Pictures Around Toronto Again

Purchased to commemorate the Olympics.
How I walk around town.....
The Toronto comicon.

A seat in the financial district.

Where my Grandfather on the Orchard side used to work, the stock exchange. I never met him,he retired to Florida, living on a yacht.

Spectrum Silver!

Just found out I got silver in Spectrum's 17th Annual! I got in the comic book section. More on this tomorrow, I'm in pleasant shock. I do know it's from the Cloud Cave mini from the Flying Boat comic.

Guy Davis Rocks!

Just met Guy Davis at the Toronto Comicon and he is the coolest guy ever as well as one of my very favorite cartoonists. I can't express how much of an impact his Baker Street comic had on me when I was thirteen and how much it shaped and broadened my understanding of comics.

Goggles!

Yes, I'm an aven bigger nerd then you may have assumed.

Landing Gear?

Just an idea...In one version of the cover the boat is running across the clouds with extended metal feet, landing gear maybe?

John Bauer

A favorite of mine. I've spent way too much money hunting down his beautiful books. Please check out Mr. Bauer's work, it's incredible.

Steampunk 2: Steampunk Reloaded

This is about the coolest thing in the world to be involved in. Thanks Jeff! You rock, good sir.

Flying Boat Cover Process Eight, Final Picture.

And here is the final cover painting! After the final watercolurs were applied, as seen in the last post, I decided to paint over the drawing in the sky with gouache. My initial plan was to just add some highlights with gouache but I ended up over-painting a lot of it and I think for the better. The gouache phase of a painting is always amazing to me; the way all of the sudden these colours are popping and everything becomes so vibrant. It's an amazing medium. I prefer it over oil and acrylic, really.

Top Shelf is already using it for promotion and I've already seen the comic mentioned in the same paragraph as Alan Moore, which is a real thrill.

Thanks so much for following along. More soon on the Adventures of the Flying Boat.

Flying Boat Cover Process Seven

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4One is the final inks again. This is on Arches 140 pound hot pressed paper which is great for both ink and watercolour. The drawback for using watercolour with hot pressed paper as opposed to cold pressed (or "non pressed") is that it's harder to do an even wash of colour. In cold pressed papers there is enough texture that the watercolour washes will fill large areas without any difficulty but this is harder in a paper with a smooth surface. However nibs catch and spatter in the tooth of a cold pressed paper making it less ideal for inks. I end up using gouache to solve this problem.

Two, three and four are the order in which I apply colour which is taken from this book (five) , more or less. William Joyce is one of my heroes and his process in amazing.

Two: I start with yellow and then red. At this point I already have an interesting almost monochrome picture. With each successive layer of colour more of the image is revealed.

Three: I start to add blues to the mix, in this image just concentrating om making the boat and the clouds purple. This photo doesn't quite show the richness of the three colours but it's quite astounding what can be done with a minimal palette.

And finally four, the sky. This illustrates the difficulty I have in getting an even wash on hot pressed paper. Instead of an even wash I end up with whorls of colour and variations in the density of the pigment. Ins stead of worry about this too much I try and use it. The unevenness suggests a Van Gogh-like movement in the sky and clouds that I use. Here I see another "mistake" I've made; the ultramarine wash has obscured my inking in the sky to the point where it looks terrible. I worried about this for some time because I had spent a long time inking the sky and was quite attached to the way it had turned out but in the end I realized those lines had to go. That's what's great about gouache.

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Flying Boat Cover Process Six

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2This is seeming a lot more involved and methodical then it is. The reality is I'm a lot more halting and sloppy when I work and this process is pretty vague and open. I'm quite easily distracted and find I need some kind of structure so I use this method based on the methods of artists whose work I love.

Number one is the tracing I used to transfer the pencil drawing on to nicer paper, in this case Arches 140 pound hot pressed watercolour paper. Arches has been my favorite paper since art school. It seems to have all the qualities to make it versatile and durable. I use pretty generic tracing paper and there is a fair amount of redrawing that goes on in the transfer. One thing Like about transferring a drawing this way is the opportunity it affords me to work on it in reverse where I can see if it's properly balanced and objects have enough symmetry.

Once the drawing is transferred and it is touched up and tightened on the Arches paper I ink it. Inking is probably my favorite part of the process, to me it's revealing the scene that's been hidden the whole time and it seems to develop like a Polaroid. I use a number of different tools for inking. Primarily I use a pen and nib. In this case I used a Zebra Comic Nib in a Tachikawa nib holder. For years I've been using Speedball drawing products but have recently switched to Zebra pens. The ink I use most of the time and used for this piece is FW Acrylic Ink, India ink and white opaque. I also used a variety of other disposable pens and brushpens.

Next step is the watercolours.

Flying Boat Cover Process Five

For me this is where things begin to get interesting; the pencils. At this point I've done so much preliminary sketches that it seems to be already done, it's just a matter of making it visible. I do want to stress that the invention never stops, at every stage in the process there are surprises and things take unexpected turns.

I really like this picture. It has some pretty light hearted elements and some darker ones. It encapsulates everything about the story I want to get across.

This picture is done on Mayfair (I think) with 2B pencils.

Flying Boat Cover Process Part Four

This is the final thumbnail before I move on to the final pencil sketch. I was ready to move on at this point so the thumbnail was done pretty quickly. I think over drawing comes when you start over rendering to soon not from drawing too much. Keep things loose as long as you can. So far I've been working on the cover for three days.

Tomorrow is the fully rendered pencil drawing.

Flying Boat Cover Process Part Three

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2I went through another afternoon sketching the revised cover. Here (one and two) are a couple of sketches of Harry and Silvio's official cloudmapping hot air balloon. Again, this set of sketches prompted me to explore this world further.

Tomorrow; the final thumbnail.

Flying Boat Cover Process Part Two

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3As I mentioned last post Chris said he thought the boat should be wonderful and magical. He was right, the story had changed so much it didn't make sense to have the same broken down, mundane boat. It also gave the opportunity to add a really cool steampunk engine. Playing with this design let me push the boundaries to Maddy's world even further. I started to realize that these stories can fit just about anything.

The day I had to do these drawings I had a friend visiting so I carried bits of paper with me all day jotting down all my ideas as I went. They even sat next to me over supper. I got really absorbed in this boat and imaging it flying across the sky, chugging along, leaving puffs of smoke.

One and two are sketches I worked on during the day and three is the final design. This was done over about twelve hours whenever I had a spare moment.

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And four is a painting by James Christensen whose work was a huge influence on this design. If you don't know his work check it out, it's wonderful.

Flying Boat Cover Process Part One

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6Today I'm starting a multi-part process series on the creation of the Flying Boat Graphic novel cover. Starting today from the earliest ideas to the final piece.

I've always been a bit embarrassed about the fact that I usually use one of my first ideas. That's bad design but I can rarely find anything I love more then the initial burst of creativity. Numbers one and two are my earliest thumbnails of the cover done in brushpen and it stayed very similar to this in composition. I try to work quickly at this stage, getting ideas out.

Three-When the idea seems to be evolving into something workable I start doing more detailed, exploratory sketches. You can see on the left side of number three I was toying with the idea of a lantern. This came back in the final design in another form. One reason I didn't like the lantern is that I didn't want to draw that type of light source all the time both for practical reasons and also I wanted the boat to be a bit stealthy looking.

At this point I have a healthy pile of loose sketches littering the floor of my studio. This is when I usually start looking at reference. Reference is lots of things. In this case boats, clouds etc. but also art. Number four is Van Gogh whom I pull heavily from for inspiration. My skies are always swirling, the stars are always glowing.

Five is the pencil rough, in fact what I thought would be accepted as the final pencil rough (which luckily, it wasn't). The final was close enough to this though that I traced this image and reworked it to the final. Six is a colour sketch I threw together in Photoshop both for myself and for editor Chris Staros.

Chris liked this image but felt the boat was boring and it needed to have Harry and Silvio in it. I actually disagreed at first about the boat. When I had done the minicomic Maddy discovers the unassuming boat in the middle of the dessert just when she needs it. In the graphic novel it is an entirely different type of flying boat. I soon realized that Chris was right (as I'm finding he usually is) and I got back to the drawing board to explore some new ideas that would change the feel of the Flying Boat.

Tomorrow: Exploratory sketches.

Galaxy Express 999

I really wish this was real and not just a ride. It should have a pipe smoking room as well. Via Voyages Extraordinaire.

ART BY AURÉLIE NEYRET

The wonderful Aurelie Neyret.

Sumi! Paralympics Mascot.

"Sumi, an animal-guardian spirit, is a Thunderbird that wears the hat of an orca. Sumi will be the mascot of the Paralympics," I really love the Vancouver Olympic mascots and wish they were showing up more in the coverage. An Asian style design based on Native myths is as about West Coast as you can possibly get. They were designed by very talented Vancouver based artist Vicky Wong.

Another Cover Peek....

A Dog Walk Along Lake Ontario This Morning, Curious Swans.

Wish I could've captured the lovely snow as well.

Just passing through On My Way Back To Bed.

I've lost count of all the little bugs I've caught since Henry started at daycare but this is one of the worst. I've mostly been asleep for two days and just got up to see if food is appealing yet (its not) and to check my Google Reader and to post something here.

This is drawing from my Flying Boat ideas archive.

Cover Peek

The cover is actually done for Flying Boat but this is a sliver of it during the process.

Happy Valentines Day Julie!

Airship Over Toronto

I'm a terrible flier. Terrible. I need spoonfuls of Atavan and an escort to get on a plane as well as someone to interpret every noise that the plane makes (eg. "that's just the landing gear..." etc) I've always assumed that I'd have a better time on airships. I've got nothing to back this up but you don't need to when you're a romantic.

So while I was looking for an old travel itinerary for an airship trip between Halifax and Toronto I found this really cool article from the Torontoist website. So cool.

Rabbit

Parke Harrison

Fascinating work by Parke Harrison.

Egyptian re-touched

A sketchbook drawing I posted before but can't seem to stop noodling over...

Poetry And Mystery

"People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image," René Magritte.

I read this quote yesterday in a book and the truth of it hit me like a ton of bricks. No matter how much I assume symbolism is being used in my art work it's always about the mystery.

And then I love stories. Can a story clearly told still be mysterious?

Where Owls Fear To Tread

A little sketch I finished off in the waiting room at Sick Kids. It's two space faring owls.

Henry's still sick and sleeping. It's not that serious but it's thrown our schedules out of whack.

A Million Plastic Reasons To Draw

I've always loved toys and I don't think for sentimental reasons. Growing up, for various reasons I spent a lot of time by myself. Most of my time. Toys were a great inspiration to tell stories. They just popped out of all the weird, various plastic creatures that lived together in a box. I had always drawn but the toys inspired me to tell stories and make up stories in pictures. I've been thinking about this lately....