THE CREATIVE PROCESS PART 5- PHOTO RESEARCH

Research is a very important aspect of any artist's job, but particularly a comic book artist's. If there is something that is not drawn correctly, like a real life building, it's pretty easy to tell. When I do research, I like to actually see the thing I'm drawing close up. That's not always possible. The first time I did any kind of extensive research was for a scene that took place in the Oval Office of the White House. Obviously I couldn't go there so I had to discover the layout of the office by looking for photos of it. The only problem was that this was back in 1996, and there was no such thing as Google. Today, all the information that I needed was a mere click of the mouse away. This was not so back then. I spent hours in the basement of Loyola University's library looking through bound copies of the magazine Newsweek in order to get an up to date look at President Clinton's Oval. What made this a little more challenging was that Clinton didn't redecorate the Oval Office right away after becoming President, but waited over a year (Barack Obama did the same thing). Because of this there were different decorations in the office depending on when the pictures were taken.  I was unable to take the bound volumes out of the library, so I literally had to make sketches while I was there. It took some time, but I was able to get a fairly accurate layout. These drawings were done in January 1996:

The interesting outcome of this project was that I now pay very close attention to the changes that are made to the office each time a new person becomes President.

It's important not only to be accurate, but it's just as important to remain up to date. The same can be said for clothing fashions and hair styles. Because these are things that constantly change, keeping up with them becomes a job itself.

LIFE DRAWING PART 4

In 1999, I had worked at Steve Edsey & Sons illustration studio for a year and had helped out on a few projects, but it was becoming clear to me that my artwork just wasn't getting any better. I felt that in order to get to where I wanted to go, I had to go back to school. There was only one choice of where to go - American Academy Of Art. Not only had most of the illustrators at Edsey gone there, but my Dad had as well.

In my first year at the Academy, I had figure drawing 3 nights a week for 3 1/2 hours a night. My teacher was Melinda Whitmore who had graduated from The New York Academy Of Art.

Melinda was great - she took a lot of time to move all of her students in the right direction. She was a real stickler for measuring the human figure in order to get the correct proportions - something that I had never done in my previous art classes. In addition to the studio class work she had us do outside projects, such as doing gesture drawings,  drawing from the work of a great master in order to look at the figure the same way they did ( I drew from a Leonardo Da Vinci drawing), and doing extensive drawings of hands and feet. She was also a an expert on Human Anatomy, and taught that course as well in my second semester. Below are some of the drawings I did in Melinda's class:

Overall Melinda's class was a great experience. She and her husband David Jamieson own and operate the Vitruvian Art Studio where students can learn the same techniques that these two wonderful people taught me.

DONATIONS

Every year I try to give to various charities if I can. I regularly give to Part Of The Solution, a soup kitchen in Bronx, New York where I had done some volunteer work after undergrad. I have also given to the Chicago Food Depository, The Michael J. Fox Foundation For Parkinson's Research,  Catholic Charities, and the Red Cross.

I want to tell you about a special fundraising effort. Jill Pantozzi is a columnist for Newsarama, MTV Splash Page, Topless Robot, and  Publisher's Weekly (among others). She writes a blog, The Nerdy Bird, which is fantastic and, truth be told, inspired me to start this blog. When I did start it, Jill was nice enough to take a look and give me some advice. Some of the content of the posts that I have done were her suggestions.

On March 12, Jill will be participating in the Muscular Dystrophy's annual MDA Muscle Walk, for the New York-New Jersey Metro area. Jill was diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy ( specifically Spinal Muscular Atrophy) when she was 2 and a half. She and her family have been involved in MDA soon after and have done everything they could the help find a cure ever since. She talks about it more in depth HERE.

Donations to Jill can be made HERE or to her team " The Nerdy Birds" HERE. She's getting pretty close to her goal. Anything you can do to help out would be appreciated.

Thanks!

INFLUENCES PART 5

Today is Len Strazewski's birthday. Len, former writer of DC Comics Justice Society Of America and creator of Prime for Malibu's Ultraverse universe, is the current writer of AC Comic's Stormy Tempest character for Femforce. I first read Len's work back in 1990's Flash Special #1 where he wrote an adventure of the Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick. Little did I know that 20 years later I would count him among my best friends.

I first met Len back in 1993. I had known Mike Parobeck, who was Len's artist on DC Comics  JSA and The Fly titles. Mike had been looking at my artwork on a fairly regular basis and was about to move to Florida. He said that Len would look at my artwork and gave me his number. Here are a couple of the pages, out of about 20, that Len looked at upon our first meeting:

Did he love them? No. In fact, he tore them apart. His comments were basically "Why did you do THIS?" "Why isn't anything happening here?" "This stuff need to be more exciting" He said that the character of Chuck ( who is on the second page) looked like he was "deflated" and  talked about what Dick Giordano said about the construction of faces ( that they were made of flesh and should be drawn as if they were unmoving plastic). His biggest complaint was that nothing was happening on the pages and that people were just standing around talking.

The truth of the matter was Len was dead right. My layouts were not overly exciting. Things didn't flow as well as they should. So I fixed it. Below are the pages I drew immediately after my first meeting with him.

At this point, my work still had a very long way to go. I had done no life drawing yet, with the exception of one figure drawing class at Truman College. Still, there was a difference between what my work looked like before and after meeting Len Strazewski.

Len continued to look at my work from time to time. He was the first person to give me scripts to draw from. He was writing Prime and Prototype for Malibu and would pass stories along. It was incredibly helpful. Here are some pages I drew circa 1995-97:

By the time I started grad school at American Academy Of Art, Len had pretty much left the comic book world for greener educational pastures. He started teaching journalism at Columbia College Chicago and eventually rose to the prestigious position of acting chair of the department.

He has gone back to dabble in the comic book world from time to time. Below are a few pages I drew for an independent project that he's been pursuing:

This is for a story titled  TRUE COLORS

This for an ongoing epic called MILOS

In 2010, Len started writing the Stormy Tempest feature for AC Comics, adding depth and humanity to this little known character. I'm luck enough to be the artist drawing it.

It's interesting to think that I started out reading Len's work and ended up drawing it. As lucky as I feel for that, I feel even luckier to know this wonderful person. Happy Birthday, Len!

HERETIC ISSUE 6 (2008)

Heretic: Templar Chronicles was the first project I worked on for Markosia Enterprises, starting back in 2007. The graphic novel was based on the the novel by Joseph Nassise and deals with the adventures of modern day Templar Knights. The knights fight ghosts, zombies and are lead by Cade Williams, who has the ability to cross over into the world of the dead. The following pages show Cade and fellow knight Sean Duncan being shown the Vatican's trophy room where the Spear Of Destiny is kept.

At the end of the issue, there is a huge battle between the knights and zombies on the ground while in the air another battle wages between knights and ghosts.

This story was interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that it was about a year since I had worked on Heretic - I was asked by Markosia to put it aside for Kong, and it took a long time to get this script. In fact, I had already done my first Femforce story by the time I got this script. My artwork had changed quite a bit in that year:

If you look closely, you can see that the faces and the bodies are more developed

in the second page than in the first.

Also, I had just started using a computer program called Sketchup which allowed me to draw more accurate backgrounds. The end result was pretty good, I thought:

Originally planned as a 6 issue limited series, the series was cancelled at issue 3, with the intent to publish issues 4, 5, & 6 along with the first 3 issues as a complete trade paperback. The first artist had left the series after the 3rd issue and I was asked to do chapters 4-6, all of which I had completed ( 85 pages total). Of the 3 issues I drew, this one was the most professional looking. To this day, the trade has not been published and it seems unlikely that it will be. If you're interested in this type of story, it's probably worth it to get a copy of the novel. It can be found HERE

THE CREATIVE PROCESS PART 4- DRAWING MARIE CURIE

In late 2005, I received a phone call from Capstone Press. They had a project that I had sent in samples for, the life story of Marie Curie, and they liked the samples and wanted me to draw it. Although I had drawn a short comic feature for a compilation that the people I work with were doing, was working on pages for my own project, and had spent the previous summer painting over a hundred celebrity faces for a book that never saw the light of day. This project scarred the hell out of me. Why? Because it would be the first professional comic book work that I was doing for someone.  Once I started working, everything went just fine.

They sent me a huge folder full of reference. Between that and some clothing books I bought pertaining to that time period, I was all set. They sent me a template for the way the pages were to be laid out. I went out and bought a digital camera and started taking reference shots. I was contracted to provide thumbnails ( they referred to them as "storyboards"), pencil and color 12 "spreads" which ended up being 24  individual pages. Here are the results:

Overall this was a fun project. If you are interested in getting a copy, it can be found HERE or HERE

LIFE DRAWING PART 3 - LEARNING HOW TO DRAW

Every artist has to start somewhere. My first figure drawing class was at Truman College in Chicago. It was one semester and, like most 19 year olds who had never experienced it before, I was very shocked to see someone posing nude. I got over it real fast when I realized that no one else in the class even noticed.

Two years later, I had Drawing 101 at Loyola University Chicago. In that class, we not only had nude models, but we also had to do self-portraits and all kinds of other things. I now cringe at the stuff I turned out in that class.

The second drawing class I had at Loyola was a Human Figure Drawing And Painting class. At that point I had done a lot of studying out of books and had a much better grasp on some of the basic principle of drawing figures.

I was still a few years away from a lot of the breakthroughs that would eventually come.