Brian Moore's Sketchblog

I spend a lot of time thinking about process. How to make my art more quickly without sacrificing quality, how to organize images and tools. Comics can be very labor-intensive—layout, researching, penciling, inking, lettering, and so on—so another element to think about is how to keep the whole process fun.

I look at the work of some of the artists I admire—Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Eddie Campbell—and their art looks like it was a blast to make: elastic, playful, but with solid draftsmanship behind it. Of course a prized artistic skill is to make it all look effortless, no matter how much the artist sweated over it.

The panel on the top left follows my first stab at a working process for The Sweetened By-and-By: working out the lettering and balloon shapes on tracing paper, penciling a rough sketch in the space that’s left, inking the balloon shapes and panel lines on watercolor paper, lightboxing the pencil rough onto the watercolor paper, doing a finished drawing in ink, and finally painting. I also scrubbed out the wash on Atom’s suit to make it look shabbier (and to try to improve the contrast with the background), and added some colored pencil on the suit and wall to give it some texture. Whew!

After all that I needed a break, so I went directly to the next panel and brushed on some paint. I tried to suggest some forms with quick daubs of ink. And then I went in with the pen to refine the drawing. Then more black shapes, and a few more washes. Then some additions (dots, highlights) and corrections (the two barstools at left) with white gouache and ink. Much less regimented than the previous panel, and more fun. The downsides: I didn’t plan out the lettering, so I spent time drawing art that is destined to be covered by a balloon. And the drawing, though it was fun to do, isn’t as rigorous as I would like.

So my goal now is to hit a happy medium between these two approaches. Maybe I’ll only do a very rough pencil guide on the watercolor paper, and mostly improvise with the pen (as I did in the bottom right panel.) Or put down a few washes after the balloons, but before picking up the pen. We’ll see. And that will be what keeps it fun.

Testing a new doo-dad I’ve added to my sketchblog; if all goes well it will cross-post on livejournal. Not much to see here.

To Not Be Continued.

“Unintentional” was an improvised strip I started and abandoned in the summer of 2007. I was trying to work around the hesitancy I was feeling about putting pen to paper, so I just picked an arbitrary doodle and used that as the first installment of the story. To my surprise I was able to keep going, on a near-daily schedule, for a few weeks. At that point I was starting to feel a bit wobbly on my story-telling tightrope, and also was about to embark on a cross-country vacation, so the strip fell by the wayside. It was a lot of fun to do, though, and the improvisatory nature of it was a nice break from the more structured, “realist” work I was doing on Smithson. And it’s provided me with some core ideas that I plan to expand into a longer, fully composed story.

Each page was drawn directly in ink with my then-favorite crowquill pen, and then shaded with washes of pthalo blue watercolor (chosen because it’s a dye-based, intense pigment that didn’t go too dull on the absorbent copy paper I was drawing on.) I tried to do as little preparatory work as possible, and to avoid after-the-fact Photoshop work too. I did end up doing some sketches and combining panels spread across two sheets into one page. Maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to try this experiment again.

I’ve moved the strips from their old home on Webcomicsnation.com to this blog’s archives – here’s the first strip.

Strolling around the streets of the city in my story, seeing what things look like.

Here’s the color version of yesterday’s doodle.