Spatterings

Hack, Cough, Whine, whimper, grimace...

Sick since Sunday. No new illustrations, sorry. Midway through a helluva nice webiste, though. More tomorrow.

Later,
T

OK, Otis on Monday

So, like I said, this Otis Redding picture has given me trouble.

First off, for whatever reason, I find it infinitely harder to draw a badly conceived image than to render a well-conceived image, no matter how detail-laden. If it's a bad idea to start with, I'll struggle with each and every line. My brain, never my favorite organ, sabotages my drawing hand. And I've been having trouble with this picture.

Why? Well here goes...

1) Otis's biggest hit was "(Sitting on the) Dock of the Bay." I thought a picture of Otis sitting on the dock of the bay might look nice. Sketched that, started inking it, realized "My God, this is boring." James Brown towers over buildings, Otis sits on a dock? Hardly seems fair.

2) So I thought I'd try drawing his triumph at Monterrey. Otis, electrified audience, angular composition. Got it. Draw. And it worked, sort of. Except that there were really two special things about that moment. To wit:

a) Otis showed up Jimi Hendrix, or so the legend goes. If they ever confronted each other over this, it might have made a nice image, but as far as I can tell, they didn't. That Otis topped Hendrix is really just a rock critic myth, so who knows if the people who were there even saw it that way. So there's no picture there.

b) Otis triumphed in front of a mostly white audience. He crossed over. But again, so what? Crossing over is a commercial triumph, not an artistic one. He'd already recorded "Try a Little Tenderness." He'd already sung "Shake." He would have still been a legendary song-writer because of "Respect." Bowling over all those hippies meant was that he might now be able to sell more albums. Good for him, of course, and as a white person, I'm glad that he became famous enough for me to know about him. But I can't imagine that Otis Redding would like to think that his greatest achievement in life was finally pleasing white people.

So now I'm on another image, a picture of Otis singing in front of a large (but racially undifferentiated) crowd. Coming along so far, but we'll see how it goes. Hopefully, Monday, but The Studio has a website to finish up.

-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

A breather, sort of

No new illustration to post today; maybe tomorrow I'll put up some more PART-TIME DOG stuff. There's some in the bank, but the images have to be proofed and type-set.

The Studio is in the mid-frenzy, creating flyers and brochures and emails for a wireless conference to take place in Italy this spring. I'll post some of the goodies here (violating my own rule about limiting this blog to illustration) over the next couple of days. In the meantime, back to the hated HTML...

One more unrelated thing: my three-year old daughter's been sick, and it may be walking pneumonia, the poor thing. She had to have a blood test today. We'll know more soon.

-Seltz

The Hardest Working Man in Show Biz

Not me, of course; I'm referring to Mr. Dynamite (left).

Odd thing about James Brown: the man was entirely without irony. There was absolutely no put-on in his persona, no sense of distance from the out-sized personality he created for himself. The only other guy I can think of whose ego was on such constant display was Mohamed Ali, and he was (is) always very conscious of the image he was projecting. He'd crack himself up occasionally. Not James Brown. He meant every word he sang.

His lyrics are the perfect evidence for this. R&B lyrics can be pretty sharp. Motown, for instance, always claimed that its ability to create songs that told a story was the root of its success. Think of Smokey Robinson, whose "Tracks of My Tears" or "Tears of a Clown" told whole young reader novels in 2 minutes thirty seconds. (The Beatles learned a hell of a lot from Smokey.) Ray Charles sang songs with sly innuendos, Al Green pitched a few double entendres, Sly Stone veered into social commentary, but James Brown stuck to his guns: "I feel good/ Like I knew that I would." What did that mean? It meant he felt good. And he knew that he would.

Part of the reason he could pull that off was because for James Brown, unlike Smokey, or The Beatles, or anybody else in the world really, the lyrics were as much percussion as melody. The song doesn't go "I feel good/Like I knew that I would." It really goes "I feel GOOD (da da da da da da DA) Like I knew that I WOULD (da da da da da da DUM)." And that percussive sense, together with the squeaks and squeals that made up the rest of his famous vocal style, was enough that you never had to listen to the words; you could just feel them.

That meant that JB could sing with total conviction about the most idiotic things and not ever trip himself up in a joke. No one in the free world but James could sing "Hot Pants" or "Sex Machine" without getting at least a couple of giggles. (Eddie Murphy owes the best part of his early career to that fact.)  In fact, the only other guy I can think of off hand who writes music as funky, George Clinton of Parliament, scribes lyrics that are ceaselessly  sci-fi in-jokey world-view, filled with Chocolate City and Mr. Nose and the Mothership and all that. Even when Clinton just wanted to sing about chasing tail, he was an "Atomic Dog," not just a dog.

In any case, RIP James Brown, a true American inventor, a complete one-of-a-kind, a born innovator. This image is going to be, I think, my next postcard, but it will also be  available poster sized for a price yet to be determined. Any inquiries can be posted in the comment section.   

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.

The Office

Here's a new twist: this is a black and white brush and ink drawing of the cast of NBC's The Office drawn on bristol vellum, scanned in, and then colored on the computer. For this one, rather than the flat colors I'm using in PART-TIME DOG, I chose to try to simulate the effects of watercolor with the brushes in Photoshop. PhotoShop has its own brushes that try to do this, but the free add-on brushes by Dan Nagle, located in about 100 different places on the Internet, worked better for me. I've got another image, which may be my next postcard, done in the same manner. I'll post it over the next couple of days.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to know where to track down the Nagle brushes, just send me a comment and I'll put up a link in a future post.

Later,
T

At last, PART-TIME DOG, in color

As promised, the cover to my long-coming graphic novel PART-TIME DOG. Much, much angst over this one, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. The missus likes it, too, and she's really the critic whose opinion I value the most. Which is of course why she hates to give an opinion. Did I ever mention that I don't like criticism.

Anyway, this one's for Ines, and of course, for Rob Brown, the model for the unnamed protagonist. R-O-O-O-O-B!!

More tomorrow, kids!

-T

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