Spatterings

Good heavens, how long has it been?

Well, let's see. Where to begin?

I think the last entry on this blog was made right before I quit my last job. In addition to my freelancing, I was holding down a day job on the art staff of The Deal, a business weekly. The Deal was, in most ways, a nice place to work, with a great bunch of people, but the money was ... uninspiring, and I also had no possibility for advancement. I was trying to figure out my next move when I received an invitation to art direct at another company, which will for the time being rename nameless. In the meantime, I was asked by The Deal to do their conference marketing materials, an interim job that has lasted about six months now and will (he writes with fingers crossed (no mean feat)) go on indefinitely. I really enjoy that work, although it consumed my waking hours to the point where I actually did not have time to draw -- not illustrate, draw -- for several months. Things have gotten better lately, but not that much.

Just recently, while still essentially working two jobs, I took a week of (ha ha!) vacation to attend Milton Glaser's workshop at SVA. Milton Glaser, if you don't know, is a legend in the design industry, a phrase that for once can be used entirely without irony or hyperbole. I can't describe much about the experience -- suffice it to say that it's like no other design workshop on earth -- but it was inspiring, to use a word that I usually can't say without wincing. Milton is, among other things, a mensch, and it was amazing to work with a person who, while remaining remarkably down to earth, uncompromisingly strives for greatness. I learned two big things that week: First, that I am capable of extraordinary work, and second, that I will never do it at the job I am at now. The time has come to stop fooling around and to set up my own full-time studio.

The first step to doing this is to resume doing illustration, so expect to see a lot more frequent updates on this site, of what I think will be surer material. The next step is to find a partner. I want a collaborator. The final step will be to actually set up a business. I've seen forty-year old freelancers, and the picture isn't pretty. I don't want that. I want an office, a business plan, and an accountant who keeps lauding me for surpassing expectations. This won't happen tomorrow, but it's going to happen. And soon.

OK, more later. Now, to bed.

-T

Tomorrow, Otis?

Well, the James Brown piece is a hit, based on responses. (Remember, you want an over-sized postcard, send me an email. It is also available as a poster, if you're interested. ) Next up, my second-favorite R&B singer, Otis Redding.

Otis, unfortunately, doesn't have nearly as iconic an appearance as JB. He didn't live that long, alas, (like Buddy Holly, he died in a plane crash) and he didn't have a huge processed pompadour and flash clothes. He was a big stocky guy, not ugly, not a matinee idol. It's really harder to come up with a terrific image that encapsulates him. His most famous public appearance was at the Monterey Pop festival, in which he apparently topped Jimi Hendrix. (More on that tomorrow, probably.)

So we'll see how this goes. Damnit, the man wrote "(Sitting on the) Dock of the Bay" and "Respect." He deserves a poster.

More from PART-TIME DOG

Another quick post today. This picture comes a little bit further than midway through the always in all-caps PART-TIME DOG. (Don't get your hopes up, though -- I am not working sequentially.) The caption reads "You know, with a little effort, I might be able to sniff my own butt."

Trust me, in context, it's hilarious.

-T

Friday sketch blogging – James Brown

In one of the great ironies of the new millennium, the passing of The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business was overshadowed by the passing of Gerald Ford, The Slowest-Walking Man in Politics.

James Brown begot soul, funk and the foundations for a hell of a lot of hip-hop. Ford begot the career of Chevy Chase. JB sang "Please Please Please" "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," "Papa Don't Take No Mess," and "I Feel Good." Ford pardoned Nixon. This is apparently worth celebrating because it spared this nation the horrible pain that would have resulted from an actual trial. I'm not sure that the burning lungs that accompany prolonged cackling qualify as "horrible pain," but then I'm not in charge of closing the stock market, or I would have had in done in honor of Soul Brother No. 1.

So here's JB, in a study for a poster I'm planning to do this week, in honor of His Badness.

Black thoughts

This is a long one, and no pictures, sorry.

As a Hanukah present, my wife Ines gave me the latest book from Burt Silverman, a reprint of one of his sketchbooks. Very nice, and it got me thinking.

In one of the written passages that accompany the lovely drawings, Silverman describes how a lot of his artwork is about reconciling the design elements (ie, flat shapes arranged in a pattern) with the more realistic (ie, rendered, shaded, carefully drawn) elements. To resolve these issues, Silverman often just renders the clothing of his subjects as a flat shape, with zero or minimal rendering. It looks pretty good when he does it. David Levine does similar things in his caricatures, which is no surprise, seeing as they trained and exhibited together when they were young. (From what I've heard, who took what from whom is a matter of some contention. I have, I stress, no dog in that race, as the expression goes, or at least I think that's how the expression goes. I am certain that I have no dog and know nothing about racing, so I will rest this paragraph on those certainties.)

The reason I bring this up is that over the last several years, my illustration work has been purely painted, but as I mentioned recently, I've started to introduce pen & ink to some my work, either combined with paint or with computer color. This has caused me to re-think the way I reconcile rendering and design in my pieces.

Why? Put simply, when you're working with ink, the blacks are really, really black. In paintings, they are usually not; they're dark colors, usually cooler than the surrounding colors. But with ink, they are blacker than Dick Nixon's soul.

That means that other colors on the piece work differently. Unless you're going to work in a very low color key, you're going to have to accept that fact that the blacks will not blend in naturally with the color, forming a continuous whole as in a painting, but will instead stand out as a drawing that sits below the color atop it. (Since the advent of computer colors, which gave them the option of working with something other than a limited range of flat colors, comic books have tried to solve this problem by running very dark, over-rendered color over the inked artwork. Sometimes this works fine -- there are some beautiful comics out there -- but often it makes the comic look like it just came out of a warm water wash with a tub-load of black socks.)

I was trying to work on fixing this tension by using a lot of dry-brush in my work, which allows some of the ink to read as gray, but as I've started on the color for PART-TIME DOG (and yes, I've decided that I'm only using ALL CAPS when I write about it from now on), the nice, slapdash messy grays don't stand up to the flat colors as well as a juicy solid black might. (And why am I using flat colors? Because my goal for PART-TIME DOG (see?) is for every page to look like it could be a poster, and flat colors help the design elements of the page to stand out more.)

So as I post up these pages, keep an eye out for  changes in the way I use blacks. I'm curious myself to see how it develops as this thing moves forward.

One more thought: PART-TIME DOG.

Happy new year,
Tom

Part-time Dog Teaser

Spent the last week finishing up the first four or five pages of PART-TIME DOG. Expect several individual pages to be posted over the next week or so. Other than that, the Studio has got to create a brochure and a website for the a converence. The deadline for both is Jan. 12th, so that's going to be dominating my time until then. After that, though, expect an absolute blitz of promotion for illustration.

Later,
Setlz

Iggy Pop, Now in Full Color!

This is more like it, I think! Same old sketchbook drawing as seen below, but colored with Dr. P.H. Martin's Concentrated Watercolor dyes. I bought this stuff a long time ago, and let it sit in a dark corner. Which is appropriate, because the problem with this stuff is that the color isn't light-fast, which means if it doesn't sit in the dark, it fades.

Still, I really got a kick out of using it. Coloring on the computer can give similar brilliance, but applying colors with the Wacom palette is surprisingly tedious, because the pen tool is no where near as responsive as a good sable watercolor brush. (This is the real reason that computer art has yet to replace "real" art. It's harder to simulate old fashioned techniques on the computer than to do it by hand in the first place.) Coloring with traditional watercolor requires a rigid surface (either a piece of board,  a stretched piece of paper or paper on a block) because the many washes required to get similarly vibrant color warp a loose sheet of paper.

So I'm going to keep experimenting. Dr. Martin also makes a light-fast line of inks called Bombay Inks, and I just bought some of those. I'll experiment with them tonight and see how I like it.

Friday sketch blogging

Frustrating week. I'm still working on The Office picture. It's almost done, or maybe it isn't. That's the problem with working on the computer. The damn medium is so flexible that you just aren't committed to one version over another. I'll revisit it over the weekend, and see if I feel like giving it another go. When I'm satisfied with it, I'll post it here. The Iggy painting isn't going that well, either. The color, which I wanted to be a rich, glowing red tone, has faded out pretty badly. Shocking, considering I was using Daniel Smith colors, which I usually think of as the best available.

This sketch, on the other hand, which I am calling "Colbert and Stewart Contemplating a Bust of Murrow," is definitely going to be a painting. One doesn't rip off Rembrandt on the computer. I'll be doing it in my standard watercolor on hard board technique. I'd love to do it in oils, but I am too damn slow when it comes to oil paint. Maybe I'll be faster by next year.

I'll try to do a step-by-step of my technique for this piece. Right now, I think the figures are a little stiff, but beccause I'm going to be doing as dark-suited figures against a dark background, I'm going to lose a lot of edges anyway. As  I paint it, that should work itself out. 

After this, on to the cover for Part-Time Dog (about which more later).

Yers,
Tom

Friday sketch blogging

Slow day, so a chance to show off some drawings and some works in progress.

Drawing is central to piece I create. This is usually the case with illustrators but not necessarily the case with designers. Several designers I know say that they can't draw at all. Some tell me that they don't really know anything about type. Some even tell me that they don't read magazines. Without fail, these designers make more money than I do. I am hoping that they spend some of their windfall gains on purchasing original art from me. I am not holding my breath.

Back to drawing. For the curious among you, I like a nice soft lead, usually a 4B, in a Koh-i-Noor lead holder which I sharpen with a Staedler lead pointer. Usually I like paper with a little bit of tooth. Lately, I've been working on Strathmore bristol vellum. (It's good for inking with dry-brush technique, which I'll blog about later.)

Incidentally, I have nothing against wooden pencils, except that sharpening soft leads can be a pain, and as the laziest man in the room, I will often draw with a dull pencil (bad, bad idea) than take the time to sharpen. Someone once suggested that I should just sharpen several pencils before I start drawing. I countered that if I did that, I'd no longer be the laziest man in the room. This ended the argument. It's hard to argue with a person who stands for sloth on principal.

First up, a sketch for sketching's sake. This is a drawing of De Kooning, from a book of photos by Richard Avedon. I've liked De Kooning ever since I read a story about him years back about him and his daughter when he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. They were watching a movie on a plane when he turned to her and said, "This movie stinks. Let's get out of here." That kills me. Also his paintings are  about a hundred and seventy two times better than those of his more celebrated friend, Jackson Pollack.

This is the first drawing in a beautiful Holbein sketchbook I splurged on about two years ago and then have been too terrified to draw in ever since because it cost so much. I usually start a sketchbook great, and then start scrawling pages of hand drawings and eye drawings and gesture poses and to-do lists and skip pages and basically make it look like crap. I am trying not to do that with this sketchbook, but give me time. I did start drawing upside-down in the back of the book, so I have a fine start.

Next up, a drawing of Steve Carrell for a much bigger picture I am doing of the cast of The Office. I'm finishing this one in pen and ink with added computer color, as opposed to many of my other pictures, which are water color on hard board. (More of these in a later post, when I'll step by step through the piece.) I have finished drawing and inking the picture, but I didn't like the face of Steve Carrell. I think I found him a challenge to draw because he's basically a handsome guy and his character on the show, while obnoxious, is oddly sympathetic. Why I find it difficult to draw good-looking friendly people while I enjoy drawing odd-looking or obnoxious people is a question probably best left to professionals. My friends should definitely just keep their big mouths shut.

Finally, a thumbnail for a picture I'm going to do this weekend of Iggy Pop as the last of the rock dinosaurs, which I did in my new Holbein sketchbook. I love drawing Iggy Pop. (Why? See above.) This will be for a pretty large (14 x 20) painting. I include it because someone in my class claimed that he'd never seen a thumbnail from me. Now he has. Although this is a pretty loose, crummy thumbnail, I admit. I'd never submit anything this scratched out to an art director, but as this is a self-promo piece for which I am functioning as art director, it'll do for now. (If you can't read the writing below, it says "Tyrannasaurus, duckbill dino, velociraptors." The scratched out word is me trying to spell "denonychus" before I gave up. The text on the right says, "Iggy, last of the dinosaurs. Radamoom." Or maybe "areshales?" Or "Marshes?" Then it says, "Left to ("toplit" scratched out) w/rim lighting?" If you can figure out what this means, I will give you a lollipop.

Then I've drawn a random eyeball. It's begun. There goes the sketchbook.

-Tom
http://www.seltzerstudio.com/ 

Here goes nothing

I'm going to try to keep this blog focused on my illustration, to write about my process, technique and finished projects. I'll likely also post about other artists that have inspired me, techniques that I'm experimenting with, tools that I'm using. And if my mind should wander to politics, or current events or whatnot, I'll probably post a few words on those subjects, too. I'm paying $4.95 a month and I have no readers, so it's hard to see why I shouldn't.

I'll be playing with the site's design over the next couple of days. When you have no readers, why not experiment?

One other thing: my main site, which houses both my illustration and my design work, is www.seltzerstudio.com. Everybody should go over and check it out right now then come back here and shower me with praise. Remember, I hate criticism.

All right, more soon.

Take it slow,
Tom