Well, I’m a total traditional art convert. I hate being tethered to my computer now; it’s so freeing to once again be able to do my work anywhere it might strike my fancy. My new obsession is buying art supplies. Sweet, sweet art supplies.

I just bought a bunch of Kolinsky Sables from Rosemary & Co. A friend of mine, Kiel West, introduced me to Rosemary’s brushes. She’s a woman in England who hand-makes all her brushes at a fraction of the cost of other manufacturers. Manufacturers who seem to have an inverse quality to price ratio of late – I’m looking at you, Windsor & Newton.

This will be my first order. I can’t recommend them from personal experience yet. She comes so highly recommended, and with prices so affordable, it’s hard not to get excited. Just look at how much brush I got for so little dough:

1 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 1 = $6.41
3 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 2 = $20.91
3 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 3 = $25.28
1 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 4 = $9.80

1 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 1 = $4.58
3 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 2 = $14.14
3 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 3 = $15.87
1 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 4 = $5.82

1 x Bamboo Brush Roll. = $7.36

Sub-Total: $110.17
Shipping to the USA: $8.48
Total: $118.65

$118 for 16 Kolinsky brushes with shipping. Wowee. Unless these are the single most atypically useless Kolinsky Sable brushes ever made, that’s a miniscule amount of money.

What do they have in common? Me! They were a couple of semi-recent commercial gigs. I haven’t been posting / blogging a lot of commercial work. I’m growing a bit disenchanted with it. All I want to do is find the time to work on comics and video games (the latter being where I worked before becoming a freelance illustrator; before that I was a print designer). I think it’s easier to make a living making product based on my original works than through billable hours for clients. Budgets are shrinking ever smaller and there aren’t enough hours in the day.

I’ve convinced myself to start a few comics after I get back from a trip to Prague in the next few weeks and embark on the latter path. We’ll see! But I digress…

For the Paste illo, I managed to feature my friends as ghosts haunting Jim Carroll (Known, musically at least, for “People Who Died.” He’s a great prose writer; author of The Basketball Diaries). Who better to haunt him than the people I interact with on forums? They’re kind of etherial friends. They exist on the tubes and nowhere else from my perspective. That’s sort of eerie.

I got a bunch of them to submit photos of themselves and proceeded to place them into the illustration in a paint by number fashion.

I used the same method to make my BRAINS Threadless tee. That image featured ~40 unique heads and is the current tiled background for my blog. It’s an easy way to make a crapload of people happy, har.

After roughing in the approximate locations of all their faces, I started in on the loose pencils, seen here in green.

Here it is inked and colored:

I’m not too wild about it. It was one of my last fully digital pieces and the sterility of the medium seems more obvious to me now than it did then.

Same goes for this guy, the LA Weekly cover. It was a bit of a rush job, time-wise, as a prior commitment for the cover didn’t work out and I batted clean-up. I’m happy with what I was able to accomplish, but I wish I could’ve done more in hindsight. They liked it a bunch from what I gathered, so I guess I should stop being so critical of myself. No one is a bigger heckler about my work than I am, that’s for sure!

Here’re the pencils for the first version of cover before their input:

And here are the pencils after their input:

The beginning of the inks:

And the final product:

Two things: there is a ton of bleed in that image. Her hands are cropped and there’s a ton taken in from the sides in the final. I wasn’t responsible for -and this isn’t the final- text. They dropped that in for the finished image. A friend in LA was good enough to take a photo of it:

Here’s the problem. Snow Leopard is seeing the Cintiq’s default refresh rate higher than its native 60hz. Using a third party app named SwitchResX, I created a custom 1650×1080@60hz resolution. I rebooted my MacPro, applied the resolution setting in the Display SysPref PrefPane, and, voila, no more problem.

An official fix would be nice, though. Hear me, Apple & Wacom! Old man Frenden shakes his fist at you with scorn and malice!

In case you didn’t catch my twatting on Twitter, the Cintiq 20WSX’s display goes googly-moogly after upgrading to Snow Leopard. It’s not like Wacom had months of anticipatory development time to ensure it’s compatibility or anything!

Apple support forum discussion on the topic.

Me lamenting Wacom’s monopoly of pen-based input devices and their lack of customer support on Twitter.

I sure do love my $2400 brick!

Now that I’ve gone traditional, using my Cintiq is a drag. The 1/4″ of offset between the stylus and my cursor paired with a fair amount of lag makes for a frustrating drawing experience.

I’m glad I started digitally. It afforded me the luxury of mistake making and experimentation. As my control of lines has gotten better, though, I make less mistakes and have started to want more accuracy out of my tools. In other words, my capabilities are not the problem now – it’s the tablet that is slow and inaccurate comparatively.

Case in point, a cheapie, #6, sable-round on cardboard gives me more control than a $2000 Cintiq and three $60 styluses (paired with $5400 worth of a MacPro, extra hard drives, and a 24″ secondary display).

That setup is beaten by a $5 brush. Deeeeepressing.

I’ve said before that it’s become increasingly difficult to make an honest living as an illustrator. Print is dead, taking a large swath of possible clients with it. The tubes move too quickly making custom illustration for articles an unlikely occurrence. Prices have been driven into the ground by a sea of amateurs gleefully accepting spec work and companies eager to exploit them. It’s on that latter point that I want to provide a new example to back-up my statements.

I get a lot of emails from large companies looking for spec work. Most of the time, there is an implied confidentiality. A smattering of text on the bottom of the email indicates that it’s for my, and the 300 other recipients’, eyes only. Posting the contents of the email to my blog would only get me sued. Billabong’s Art Director, Aaron Hennings, included no such text.

Large companies are exploiting illustrators. They use the lure of working with an established brand to engage in unethical business practices. But don’t take my word for it, take Aaron’s:

Billabong is looking to supplement the Men’s T shirt collection with fresh freelance art by new designers. You have been selected and invited to be part of the freelance submission process.

Take a look at the attached .PDF and let me know if I can answer any
questions. Looking forward to hearing from you and seeing some great work.

We review new submissions every week, so the deadline is on going. However, we do have a limited number of designs we can include each season, so sooner rather than later is better.

Regards,

Aaron

Aaron Hennings
————————
Art Director
Billabong USA
117 Waterworks Way
Irvine, CA 92618
(949) 753 7222 tel. x3292

Here’s the attached PDF. I’d suggest you take a look at it. They even provide a nice tee template for forking over your multitude of Billabong branded, spec generated designs.

I know a half dozen or so other illustrators who got this email. Luckily, most agree that doing spec is bad. Some don’t. Please, don’t be one of those illustrators. Your decision affects us all.

Friday Practice

(Posted on Saturday, natch!)

I’ve been trying to draw through my forms. This is a tip gleaned from Scott Robertson’s videos on perspective. He suggested drawing past the point you’re trying to hit while still hitting it. Drawing “through” the form. I’ve been doing that when drawing in perspective, but I’ve started to use the technique in my life drawing with organic figures. Paired with the square-boundary, outline-your-figure philosophy, I feel like I’ve found a way of quickly, loosely jotting down ideas that suits my arm.

Fluid strokes are important in my style of work. Analog, most people “push” lines away from themselves. Digital, I tended to “pull” lines towards myself. I’d start fast, with light pressure, and slow down, with heavy pressure, if the line were, say, a feathered halftone.

Now that I’ve been drawing traditionally, I get more fluid, natural strokes with a “push” (again, dragging the stroke away as you draw). Working traditionally has taught me this, and It’s helped a ton. Draw from your shoulder and elbow, not your wrist. It takes some getting used to. You won’t be as good this way, likely, to start. The end result is fluid, pretty strokes.

Stock Carpenter Race

Art directed by J.L. Vara of Dutch Southern, it was a fun job to revisit the characters of Carpenter movies past. I’m a huge fan, from Thing, They Live, Christine, to Big Trouble in Little China and, guiltily, Ghosts of Mars, there’s little he’s touched that isn’t worth a tribute or two. It’s up for sale if you feel the same.

A little process from this guy:

Back of the tee for my wife’s TNR charity (trap, neuter, return – it’s for feral/stray cats).

We don’t want to spend the charity’s money on tees, so I kept it to one color. We need something, though, to look more official when we’re out doing our thing.

Well, maybe not sleeps. But I bet they cavort. They look like the cavorting type.

The fishman tee design that garnered a lot of interest is for sale at Shirt Fight starting right now. Wee!