10/11/07 - Process of The Process & 24-Hour Comics

This story is taken from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog and looks to be an excellent workup of one web comic cartoonists working process.

"The Process" is the work of Joe Infurnari (self portrait at left) whose work is reminiscent of comics legend Will Eisner!

On Joe's blog he details the steps involved in creating his web comic.

PS: The CCG mini 24-Hour Comic Event location has been confirmed. Watch the CCG Calendar link for full details coming soon! All around the world Cartoonists will be creating various 24-Hour Comics on Saturday, October 20th 2007. Here is a link to some of the activities that SCAD Atlanta is up to that day. The idea for this event is the offspring of famous comics theory author Scott McCloud.

Thanks to Stevie Moore for managing this event while I am out of town!

07/23/07 - Instructional Video Links on Making Graphic Novels

How-to videos on creating a graphic novel! I just found this one - http://www.expertvillage.com/interviews/comics-novels.htm

Does anyone out there have experience with this site?

07/02/07 - 2DArtist Magazine

2dartist is excellent and I have been buying this online PDF magazine for over a year and highly recommend it. Best of all you can check it out with a free preview for each issue and if you like what you see the cost for the full blown issue is only four bucks! Support a great magazine and get a great deal at the same time!
Geared for the digital artist crowd out there, this and ImagineFX are really the top two art tutorial magazines available.

07/02/07 - Excellent Videos With Ron Lemen Art Instruction

Ron Lemen has been involved in art education for a while and recently been involved with Gnomon Workshops out in California. You may remember that name from previous posts - they offer training to and with some of the best concept design and FX artists in Hollywood.

xTrain is a newish web company that wants to deliver high quality video based training over the web. Right now several wonderful training videos are available to you free once you set an account. I highly recommend the Ron Lemen training on traditional art media and also on Painter X (although I found the traditional media instruction to be more informative). If you have a fast Internet connection I encourage you to JUMP on this great opportunity to learn!

11/26/06 Digital Illustration Links & Events

Guys, here's a little doodle to get you in the Christmas Spirit (women visitors are encouraged to post a link for their hot Santa).

Did not get to go to MOC (see previous post), home sick today ;-(

But here are some links some of you may find interesting. I have talked about the Gnomon Workshop videos before, they are based out in California and really work to support the movie and television production industry out there. Well I have found some other folks in that same market who have some nice sites with really good tutorials (no videos or DVDs yet). Conceptart.org is hosting the Insomania workshop and seem to be physically centered in the San Francisco area. I know of at least one CCG member who is a big Jason Chan (lately of Imagine FX magazine fame) fan, he seems to be a prominent member in this online community. Some great content there, but hard to navigate all the forum posts to know what's happening! Massive Black is a large studio for concept artists and they apparently are on the brink of releasing some video instruction and also have info about a workshop they host/hosted in June (I checked my calendar and think this is a past event - but they were too cool to put the year anywhere on their site!).

11/18/06 - Using the Computer for Drawing and Reference

I found this post over at Newsarama.com, it is an interview with Brandon Peterson. He has worked with using 3D design software for comics since he was the art director for CrossGen Comics (sigh, I miss that company!). I found out about Google's SketchUp (WOW! A free 3D program that's easy to use and learn!) from reading this piece and find it touches on some timely issues: use of photo references and TRACING! SketchUp looks like a great way to work out perspective for interior or exterior comic scenes...but I will still be working on my hand drawing skills for drawing perspective scenes, interior and exterior. Ask me about the great tutorial DVD I purchased from Gnomon Workshop by Scott Robertson on sketching by hand various 3D objects. Over at eatpoo.com (Yum! what an inventive name!) they have a post by Scott showing his special perspective skills if you are interested.

Just keep saying this mantra: "The computer is just a TOOL, The computer is just a TOOL...". By the way the images above are by moi, they were drawn freehand with a Intuous 3 tablet and SketchBook Pro 2. If anyone has samples they have created in SketchUp I would be interested in seeing it - I will post something once I have gotten through the tutorial!

06/14/06 - Some "How To" Links: Perspective

Here is a nice process tutorial I found while looking for info for perspective grids and drawing comics: http://www.disraeli.plus.com/educatio/levdemo/
I'm definitely going to try the BLEND tool in Illustrator for making the perspective lines!

Scott McDaniel shows a bit of his perspective process on his site: http://www.scottmcdaniel.net/
He uses frames so I can't link you directly - go to DRAWING COMICS in upper left pane then click on PERSPECTIVE in the bottom left pane - he shows several examples...

Here's one from Will Terrell of Lucid Comics that keeps things pretty simple (don't forget to roll over the red buttons to see his drawings progress):
http://www.lucidcomics.com/creatingcomics_perspective.htm

Scott Reed shows (but doesn't really explain- hint, hint) his use of perspective grids in this link: http://www.websbestcomics.com/theprocess.htm

Here's a good all around comics how to resource: http://www.members.shaw.ca/creatingcomics/

And here is an overall how to resource for drawing: http://www.artshow.com/resources/drawing.html