One section of the story calls for “menacing Art Deco”. Still need to practice that. Atom looks mildly worried; that’s a good start.

I’m blowing through the watercolor paper pretty quickly these days— big piles of discards with half-painted panels or random daubs of color. Sometimes the daubs are more interesting than the panels. So I’m trying out some collage work with these leftover bits. The first one got a little out of hand, but this crop of it looks okay.

This was a wraparound cover idea for a theoretical Smithson book. You can see a detail of the painting in this post from last year. It’s gouache and ink on bristol board.

Here’s the version with logo and type:

The design is okay, but that logo needs some work. If I were to do this again I’d go for something more ragged-y and hand-drawn looking. (Or outsource it to somebody that knows what they’re doing.)

A colorful Smithson panel in gouache and ink. Looking at this new, vibrant scan, I’m startled to realize how terrible my old scanner was.

Here’s a panel from the first draft of the book, done in late 2008. Mostly watercolor with some touch-ups in gouache. For the new version I’m drawing at a larger size and have hopefully learned a few more things about watercolor.

Here’s a gouache painting of Micki from Smithson. The spiral shape was a recurring visual motif; it showed up as a big sculpture in the middle of campus (which all the students sat on, naturally) and on a pachinko machine in one episode.

Someday I might make a post featuring all the appearances of another visual motif, a guy with big sideburns that I would put into the foreground of crowd scenes to establish depth. (I called him Ray Poussoir.)

Here’s another Smithson sketch from the archives. Here I had eventual print publication in mind, and was trying to arrive at a b&w style that I liked. And as always trying to draw faster and in a more lively way. I used colored pencil for the linework, with a loose watercolor wash and some gouache highlights. When I finished it I wasn’t that thrilled, but with a few years’ distance it looks okay.

Here I tried my hand at re-designing some Smithson characters, in gouache and ink. This is from a while back; now I’d go a little lighter with the gouache washes. Hey, that’s fun to say.

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.

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