Transitioning to Copic Markers



My first experience with coloring a comic was not the best foot forward I could have made. I had seen very well-done comics with greys done digitally, and I wanted a piece of that. Not only did I (as I do now) think that greys lend more emotion to the comics, but the tone of Axolotl and its setting benefits greatly from grey tones, especially when there are an enormity of grey tones. Axolotl takes place in an older time but more importantly, a place where many different peoples mingle. I wanted to properly capture the various skin tones, hair colors, eye colors, the colors of their outfits. With an arsenal of so many greys, I could better emphasize the diversity of Ao Lai with more than just different facial features, although that's good fun. But about the coloring style...

I had done numerous digitally colored pieces before the start of Axolotl's first coloring, at least a hundred easily. So I thought coloring greyscale would be just a lot of the same thing. I was very, very wrong. Not only was the process more involved, meticulous, and reliant on correctness than I originally foresaw, but it was time-consuming and immensely draining to have complete 24 pages with nothing but grey grey grey... When I had finally finished it, I knew I could never do that again.

Earlier that same year, I believe, or maybe the one before, I had tried copic markers for the first time. Being proficient in pencil shading, I took to it very easily. I was pleased with the soft, natural look of it as well as the ease and speed at which I was able to use it. Also important was its traditional style of use: because it was an actual tool and not a Photoshop tool, I had a more natural connection with it and was even able to work with it pretty much where I wanted. After an exhaustive process of getting the first Axolotl episode colored, I decided it was time to go back to traditional methods and use the copic markers to color Axolotl.

Here are some coloring tests I did for the four main characters I have so far for Axolotl. I had intended on the ease of this newer method, and I was not at all disappointed there. But I hadn't counted on an added bonus. The markers, at least the way I'd done them, have a sort of faux-watercolor look to them. The slightly blotchy look to them, the irregularities, the very soft accents. I think it adds to the old-timey feel of the comic. It also emphasizes the very round, bold style of my lineart.

I also get the feeling that a traditional tool inherently, and perhaps to the audience, subconsciously, allows for a wider margin of error. Maybe it's because of the implied permanence of the medium, but maybe because its (usual) lack of perfection lends something to the personality of the art. It may be due to the great deal of digital art floating around us nowadays, the appearance of something that has clearly seen the human hand is refreshing. I think so. It's not as if I hate digital art; I love a well-colored digital piece. It's just that that extra mile done traditionally means so much more to me.

The portability and versatility of the copic markers is an especially important factor to me. I only have one Adobe Photoshop Elements installed on one computer, so I can only Photoshop when I'm home and at my computer. And if the power hasn't blown out. With copic markers, I can use them during a blackout and away from home, provided I have light, something not as much of a hassle to find. This also means that I can lounge somewhere and color while I watch something. I can be physically comfortable and more relaxed while working as opposed to sitting in pretty much the same position to color for several hours. And what would come from being more comfortable but having more fun? And having more fun may lead to a more expressive and fun art style.

Naturally, I'll have to be aware of the expensiveness of the copic markers I use, and I do use quite a few. As they're about eight bucks or so a piece, my arsenal of about 12 costs about $96. Thankfully, I use them out of proportion to each other, so they die at varying times of the process and not all at once. But $8 a marker is a lot, and I'm not averse to looking for a substitute good.

Is Originality Even Possible Anymore? An Essay

                Creative, groundbreaking, fresh. These words follow behind practically every single creative artist and sticks in their head like an earworm. I know I was stuck in that sinkhole. Art is made to be shared, and when you share it, you might end up thinking about how creatively groundbreaking and fresh people will find your writing, drawings, sculptures, or whatever. Why? There’s “good” art and “bad” art, and when people want “good” art, said three things almost always seem to be on the top of their list. But there’s that one word that haunts the creative types such as myself. Originality. Yes, the desire to be original and to break trends is intoxicating. Or it can be, depending on who you are. Not just to create something new and make something good, but to not make the same thing that that guy over there made. With companies and indie creators pushing out so many fantastic and really horrible products, it’s sometimes hard to make your own project that won’t make your audience say, “Hey, such-and-such obscure person you’ve never heard of already did that, you plagiarist.” It’s not easy in the Information Age to create without the nagging sense that you didn’t come up with it yourself. Or worse, that someone took your idea. Personally, I don’t think it’s that simple.

                First thing’s soonest. Total originality is impossible, and when I learned that, it wasn’t an easy pill to swallow. My comics teacher, Jerzy Drozd, is almost always the one I look to for any info on comics. And he said that if something were 100% original, it would be outside human experience, ergo impossible to understand. Everything is based on something else, ergo nothing is “truly original” in the sense the word’s chucked around. He and his friends, Mark Rudolph and Kevin Cross, ran a podcast, Art and Story, in which they debunked the public concept of artistic originality many times. Many times.

                But still I, a young, frustrated artist at the time, didn’t want to believe that what I created would never be “truly original.” But Mr. Drozd would always say that in just doing the work, you’d learn to put your own personal spin on whatever you were doing. Still though, that wasn’t good enough for me, and I was quickly growing sick of making something up and spending a ton of time on it only to find some guy I’ve never heard of who’d done it better. So I forced previously good stories to go in strange, usually uncomfortable places in their direction, trying somehow to make them new and interesting, a thing no one had ever seen before. As was and is my want, I overthought things to the extreme. It was gonna be big, it was gonna be awesome, it was gonna change the comics industry, blow the doors off of everything. I was going to be on TV and make ten movies, because what I’d written was so fantastically, extraordinarily, and undeniably original.

Of course, when it got down to it, all my comics (and other stories, I might add) ended up sounding like perfect pieces of the 90’s comic scene: pretentious, no tangible love for the projects, and just feeling like nothing but a snatch for the quickest buck. The 90’s being the decade of some of the worst American comics in American comics history, you can imagine how “good” that was. Discouraged by the results, I didn’t think I could ever really make a good, solid, original story.

It didn’t always bother me when I wasn’t totally original, and once, I did take pride in similarities between my work and a much more well-known author. The phrase, “great minds think alike,” came to mind, and the thought made me think too hard about it.

Why? Why did we think alike? We’d never met, we’d probably never had the same list of favorite books, we had thoroughly different upbringing. Why did we have the same idea? I’d developed the same idea in isolation of one of the greats, and he’d developed it in isolation of me. So how was this possible? How could we both be original on the same subject of the same thing? Was my original stance on originality misinformed, if not, just dead wrong? At the time, I couldn’t think of a logical answer that satisfied me, so I let my left-brain explain it for me.

Perhaps our imaginations were linked. Well, maybe not linked, but part of the same world, a different kind of world than the concrete one corporeal humans exist in. Maybe there’s a whole world where our subconscious states existed. The more I thought about it, I decided maybe they lived like nomads. But like strategically travelling ones, ones that never slept. And they wouldn’t live in houses made of wood or stone like humans do. There would be lands of ideas where our subconscious states could inhabit. And just like normal people, these subconscious versions of ourselves would be drawn to certain spots. Certain people would travel back and forth amongst dozens of different interests. To bring it back around, maybe this author and I, despite having never met each other, traveled the same route in this subconscious world.

When I thought about this, I could see how, yes, my previous stance on originality had to be wrong. My teacher was right; we couldn’t possibly be “truly original,” because everything is based on something else. But looking at it like this, for some reason, made me realize that my own creative take on the same thing would make it fresh. I wasn’t copying or being copied, and anything I made probably wasn’t going to become in any way groundbreaking, but the thing that made it what I wanted was the fact that I had made it myself. Ergo, originality. 

Benefits of Fanart, Maybe?

When people hear the term “fanart,” for the most part, I think people associate the image of fanART with fanDOM. Artists who aren’t creative enough to create their own characters and just turn into drooling fanboys/fangirls who write bad fanfic, you know, that type of crowd. But just as not all fans are rabid, not all fanart is useless. In fact, I personally think drawing fanart can help an artist observe things in ways that drawing original characters doesn’t always do as well.

My favorite backup for this point is that drawing fanart can help you discover (and keep in touch with) what aspects of design you favor over others, i.e. how colors interact with certain characters or what style of clothes they wear or something. And other artists have reported that identifying the aspects of design that work well your style will, in turn, help you evolve your style. I think, too, that it’s a pretty big help if you talk about what you like about the character in at least your final rendition of the character if you’re posting your pic online.

I’m speaking from experience. On my Tumblr blog, I occasionally do Dragon Ball fanart, and I learned a lot about my personal sense of aesthetics by drawing my favorite characters. For instance, by drawing Frieza and going into why I like him so much, I realized, “Hey, I like it when characters have stuff framing them.” And now I can incorporate that into my artwork as I so please, and I seriously don’t know if I would have discovered my love of framing any time soon.

Second neat point, though it’s a touchy one: branding. By talking about how much you enjoy Charlie Brown or something, you can also, depending on what your work is, show that what people find in, say, the art of Charlie Brown may also be found in your art. Maybe. It depends on how much DNA you and your favorite stories share, of course. But let’s say for the sake of arguments that they share some. Because there’s a similarity between your work and Charlie Brown, the latter audience is more likely to take a gander at your stuff.

And here’s where it starts to get itchy. It sounds crass and sleazy as if you’re saying, “If I just draw enough Charlie Brown, I’ll get a bazillion followers, and then I’ll be richer than heavy cream.” No, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that your public exploration of something will probably cause at least a few people to give you a double take. And as long as you honestly, really, really do love what fanart you’re doing (it is called FANart, after all), you’d be wise to take advantage of that. If not, be aware of it, at least.

Last but not least, my final topic is also not really a fan favorite. Findability. It’s related to the second topic in that it involves an artist’s audience. By doing fanart of something popular or well-known, you make yourself easier to find. And again, that sounds like a dishonest scheme, but it isn’t if it’s not coming from a dishonest place, at least from where I’m standing. If you’re honestly into a thing that’s really popular, then do it. Draw it. You’ll gain from the experience of exploring what you enjoy, and you may experience more traffic to your site as well. Plus, the traffic might give you critiques, which are invaluable.

To summarize, in my opinion, fanart is useful for discovering the aesthetics you wish to capture or enjoy, and by sharing it, you invite similar thinkers to your site or blog or whatever, which can help you cultivate your brand and your audience.

Frieza Fanart

Thank you. =P

Exclusive Pictures - Making of "Teh Fuzen Jump"

I revisited my crow quill pen after going to a comic book class and being re-inspired to use it. I had used it once, but I wasn't that happy with the result, so I'd shelved it for some time. But I learned in the class that the crow quill pen yields a much crisper, cleaner line than the tools I've been using. Which is very true. The fortunate thing about this the fact that my old tools, my pens, leave a feathery edge to all my lines. This makes it hard to use the Paint Bucket tool to fill a whole space properly, 'cause it leaves little pockets of grayish white everywhere; the Paint Bucket can't fit into everywhere. So with the crow quill, I do not have that awful problem, and not only is the clean up faster and easier, but I don't have those dreadful softy lines.

My teacher, Jerzy Drozd, had said that turning one's pencils blue on the computer is a good idea, recommended he may have said too, and here's why. Say you're inking your pencils, you're doing an awesome job, and then you mess up. Not only did you mess up your original art work, but if you really really messed up, you might have to start all over. But if you have a pic stored safely away, you could print out another and save yourself the trouble. Plus, since your original artwork is untouched, it'll up in value and may be worth something in time. Also, because certain scanner settings almost totally miss blue lines, so clean up is much faster and easier.

By this point, I'd already inked the picture and scanned it with the proper setting, and as you can see, most traces of blue have been removed through the scanning process. Exactly what I wanted. Now all what's left is to crop the picture, do the remaining clean up duty, and move on to the fun part: coloring.

And here we be, the finished picture. Fuzen's go-getting demeanor comes across really well in this picture, I think. And the sharp colors are great here, too.

Ahh, now 'bout the picture. His top is just a short-sleeved hoodie. The design on his pants are based on the Chinese-style top I regularly draw him with. Fuzen was raised by a Japanese woman and is mostly familiar with Japanese culture. However, seeing as he lives in a very diverse nation with a number of east Asian cultures, he's often exposed to many of them, especially Chinese, Thai, and Japanese.

I hope you found that interesting. These three pictures aren't on deviantART; they're exclusive to this here blog. But keepin' with tradition, I'll post the link here.

GenreChowderStudios' deviantART homepage

Also, check my teacher's artwork. He's really good, and he has a pretty distinctive and energetic style. Here are a couple links.

Jerzy Drozd's deviantART homepage

Lots of interesting pictures here, including He-Man character re-imaginings, original characters, and more!

Art & Story Podcast: The Show That Digs Deep Into the Craft of Cartooning

One of my favorite sites I've found so far. Long, informative, and very funny podcasts about creating comics. The hosts A&S hosts take specific elements of creating stories through pictures and dissect it with very entertaining yet super helpful results. Check it out. It's. Worth. It.

Comics Are Great!

Jerzy Drozd's main site. See all the stuff he's working on, done, and may do in the future. Best place for you to go to get something of everything, if I'm not mistaken.

Later.

Sheldon Draws Himself

Well, this is coming in a bit late...

At any rate, here is the blog entry for the picture that Sheldon "drew." It's somewhat more compact than his usual style, so you can assume his "mental illness filter" isn't distorting his visuals as much. There really is not much more to say about this picture, except for maybe something about his art and how Sheldon sees himself in art in comparison to how I draw him. I don't have much to say at all, so I'll keep this short.

Sheldon began drawing art as a response/coping mechanism for his mental illness. He originally just focused over drawing what he imagined his hallucinated voices to look like, but eventually, his drawing obsession to drawing his little sister, and then after a while, he simply branched out and drew other things. Not to say he was particularly enthusiastic about art as an artist would be, but he enjoyed drawing as it was something of an escape from his issues, though his illness kind of shows in how he portrays things in his art. In the beginning, he had the confidence to display his art, as kids will, but as he aged and lost confidence in himself, he almost never showed his creative works, despite his radical improvements, and came off as hiding his work jealously, even fearfully.

And now for comparisons once again between my portrayal of Sheldon and his own portrayal of himself.

• I draw Sheldon with eye tilting upwards. He draws his eyes almost drooping a little.
• Again with the eyes, I draw Sheldon with almond-shaped eyes; Sheldon portrays himself with squarish eyes.
• My portrayal of Sheldon's face makes him frustrated while Sheldon draws himself looking more or less fatigued or weary.

• Needless to say with his more realistic style, Sheldon draws his hair more realistically than I do.

That's all. Hope you enjoyed this shorter blog entry.

This picture is also on deviantART.
SS- Sheldon
GenreChowderStudios' homepage on deviantART

Later.

Child with a Balloon

I've been working on a long, long, long project, as well as a slightly complicated but equally difficult project, and after a few weeks, I decided to take a break and just do something simple. But it's connected to the latter project, so it's not like I'm wasting my time or anything.

Our little girl here is from a short story. Not the literary short story, so to speak, but it's a story that's short. I'm dividing it into parts. How many, I don't know, but quite a few, I believe. Most of this little girl's story is a big reveal, so I won't have much to say about her. Nope, not even her name. But I won't keep tight-lipped about her all the way, 'cause that'd be boring of me.

This young girl from the early 40s resides in East Tennessee. She's innocent enough, but despite being relatively well off, she has bad grammar usage skills. And it shows when she talks; you can tell she's trying to break the habit, 'cause she often corrects herself, i.e. "I didn't do nothing. I mean anything." But when she's angry or frustrated, she doesn't monitor herself as faithfully, and her poor grammar slips through the cracks.

This Tennessean also would like to present herself as a debutant, but her scruffy personality (and sometimes appearance) stands quite firmly in the way of that. Last but not least of what I'm going to tell you, our young girl is tenacious, bright, and hardy.

Hopefully, you've enjoyed this less than weighty explanation of this character, and even more hopefully, you'll enjoy the upcoming story.

This picture is also on deviantART.
Child with a Balloon
GenreChowderStudios' homepage on deviantART

Later.

Protecting Fuzen

Here we have a new picture finally. Sheldon protecting little Fuzen from the ever sadistic Flyin Psi. I actually imagined this picture with only Sheldon and Flyin and with both of them being against a completely white background. But as I drew more, I thought, "Hey, what would it look like if I added Fuzen?" I liked him there, so I added color once I scanned it. After some deliberation, I decided the white wouldn't cut it, and I revisited a photo editing/drawing site someone put me to: Sumo Art. After playing with it for about an hour, I made the flooring you see here, only I changed the color in my preferred photo editing software, Adobe Photoshop Elements. With some Hard Light, some leaves on the wall, and lots of work to make sure the chibis interact with their surroundings, we have today's product.

The idea behind the pink crystal light things on the ground is that Sheldon and Fuzen are in Flyin's domain, therefore in her power. Plus, it also let me play with lights and find ways to tie the characters into the landscape.

Fuzen and Sheldon are pretty good friends (not in continuity with their own stories). While their relationship has many levels, they typically take on a big brother-little brother way of treating each other. Flyin, on the other hand, does not get along with Fuzen and Sheldon at all. Sheldon because he's an easy target as he's emotionally (and often physically) vulnerable, and because she doesn't like his "girly tendencies" such as large capacity for compassion, sort of low competitive drive, and soft-spoken nature. Fuzen because of his small size and childishness. While Fuzen is not easily scared by many things, Flyin can easily find a way to scare him. But though Sheldon is more easily frightened than Fuzen, he would try to keep any kid safe, especially one he cares about like Fuzen, even though he could suffer consequences. Despite that, you can still see a bit of apprehension in his face. I may draw a normal picture of them like this. You know, un-chibied.

I hope you liked the picture and the text that went along with it.

This picture is also on deviantART.
Protecting Fuzen on deviantART
GenreChowderStudios's deviantART homepage

Later.