Hello, hello, Meat-Heads! I thought today I'd talk about about working from reference!
So, all artists really should work from reference, right? Well I think Reverend Lovejoy put it best when he said:
Reference, working from reference, and knowing how literally to use it is something that each artist really needs to determine for him or herself. Plenty of people draw solely from their imagination and are perfectly content to do so, and I'm not here to knock other drawing styles or approaches, so I'll just talk about how working from reference has related to my own work.
I've had a love/hate relationship with reference over the years. I've gone from not using it at all, to using it exclusively, finally to what I've felt is a solid balance between the two. Here's a breakdown of how things have changed in Dead Meat over the years:
a. No reference--BLECH. Very unrefined, very....well...bad.
b. SOME reference--Better, but still unsure of HOW to use it. At this point, using reference meant just drawing the photo I had taken. Turning it into a character was difficult.
c. ALL reference--This is a look that I don't hate, but I became unsatisfied with. I'll talk about why in a minute
d. HALF and HALF--this is my current, and preferred method of working. Some reference, some imagination.
The difference between b, c, and d may be subtle, but it's there. I worked EXCLUSIVELY from reference for a long time, and though I'm glad I did, I'm also glad I've started to move away from it. Working so literally from reference really helped me work out some style problems I was having. It helped me with form, with anatomy, and especially with shadows. I would light and shoot everything, and then draw from those photos very literally. here's an example of how little changed sometimes in the transition from photo to drawing:
From Vermillion #2 available at WaheelaComics.com
However, after a time two things happened: 1. I worked so deliberately from reference that in certain spots where I wouldn't, due to time restraints or lack of a photo, it wouldn't look the same. It made the work look very inconsistent. Even with background elements--If the foreground characters were all referenced, but the background characters weren't, it was obvious and distracting (at least to me). 2. I felt like the reference was becoming a crutch, and also it was making my work very stiff. Every thing felt very staged, nothing had fluidity to it, and I became really dissatisfied with the way things were going.
If things were to change, I had to re-evaluate how I was doing things, and luckily, producing Dead Meat full time actually forced me to do so. I realized that working so tightly from photos really slowed down my production time, on top of all those other things, and also the more I was drawing, the more confidence I was starting to get in my non-referential abilities. That's not to say I don't use reference anymore--of course I do, I still light and shoot my reference--but I'm not a SLAVE to it, and I think it's making an important thing happen: my work doesn't necessarily look more REAL, but it definitely looks more TRUE.
So in the end, should you? shouldn't you? Well let me put it this way: reference is a TOOL, and using it, even in the most passing fashion will NEVER hurt your work. It may not always make your work look real, but it will always make it look TRUE.
Now it'd be unfair to end this post without an embarrassing reference photo, so here you go!
Until next time,
EAT DEAD MEAT!
STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW. YOU CAN'T MAKE COMICS UNLESS YOU BUY THE RIGHT PENS, AND THE RIGHT PAPER, AND THE RIGHT ERASERS AND PENCILS!!!
Although this, of course, is a load of garbage, it took me a while to REALIZE it was garbage. How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, and any number of other books out there may tell you differently, but when it comes down to it (as I think DC art director Mark Chiarello said), the only right tools are the ones that feel comfortable.
When it comes to my own comic work, one of the things that makes me feel comfortable is working pretty big. Finding the right size to work, however, has been a pretty long process of trial and error. I started, like most other people, on the standard 10x15 comic page, but as my hand started to atrophy from cramping, I decided I needed a better solution. As my style changed, I made two big changes: I started using watercolor paper, and I stared working on single panels at a time, enlarged to a much bigger size than would fit on a regular comic page, like so:
As you can see, I was working pretty big. However, as I got more serious about producing work at a professional level, one of the things I really needed to be concious of was speed--and working that big is VERY slow. especially at the start, when I was a lot less confident in my inking, I was essentially drawing every panel twice, as I was filling in all of my black areas so I could see if they'd work or not. There was also a psychological aspect to it as well, where if I was only focusing on one panel, as opposed to a full page, my satisfaction level stayed constant. In other words, since each individual panel felt like a full illustration, if I got 2 panels done in a day, I'd felt as though I'd accomplished as much work as if I'd finished 2 full pages. It made me very slow.
I worked this way for the first 9 pages or so of Dead Meat Chapter 1, but I needed to get faster, so I decided to go back to working on an entire page, at the standard 10x15 size. You can see the size change here:
The size of one panel vs. the size of a single page
definitely sped me up, but I again felt like I was very cramped in the space I had to work, especially since as I got more confident with my inking, i liked to be a lot looser and use a bigger brush. SO, when I started issue 2, i went back to the old method: One panel at a time, enlarged.
And
It
Took
Forever.
I fell right back into my old psychological habits, and it took forever.
So I took a step back to re-evaulate again and this is what I determined: I needed a way to work big, but fast, and eliminate the psychological block of working on one panel at a time. Can you guess how I solved that problem? Anyone? Well after months of trial and error, the idiot switch finally moved to the off position....AND I JUST USED BIGGER PAPER! It's like when you go to an arena for a concert or a game, and your seats are right near the entrance, but you end up walking around the entire stadium instead of 30 feet in the opposite direction. Except now I have a new set of problems, as this paper is too big for my scanner. WILL I EVER WIN????
So there you have it--part of this game is figuring out what works for you, what makes you comfortable, and what maximizes your efficiency and quality of your work all at the same time. There's no right answer, there's no wrong answer, you just gotta try things out till it feels right. If that sounds like too much work, though, there's always this to fall back on:
Until next time,
Eat Dead Meat!
It seems Eric has finally gotten the better of his arch-foe! This could be the end! OR COULD IT????
So this post isn't explicitly about cliffhangers, but more so about the idea of writing for a serial format as opposed to writing a full graphic novel. So as I've talked about before, I only fairly recently came to the decision to present Dead Meat in an online, page-to-page format, and before coming to that decision I had already written the first issue a few times, and had actually already completed most of the second issue. The issues were written as the first two issues of a larger story, and were approached in the way most comics are, with an ending that hopefully strikes enough of a chord to bring the reader back for the next one.
This is a perfect example, from Kingdom Come #1 written by Mark Waid, art by Alex Ross. Kingdome Come sets up a world in which superheroes have gone nuts, and Superman has vanished for years, allowing the world to sort of drift into chaos. The body of the first issue is spent setting up this world, and then the last sequence of pages comes:
This return of the Man of Steel is fantastic, and completely hits the right chord to draw the reader back for issue 2. Endings like this are common place in comics, and allow you to tell your story for 22 pages, and then deliver a punchline to make sure your readers leave wide-eyed and wanting more--but what happens when you're readers have to wait a week between pages let alone entire issues? You have to really consider the content you're putting up for your audience to view, because even though it's only a page, that page has to sustain them for a week, and be interesting enough to warrant a return to see what happens next. With that in mind, however I'm not saying every page has to end like this:
As I said, I wrote issues 1 and 2 before I decided on format, so when I got to issue three, I re-evaluated my approach, and started to be more conscious about telling a story on each page. My biggest regret about the way Issue 1 has played out so far is that there are a couple pages that are half of a conversation about something, and while this in and of itself isn't bad the place it ends on the page may not be totally satisfying to a reader.
At the same time, being conscious of this sort of "ultra-serialization" of your comic can actually really let you play with pacing and hanging on things for effect. For instance, there's a page in issue three that is 4 panels depicting a single, quick event that occurs to a main character, and devoting an entire page to it was done to make sure that it lingered.
In the end, it's a balancing act you have to be aware of, making sure you can maximize the content of a page in and of itself, but not to the extent that you sacrifice the larger storytelling of that page as it exists inside the entire issue. This is just another thing that I've been learning along the way as I do this--and there are mistakes I'm going to make along the way that I won't shy from talking about here, as the entire point of this is to show people the process, and hope that they can learn from it should they decide to do it themselves! WILL I be successful? WILL I crash and burn? IS there anyone out there who gives a crap?
STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT!
Until Next Time,
Eat Dead Meat!
Follow us on Twitter!! http://twitter.com/deadmeatcomic
Hello Meat-Heads! As you can see by Eric's former home, there's some changes about! Yes, unfortunately, this will be the last blog post here at deadmeatcomic.blogspot.com.
HOWEVER, from now on, Evolution of An Idea will continue to update and post over at www.eatdeadmeat.com, so you can have your meat and eat it too!
Why the move? Well it seems like a perfect topic to cover here, so let's take a look!
When I started this blog, I knew that this site was not going to be the home of my comic Dead Meat, and while I built eatdeadmeat.com, this was the easiest place for me to do a blog, and it's been fantastic in the months that I've been using it. So I launched eatdeadmeat.com, and everything was great! I had a great first week, lots of hits, lots of eyes on my comic, but that was due pretty much exclusively to the fact that I was putting up a page a day for that first week, which kept people coming back. Once I settled in to my page-a-week format, pageviews dropped off dramatically. Yes, I can hear you fine when you say "No kidding, genius"--you don't have to yell. So when I took a step back I saw what I had: One site that updated one or more times a week (the blog), and another that updated once a week (the comic). I want people to see both of these...but at the time it didn't occur to me that having two separate sites could be a bad idea! In doing that I instantly cleaved the numer of hits eatdeadmeat.com could have, because half of its potential audience was going to another site, instead of RETURNING to eatdeadmeat.com more than once a week!
This brings us to what I believe is the golden rule of running a blog/website/whatever: people will come to your site only as frequently as you give them reasons to, and in the easiest way possible. Again, no need to yell, I can hear your heckles quite well. Yes, even you in the back, sir. I know this is an obvious thing to say, but sometimes it's the obvious things that get overlooked. Take those KFC/Taco Bell combos that are everywhere now. Can you believe that obvious combo had been overlooked for so long? Me neither.
Ok, ok! Anyway, my point is that I had these two related websites that were existing separately, not being able to maximize site traffic on their own, so I've decided to combine them into the monster that they now are. Hopefully you'll continue to read this blog at its new home, and hopefully you'll continue to enjoy Dead Meat as the story unfolds! What all of this basically comes down to, and also the point of this blog, is that this whole project is a learning process, and it's going to take me a while to get the hang of it, and hopefully anyone out there interested in doing the same will be able to learn from my mistakes. No one does it right the first time!
Just want to extend my thanks to everyone who's been checking out the comic over at EatDeadMeat.Com, and as a sign of appreciation I'll be extending the opening week of pages by two days, so don't forget to head back tomorrow and Saturday for pages 7 and 8!
So keep coming back, follow Dead Meat on twitter at Twitter.com/DeadMeatComic and stay tuned for a bunch of cool updates coming down the pipe pretty soon!
Welcome, Meat-Heads, I hope your new year starts off happier than Eric's here!
I hope everyone's had a chance to head over to www.EatDeadMeat.com to check out Dead Meat, the FREE, online comic I've been blabbing on about these many posts! If not...well...I'll get you eventually!
Which brings me to my next point: REVENGE. Revenge, as far as a dramatic device, is amazing. Seriously. Comparable probably only to love, revenge is THE most effective character motivation in terms of eliciting a visceral, base response from the audience (provided it's done well). Everyone loves a good revenge story, everyone loves to see the bad guy get theirs, especially if the way in which the protagonist has been wronged is particularly heinous, and it (along with love) is one of the few things powerful enough to BRING SOMEONE BACK FROM THE DEAD!
(Pour one out for Detective Frank Drebin while you watch this)
Now that is POWER! That clip is from Creepshow, which is an anthology-horror movie inspired by such comic books as E.C. Comics' Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Shock and Suspenstories, etc, which usually follow a formula pretty standard to the events in that video, but the "revenge from beyond the grave" plotline pops up all over the place, even in Hamlet! So if it's good enough for old Willy Shakes, it's gotta be good enough for us, right? And as we all know, the revenge story in Hamlet plays out like this, right:
Right!--wait, I mean no! Hamlet spends the better part of the play plotting, and thinking, and re-plotting, and over analyzing the consequences of his revenge! It's this attention to exploring the causes and effects of his vengeance that makes it so effective, which brings me to my next point: revenge without a solid, emotional connection to the audience is (most of the time) boring. This is why so many revenge plots involve that other giant of the character motivation world, love. People can identify quickly and personally with loss of a loved one, loss of a loved thing, and just the denial/loss of love in general, and can get a good, guttural response to seeing that injustice rectified.
However, many revenge-based stories are some variation on "you killed/kidnapped my ____, prepare to die!" And are usually followed by 90 minutes of carnage, and then at the end they kill the bad guy and they're fun, but you kind of don't really care. But why don't you care? I did just say that loss of a loved one/thing is a quick way to get someone on board with a revenge plot, right? So why don't these work all the time? Well, it's because you have to stew in it. Much like in Hamlet, you have to be completely entrenched and saturated with it, so when the revenge gets under way, you feel like there's real weight to the situation. One of my favorite revenge movies of all time is Tony Scott's Man on Fire, starring Denzel Washington. It's a pretty basic set up: Denzel is a disgraced former special forces guy or marine or whatever, who's taken a nothing job as a rich kid's bodyguard. The kid gets kidnapped, and he goes on a killing spree to get her back. This should fall into the "yawn" category, right? Well the reason that it works is that for the first solid hour of the movie, if not more, they build Denzel's relationship with the girl to such a degree that when the girl finally gets nabbed you KNOW that he is going to do anything and everything to get her back, and it's going to be awesome.
So when I started writing Dead Meat, as far as my main group of characters was concerned, I wanted to give them all a common motivation, something simple and identifiable that would allow the audience to get their "thing" quickly, and move on to focusing on the characters and their relationships. I didn't use revenge as such a heavy plot element as some of the examples I gave above, but it's safe to say that I felt revenge would be a more appropriate backstory than love...well I guess I could have gone with love...but that would have made for a pretty different story.
At the end of the day, you can't really go wrong with revenge. It's a feeling that everyone's had--the desire to get even with someone who's wronged them, or that neighbor's dog who crapped on your grass--and when it's done well, it is a very strong, very real character motivation that can resonate with pratically anyone. So be on the look out for my next book: a really well motivated story about a guy getting revenge on the neighbor's dog. Or is the dog the one getting revenge?
p.s. I should have some updates on the comic pretty soon--there'll be original music soon, as well as the entire first issue being for sale digitally, so keep reading, and keep checking back!
Alrighty, Meat-Heads! This is it! Head on over to www.EatDeadMeat.com RIGHT NOW and jump face first into the world of DEAD MEAT!!! Then when you're finished, spread the word, and build an army of Meat-Heads to execute my fiendish pla--uh...>cough<...I mean....do enjoy the comic.
Until next time,
EAT DEAD MEAT!
