art by Geof Darrow for Shaolin Cowboy, I am progressing with the narrative of my own comic using a combination of text and image, essentially completing the script with images rather than words. This method seems to be working for me as images suggest where there narrative should lead and with the visual medium of comics, the art needs to clearly show the story using a sequential illustrations and be understood without needing text. Stan Lee used the conceptual talents of the artists he worked with to his advantage, allowing them freedom to create a sequence, providing them with only a skeletal plot outline. After the artwork was completed, he would then complete the writing process, and as a result of his prolific output, 'the Marvel Method' has been a tried and tested method for the creation of comic books.

Below: left, a page from Moebius' The Airtight Garage c. 1976 and right, a page from Shaolin Cowboy with line art by Geof Darrow and coloured by Peter Doherty.

After collecting visual references, writing a treatment and an early draft of a script I have been experimenting with beat scripts with mixed results. I am continuing the project by letting the narrative unfold using visual beats; storyboarding the comic book and writing with images. The juxtaposition of images in the pencilling stage suggests where the sequence should go. The dialogue will be added digitally after the final artwork has been scanned. The comic pages are loosely laid out in pencil, setting out the composition and erased when necessary and then the bulk of the drawing is done in ink.

below: work in progress, using ink as part of the development of the drawing

Using traditional art tools, I can get a more immediate and violent effect in the artwork that reflects the violence in the narrative. The sharp Gillot 303 nibs used in the dip pens scratch away at the paper and occasional ink splatter adds to the disorder that I want to create in the depiction of the protagonists world in the comic. Reworked artwork, using white acrylic to paint over lines and then inking over those marks is there to suggest that the protagonists perception may not be reliable. As seen in a previous post, using the example of the art style of Jerry Moriarty, leaving traces of the artwork below layers of ink and paint draws attention to the medium itself and leaves evidence of the artist in the construction of the images.

Jerry Moriarity's reworked comic art illustration style can be seen in my previous blog post: http://valentedrawingboard.blogspot.com/2010/02/human-hand.html

"I often sketch with pen. It forces me to be exact. And if it doesn't work, it screams at me. The sketch. The pen just laughs."

-Bill Sienkiewicz

below: a page from Bill Sienkiewicz's Marvel comic book adaptation of David Lynch's film of Dune

in dreams

2010-04-16T01:31:00.001-07:00

Little Nemo in Slumberland (Winsor McCay, 1908)

'Cat Bus' from My Neighbour Totoro (Dir. Hayao Miyazki, 1988)

The Temptation of St. Anthony by Salvador Dalí (Oil on canvas,1946)

Above: visual representations of a distorted perception of reality.

fact and fiction bleed together

2010-03-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

"The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain."

— Roberto Bolaño

2666

In Roberto Bolaño's 2666 the authors research is clearly seen in his practice as the chapter entitled 'The Part About The Crimes' documents a series of femicides that occurred in Ciudad Juarez with a journalistic detachment that makes the reading of the chapter more unsettling. In the novel, the crimes are set in the fictional town of Santa Teresa. The author gives a context to each of the murders to humanize the victims and explore the ongoing corruption that allows the murder of women to continue without being cluttered by the media's focus on Ciudad Juarez as a battleground in Mexico's drug war. These are human casualties.

comic book horror noir

2010-03-26T12:29:00.000-07:00

Jacques Tardi

2010-03-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

comic book noir

Jacques Tardi allows dreams and reality to fragment and synthesize in his work, to highlight the mental and physical trauma that is produced by acts of violence. His protagonists have difficulty in separating fact from fiction and the reader cannot anticipate the outcome as the fragmented narrative unfolds, becoming more involved with the work.

strewn newspapers

2010-03-26T05:40:00.000-07:00

newspapers, reflections and locked doors...

Francis Bacon, Study of George Dyer, 1969 (oil on canvas)

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Francis Bacon, In Memory of George Dyer, 1971 (oil on canvas)

---------------------------------------------------------------

Francis Bacon, A Piece of Wasteland, 1982 (oil on canvas)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

visual references...

film language transferred to an alternative medium...

Still from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Poemkin, 1925

Bacon frequently referenced images from film and photography to construct narratives...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I had a furious row with a studio executive once: he said, "They won't get it, Nic" and I said, "No, they'll get it; it's you who's not getting it, because you're trying to force something that's different into being the same". People usually arrive to see something with an open mind. I want to make them feel something emotionally, but not by planning how to get them there. That would almost be like the communist days when newspapers told people what to think - when there was no competition with Pravda."

-Nicolas Roeg

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/jun/03/hayfilmfestival2005.hayfestival

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

cut-ups...

fragments of information...

torn newspapers.... partial headlines...

interpretation...

perception...

Rius

2010-03-24T11:53:00.000-07:00

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Rius's comics were not for escapist entertainment but were intended as cultural guerilla warfare, attempting to shame the middle-class Mexican into an awareness of his society and its glaring inequalities and hypocrises."
(Raat: 39)

Ed. Raat, W.D. and Beezley, W.H. (2007) Twentieth Century Mexico, USA: University of Nebraska Press

http://lambiek.net/artists/r/rius.htm

Aztec mythology and Mexican 'comics'

2010-03-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

above: A page from the Codex Borgia showing Aztec gods of life and death - image taken from The skeleton at the feast: the Day of the Dead in Mexico (by Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloë Sayer) .

Picture manuscript...

Discovered c.1519 in Mexico

------------------------------------------------------------------

McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisisble Art, New York: Harper Collins

visual narrative

2010-03-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

film > comic
storyboards > layout & pagination
screen > print > computer screen

interactive medium > active audience

-----------

mise en scene > mise en page

"Where the filmic image enters into a spatial relationship only with the off-screen space cut off by the frame, the bande dessinée image will always be perceived simultaneously with other images. Each panel is, then, surrounded by its perifield." (Peters 1991:15)

Miller, A. (2007) Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French Language Comic Strip, UK: Intellect Books

2010-03-22T10:35:00.001-07:00

Kafkaesque on Prezi

Kafkaesque

2010-03-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

Kafkaesque:

adj.

1. Of or relating to Franz Kafka or his writings.

2. Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: "Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport . . . haunt his innocence" (New Yorker).

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Kafkaesque

Towards a thematic adaptation... recontextualizing themes and atmosphere from Kafka's text for a modern audience... themes in Kafka's text fit the aesthetics of film noir, sharing similar traits. The paranoid 'wronged' protagonist, isolation, crime, entrapment, the femme fatale, a subjective point of view.... Psychological metamorphosis

-------------------------------

"You show the protagonist so that the audience can put themselves under the skin of the man. First of all, I use my camera in such a way as to show things, whenever possible, from the viewpoint of the protagonist: in that way the audience identifies itself with the character on the screen and thinks with him."

- Fritz Lang

Bogdanovich, P. (1967) Fritz Lang in America, Studio Vista

a metamorphosis in response to the text

2010-03-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

The problem that arises from a visual adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis is the lack of empathy that would result from not having a human face to identify with; the audience would immediately be emotionally detached from the transformed protagonist. Seeing the protagonist as an insect, with few human traits to hold on to would quickly become uninteresting as the audience would not be able to relate to a subhuman creature. Previous adaptations have attempted to get around this by giving Samsa a human head with an insect body or as seen in the stage version, he is a man with insect movements, but the existing adaptations detract from the sense of empathy with the character that is required from the reader to make the story work and Kafka's text is distorted. Moving away from a mechanical adaptation towards a thematic treatment of Kafka's text allows for a more successful presentation of the key themes in a visual narrative. A human face is necessary for the audience to engage with the protagonist and a step toward a mental metamorphosis, presenting a protagonist with an altered perception opens the work up to becoming a more successful visual narrative.

[Searching for the sure-fire flop]
Max Bialystock: "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach." Nah, it's too good.
The Producers (Dir. Mel Brooks, 1968)

An example of a successful thematic adaptation is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which deviated from the source material (Philip K. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep') in order to produce a successful visual narrative. Alejandro Jodorowsky's unrealised vision for his film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune started with the director taking ownership over the source material and adding and subtracting concepts without any reverence or obligation to the source material commenting that, "I did not want top respect the novel. I wanted to recreate it. For me Dune did not belong to Herbert as Don Quixote did not belong to Cervantes... the work of art is created from the collective unconsciousness."1.

While the project was taken away from Jodorowsky after 2 years of pre-production and eventually realised and later disowned by David Lynch in his own adaptation, Jodorowsky was able to develop concepts from thousands of pre- production illustrations for his version of the film and find a new audience for the material using the medium of comic books. He continues to collaborate with artist Jean Giraud. Comic art is a valid medium for communicating a visual language and Jodorowsky found a receptive audience to his work in Europe.

"One of (David) Lynch's unproduced projects is an adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis."2. David Lynch has so far been reluctant to produce a film as a mechanical adaptation of the text, revealing in an interview with Chris Rodley, "I've got the script of that. It needs a little bit of work but I like it a lot. Unfortunately it's expensive and it won't make a lot of money." 3.

His existing films do frequently feature metamorphosis and can be seen as being Kafkaesque. Of these existing works, Lost Highway has been very influential on my own research in it's use of a subjective narrative and the use of an unreliable narrator. Lynch uses the aesthetics of film noir to present a visual narrative that can be understood by a modern audience literate in the visual language of film. Fred Madison, the protagonist of Lost Highway constructs a fantasy to escape from his prison cell, revealing that he likes to "remember things my own way". His metamorphosis in the film occurs in his prison cell when he transforms into another very different character, becoming younger, more confident and successful with women. The aesthetic of film noir is important as it complements the subject matter; the shadows that envelop Fred hint at his inner darkness and the femme fatale that he desires leads to his destruction as he loses his grip on the fantasy world that he has contstructed.

As part of my research project, my own exercise in creating a beat script and treatment of Kafka's Metamorphosis resulted in the need for an extensive reworking of the original text to make it work visually and the addition of new scenes that distorted the original story to the extent that it made me uncomfortable to produce a straight adaptation that could satisfy myself or an audience familiar with the work. My response to the text and failed attempts at writing a successful adaptation did inspire me to write an alternative, Kafkaesque and subjective narrative that is directed at a modern audience. I have written the first draft and I am developing the short story visually, experimenting with conceptual storyboards to make it work as a visual narrative. The treatment is inspired themes contained in Kafka's work and by a story that continues year after year in the newspapers which can find its audience in the presentation of real human horror in a way that can evoke empathy and create a successful visual narrative.

----

1.
Cobb, B. (2007) Anarchy and Alchemy: the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Creation Books

2.
Sheen, E. and Davison A. (2004) The Cinema of David Lynch: American dreams, nightmare visions. Great Britain: Wallflower Press

3.
Ed. Rodley C. and Lynch D. (1997) Lynch on Lynch, England: Faber and Faber Limited

foam

2010-03-11T15:36:00.001-08:00

-----

For the way finding project in Amsterdam, I teamed up with Benz and we started off by getting lost until the Foam gallery found us and we found our bearings. As a starting point, the bicycles and trams that attempted to run us over while we stared at our maps and the welcoming and fractured font of the Foam logo became the trigger for visual experiments depicting our section of the city...

Storyboards for a short animation were fueled by coffee and drawn in cafe's. We made quick test animations by layering pages of the storyboards and making them transparent by using candlelight in a dark cafe'. Motion was a very important aspect of the city; everywhere bicycles zoomed past and as we were on foot we were very aware of the constant flow of people on foot and on two or four wheels. In the storyboard designs, the sliced 'a' of the foam logo is featured in the typography that represented each of the street names of our slice of the city; Vijzelstraat, Kerkstraat, Keizersgracht, Reguliersbreestraat and Rembrandtplein. The curve of the red 'a' detaches from the rest of the letters, slides across the screen and parks in the bottom left corner. The letters stack up in the bottom left corner, the next 'a' in the sequence moves behind the first like the parked bicycles seen in the photo above.

The group meeting to discuss our initial ideas was productive as the feedback that we got in response to our rough designs focused on the sounds of the city; the trams, the clicking traffic lights and the bicycle bells that were another quirk of Amsterdam that needed to be included. A small digital camera was used to record the sounds of the city, more storyboards were sketched out and work started on the digital art needed for the animation. Font was altered using Adobe Illustrator and imported into After Effects to be further manipulated. The sliding 'a' letters were placed onto a new layer to become animated wheels.

The animation developed as Benz reacted to the soundtrack and began to improvise, moving away from the storyboards to produce an animation that complimented the sounds of the busy city streets. The animation was done quickly and instinctively and captured the chaos of the city, becoming more textured and chaotic in response to the soundtrack. Collaborating with Benz was a valuable experience as we complimented one another; he responded to sounds of the city and edited to match the rhythm of the soundtrack and I responded to visuals; incorporating the curves of bicycles wheels and street signs and the horizontal lines of the architecture into the storyboard design. The short deadline allowed us to produce a simple animation that was instinctive and reflected our response to the city.

-----------------------------

Digital animation by Benz:

---------
Benz's blog: http://suttana.wordpress.com/

---------------

Below is my own experiment in quickly producing a digital animation as a response to the Amsterdam way finding project animation. This animation also deviates from my initial storyboards as I responded to the flexibility of the digital medium, allowing the animation to develop naturally. Created using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects.

Lambiek, Amsterdam

2010-03-11T09:28:00.001-08:00

On the book shelves at Lambiek, "Europe's first comics shop, and the finest of Holland", comics and graphic novels are organized not by the writers name, but by the name of the artist. The downstairs gallery holds original and limited edition prints of comic art.

http://lambiek.net/about.htm

----------------------

Rashomon

2010-02-26T16:11:00.003-08:00

Rashomon (Dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

http://www.criterion.com/films/307

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"You have one subject and you look at it from three different perspectives and then you intercut those perspectives."

- David Bowie, from an interview on Countdown, 1980

-----------------------------------------------------------------

"Now montage is actually closer to the facts of perception than representational painting. Take a walk down a city street and put down what you have just seen on canvas. You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments. And the same thing happens with words. Remember that the written word is an image."*

-William Burroughs

(*extract from The Fall of Art, taken from The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 1985)

traces of a human hand

2010-02-26T09:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.shadowrobot.com/hand/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

A step back from Photoshop...

The layered and reworked comic art style by Jerry Moriarty shows traces of what was erased and painted over giving a false sense of motion to the artwork. The thought process of the artist becomes part of the message.

art by J. Moriarty from Jack Survives

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Paris at the BD Artist(e) gallery, I got up close to a page of original comic art by Dave McKean that featured a reworked panel pasted on top of the page. Traces of the alternative dialogue and artwork could still be seen through the new addition on the panel below. The imperfection seen in the original art showed evidence of the human hand that would be lost during the print process.

http://www.bdartiste.com/

---

An interview with UK based illustrator and comic artist Matt Timson

Matt Timson is currently illustrating the horror comic, Impaler.

Have you found working in the comic industry to have been a struggle in the UK?

MATT TIMSON:

It is quite a lot of work. Really, your only way in, in this country is the small press or 2000AD. 2000AD is obviously quite hard to get into; there’s a limited amount of spaces. Everyone has to start with a Future Shock (that has to be perfect) and you’ve only got a five-page story every ten progs or so, so it’s difficult to get in.

Do you do much digital work?

All of it is digital… It’s been about five years since I’ve drawn on paper and I’m actually finding it quite difficult now which is a terrible thing to admit, but I’m used to looking at the screen and adjusting something straight away if it’s not quite right, but paper is a real pain.

Do you find using digital media to be an advantage?

Ten or fifteen years ago when I first started out it was really a bit harder because your work really had to be on your doorstep, which was quite limiting…
Of course with digital and I don’t care who says it isn’t, it is easier; it’s a lot easier to work in stages. Fully painted art work like that (Impaler comic art) with traditional media it would take probably just as long but, if you’ve stuffed it up, you’ve stuffed it up. In some ways that’s kind of a good thing because once it’s done, it’s done and you can’t go back, because I keep going back. There are a lot of people, and I am one of them to be fair, who couldn’t have made it as a comic artist before. I can because there are lots of cheats, which I’m not going to show you. I started doing cartoons and that was quite easy; just draw and colour things in. From that I started to do this sort of thing (fully painted artwork) just for fun and the more I did it, the better I got at it and I realised one day, you know that’s it. I don’t actually need paper. Before that I was drawing things and scanning them in. I think if you can draw and you put in the time you can pick it up quite easily.

Do you think there are disadvantages to drawing digitally?

You get used to the fact that it doesn’t matter if you draw something badly because you can resize it and reshape it in Photoshop; it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if that side of the heads wider than the other because I can just shrink it across and Bob’s your uncle but obviously I can’t do that in real life and I sat at home last night thinking I can just do a few sketches and urgh – I can’t be giving those to people (laughs). I thought I’d do some on the computer, print them out and trace them off which is a bit sad; it kind of defeats the object.

adaptation

2010-02-26T00:02:00.000-08:00

Adaptations of Kafka's Metamorphosis have had varying degrees of success. The beginning of Kafka's text forces us to see events unfold from Gregor Samsa's perspective and evoke a sense of empathy from the reader. Translating the text to a visual narrative creates a very different response from the audience. Something is always lost in translation. A reworking or re- imagining of the original text is required to adapt it to a visual medium.

Robert Crumb's Kafka, 2005

Part illustrated biography, part comic adaptation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Caroline Leaf The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa, 1977. Animation.

http://www.carolineleaf.com/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Steven Berkoff's stage adaptation of The Metamorphosis

Filmed version, 1987 (Dir. Jim Goddard)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

...

Opening montage...

2010-02-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

The opening montage...

motion and confinement...

setting up clues to character and their instincts and behaviour...

contrast between chaos and order... juxtaposing static scenes with frantic motion... building tension... setting up obstacles

reflections using montage as a mirror, actions are duplicated

internal and external expressions

animal instincts

Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (Dir. Miike Takashi, 2002)

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The Cremator (Dir. Juaraj Herz, 1969)

black and white

2010-02-24T02:03:00.000-08:00

The Kiss by Jeffrey Catherine Jones

http://www.jeffreyjones-art.com/

Expressive and loose inking styles can be seen in the comic art of:

Jacques Tardi
Jeffrey Jones
Jorge Zaffino
Tony Salmons
Dave McKean
...

Black and white photography gives a sense of the past and a feel of documentary - an objective feel... removing emotional associations of colour, the viewer is guided toward a particular reading...
I have chosen to produce black and white artwork for my MA project to compliment a subjective visual narrative.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Black is the most essential colour ... [it] should be respected. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and does not awaken sensuality. It is the agent of the spirit much more than the splendid colour of the palette or of the prism."

-Odilion Redon

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I didn't have money to buy the paint so I would work a regular day job working on apartments, doing sheet rocking or plastering things and then I would steal all the leftover gallons of paint and add them to other gallons. So (my work) was purely black and white because it was the easiest and cheapest way to pull it off."

- WK Interact

(from an interview in Juxtapoz magazine, Jan 2009)

the cover to the Jan 2009 issue of Juxtapoz magazine features art by street artist WK Interact

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

"For some unknown godforsaken reason, I become an editor at DC Comics. I pitch the idea of a black and white anthology series featuring Batman. The key to the series' success, I figure, is to hire the very best artists in the business. Most everyone at DC tells me it won't sell. No one likes black and white comics. No one likes anthologies... the series becomes a creative and financial success."

- Mark Chiarello

(from the introduction to Batman Black and White, Vol. 1: 2007)

Breaking walls - film and animation

2010-02-24T02:00:00.000-08:00

Subjective narratives that use the medium as part of the storytelling...

The Holy Mountain (Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)

"What I cannot do in [cinema], I do in comics."

(Alejandro Jodorowsky, 2004)

Heavy Traffic (Dir. Ralph Baksi, 1973)

Poster designed by Jan Lenika for Roman Polanki's Repulsion, 1965

The Tenant (Dir. Roman Polanski, 1976)

"just play yourself"

Irma Vep (Dir.Olivier Assayas, 1996)

Breaking walls - comics

2010-02-24T00:54:00.000-08:00

self-reflexive comics...

An awareness of the comics medium becomes part of the narrative...

Japanese manga artist, Shintaro Kago... As Abstraction progresses, the narrative becomes fragmented and the panels are re-ordered giving a dreamlike and disjointed sense of time

> a page from Abstraction by Shintaro Kago (c. 2007)

Grant Morrison's Animal Man... the author interacts with the character...
The character exists outside of the comic book panel...

Animal Man #19 (Cover Art by Brian Bolland, 1990)

Animal Man #26 (Cover art by Brian Bolland, 1990)

(interior page from Animal Man #26. Written by Grant Morrison, art by C. Troug and M. Farmer)

Cronenberg's typewriter

2010-02-22T14:29:00.001-08:00

Stills from Naked Lunch (Dir. D. Cronenberg, 1991)

Below:

A Polish film poster for Cronenberg's 1986 film The Fly, designed by Eugeniusz Skorwider

---

---

A short interview with John Reppion and Leah Moore on writing for comics

John Reppion and Leah Moore are a married comics-writing team. They are based in the UK, and have been writing for American publications.

Do you ever draw layouts on scripts for each other or the artist?

JOHN REPPION:

The ridiculously strict, long winded process that we have is that we sit down and we discuss everything, we sit down and discuss the story, we make notes about what's gonna happen (the beginning, middle and end kind of thing) then we write down the numbers of the pages and then next to each page we write down what happens on each page then Leah draws a rectangle, we divide that rectangle into how many panels we want on the page, how big they are and then Leah draws little sketches...

LEAH MOORE:

...I do little thumbnails of indecipherable nonsense and whenever he has to type from them he's always like, "What's that there? Is it like a man lying on his back screaming?" No, it’s a horse joyously leaping over a hedge - they're really awful aren't they?

JOHN REPPION:

They're not that bad... you get to do them, I'm not allowed to do them because you can't tell what mine are... Because we talk things through as you're drawing them out, we just have them in our mind more than anything. We divide those sketches up and then basically just sit at separate computers and type them up.

LEAH MOORE:

We grab say four pages each and type four pages and then get another four pages until its all done...

JOHN REPPION:

...and when they're typed up, then we go through and add al the dialogue in. I think most people would just say, write what's happening and just start typing...

LEAH MOORE:

Like; "he is climbing up a building"... yeah, it would probably be a lot more conversational.

JOHN REPPION:

Which you could do if you were writing it on your own I suppose but, if you're two people writing it...

LEAH MOORE:

This might be why it takes us so bloody long to get through a script to be honest.

Storyboards

2010-02-22T13:44:00.000-08:00

Above: my pre-production storyboard sketches for the infamous NTU 'Violette project' depicting unnatural and uncomfortable interview compositions. The sketches were made after our teams initial brief to create a short documentary film was canceled by the man himself and replaced by a new brief to film a series of short interviews about perceptions of fear and comedy in a controlled studio environment.

below: the video footage was edited by Benz and projected onto a studio wall as part of an exhibition of the collective Violette projects

---

////

Body horror - transformation scene from John Carpenter's The Thing:

The Thing (Dir. J.Carpenter, 1982)

Storyboards by Mentor Huebner

------------------------------------------------------------------

storyboard layout for Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

In terms of speed, it is much faster to draw storyboards directly into Photoshop, especially when an animatic is to be produced using the storyboard art, but after recently experiencing computer malfunctions, with my laptop attempting to self destruct, I am looking to a more traditional way of producing storyboards. A beat script will be illustrated using the Japanese storyboard layout seen above and I will be sketching quickly on paper using soft lead pencils. The art can later be scanned and manipulated further. Having a hard copy of the original pencil art, it will be easy to display the work without having to rely on technology. The storyboards will be used as a reference for further experiments with poster design, comic book art and animation.

Polymelia

2010-02-21T05:09:00.003-08:00

Polymelia: the presence of supernumerary limbs.

Odilion Redon, The Crying Spider, 1881

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Jon Beinart's Toddlerpede's:

http://beinart.org/info/jon-beinart.php

--------------------------------------------------------------------

---
The Amazing Spiderman #101. Art by Gil Kane, 1971
---

Santa Muerte

2010-02-21T05:09:00.001-08:00

"Such a crumbling beauty. Ah, there's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars wouldn't fix." - Tom Waits

---------------------------------------

Concept sketch for Santa Muerte - female skull with Aztec tile decoration

using existing news stories to help form visual narratives...

Mexican drug gangs worship Saint Death

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6982343.ece

Art and Literature, Bacon and Ballard

2010-02-21T04:49:00.001-08:00

Crash: A Homage to JG Ballard

Gacosian Gallery, London
(11 Feb - 1 April 2010)

The Gacosian gallery space works... the artwork reflected Ballard's investigation of environment, violence, corrosion, destruction and technology. The large spaces allowed the art room to breathe and held an eclectic mix of modern artwork by Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville, Jean Michel Basquiat, Paul McCarthy and more.

Paul McCarthy Mechanical Pig, 2003-05 (Silicone, platinum, fiberglass, metal and electrical components)

Francis Bacon Still Life, Broken Statue and Shadow, 1984 (Oil and pastel on canvas)

Jenny Saville Witness, 2009 (oil on canvas)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the otherside of town was the claustrophobic setting and pretension of the Whitechapel Art Gallery's exhibition as they scraped the barrel with:
I shake you by the hand, comrade Bacon: British Art Abroad

In the small room that held the exhibition, a queue formed in front of a handwritten letter by Francis Bacon. I joined the back of the queue and eventually got to have a closer look. Not a sketch, not a piece of art, just a handwritten scrawl on a scrap of paper by Francis Bacon in a room full of very strange people determined to enjoy themselves. In the corner a woman stared at a wooden container on the floor for a long time before declaring, "It's not a work of art at all!". Clarita and I couldn't contain our laughter and decided to leave before we were asked to. We went back to Cinephilia East near Brick Lane to look at more Polish film poster prints to recover.

Cinéphilia: Polish film poster design exhibition in London

2010-02-21T03:14:00.000-08:00

Polish film posters @ Cinéphilia West
171 Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill

and at Cinéphilia East,
Sclater Street, off Brick Lane, London

Narrative illustration that is not constrained by the source material...

Holy Mountain (Dir. A. Jodorowsky, 1973) Artists: J. Gorska & J. Skakun

Blade Runner (Dir. R. Scott, 1982) Artist: Michal Ksiazek

Un chien andalou (Dir. L.Buñuel, 1929) Artist: Wieslaw Wajkuski

Seven Samurai (Dir. A. Kurosawa, 1954) Artist: Andrzej Pagowski

Breakfast at Tiffany's (Dir. B. Edwards, 1961) Artist: Michal Ksiazek

The Shining (Dir. S. Kubrick, 1980) Artist: Leszek Zebrowski

Alchemy

2010-02-20T10:24:00.000-08:00

After being derailed by a broken laptop I have just got back into doing digital artwork and discovered Alchemy - an image idea generator... a bit like the bastard son of an etch-a-sketch and clouds in the sky, the patterns that you create in Alchemy can lay the foundation for a composition that can then be further developed and finished off with additional layers of digital paint by importing the image into art software (eg. Photoshop/ArtRage).

http://al.chemy.org/gallery/

mixed media as the message

2010-02-19T14:40:00.000-08:00

Transliteracy Conference, Leicester
9th February 2010 @Phoenix Square

Professor Sue Thomas described Transliteracy as being the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms. The conference presented a wide range of media used to engage with modern audiences and the use of social networking tools was encouraged and the speakers were filmed to document the day for a digital audience.

Gareth Howell of De Montfort University presented the use of web comics as a means of producing small press style comics cheaply and using the web to have access to a wider audience and stretch the medium. When asked about audience and the possibility of having to wait for a 'transliterate audience', he replied that you can't wait for the audience or aim too low to make them happy; you need to challenge them to adapt and evolve their grammar as the medium evolves. His target audience is web savvy and he produces fragmented narratives that complement his medium of choice using the internet as a tool and weaving web comics with character blogs to allow stories to be broken up and read according to the audiences personal preferences.

The comics medium relies on audience interaction; the reader imagines what takes place between the gutters as the artwork changes from panel to panel and Howell uses the web to encourage readers to engage with a story from site to site or device to device (e.g. a story read on a hand held mobile device.) Using different mediums such as comic book layouts and social network links to expand the stories changes the way that it is read and allows for the author to experiment with different perspectives and designs and get audience feedback. The medium is further expanded as the work can then jump from author to author as the readers comment on and develop the fictional worlds.

Above: fan fiction based on The Watchmen commenting on the decline of the newspaper comic. Ombudsmen by Scott R. Kurtz.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Steve Gibson presented Grand Theft Bicycle; interactive video game art produced as political satire. The user interacts with a 'Borgcycle', a customized bicycle with controls built into the handlebars that is hooked up to the game. The interactive game becomes a social experience as onlookers enjoy watching the action unfold as much as taking part.

http://grandtheftbicycle.com/

“The medium is the message.” - Marshal McLuhan

The Long Tomorrow

2010-02-19T01:16:00.000-08:00

Graphic storytelling: The influence of Dan O'Bannon and Moebius on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner

Above: toe curling body horror as 'The Girl' transforms.

Moebius has frequently collaborated with film makers, having previously worked on Ridley Scott's Alien, designing space suits, his artwork was also a source of inspiration for the design of Blade Runner. His collaboration with writer, Dan O'Bannon produced The Long Tomorrow which shares similar themes to those seen in Scott's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Moebius conveys mood, atmosphere and horror with stripped down and direct line art. His attention to detail and body language; showing the curled toes of a horrified man witnessing his lover shape shifting into her true alien form is something that I will try to capture as I gather visual references for my own project; a graphic treatment of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Experiments with mixed media and sequential art will be presented at my MA exposition. A distorted perception of events, paranoia and body horror, featuring contorted and cramped hands and feet will feature in my own concept art for Gregor Samsa's awakening in The Metamorphosis. His metamorphosis and his altered perception of reality may stem from a seizure or stroke...

JUAREZ and KAFKA

2010-01-29T01:45:00.000-08:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

VARGAS:
This isn't the real Mexico. You know that. All border towns bring out the worst in a country.

Touch of Evil (Dir. Orson Welles, 1958)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

rough notebook sketches...

Horror and metamorphosis

---------------------------------------------------------------------

As a study of 'in medias res' and a subjective narrative, elements of Franz Kafka's text, Metamorphosis has been chosen as a vehicle for experimentation with a graphic, mixed media treatment of a text for my MA project. Kafka's story offers multiple interpretations, the story itself becoming warped and distorted in translation, it will be the foundation for visual treatments and experimentation with story beats. It features an unreliable narrator and an opening story beat that causes chaos that the narrator fails to resolve. Using Kafka's work as a starting point for experimenting with sequential art, I can work with a limited palette of themes.

---

video: Rock band At the Drive In use the music video format to communicate information to a diverse audience

---

video stills: the subtitles show the link between consumerism and the murders in Juarez; the majority of the murdered women work in factories in the border town.

---

The ongoing femicides in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, a real and socially relevant and current, ongoing news story is something that I will attempt to present using comic art, adapting Kafka's story to use as a foundation for visual treatments of real horror. The themes of metamorphosis, alienation and the collapse of a family unit are shared in Kafka's text and the news coverage of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The comics medium will be used to communicate with the audience and have them interact with the issue.

I first heard of the situation in Juarez from my Spanish teacher while in Guadalajara, Mexico and the story stayed with me. A very different Mexico was depicted closer to the border than what I had seen in my experiences of travelling around the country. The ugliness of the murders is heightened by the ongoing corruption that surrounds them. I feel confident that I can now give the story a worthy visual treatment, something that has been lacking in recent film treatments of the situation. For years, young women have been preyed on by rapists and murderers while commuting to factories on the outskirts of the city. The killings continue and, to use imagery from Kafka, the men who commit these crimes are like vermin or cockroaches.

"Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach."

(Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, 1913)

With comics and animation I will not be limited by the egos of actors or the constraints of budget and a mixed media treatment can hopefully bring the story to a wider audience. The comic book medium has been used by Amnesty International in the past to bring attention to injustice and bring news stories to an audience in a format that they can interact and engage with, using expressive artwork to communicate the desired message more directly and make the audience wake up to the ongoing situation as factory workers continue to be seen as being disposable and corruption continues to be ignored in the border town.

----

story beats

2010-01-07T12:02:00.000-08:00

"Start with the disordering event, and let the beat be about the attempt to restore order."

- David Mamet*

(Above: sequential art by Paul Pope, color by Jose Villarrubia : Batman Year 100 publisher: DC © DC)

*Mamet, D., 1992. On Directing Film, Great Britain: Faber and Faber

LIMITATIONS

January: laptop self destructs and I find my old watercolour set... sketchbooks replace Wacom tablets and there is no undo function on a real page.

In the Gnomon workshop Visual Storytelling DVD, Iain McCaig describes the importance of story beats, explaining that, "A beat is, if you think of a train track, a beat is a piece of the train track and your story is the train. And so, the beat is the thing that allows your train to move forward on the track. If you miss a story beat, it's very easy to tell because your train quickly becomes derailed." Visual beats can unravel the needs of the narrative as you find visual solutions to convey the motivations and obstacles of the world that your characters inhabit.

"A deed without a name."

2009-12-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

Above: study of Macbeth based on the film adaptation by Orson Welles.

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

- Orson Welles

Visual experiments illustrating Shakespeare's Macbeth. A short flirtation with Macbeth was abandoned as a comic adaptation would require severe editing of the source text and would leave audiences unsatisfied.

Below: a contemporary take on Macbeth illustrating Tony Blair, prophecy and oil

(left: initial pencil sketch. Below: mixed media. Ink, acrylic and collage on typewriter paper).

A section of the text was typed on an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, cut-up and pasted on to the illustration. With my laptop out of action, I resorted to using a typewriter to complete the illustration. Click to enlarge.

2009-12-10T13:19:00.000-08:00

SUBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVE OF THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

Lost Highway (1997 ) Directed by David Lynch

Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.

Ed: What do you mean by that?

Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

PGC phase

2009-12-06T14:11:00.000-08:00

blog in prog... unedited 1st draft:

Trial and error and happy accidents...

I have always found inspiration in film and focusing on visual research throughout the PGC phase, I had the good fortune of having a personal tutor with good taste in film who frequently uses film references in our meetings to communicate ideas. Visual research has made me look under the skin of visual narrative techniques; to break them apart and reconstruct them in my own practice through illustration. I am interested in developing a mixed media project, exploring visual storytelling techniques for both print and screen based contexts.

Using visual beats to communicate the narrative was something that my old sketchbooks contained... the PGC research phase has put these scribbled sketches into focus. The design process project was for me the most important part of the PGC phase as it took me away from the computer and forced me to create a conceptual storyboard that would get immediate feedback from an international class of peers.

Telling a story visually forced me to see the flaws in the storytelling in my artwork and alter it to make it more readable to the audience. To explore visual storytelling further and got hold of a copy of a Gnomon Workshop DVD by Ian McCaig entitled 'Visual Storytelling'. In the workshop, he presents his own work in progress with a voice-over narration using simple art tools (pencil and paper) to illustrate his own twisted sci-fi take on 'The Little Mermaid'.

Above: screenshots of Ian McCaig in action

McCaig creates illustrations that tell the story in visual beats and constructs a sequence that communicates the story using character, composition and tone to convey meaning. Discussing the workshop with my tutor, Simon Perkins, at the second group tutorial, I found that I had stumbled in the right direction. Beat-scripts have been a tool used by Simon to construct his own narratives in film and in the group setting, being able to bounce ideas around, the idea of using different perceptions and points-of-view of an event to create a visual narrative was explored... the tutorials helped with the development of the learning agreement and using limitations to find creative visual solutions. Starting the narrative 'in medias res' (in the middle of the story) will allow me to disguise the motivations of the central character and by also using an unreliable narrator I hope to produce work that will stand up to repeated viewings.

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/product/157/

Illustration: content/context

2009-12-06T08:07:00.000-08:00

Yoko and I jumped on a train to Sheffield to attend the Illustration: Content/Context conference @ Sheffield Hallam University

The focus of the conference was the role of authorial practice in furthering the context of commercial illustration output...

3 presentations by:

Simon Spilsbury, Benjamin Cox and Andrew Foster

followed by a Q&A session and a viewing of Andrew Foster's exhibition at Sia Gallery...

blog in prog... the contents of my notebooks will be digitized

(...)

Check out Yoko's blog: http://yokoyoshihara.wordpress.com/

2009-12-06T07:52:00.000-08:00

2009-12-04T00:24:00.001-08:00

Setting my own brief...
(in prog)

I will be using a subjective, unreliable narrator to explore visual storytelling in a variety of mixed media contexts. I will be experimenting with storyboards, animation and comic art using the framework of an unreliable narrator and the technique of starting the story in the middle of the action; 'in medias res'. By creating my own brief and working within set parameters it will be possible to experiment with creative visual solutions to develop authorial practice...

visual beats and beat-scripts...

Subjective narrative

2009-12-03T15:53:00.000-08:00

Detour (1945)
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

Lost Highway (1997)

Directed by David Lynch

D.O.A.

2009-12-02T00:28:00.000-08:00

D.O.A. (1950)
Directed by Rudolph Maté

"I want to report a murder..."

in medias res Latin [ɪn ˈmiːdɪˌæs ˈreɪs]

(Literary & Literary Critical Terms) in or into the middle of events or a narrative

[literally: into the midst of things, taken from a passage in Horace's Ars Poetica]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 6th Edition 2003. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

Visual narrative "in medias res"

2009-12-01T09:07:00.000-08:00

Aeon Flux
(Pilot: first broadcast 1st September, 1991)
Created by Peter Chung

The 12 minute pilot for Peter Chung's Aeon Flux was first broadcast on MTV for Liquid Television in a series of short 2 minute segments. Chung begins the animation "in media res" (in the middle of the action) and slowly reveals Aeon's motivation as the plot unfolds. Aeon is seen opening fire on an army of masked soldiers from the very first frame of the animation. Her mission is unclear and she shoots her way through the lines of soldiers to get to her destination.

The second 2 minute segment in the series shows the viewer a different point of view. We see through the eyes of one of the dying soldiers. We see the event from a different perspective. His perception of reality becomes distorted as he hallucinates in his final moments and we see the extent of the carnage, questioning the assumed heroism of the previous 2 minute animation.

Visual Storytelling in The Twilight Zone

2009-12-01T05:58:00.000-08:00

The Twilight Zone: Four of us are Dying
(Season One, episode 13. First broadcast January 1st 1961)

In the opening sequence of this episode, Rod Serling's narration alters our reading of the visual signs. We follow the main character and are warned by the narrator that he is not to be trusted, that he is a man with "a cheapness of mind, a cheapness of taste." The camera is slanted at a Dutch angle to immediately communicate that there is something out of place about his motivation and a diagonal composition is used as he checks in to the hotel. The close up reveals the face of a nervous man eager to get to the safety of his cheap hotel room.

As he begins to shave, visual information that would normally be decoded as a process of cleansing and purification is subverted by a warning from the narrator. Serling's voice-over is used to expose the inner character of the man and warns us not to trust what we see;

"Mr. Hammer has a talent, discovered at a very early age.
This much he does have.
He can make his face change."

As the frame changes to an over the shoulder shot, a new face is reflected in the mirror. The moving camera follows his hand as he flicks cigarette ash into the ashtray before again abruptly changing position to an over the shoulder shot to reveal another new face reflected in the mirror. The change is accented by a musical cue.

Thought Bubble sequential art festival, Leeds

2009-11-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

Sunday 22nd November...

Digital colouring in Photoshop & Painter
with Peter Doherty

Peter Doherty's digital colouring workshop gave an insight into his personal work-flow as he revealed some of the digital tricks that he uses in Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. Working as a comic artist and colourist for 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine means having to hit tight deadlines and through trial and error, Doherty has developed a fast way of working. Doherty flips between Painter and Photoshop to take advantage of the more natural, painterly and textured look art that is possible with Painter while taking advantage of Photoshops editing power.

Sidestepping Mark Chiarello's advice in The DC Comics Guide to Colouring and Lettering Comics (to work only in CMYK mode when colouring for publication), Doherty works in RGB mode to avoid any conflict when flipping between the software as Painter does not enjoy layer and screen blends in CMYK mode and data would be lost with multiple conversions from RGB to CMYK. He converts the image to CMYK mode at the end of the colouring process to prepare the finished artwork for print.

Doherty demonstrated how he uses layer masks and channels to give himself the option of editing sections of the artwork at any stage of the colouring process. A lot of comic book colourists work in 'flats' when preparing the artwork for publication. He prefers to work in channels as channels work in both Painter and Photoshop. He uses layer masks to separate figures from the background allowing him to paint sloppily and quickly. His work-flow is adapted to compliment his choice of digital art tools.

Some of Peter's artwork can be seen here: http://www.peterdoherty.net/

...

Visual storytelling with Frank Quitely...

Frank Quitely and writer, Grant Morrison, worked together very closely to develop the aesthetic of their graphic novel, We 3. Using the layout and the page design as a storytelling tool, Quitely fragments one large scene into a series of panel borders that resemble doors to depict slices of time. The cat exists both inside and outside of the panel borders, leaping through slices in time. The soldiers remain inside the panel borders. Quitely and Morrison worked hard to construct a layout that would welcome repeated readings and the image was reworked several times before a visual solution was found that satisfied both the artist and the writer. The visual treatment shows the animal's heightened perception of time and maintains the flow of action by linking the separate panels with dynamic arabesques, depicting a scene of carnage as the soldiers become his prey. The bottom panel is divided by the silhouette of a tree and the composition reveals the personality traits of each animal; the cat remains distant and detached from the group, the dog seems loyal and concerned and the rabbit seems oblivious to it's surroundings.

Below: detail from We3, art by Frank Quitely and words by Grant Morrison

---

Interview with Peter Doherty
at the Thought Bubble Festival, Leeds

Peter Doherty has been working as a professional comic artist for 2000AD since the early 1990s.

Can I ask you about how you work and your experiences of working in the UK comics industry?

PETER DOHERTY:

I broke into 2000AD in 1990. I broke in. I got to know people around here (in Leeds) actually. I met Duncan Digrado at radio (who I knew for years). He was working on stuff for Crisis; they were doing a fill-in on New Statesman; through him, I met John Smith - he lived up in York and so I met some writers (this was sort of the late 80's).

Because I knew them, I knew the people to ask to write me a little story. I did a story; that's how you got in; you couldn't just draw pin ups. I did two five page stories and they bought one so that's what got me in. I jumped in straight away so I had no apprenticeship, none of this trampin' 'round and all that sort of stuff. It was partly through design because I didn't do anything until I knew I was at least halfway decent.

These days I read the scripts and sometimes draw in a sketch book. I scribble in a sketch book and scan it in bits and put it together in Photoshop so you get the immediate idea of what the page will look like straight away.

Do you use a mixture of traditional and digital art?

These days when I colour the actual comics it's all digital art but, having said that, some of this stuff... I'll use quite a lot of textures. They might be scanned so I might use thins like scraps of paper (Chinese paper with a grain in it, that sort of stuff) or watercolour paper.

I use Corel Painter and I use Adobe Illustrator to letter. I use everything and anything, I don't care. I don't think my inking is all that good, so it's nice with digital, you're completely in control. I've never done it all digital I still quite like the feel of a pencil and a piece of paper.

But... if I could find a way of inking that was more efficient... but then I still quite like inking... but then I quite like painting...

Do you use brushes or pens to ink your artwork?

I use all sorts... you can use this sort of stuff (Faber-Castell artist pen) but the tip goes off them quickly, so I have to use a lot and it's very costly. When I started I was using dip pens and I'd rather use those but the problem is I'm a bit sloppy and I'd have too much ink at the end of the pen and there's just blobs of ink everywhere and I've spoilt something and can't get it off. When I used to do it on watercolour paper... I can't spoil the page as I need to paint on that as well. I really admire these people like Dave Gibbons; when he does stuff it's very clean and precise. I saw some Watchmen pages years ago and there's no white-out or anything, he knows what he's doing and he's very focused. Sean Phillips is quite like that as well; he does it and it's done well, but I'm not like that.

What kind of paper do you prefer to use for comic art?

With choosing paper (this is another reason to split the process up - especially now) I duplicate work. A friend of mines got one of those printers that's got pigmenting (so it's waterproof). He can print on watercolour paper for me and I can put watercolour over it. I can do a drawing on one sort of paper, print it out on another sort, print that out and colour it on another sort. I'm a sloppy worker so I can take things out of the process and I can split up the process so if I mess it up at any point I've not messed it up completely. The way I colour stuff with Photoshop and Painter is I have a series of selections and I save them in channel's so I can always go back and change stuff. It allows me to do what I want.

Do writers ever give you any page layouts?

John Smith would do that sort of stuff, but I know John and I ignore it because I know I can ring him up or email him the layouts and he'll tell me if they're wrong and usually they're not. Usually I've done it for a purpose.

Have writers reacted and added more to the finished script in response to the artwork that you give them?

Well, John Wagner does all of his subs after the artworks done, he goes through it and rewrites it. On the last episode of this Ratfink story (for the Megazine) he was getting layouts off me because I was quite late with it so he didn't see the finished artwork and some of it was quite vague. He'd ring me up to ask me what was in a particular panel just to clarify it but he'd change dialogue because you'd draw it and then the dialogue becomes redundant and you do it another way and you need to have a little more dialogue to clarify matters so that's quite good. With 2000AD with John Wagner, that's what he does because he wants his story to breathe properly. He knows what he wants his story to read like. I usually do a good job of telling the story because I see that as my job.

2009-11-18T23:28:00.000-08:00

...

1. Background - What do you think is the background, which has informed this work? (Market, Competition etc)

2 Audience and context - Who do you believe is the target audience? What is the context for this piece of communication?

3. Executional guidelines – Describe the key words (mood, personality or visual qualities etc) that has informed this work? What are the materials, techniques and processes used to create this piece of communication?

4. If you were commissioned to design this work yourself – what are the stages in the research and design process you would use?

Research processes...

Design processes...

5. How might these processes relate to your own research?

...

(rough draft in progress)

To produce a piece of work like Jessica Dimmock's The Ninth Floor, the design process needs to be loose and the artist needs to be alert to 'happy accidents' that may appear to inform the narrative as the work progresses. Dimmock began her project by accident. She was photographing in the streets of New York when she was approached and asked to take some photographs of the addicts that lived on the ninth floor of an apartment building in Manhattan. By being open to becoming friends with her subjects it was possible to get very intimate shots and document them over a three year period to get enough material to form a strong narrative. Her work informed the design process. Her photography has been exhibited, published in a book and shown as a multimedia presentation that uses audio and text to compliment her images.

multi-media narrative

2009-11-18T23:11:00.002-08:00

"In 2004, anywhere from 20 to 30 young addicts lived on the ninth floor of an elegant narrow building overlooking Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The squatters had turned the sprawling apartment into a dark, desperate and chaotic place.

People hustled, scored, shot and smoked wherever they could. Friends conned each other for their next hit. They slept on piles of clothes on the floor. The power was shut off; the bathroom unusable; the kitchen filled with garbage. Anything of value was sold off.

For nearly three years, Jessica Dimmock followed this crew documenting what happened to them after eviction, how they fought to get clean, sank deeper into addiction, went to jail, started families and struggled to survive."

http://mediastorm.org/0021.htm

blog/smog

2009-11-18T23:11:00.001-08:00

***VANDAL VACATION*** from WWW.REVOK1.COM on Vimeo.

Infamous graffiti artists should probably avoid Twitter... and so should you.

MIA

2009-11-18T13:38:00.001-08:00

vertigo on the Air Shard viewing platform...

Imperial War Museum, Manchester...

POW camp magazines made using a typewriter and hand drawn illustrations

RAF 'escape pattern' flying boot design (the top of the army boots can be cut away so that a pilot can pass himself off as a civilian.

Royal typewriter... words as escape

Ronald Searle illustrations... documenting illness and starvation with illustrations

interactive POW gallerY> find out if the POW was interned/survived/escaped using a stamp

diaries with drawings/diagrams/designs showing escape tunnels from the camp...

the deliberately confusing design/layout of the building...

vertigo on the Air Shard viewing platform...

old photographs...

Sanpshots of Christina attempting an escape from the exhibition space dressed in a German army uniform> using textures in Photoshop to digitally age a snapshot of Christina...

I took a series of photos of abandoned and weathered buildings in Nottingham to use as textures for my own artwork at a later stage... to make digital art seem more organic... the human touch that was on display in the handmade magazines from the POW exhibition has also inspired some experiments with text and image... I will use the old Olivetti typewriter that I picked up in a junk shop...

the way of the bicycle thief

2009-11-18T05:48:00.000-08:00

Visual research informing practice...

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

(Jim Jarmusch – MovieMaker Magazine 2004)

http://www.moviemaker.com/articl es/print/jim_jarmusch_2972/

The Design Process project:

The Brief:

Waterstones.

Choose a small passage from a famous book or poem and use it to create a 15 second screen-based invitation to read more books. The final presentation may take the form of a visual storyboard sequence. The audience is adult and literate.

The book that I chose to create the screen based invitation to read more books was Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. I wanted to depict the writer as an outlaw and sell the danger of his paranoid, junkie, criminal lifestyle to the audience; to buy the book would be to experience danger. Waterstone's tag-line is to "try something new". The Restored Text of Naked Lunch is now in print and ready for a new audience.

The initial rough concept for the storyboard was sketched in the corner of a room away a computer. The rough layouts were later tidied up and redrawn using visual cues from film noir (watching Romeo is Bleeding and Alphaville helped to capture the atmosphere of film noir in the sketches). To test the timing of my storyboard, I scanned the sketches into Photoshop and seperated each frame to create a short animatic which was exported as a Quicktime movie for further editing in Adobe Premiere. To meet the brief and show only fifteen seconds of visual information required some harsh editing.

I showed a very rough cut of the 15 second animatic on a loop, featuring a voice-over by William Burroughs reading an extract from Naked Lunch. My sketchbook featured rough layouts for the text on paper but without text overlays, the message of the animatic was not clear.The work was presented on a computer screen with a portfolio of storyboard artwork next to the screen. The feedback from the session was useful as the final sequence needs to be more clear and readable to the viewer. A greater awareness of the audience during the design process puts more of a focus on what the essential visual information should be.

Stealing from Godard and using text to communicate to the audience would be the final element of the design process... using text to add to the reading of the advertisement. To communicate an idea in 15 seconds, I need to use text to compliment the images and to direct the reader to the message. Alphaville is a film that captured the mood that I wanted to convey and watching the film again influenced my storyboard sketches. The satirical edge to William Burrough's Naked Lunch is echoed in Godard's film. The cliche's found in detective stories are used for black comedy.

Text is used by Godard to compliment the moving image. For the films trailer, each cut in the montage is punctuated and complimented by text.

Naked Lunch test animatic from Johnny Occult on Vimeo.

The next stage of the process will be to create a more readable storyboard and animatic that has the right amount of information for a 15 second presentation and to add text using After Effects...

Above: screenshots of the Alphaville trailer

Alphaville (1965) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

2009-11-18T05:37:00.001-08:00

I tracked down an old Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter in a junk shop and posed for reference photos...( photos by Clarita)

some rough ink sketches on tracing paper over even rougher pencil sketches allowed me to play with the reflection of hands in the glasses and loosen up and simplify forms

2009-11-18T05:28:00.000-08:00

2009-11-18T05:07:00.000-08:00

David Valente

MA illustration

Online Learning Journal

Nottingham Trent University

2009-11-18T05:01:00.000-08:00