Ushering my ‘zine out into the world after its lengthy period of gestation was great fun for me, despite the fact that in order to avoid the editorial inhibitions that come from courting advertisers I had to personally fork over the bucks to get it printed. It was a financial indulgence I’m not in a position to make a habit of, but it was worth it this time just to get a little dust stirred up in this sleepy town and to provide a looser-than-normal platform for creatively-inclined locals whose interests and points of view aren’t easily accommodated by the handful of existing publications in these parts.

Stacks of Perp #1 were up for grabs for a short while on counters at Papyri Books, North Adams Antiques, and Cup and Saucer here in North Adams and a lively launch party was hosted by MCLA Gallery 51 on Main Street. A gratifying level of enthusiasm was forthcoming from the local folks who picked up copies before they ran out, and even after the paper copies printed by Becks Printing were long gone, curious would-be readers from around here and from distant climes have continued to download it for free from the Perp’s web site as a PDF document).

In other words, in its small way, Perp #1 seemed to be a home-grown "hit." I offer as evidence of this the question that people have persisted in asking me ever since the first issue’s debut: "So when is Perp #2 coming out?"

Well, predicting an actual publication date for #2 is as iffy a proposition at this point as it was during the year it took to pull #1 together, but I can now say with confidence that the Perp is officially poised to return, thanks to a $2,144 grant the project has received from the Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire.

My job now will be to once again start speading the word. So all you writers and cartoonists scattered in nooks and crannies around Berkshire County thinking oddball thoughts that you’ve never felt able to share with your neighbors should take note: the time is now to get your creative juices flowing.

You will soon start seeing fliers seeking your involvement as a Participating Perp, but you don’t need to wait until you come across a flier to get in touch with me. I’m right here.

"The only thing I regret in my life is never having made comics."
—Pablo Picasso (according to an unsourced quote found online)

Assuming that the foregoing Picasso quote is legit, I feel reassured that the master cubist would not have minded the liberties I’ve taken in building the cartoony image above, which is my riff on one of his paintings and which was my reponse to an invitation to create promotional art for this year’s edition of North Adams Open Studios.

Anyway, I think you’ll see why the painting above struck me as the perfect springboard for a cartoon by yours truly that would be promoting a 21st Century celebration of North Adams artists. For one thing, it depicts an artist in the act of creation. How appropriate is that for advertising a citywide art show? Also, the sheer prescience manifested by the Spanish genius (who died 34 years ago) in showing an artist who’s watching a giant flat-screen TV while drawing even though such electronic wonders had not yet been invented when he created the painting fairly takes my breath away! (Admittedly, whatever show is airing must be less than riveting, since it seems to be making the artist’s companion doze off.)

But to leave speculations about Picasso’s technological clairvoyance aside, you can probably tell that I’ve incorporated into my own cubist-lite ‘toonery a patchwork of snippets from the works of several of the dozens of local artists who’ll be taking part in Open Studios this fall (October 13 and 14, to be specific). If you want to see work by the artists whose art I snipped in more dignified contexts, check out the links to their portfolios and web pages below.

North Adams artists included within my drawing, all of whom will be showing their stuff during the North Adams Open Studios weekend, are: Borkowski; Ed Carson; Sharon Carson; me; Martha Flood; FocoLoco; Karen Kane; Joan Kiley; Cynthia Lewis, Melissa McGorty; Danny O, Debi Pendell, J. Richards, Jr.; River Hill Pottery; Susan Rose; Robert Schechter; Norm Thomas; and Thor Wickstrom. Five galleries (MCLA Gallery 51; Brill Gallery; Eclipse Mill Gallery; Kolok Gallery; Northern Berkshire Creative Arts) will be hosting group shows in addition to the downtown spaces being converted into temporary venues for the weekend.

Even more gratifyingly, rather than sitting quitely in Ithica pondering his comics in solitude, Stephen shares his observations regularly in his blog Attempts (which I’ve just added to my permanent blogroll because, well, it’s so reliably interesting).

Anyway, this Thursday Stephen chose to expend more than 4,000 words describing in incredible detail how a single page from my graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby works. Here’s a direct link to his analysis.

Furthermore, when you visit Stephen’s blog you’ll find that this is but a single installment of a massive project that’s been underway since March. It’s called "100 Great Pages." and so far Stephen has given the Frug treatment to pages by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Paul Chadwick, Robert Crumb, and other similarly distinguished creators. And many more installments are clearly in the pipeline since, y’know, his take on page 131 of Stuck Rubber Baby is only #11 in the series! (Stephen invites his readers to nominate their own favorite pages, by the way.)

A final note: This isn’t the first time that Stephen has cast an eye on SRB in his blog, I’ll mention in all immodesty. Check out his November 28 entry for a lengthy description of his experience teaching my graphic novel in the classroom, or my own December blog post describing his blog post. And for any of you who’re scratching your heads thinking, "What the fuck is a Stuck Rubber Baby, anyway?" I’ve got a whole section of my web site devoted to the book.

Yes, Amazon.com carries it, in case you’re wondering….

HOWARD TO DAVID: Say no more, David. I’ll be happy to take you more slowly through the steps I took to achieve the effect in the image below.

Since my last post I’ve finished drawing Episode 14 of Mark the Art Guy, which will bring this Adobe-sponsored webcomic experiment to a close. There’s some "post-production" work still to do, like incorporating some minor revisions for a projected 16-page printed version of the series. If all goes as planned you’ll be able to pick up one of these comics handouts if you’re the sort who attends Macworld Expos and the other digital technology gatherings where Adobe tends to set up product booths. Also, I still have to draw cover art for this promotional funnybook.

After that I’ll be taking a breather from touting Adobe’s graphics software for pay.

Which doesn’t mean you won’t continue to hear words like Photoshop and Illustrator tripping off my tongue in this blog, since I was already using and sharing online tips about these tools in my site’s Cartoonists Corner long before anybody at Adobe Systems figured out that I existed. I can’t think of any reason why they won’t continue to crop up when I’m moved to talk shop with you in the future, since I continue to use them daily.

Mark and his imaginary sidekicks may be bidding me farewell, but plenty of other projects are already elbowing their way to the front of my brain pan to make sure I don’t actually get to, like, relax and zone out this summer in the wake of my Art Guy matathon.

(1) I’ve agreed to lead a workshop in comics creation for eleventh-graders at BArT. Now I can feel you becoming confused, so let me explain. The BaRT of which I speak is not San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system. My mime performances on subway platforms have been bringing in so few coins that I’ve retired that branch of my art career. No, in this case BArT refers acronymically to the Berkshire Arts & Technology Charter Public School, a cool institution of learning located in nearby Adams, MA, a town that North Adams is located, well, north of. For a couple of hours most schoolday afternoons over a two-week stretch in late-May and early-June I’ll be sharing the secret joys of comics creation with members of the iPod generation. That’ll take some advance preparation, those BArT juniors being a savvy group o’ young’uns.

(2) Collegiately speaking, meanwhile, should they achieve their minimum enrollment I’ll have two, instead of this year’s one, cartooning-related courses to teach at MCLA during the school’s 2007-08 school year. The Spring ‘08 follow-up to the cartooning course I introduced last fall will be created from scratch, so even though it’s scheduled for launch many months from now, it has already begun siphoning off a portion of my mind’s mulling reserves. After all, you can only crib so many ideas from Scott McCloud….

(3) I have long-promised preliminary sketches to get done for a projected children’s book that, if it flies, will be co-authored by my longtime pals Andrew Guerdat and Michele Gendelman. The Michele half of this creative husband-and-wife team, by the way, has recently co-authored (with Ilene Graff and Donna Rosenstein) a fresh take on child-rearing "that won’t make you feel like a complete idiot the way those other parenting books do." Just out from HarperCollins, it’s called What The Other Mothers Know. (Be on the lookout for Michele if her book tour through Chicago, New York, L.A. and Costa Mesa swings your way.)

(4) I still owe Doc Radin some drawings that he commissioned (and has been awaiting most patiently) for his revamped Drury Drama Team web site, my recently completed logo design being only the first step in Doc’s master plan for world conquest and dental supremacy.

(5) Then there’s that new novel I’m itching to get started on and the play I want to write. And oh, yes, the back yard grass is threatening to need mowing again.

You get the idea.

I will be doing black and white line art, no cross hatching. Color graduated tones. I’m basically going to draw and ink the motion lines with the rest of the artwork, yet my confusion comes in how to transform the color of the motion lines to another color in Photoshop and fade it to make it look like motion lines. Ultimately I’m trying to achieve smooth free and loose motion lines rather than if I would use the mouse and draw it directly on the computer, which would cause "nervous looking motion lines."

HOWARD TO GREG: Nothing beats the pen tool for creating "smooth" motion lines. Just create the path you want, convert the path to a selection, and fill the selection (on a separate layer) with black, gray, or whatever color you like.

Since you’re shading and coloring digitally, you automatically have at least one special tool available: partial transparency for layers. Coupled with broad brush effects or the eraser tool set on its brush rather than pencil mode, you can create a streak through the "air" that is strong near the sword (or whatever) and fainter as you approach the opposite end of the trail.

If you like you can use the blur filter to soften the edges of your actual speed lines.

STEVE TO HOWARD: Enjoyed your comic [For those who came in late, Steve’s referring to my Mark the Art Guy webcomic—H.C.] for Adobe. It has that animated Wolverton/Crumb look I like. But I have to ask: did you ink all, much or any or it with Illustrator (and a Wacom?). I’ve just discovered how smooth the brush tool in it works with my graphire and I’m using it to ink some drawings for a flash animation. Never thought my shaky hand would be able to ink with the computer.

HOWARD TO STEVE: I’m glad you’ve enjoyed my Mark strips. As for the tools I’ve used for that project: Adobe Illustrator has been extensively used for special effects (for simulating elements that have precision aspects like, for example, the grids that appear in my Mark strips when Vanishing Point is used).

But no, the Wacom tablet I bought years ago (but never mastered) has not been involved in my Mark drawings. I really should have another go at getting comfortable with that device; I know a lot of artists who really like it, as you do. Looking at a screen instead of my hand while I was drawing spooked me! I’ve gotta get over that—but finding time to learn new skills has been hard of late.

There’s a lot of digital-to-pen-&-ink-and-back-to-digital back-and-forth action in my way of working (some of which I’ve touched on in earlier blog entries), but my initial drawing still happens on paper. Sketches are scanned for fine-tuning compositions and finished art is scanned for clean-ups, corrections, and coloring. But thanks for reminding me that I really shouldn’t be letting that Wacom tablet gather dust on a shelf!

HOWARD to BLOG READERS: If you visit Steve’s web site, Caricatures Etc., you’ll discover that he can whip out a mean caricature from a submitted photo. Got a friend who deserves a unique gift sometime soon?

I’ll use the strip’s closing panel as an example since, while working on it last June, I saved all the stages of its development with this kind of demo in mind.

WHAT’S IN A PANEL?

As a rule, I need to know three things when I begin working on a new comic strip panel: (a) What’s the picture going to show? (b) What words will accompany that picture? and (c) How am I going to fit picture and words together to make a balanced composition?

This particular panel revolves around a mom who is nursing a newborn while conversing with a "Narration Block Lady." With neither a baby nor a lactating mother handy to use as live models, I went searching on the Internet for photo reference material. Google Images provided me with the cozy image you see below.

I placed the resulting mother-and-baby sketch into an Adobe Illustrator file containing text that I had typed out earlier. Illustrator is a great application to use when experimenting with various text-and-picture relationships because of the ease with which you can nudge blocks of words this way and that, changing their line-breaks and tweaking their phrases as needed.

Back when I first began using this system for building compositions I determined through trial and error that if I typed using a plain Helvetica font stretched to 115% of its native width, the resulting stacks of words would approximate the overall spacing of my typical hand-lettering. So typing my narration in advance makes it easy to see how assorted arrangements of words will work visually in combination with whatever picture they need to share panel space with.

Once I have arrived at blocks of typed text that look good to me, I will trace them by hand so that the end result has the warm imperfections that come with hand-crafting.

FROM ROUGHS TO INKS

Turning back now to "Neighborhood Secrets": with my panel composition loosely planned, it was time to send the magazine’s editors a rough version of the art I would later draw carefully.

So with the strips preceding panels indicated in a similarly loose manner, I emailed my rough version of the strip to the magazine for approval. The editors liked what they saw and gave me a thumbs-up to proceed with the finished art that the magazine’s readers would ultimately see.

The first step in this final stage of drawing was tracing an enlarged printout of my rough in pencil onto 2-ply bristol board. Then I started inking.

The middle drawing above is my "completed", or fully inked, artwork. I put the word completed in quotes because of the large, obviously empty areas that clearly need to be black but that I didn’t bother filling in by hand (like the mother’s hair, f’rinstance). In olden-days (before the arrival of digital graphics software) a lot of time would have been spent filling those areas with India ink. But that’s a variety of mindless labor that can now be turned over to computers, as long as you don’t mind giving up the pleasure of physical artwork that looks the same as its printed counterpart. Once scanned, I knew I would be able to fill such areas with perfect fields of solid black in the blink of an eye. Photoshop’s wand tool stood ready for action.

NEXT COMES COLOR

I color my present-day comics slightly differently than I colored the illustration used several years ago as a case history in my demo called "How I Color My Comics Using Adobe Photoshop." (For those who are interested, there are several such technical demos residing in the Cartoonists Corner of my main web site.)

The digital coloring method described in that demo is still the one I use for most color illustrations. I’ve modified my procedure, though, when it comes to coloring comics. Comics have special needs. The readability of small hand lettering calls for an extra level of crispness, and pagefuls of black outlines look best when they pop off the paper in a very distinct way, setting off the surrounding color without getting mired in it. At least, that’s how I feel about the comics that I draw!

With those concerns in mind, here’s how I go about coloring a comics-style feature like "Neighborhood Secrets." First comes the B&W line art I’ve discussed above, which is first inked on paper and then scanned and refined in Photoshop. Before color enters the picture I set aside one copy of the art for later use, saving it in Bitmap (line art) mode at a nice, sharp resolution of 600dpi (dots per inch).

This CMYK file can be safely sampled down to 300dpi without a noticeable loss of quality. Colors don’t require the level of sharpness that B&W line work does.

In most ways I will color a comic strip like "Neighborhood Secrets" in the same layered manner I describe in the aforementioned Cartoonists Corner tutorial, so I won’t repeat all that here. But there’s one major difference. Once I’ve finished my coloring I won’t flatten my CMYK file until I’ve deleted the layer containing my original drawn outlines.

Why was the outline layer there in the first place if I was going to trash it in the end? Well, it’s been needed until now to serve as a guide for the application of color on layers below it. But with my coloring now complete, such a guide is superfluous. In fact, it’s objectionable! In this file I want color and nothing but color. The strip’s crucial black outlines (and the lettering in my word balloons) will be supplied by the B&W version I saved earlier.

NOW COMBINE EVERYTHING IN ILLUSTRATOR

Here comes the final step. In Adobe Illustrator I will stack my 600dpi B&W image on top of my 300dpi color image and save a copy of the result as an EPS file. The black outlines will stay as crisp as one could ask and the colors will stay purer. I won’t be dogged by the darkened, smudgy look that comes with imperfect color-registration once the art goes to press.

This is what is so terrific about the EPS format. You can preserve the two different resolutions and modes in a single file that’s easily imported into most layouts programs. By contrast, the color in JPEGs or TIFF files gets mashed together with the black outlines. You don’t have the option of retaining a sharp 600dpi resolution in a drawing’s outlines if the color in the drawing is saved at 300dpi. Every black line in a TIFF file will always have some red, white, and blue ink in it. If the colored inks aren’t applied to paper by the printing press in precisely the position that they’re supposed to be, color will peek out from the black lines’ edges, making them appear slightly blurred. This happened with some comics of mine that were published in Heavy Metal years ago, and with some episodes of Count Fangor in Fangoria as well. I hate when that happens! I’m for crispness in art as well as in breakfast cereal.

A CLOSING NOTE
(EXCLUSIVELY FOR PHOTOSHOP GEEKS)
CONCERNING MY COLORING SYSTEM
AS DESCRIBED IN THE CARTOONISTS CORNER

Take a deep breath and prepare for picky details, children. Instead of using SELECT>SIMILAR to isolate all the black pixels on my outlines layer so I can hit SELECT>INVERSE and delete any pixels that aren’t black (as described here), I now activate the "NON-CONTIGUOUS" button in my Options Bar before selecting a random black area. This produces the same effect that a SELECT>SIMILAR command did in older versions of Photoshop; that is, every black pixel in that area will be selected with one click of the mouse. But in Photoshop CS2, non-contiguousness rules in this circumstance.

Got that?

Actually, the old SIMILAR command continues to occupy a slot in Photoshop CS2’s SELECT menu, but for some reason it no longer does what it used to do. At least, not on my iMac.

Normally, when I’m called upon to draw a cartoon rendition of someone I don’t know, as was the case with Dr. Bridgers once I began working on cover art for his book, I’ll want to see as many images of my subject as possible. I’ll want photos taken from an assortment of angles, under varied lighting conditions. Photos that show the person’s face expressing a whole range of moods.

Contemplating these photographs will help me imagine him or her in three dimensions, and the chances are lessened that I’ll be misled about the subject’s overall personality by one single instance of deceptive lighting or an expression reflective of one day’s atypical attitude.

Finding such a slew of contrasting photos can be easy when you’re drawing a national celebrity who shows up in the pages of People regularly. Unfortunately, Dr. Bridgers didn’t fall into that category and time was too short for me to do extensive digging for photo reference. All I had to go on when I began the project was a small photograph that had appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of UAB Public Health magazine (the same issue for which I had drawn cover art earlier).

So instead of trying to draw the man’s face from scratch, I decided to adapt the photo itself into a form that looked cartoony enough to fit into the cartooned surroundings that had already been approved for my dog-filled book cover art.

Well, mainly approved. There had been one small request for a change.

It was an easy change to accomplish. By shifting of my cast of characters, space was cleared among my "yellow dogs" for Judy and Bill Bridgers’ shaggy and un-yellow Brooke.

I needed to make the face look as if it had been hand-drawn. Look at the progression of details below to see the process I used. First came the raw screened photo captured by my scanner. Next is the same scan after I washed out most of the dots by applying Photoshop’s Gaussian Blur filter. Next I broke the image into small areas of flat color by posterizing it (IMAGE> ADJUSTMENT> POSTERIZE). And that was just the beginning, posterizing-wise!

Below is the drawing as it appeared in the context of my final cover design.

Did you find this backstage look at a cartooning project interesting? Be careful about encouraging me now, ’cause I’ve got a million of ‘em!

Drawing a cover for his book presented challenges, though. The guy would pretty much have to be front and center, since his ruminations were the book’s raison d’être. But how do you draw a cartoon version of a man you never laid eyes on?

I’ll get to that tomorrow, in the second part of this exercise in cartooning shop talk. First I had to figure out what my drawing was going to look like. Dr. Bridgers would be in the middle of — of what?

I took my cue from the book’s title. I mean, a book called Yellow Dog Tales has gotta have dogs on the front, right? Not brown ones or black-and-white spotted ones; yellow ones. But what exactly is a "yellow dog" anyway? And how did that variety of canine get tethered to some people’s political leanings?

A little Googling led me to the Yellow Dog Democrat web site, where all things became clear. Way back in 1928 a Democratic Senator named Tom Heflin committed the unpardonable crime of supporting Republican Herbert Hoover for President. According to legend, party loyalists denounced Heflin’s offense by reaffirming their own party loyalty. "I’d vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket," they angrily proclaimed, and a super-partisan archetype was born.

As for the real-world dogs hijacked by the term, I learned from the Internet that an alternative name for a "yellow dog" is "Carolina dog." Here’s what such beasts typically look like.

Come back tomorrow for a further description of how UAB’s much-admired Bill Bridgers was turned into a ‘toon.