I saved this study for last because it was in some ways the easiest. She was the first of this set of characters so I have the most practice with her and have a pretty good handle on how she stands, glares, and holds a sword.

Because the universe has a sense of irony, she’s also the hardest.  I need her to be demonstrably the same character while having two different appearances: One as she actually is, and one a disguise she wears to not freak the squares.

So I tried to make her appearance as consistent as possible:

-Though I loath the  ’all women wear 3-inch heels’ aesthetic, (It’s stupid. The character design should reflect the character. Heels aren’t a default, they’re a decision.) in this case it actually made sense. I decided that the glamour she’s wearing to create a human appearance has limits: it can’t make her look like someone else, it can only obscure details. And it’s not very good and being sensorily consistent: her hooves click as she walks. Heels help explain the sound plus her her height (digitigrade legs give you leggier proportions) and the glamour does the rest.

-I designed her to have large areas of solid black. Keeping these blacks in the same places on both forms helps her look consistent. If she were done as an eight-bit character, she’d look much the same in both forms. Being able to identify a character even in a fuzzy or simplified form is one indication of good character design.

-Her hair, face, and jacket only have minor changes. Readers don’t pay nearly as much attention to limbs as torsos: changing the shoes on a person doesn’t make them harder to identify, but changing their hat definitely does.

Having already done one character sheet, I had a pretty good idea of how this one should go. Which was a good thing, because children are hard.

Particularly this one. Eris is in latest, most gangly childhood, which I think makes her about eleven years old. This is the skinniest she will ever be, but she also has an adult-size head on a child-height body. Which kind of makes her look like a pez dispenser.

But the challenges I’ve set for myself don’t end with Eris being a child. I’ve also made her mixed race.

Comic artists handle racial indicators in different ways. The simplest is of course just to use color. But I want my comic to be done, oh, this decade, so I’m mostly going to be sticking to black and white.

In black and white, there are three options: Blackface (awkward), hashmarks, (which generally looks like some kind of skin condition) and actually being goddamn good at your job and drawing faces with a specific shape to them.

So… I’m trying to go with that last one.

That’s not his full name of course. That’s a long embarrassing story for another time.

Jack is one of three main characters for a little comic I’m working on. More on that later, as I want to spend this post primarily talking about character design.

I’m trying something new with this comic. It’s called *designing* my characters, instead of just making them look like the first thing that falls into my head and looks mostly okay.¹

To that end, I’ve been doing research. Internet research! (Don’t worry, all links in this post are SFW) Here’s a little list of things I’ve been reading to flood my brain with quality, with notations on what I’m trying to learn from them.

- Family Man: I’m showing you the introduction rather than the homepage/current page because A) I don’t want to spoil things for you and B) later in the plot there’s some blood and boobies, and the current page has boobies. But what initially drew me to Dylan Meconis’s work was a talent for suspending disbelief of a visual exaggeration. Her main character has a physically impossible nose in an otherwise realistic setting, and you (the reader) accept it. This talent is fairly common among what is euphemistically termed speculative fiction (We called is science fiction in my day. Damnkidsgettoffmylawn.) But you don’t see it done visually very often. Additionally she does drool-worthy backgrounds. I’m still negotiating with myself the level of detail I’m willing to commit to replicating throughout a comic, and Dylan sets a pretty damn high bar. Annoyingly she is *also* a good writer, and knows how to balance textual versus visual information in a scene.

- Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name: I’m continually re-reading this one as an example of economy. (Also, I like the story.) Tessa makes lush settings with what appears to be a damn good grasp of color and the texture possibilities of digital media. Her pattern seems to be to give you a fairly detailed drawing of a setting, and then just echo the color palette after that unless some physical detail is relevant to the story. Sneaky, smooth, and temptingly less time drawing backgrounds.

Also the face practice block is modeled directly after some face practice for one of her own characters she posted to her gallery. These ‘mixed’ expressions are much more useful than the ‘primary’ facial expression charts I’d seen elsewhere. At the moment Jack’s body shape owes too much to reading through the entire archive of Hanna Is Not A Boy’s Name, I expect it to come back a bit toward my natural style with a little more practice.

- Gunnerkrig Court: This one starts off cute and a little clunky, but rapidly improves both in artistic merits and writing. It’s an old favorite to read, but what I’d really like to pick up from Tom is his use of selective detail. Objects that are  further away are simplified in a way that strongly mimics how humans actually use their eyes to focus. It has an effect similar to watching a 3-D movie: he can make sure your attention to what is in focus even in a visually complicated scene, and when everything is out of focus the words take precedence.

- Indistinguishable from Magic: If you don’t know Dresden Codak and are reading this, stop reading this and go read Dresden Codak.

Indistinguishable from Magic is Aaron Diaz’s blog, and honestly I read it because he’s so very much better at this than I am. And he clearly loves it. It’s out of my league to try to emulate him, but trying is a good way to learn. I actually decided to try and build my characters this time instead of the haphazard technique based on one of his posts about character design. So, um, thanks Aaron. This promises to be interesting.

¹Although if I’m to be fully honest, that is how this story got it’s start. I think it’s okay to let your subconscious chime in from time to time or give you a jumping off point, but I’m trying not to rely on it. See, the subconscious isn’t terribly original. There’s a lot of overlap for people that grow up in the same culture and even if you do have a few original ideas you’ll find them continually coming to the surface. It happens with all sorts of creative people: When it’s an actor people will sometimes say that they play the same character regardless of what movie they’re in. If it’s a writer, they seem to be telling the same story in every book even if the names and places change.

Relying on your subconscious (or you can say relying on your subliminal cultural assumptions, if you’re anti-Freudian) shouldn’t be confused with being *bad* at something. People who are just not so good tend to improve with practice, people who rely on their subconscious get less interesting the more of their work you see.

TLDR: Holy God, I did not sit down meaning to write that much. Feel free to just click the pretty links and figure it out for yourselves.

We interrupt your irregularly scheduled program ‘The Other Guys’, to bring you…

Goats!

Once in a great while, my webmonkey affords me the opportunity to pay him back for all his, uh, monkeying. In this case, he wanted a logo. A goat logo. He gave me a few specifics (headshot, simple, black lines) but essentially left me free to see what I could come up with.

So I got some reference material together, and started riffing on the concept of ‘goat’. When I finished my first page of sketches (the first six designs here) I showed them to my client to get his opinion on how things were going. He sort of flapped his arms and said ‘More cartoon-y! Fewer lines! Also that one in the middle on the second row is super creepy!’

In order to reduce the creep factor, I started my second page drawing mainly goats with regular pupils (instead of the weird football pupils goats actually have) and I did my best to inject some cute. I’m not actually very good at cartoons, ‘cute’ is about as close as I get.

Luckily for me, the second page of sketches produced a winner. With a little adjusting and cleaning up, here he is:

This is not the greatest comic in the world. This is just a tribute.
(For J. Harker)

Something a little different for you this week: A photo restoration.

This photo had a sad, sad life before it came to me. It was well loved however, as it must have been put in its frame fairly shortly after it was taken.  It was sandwiched into the frame with the frontpage of the newspaper Club Life, dated October 11th, 1890.

For those of you without a background in conservation, the operative word in the previous sentence is newspaper. Newspaper, particularly old newspaper, is full of all sorts of nasty reactive chemicals. By the time I got my hands on it, the newspaper had begun to dissolve under its own power.

As for the poor photo: At some point, the photo had become one with the glass. I’m not sure exactly what the chemical process was, but removing it was synonymous with destroying it. And that was the state of affairs when someone dropped it, and shattered the glass.

The owner brought it to me, and asked if there was anything I could do.  I blinked at her for a minute, and said I’d give it my best shot. The first order of business was to get it scanned, which was impossible in its current state. The photo had snapped along with the glass in some places, but was still intact in others.  The glass grated against itself every time I tried to move it, causing more damage to the glass and the photo. Flipping it over in order to scan it was out of the question. Also it was spitting glass slivers everywhere.

Painful as it was, I had to use a razor to finish the process of breaking the picture into pieces.  I scanned each piece separately, then I assembled them in Photoshop, which gave me this:

Thirty hours of work later, I gave this back to the client:

There are a few interesting things about this photo, beyond the reconstruction work.

First, it’s pretty clear that not everyone had the same idea about how to pose for a graduation photograph. The guys in the back are posed and proper, hats in hand, while others sit with either genuine or awkward informality. Most people look in the direction of the photographer, but others seem to deliberately stare somewhere else. Everybody agrees that smiling is bad, but that’s about the only consensus.

The Union College of Law later became the law school of Northwestern University.

Also, where the hell was this taken? A construction zone? An alley? Wherever it was, the guy lounging in the front felt obligated to put his handkerchief on the ground underneath him to protect his suit.

People knew how to put letters in their names in the 1890′s. Boy howdy. Here’s the best example, before and after.

Lastly, there are two women in the photo. One would have been unusual, and two is really something of a surprise.

The registry lists them as L. Blanche Fearing (to the left) and Mrs. Fearing.

That’s right. She has no first name, not for the likes of you, anyway. She is Mrs. Fearing. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

At the head of the list of awkward questions to ask creative people:  ‘where do you get your ideas?’

If you’ve ever asked a creative person this and gotten a exasperated glare in response, try not to take it personally. You’re just the eleventy-seventh person to ask that question, and about 85% of the time, the artist you’re questioning has no idea where their inspiration came from. I’ll save my Freudian speculations on why that might be for another time, because right now I’m introducing an irregular feature on Spiral-Bound Sketches.  Basically, when I title something ‘Inspiration’, that post will be one of  the 15% of the time when I do know where my inspiration is coming from, and I’ll try to explain it. Either you will find this enlightening, or it will convince you that all artists are crazy, to varying degrees.

So, on to today’s post. Recently, I had an excuse to send one of my friends a letter. Normally, I’m not one to send letters. The only time in my life where I sent regular letters was from the age six to twelve, where I was required to send my Great Grandmother a letter once a week. As you might imagine, a six year old isn’t going to be much for sentence structure, so I started out sending mostly pictures, with a few words. Eventually the words got to take up more of the content of the mailing, but the picture part was always there too. So now, when I do send a letter, it feels a little odd if I don’t include some sort of drawing in it.

This friend of mine has a favorite artist, by the name of Alphose Mucha.  I’ve learned that I can influence my sketching style (as many authors can influence their writing style) by consuming an awful lot of one unique artist. So I looked at a lot of Mucha. (I did a similar thing with Mike Mignola in March.) This is a fast process (about an hour) when I share major stylistic qualities with the artist I’m trying to ape.  In this case, both Mucha and I love to do clearly outlined forms, and we like to draw ladies who sit around looking pretty.

So that’s how this came about. As to the exact subject, I couldn’t come up with a single thing to write. So this lady with a blank piece of paper in front of her was going to be sort of an apology for being really bad at writing letters, but then the drawing itself took too long to finish, so I didn’t wind up sending the letter.

Fail.

But hey, blog post.

Just to be clear – I’m not this calm, cool and collected. I also don’t glow.

Balancing work time with everything else time is something all artists have to hammer out for themselves. Well, other than perhaps the independently wealthy artists with no family obligations and a particular gift for benign self-absorption, but I digress.

My balance is a work in progress. I have two part time jobs that are not art related, and one that is. None of this includes ‘just for fun’ projects, i.e. stuff that is not directly related to making money. Like, say, this blog. There’s also life, of course: Car payments and Thanksgiving dinner with the inlaws and watching the Perseids.

I do alright at leaving the work I do at a remote location where it belongs, but I run into trouble with work I do at home. Chainmail and some drawings are ‘work’, but they are also fun, which complicates matters. Sometimes, I want to make chainmail, as it is genuinely relaxing. And sometimes I have a show coming up, so I feel like I have to make as much chainmail as possible before the deadline, then I work myself into a slightly tarnished and blistered bag of twitch.

My problem is saying no in a rational way that also allows me to get done what I need to get done. If chainmail is fun, I shouldn’t balk at doing it a lot, right? But then I’m ‘working’ in my relaxation time. And if I only ‘work’ when it’s fun, then I’m not treating it like a job, which is the level of dedication that it deserves, and that my taxes sort of imply I should devote.

…

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want a conclusion? As I said, it’s a work in progress.

Well the Virginia Rennaissance Faire is over- for me anyway. It’s still going on,  but I’ll be attending two weddings in the next two weeks, so I couldn’t vend for the full run. (Updates may be spotty until July, as sometime in the next month I’m also supposed to be moving!) Since the ‘make chainmail 24-7′ pressure is off for a little while, I’m getting back on the horse with one of my naked ladies.

…

On second thought, it’s probably best to stay away from Ungulate metaphors when discussing nude women.

In the words of Randall Munroe: “You’re a kitty!”