Friday, April 15, 2011

Brush Pen Paris, my nouveau blogue

I've started a new blog to chronicle my efforts putting together the long awaited Paris sketchbook.

It's called Brush Pen Paris, and if you click over, you can see this entire piece.

I've excerpted the most Mort Drucker-ish passage here. I swear to gawd, I'm not trying to imitate him! It just came out this way! But after seeing this, OK, OK, I give up defending the claims that my stuff looks Mad Magazine-esque.

You can see the original pencil and ink sketches of these faces at the new blog. I drew 'em from life, then translated them into a much bigger, more detailed composition.

Check it out!

17 comments:

  1. Loverly loverly loverly. I mean if you like that kind of.. BREATHTAKING
    thing!

    What a wonderful combination of vision, style and execution.

    Stop it.

    Just.. stop. No! Marty please, after you rest? More.

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  2. On the third, or fourth look?

    I have the slightest disconnect with the extended arm of the central foreground woman, at her purse. I register the dark shadow on the back of her hand. But for a moment I thought there was another person grabbing her purse from off camera.

    And thanks. For putting me in as the waiter, sans goatee. Maybe some of it traveled to the top of my head. Also appreciated.

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  3. The big one has already been stored on my desktop. I love every figure, where they're at, posed, what level of silhouette they get. Just all good. I asked on the new blog if you were printing out a cut together composition of the sketches and then light tabling. How are you taking sketch onto your inking board?

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  4. Dudes! So glad you like the new stuff!

    To Ellis: no, I just grabbed a fresh piece of bristol and started penciling figures onto it using the old sketches as reference. I tried to leave the faces kinda loose so I could do more of the drawing in the ink--I wanted to try for a more spontaneous brush pen look in the faces, and not a straight inking of a tight pencil...but it came out a blend.

    So it was pretty straight ahead. I added and changed figures quite a bit. And with this straight-ahead approach, I felt less guilty about tweaking things in PhoSho!

    To Dok: yeah, that hand was a cluge--I had to extend the lower border of the drawing, and hadn't drawn much of her hand in the original (just the top two fingers); so I had to construct that in PhoSho--and I made it ugly as penance!

    It's great to hear how much you guys like this stuff--it inspires me to keep plowing ahead! I'm trying to have a new group of stuff up on the Paris blog every week or so. I'll keep you guys informed. Got another post finishing this series going up tomorrow.

    Again, many thanks for the comments and kind words. And don't be afraid to click "Follow" on the blog--I'm trying to prove to publishers there's an audience for this sort of thing!

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  5. Wow, the full piece is everything I was hoping it would be, and more. Because of the setting and subject matter, Playboy magazine comes to mind even more than Mad. Looking like you belong in either one of those two publications is not a bad thing!

    When it comes to getting published I don't think you will have to sell them on your drawing ability. I would think some sort of actual storyline would help, or having the right storyline or angle on why you are traveling; something that touches on contemporary concerns somehow.

    Patty took me to see a movie called "Eat, Pray, Love" about a woman traveling to various countries on a spiritual fulfillment journey. Not a great movie, but Patty loved the book, "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia".

    If I were your publisher I would send you off to Iraq and Afghanistan, Africa, Egypt and India where it's all happening these days. You could be my Jimmy Olsen. "I want SCOOPS Olsen, bring me back SCOOPS!"

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  6. Great idea Tom.
    I like your Perry White role.
    Great Cesar's Ghost Davis !
    Don't call me Chief!

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  7. Great Cesar's Ghost!

    I'd love to be Jimmy Olsen--or Jimmy Bowles!

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  8. Oh, alright, you can call me cheif this one time... aaaahahahahahaha.

    When I read the word "book" I thought you were going to print up something with Lulu or Kablam. I don't think you should wait for a publisher, you should just go for it!

    There's a group of artists at work who got together and printed up a comicbook anthology together and each got a table at the Emerald City Comic Con to sell the comic. Each of them also printed up a sketchbook and large prints to sell as well. I think you should do that! There's lots of cons besides the SD con that are smaller in scale and an artist can make a mark. Go for it!

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  9. Sketchbook, as in Stuart Ng's main staple, the artists indy sketchbooks. So obvious I couldn't see it. Rick's right, that is what you should do. When I've had money to burn, i've paid like 30 bucks for a Mignola sketchbook that was little more that 8 by 11 typewriter sheets folded in two, stapled in the middle, probably printed up by Kinkos. For that matter, show this stuff to Ng. He may want to do something with you like he has with Claire Wendling.

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  11. Sound like very good ideas. Keep in mind that outfits like Bud Plant need 60%. And of course the lower the price the more that sell.. "How do we do it? How do we do it? Volume! Volume! Pick up the volume!"

    <a href="http://tomwaits.lyrics.info/steprightup.html/a>

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  12. All you gotta do is click on "linking code'
    Step right up
    Tom Waits - Step Right Up lyrics
    I've heard that song about a dozen times , way back. Now I want to hear it again. I think I'll try a Tom Wait's pandora channel

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  13. I start my Tom Waits channel and I get more Velvet Underground and Violent Femmes that I do Tom Waits.

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  14. Ah. I'm being way to passive with the old Pandora. I'll try this with my Patsy Cline station sometime.

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  15. That Mort Drucker resemblance is great. Stephen Silver can't look that much like Mort Drucker. And he'd like to.

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