I recently came across this fun collection of artistically staged photos of Star Wars toys by an artist named Avanaut. I’m amazed at how gritty some of these are, how much depth and movement and scale the photographer got. Snow is flying in flakes, and particles and chunks. There are things in these pictures that I have no idea how how Avanaut achieved them. Do you?
I’m impressed.
Scott Hallett is a full time web developer and part time comics creator. I’ve seen him developing a great style over the past few years and I was recently reminded how fun it is to look at his art at his blog. So I thought I’d share.
I love his dead-line ink work, part Mignola, with a good dose of Flight Anthology Artist-style Indie Aesthetic thrown in for good measure. He’s also developing a great color sense. His work has recently been featured in Fablewood and Popgun. He’s one to watch.
Enjoy!
Evan Dahm, the amazingly prolific artist behind Riceboy, Order of Tales, and Vattu, recently weighed in on the value of webcomics… GOOD webcomics, that is, in this article.
He begins simply enough:
A medium gains legitimacy and respect when people making work in that medium legitimize and respect it.
He lays out a short, and compelling case that webcomics will continue to gather more artists and readers, filling the role that “indie” comics used to fill. Now that the medium is free to share and free to read, the bar to entry for both artist and reader is much lower.
Unfortunately, so is the quality bar.
As I’ve remarked before, now that anyone with a computer, some time, some software and website can slap something together and put up a webcomic, the webcomics world has become flooded. Some of it is crap. OK, let’s be honest – most of it is crap. There is simply no guard at the door. Each well-written, well-drawn webcomic shares the same platform with dozens or even hundreds of poorly written attempts, scribbled on notebook paper during algebra class, scrawled on napkins on the bus to work, or clumsily thrown together on a state-of-the-art Cintiq and written with all the care of a hastily-composed drunken mobile text.
If Evan’s thesis is correct, then the corollary is also true, that when people who disrespect and delegitimize a medium work in that medium, it’s hard for that medium to find respect and legitimacy. At the same time, we’ve seen professional artistic and comic heavyweights like Doug Tenapel and Michel Gagne making entries into the form. The quality level of webcomics, as with indie comics previously, stretches from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Evan supposes that the market will decide, that people will naturally gravitate toward excellence. I hope he’s right. We live in an environment currently where popularity has very little to do with quality, and we are all the poorer for it.
My advice, dear reader, because you can really help here – seek out and patronize quality work. Help others find it. Ignore the crap. If you’re making a webcomic, don’t make a crappy one. Respect the form, and who knows? Maybe what Evan suggests could come to pass, that eventually the prefix will drop, and we’ll just call them comics, and they’ll all be enjoyable.
Here’s to that.
There are a lot of folks out there who want to tell you How to Do It. I’m sure you’ve run across them online – How to Be Creative, How to Succeed at Webcomics, How to Be Too Cool for the Room. For anyone looking to be creative, or succeed at webcomics or blogging, or just trying to be cooler, these people are Gurus, and everyone has their favorite Personal Guru. Often you get people quoting their gurus at you out of the blue. “Well, you know, so-and-so says the real key to selling your novel is to give it away free online. Everyone knows Giveaways are the new Selling.”
Most of these people have some good ideas, but unfortunately I believe the world is split largely into two groups of people: those who know how to Do Something Well, and those who Write about Other People Doing It. Rarely do you find someone doing both. As the former Editor-in-Chief of AnimWatch.com, I should know; Heaven knows I did a lot of writing about other people creating animation during those years, and did very little animating myself.
How refreshing, then, to come across Justine Musk, the author of BloodAngel. She has a blog called TribalWriter, and she’s got quite a few useful ideas about how to gather an audience, how to have a unique voice, and perhaps, how to succeed as a writer. Her blog is worth subscribing for those of you creatively-inclined and looking for someone articulate to blog about the journey from time to time. I would point you to her latest post, “The art of getting more traffic for your blog/more people who give a damn” as it really offers some great insight.
Thanks to Tom Dell’Aringa for the tip!
The Three Little Aliens and the Big, Bad Robot, the kids’ book that my buddy Mark Fearing illustrated for the wonderful Margaret McNamara (how’s that for a mouthful of namedroppery?) is another step closer to publication. Nice mention of it here… the phrase “crowd-pleaser” was used! Holy mechanical giant!
The book comes out in September, and that gives you two months’ ample warning to save yer pennies and snag a copy off the shelves for your own self. Looks like a fun book.
Legendary comic artist Frank Miller (Batman the Dark Knight, Sin City, etc) is just about to release a comic called Holy Terror, which he describes as his response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. He says he hopes his book will really “piss people off” with its political content.
The book will chronicle the adventures of an ex-Navy SEAL who becomes a superhero of sorts called “The Fixer” who really finds a cause when disaster strikes on 9/11.
You can see a five-page sneak peek at Legendary’s website. As Legendary has c0-produced 25 Warner Brothers films, including Inception and The Dark Knight, I can’t help wondering how long before a film adaptation of this comic appears.
Thanks to Eben Matthews for the tip!
I’m surfacing mid-vacation to share a post with you all. Although many of you are not in the Arts, I know a lot of this blog’s audience is comprised of other artists, and probably many of you are fellow artists, writers and comics creators.
If so, you know that there is time you spend which is constructive – writing and drawing your strip, posting it, getting the word out – and there is time that is not as constructive – focusing on how other comics are doing, what awards other comics are getting, how many visitors, how much attention, how many ads, whether or not they are getting book or development deals, this sort of thing.
My wife pointed me to this post on Etsy, wherein a very clever and take-no-guff shop owner named SurrenderDorothy confesses that she used to spend an inordinate amount of time focused on other shops, how much they’re selling, how they’re doing compared to her, whether or not they were copying her sales techniques, etc., and how her life, sanity, and sales improved when she stopped focusing on how other sellers were faring and focused on her own shop instead.
If you replace the fact that she’s a shop owner selling wares on Etsy, and think about you and whatever you’re attempting to create and sell, her advice is fantastic and universal. I recognize some of the same negative patterns in my day, and I would suggest you probably also have some, and would submit that with a little change – putting the focus on what you’re attempting, and what you bring to the table, rather than what other people are doing – you might just succeed in your endeavors.
We all face the same insecurities, and I think it’s important not to let your competition define your efforts. The choice is whether to focus your energy like a laser, or scatter it like a lightbulb. I wish you luck.
Artwork © by Toby Shelton. All rights reserved.
Artist Toby Shelton has a great blog post on drawing hands. As I know it’s something most artists find very difficult, I thought I’d link this up. Great tips for breaking a difficult subject down into easier constituent bits.
If you updated your Firefox install this week, you were probably treated to a nice piece of art on the Firstrun page welcoming you to the new version bump. I was so taken with the art that I just had to know who was the artist behind it. Turns out it’s the UK’s own Steven Olds, and he’s done several more paintings for earlier Firefox releases (below), and as a group, they follow sort of a narrative. There’s a bit of Syd Mead in these paintings, as well as subtle caricatures of a few of the Mozilla contributors.
I love stuff like this. Wouldn’t it be fun to see a whole comic done in this style?
Graphic Designer Olly Moss has a bunch of really tasty art at his website. In my opinion, however, none are quite so tasty as these super-cool posters he made to commemorate the original Star Wars trilogy. Just great stuff all around.
Thanks to Liam Collins and Clint McCaul for the link!
