draw! comic books - #30

16
CHRIS SAMNEE #30 SPRING 2015 $8.95 IN THE US The Professional “How-To” Magazine on Comics, Cartooning and Animation THE DAREDEVIL ARTIST ON EVERYONE’S RADAR BUTCH GUICE CREATING WINTER WORLD PLUS! REGULAR COLUMNIST JERRY ORDWAY AND MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’ 1 8 2 6 5 8 2 7 7 6 4 2 0 1

Upload: presspad

Post on 21-Jul-2016

259 views

Category:

Documents


4 download

DESCRIPTION

This is a free sample of DRAW! Comic Books issue "#30" Download full version from: Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id739698959?mt=8&at=1l3v4mh Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.presspadapp.draw Magazine Description: DRAW! (edited by top comics artist MIKE MANLEY) is the professional “How-To” magazine on comics, cartooning, and animation. Each issue features in-depth interviews and demos from top pros sharing tips and tricks on all aspects of graphic storytelling, including such skills as layout, penciling, inking, lettering, coloring, storyboarding, Photoshop techniques, plus web guides and techniques, and a handy review section of the best art supplies. It even features articles on everything from nego... You can build your own iPad and Android app at http://presspadapp.com

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

CHRIS SAMNEE

#30SPRING 2015

$8.95 IN THE US

The Professional “How-To” Magazine

on Comics, Cartooning and Animation

THE DAREDEVIL ARTIST ON EVERYONE’S RADAR

BUTCH GUICE

CREATING WINTER WORLD

PLUS! REGULAR COLUMNIST

JERRY ORDWAYAND MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’

1 82658 27764 2

0 1

Page 2: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

DRAW! SPRING 2015 1

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONINGWWW.DRAW-MAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM

SPRING 2015, VOL. 1, #30Editor-in-Chief • Michael ManleyManaging Editor and Designer • Eric Nolen-WeathingtonPublisher • John MorrowLogo Design • John CostanzaFront Cover • Chris SamneeFront Cover Color • Tom ZiukoDRAW! Spring 2015, Vol. 1, No. 30 was pro-duced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing.

Editorial address: DRAW! Magazine, c/o Michael Manley, 430 Spruce Ave., Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614.

DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2015 by their respective contributors. Views expressed here by contributors and interviewees are not necessarily those of Action Planet, Inc., TwoMorrows Publishing, or its editors.

Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing accept no responsibility for unsolicited submissions. All artwork herein is copyright the year of produc-tion, its creator (if work-for-hire, the entity which contracted said artwork); the characters featured in said artwork are trademarks or registered trade-marks of their respective owners; and said artwork or other trademarked material is printed in these pages with the consent of the copyright holder and/or for journalistic, educational, or historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied.

This entire issue is ©2015 Action Planet, Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written per-mission of the copyright holders. ISSN 1932-6882. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3

36

42

72

78

CHRIS SAMNEEEric Nolen-Weathington interviews the artist about cartooning in a photorealism-driven field

RIGHT WAY, WRONG WAY—ORDWAY!From your mind’s eye to the page

BuTCH GuICEWinter has come. Mike Manley interviews the artist about winter soldiers and winter worlds.

COMIC ART BOOTCAMpThis month’s installment:Ear, ye! Ear, ye! Let’s hear it for the ear!

THE CRuSTY CRITICJamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade.This month: A pen nib and a pocket sketchbook

If you’re viewing a DigitalEdition of this publication,PLEASE READ THIS:

This is copyrighted material, NOT intendedfor downloading anywhere except our

website or Apps. If you downloaded it fromanother website or torrent, go ahead andread it, and if you decide to keep it, DO

THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal down-load, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE

IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOTSHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST ITANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publicationsenough to download them, please pay forthem so we can keep producing ones likethis. Our digital editions should ONLY be

downloaded within our Apps and at

www.twomorrows.com

Page 3: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

DRAW! SPRING 2015 3

Chris Samnee knew he was going to be a comic book artist at an age when most kids still dream of being firemen or astronauts. But he hasn’t always held that same

strength of belief and determination in his natural cartooning style. Editorial resistance to his work led him astray for a time, but with the help of the right projects and the right editors, Chris has taken his cartooning to bold new heights. What do editors know anyway?

Chris samnee

A LEAP OF FaiT

interview conducted by Eric Nolen-Weathington

and transcribed byJon Knutson

Daredevil © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Page 4: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

4 DRAW! SPRING 2015

DRAW!: I don’t know if you remember this or not, but I first met you, I think it was 2003, at the Comic-Con International: San Diego. You came up to the TwoMorrows booth with, I don’t know if she was your fiancée at that point or just your girlfriend, and you were surprised I knew your name, because you really hadn’t had much published at that point.CHRIS SAMNEE: Yeah, I was surprised.

DRAW!: You’d worked with Chris Irving, who’d done some work for TwoMorrows, on this little book that I don’t think had even been distributed, Blackbird.CS: I know he printed some himself. I don’t know if they ever went out to anybody besides friends and family, and people that he hand-sold them to. I had a few copies.

DRAW!: I think the idea was to use that comic as kind of a portfolio. Were you doing a lot of that kind of spec work? Whatever you could to get your work out there?CS: I was doing samples all over the place, and I’d kind of gotten to the point where people would look at it and say, “This is good, but we don’t know where we would put you,” and I just kept doing more and more samples. I’d just create my own story that was three or four, five pages.

I met Chris Irving, and we got along really well, and he

was going through pretty much the same thing on the writing side, and we said, “Why don’t we do a few things together?” So, there were a couple of other things we did. I can’t remem-ber what they were.

DRAW!: There was a G.I. Joe blog he had.CS: Oh, yeah, I did some G.I. Joe head sketches that looked like the backs of the old cards. [laughs] You’re really digging deep. Most of that stuff I’ve forgotten.

DRAW!: Well, that was the early days of the Internet being a way to get your work out there. Were you trying to meet people on message boards at that point?CS: I didn’t even have a computer back then. Chris told me about Batman: Dead End [a short fan film] and I was like, “Oh, that sounds awesome. I’d love to see that!” He said, “It’s on the Internet,” and I was like, “Oh, I don’t have a com-puter.” He had to mail me a CD he burned of the video. Oh, man, that makes me feel so old! [laughter]

DRAW!: If you didn’t have Internet access, what were you doing to find these opportunities?CS: I was just beating the bushes. St. Louis had a lot of conventions back in the day, and every time a convention

Thumbnail cover designs and finished

inks for a DCBS exclusive variant

cover for the newly relaunched Amazing

Spider-Man #1.Spider-Man © Marvel

Characters, Inc.

Page 5: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

DRAW! SPRING 2015 13

it.” It was basically Harvey’s slush pile, and they’d say, “Here, make this into a comic strip.” [laughs]

Some of them were just one sheet of paper, but with 24 panels, and Jon would say, “Okay, can you make this into six pages?” “What?!? No!” I didn’t know how! That was jumping into the deep end on trying to do storytelling from bare bones. It was cool. Otherwise I never would’ve gotten to work with Pekar. I mean, I know that we didn’t work hand-in-hand, but I did do his story. I don’t know if he ever saw it.

DRAW!: Your inking with that, you really went into chiar-oscuro mode. What were you looking at to feel your way through that process?CS: I was looking at the later Steranko stuff—the black-and-white stuff he did, Red Tide—and I found a bunch of scans of black-and-white “V for Vendetta” pages. I was really into David Lloyd at the time. All the blown-out line and stuff, that’s mostly from Steranko and David Lloyd.

DRAW!: Yeah, you weren’t doing a solid holding line all the time.CS: I knew it was going to be in black-and-white, so I felt I was free to experi-ment. I was already trying some of that in Capote in Kansas, and I just carried it through into the next few things. All the American Splendor was in black-and-white, I knew Area 10 would be in black-and-white, and I was just trying to get comfortable with inking and trying new things. I was never great at contour lines, I didn’t have a steady enough hand, and when I was trying to teach myself inking on Capote in Kansas, I went simpler and simpler, because I thought the less lines I had to draw, the less chance I would have to screw up. [laughter] I was just trying to make it as simple as possible so there was less of me botching things up.

DRAW!: After that you started getting more work from the big publishers. You did Checkmate, and in 2008, you got work from Marvel for the first time. Were you feeling more comfortable working in the more traditional approach? Did you ever really get to a place where you felt like that was something you could do forever?CS: I did four issues of Queen and Country somewhere in there for Oni, and I remember it was a really, really low rate. It was a per-issue rate, not a

page rate, and my wife and I were crunching the numbers, and we were like, “We could totally survive if I got this every month!” No, we couldn’t. [laughter] That was all I did then, so we could pay our bills in our little apartment. Oh, gosh, I’m thinking back to our tiny little apartment and working for Oni when Oni was a three-man operation.

I don’t know, I’ve always been into mainstream comics, so my style might have been more indie at the time, but that was because I was experimenting and trying to teach myself how to ink. Even after a whole graphic novel or two, I was still trying to find who I was. Area 10 looks totally different to me

Pencils for the cover of Magneto #2.Magneto, Professor Xavier © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Page 6: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

14 DRAW! SPRING 2015

Finished inks for the cover of Magneto #2.Magneto, Professor Xavier © Marvel Characters, Inc.

14 DRAW! SPRING 2015

Page 7: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

30 DRAW! SPRING 2015

DRAW!: Are you looking at maybe doing something creator-owned in the near future? That’s the big thing right now with Image going gangbusters, and all these guys doing their own thing. Do you have any aspirations to strike out on your own?CS: Yeah, I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire. There’re a few things I’d like to do. There’re guys I want to work with, and there’re ideas, too. At some point, I’d like to do some creator-owned work. I mean, I can’t do mainstream superhero comics forever. I feel like at some point I need to own something. I mean, technically, Area 10 is creator-owned, Capote in Kansas is creator-owned; I own half of each of those. So when I’m asked, “When are you going to do creator-owned?” those are creator-owned, they’re just for bigger companies. You know, I’ll get there. It’s a goal, but right now, I’ve got bills to pay, and only so many hours in the day, so the creator-owned stuff is going to take a little while longer to come out, but I am slowly working on some things.

DRAW!: Speaking of hours in the day, how do you divide up your day? I think you said you work in two different shifts.

CS: I do, yes. My girls wake up between 5:30 and 6:00 every morning, so I get up with them, make breakfast, get everybody changed, and try and be out of the house between 9:00 and 10:00. I have a studio in the house I work in at night, and a studio outside of the house that I work at during the day. It’s just office space that I rent.

DRAW!: Is that just to keep your mind free of distrac-tion?CS: A lot of time in my house is downstairs, and with two kids bombing around up there, it’s hard to concen-trate. I mean, somebody’s always screaming about toys, or they’re playing really loud. I can hear every single thing, and it’s just hard to concentrate. I hate to have to leave the house to get work done, but sometimes that’s just how it is. I wish I could be like Allred and be around my family all the time, but I don’t get any work done that way. So yeah, I work from 10:00 to about 5:00, then go home, have dinner with the family, put the girls to bed, have them both in bed by 8:30 or so, and hang out with my wife for a little bit, watch a movie or some-thing, then I go back to work. I’m back down at the table usually from about 10:00 to 2:00, and that’s usually

Samples of Chris’ coloring efforts done in his spare time.Batgirl © DC Comics. Captain America © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Page 8: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

36 DRAW! SPRING 2015

The Right Way, The WRong Way,

and The

oRdWay!CaPTURInG The PICTURe

In The MInd’S eyeby

JeRRy oRdWay

I’ll start out this time with an example that shows how things don’t always go smoothly from layout to finished art.

I had a straightforward assignment, to draw a Batman piece including Commissioner Gordon, as well as the Bat-Signal. I had an idea, and with my eyes closed, could visualize exactly what I wanted to draw. I rarely capture that mind’s eye picture on paper as perfectly as I see it in my head, but I keep trying, year after year, regardless.

I began to sketch out my image at a reduced size, 5½" x 8", on copy paper. I had my Fairburn System book (Set 1, Book 1) open as reference for a trench coat (see right), which Commis-sioner Gordon would be wearing. I could have made it up but wanted the added detail only a photo or the real thing could provide. The Bat-Signal spotlight is in the middle ground, easily cobbled together from various Google images, while the Batman figure is in the background. The story to tell here, since every picture tells a story, is that Batman always has a way of sneak-ing up on Commissioner Gordon!

36 DRAW! SPRING 2015

Page 9: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

DRAW! SPRING 2015 37

In the finished layout (right), now tightened up, I re-worked the Batman pose. I was still not happy with it, but I committed to it because the other ele-ments worked fine. I was ready to start light-box-ing, or tracing the image onto my Strathmore 3-ply Bristol paper.

DRAW! SPRING 2015 37

Page 10: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

DRAW! SPRING 2015 41

The final piece with the addition of a little Pro white paint and razor blade scratching across the projected light of the signal, is finished. I’m a big fan of the effect you get with a razor blade, or an X-Acto knife, but it works best with a fresh blade, and an angle almost parallel to the surface of the paper. You have to do it quickly, and know when to stop, or you’ll have a torn up surface. Practice it on decent paper scraps, over inked in black areas before you try it on a drawing you care about!

DRAW! SPRING 2015 41

Page 11: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

42 DRAW! SPRING 2015

Walking in aWinteRWoRld

Wonderland

butch guice

interview by Mike Manley transcribed by Jon Knutson

From the Microverse to the DC Universe, Acclaim, and now the frozen arctic of WinterWorld, prolific and versatile artist

Jackson “Butch” Guice pulls back the curtain on his process and career.

42 DRAW! SPRING 2015

Page 12: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

DRAW! SPRING 2015 43

DRAW!: You just finished the WinterWorld stuff, right?BuTCH GuICE: Just finished WinterWorld, and currently, the main project is a book called Paradigms, which Nick Spen-cer and I are doing together for Image now. So, that’s coming up, and I’m also doing some work for Valiant, a backup feature in Ninjack of all things.

DRAW!: I’m trying to remember, you worked with them before, right? BG: Yeah, in the Acclaim days. I worked for them for three years or so.

DRAW!: I worked for them for about a year when they did the big relaunch. Were you…? BG: I was with them too, yeah. I was on Eternal Warrior, and then they yanked me off of that and I was all over the place. As people were going to other companies and stuff, I was filling in on Bloodshot, and Turok, and X-O—an issue here, an issue there kind of thing—for about a year toward the end.

DRAW!: Was that hard to jump from character to character if you didn’t necessarily have any feeling for the character? BG: It definitely made it more of a job. It’s hard enough, you

step into the tail end of a storyline, or you just are there for the issue, and you don’t know who half the characters are, so you sort of fall back to—I’m sure you’re well aware—just focusing on the craft of filling in the story, but you just don’t have any inherent emotion involved with it from that standpoint.

DRAW!: Right, I’m kind of doing that right now. I’m doing a miniseries for DC, and I’m drawing the Justice League Inter-national, the Kevin Maguire days version…. BG: Yeah, it’s not like you have this history with the charac-ters. You know how it is: the more you work with the char-acters, if you’re having a pleasant experience, the more you get involved with it, you start getting little personal touches in, and you develop personal characters you actually like drawing and try to make your own, as opposed to doing the standard costume designs of this character or that character. That’s a real gravy for the job, is being able to do something special with it.

DRAW!: Yeah, exactly. Comparing that to when you were working on WinterWorld, and following the miniseries that Jorge Zaffino did, how did that compare to, say, doing an issue of Bloodshot?

Butch’s rough sketch (above) and full pencils (right) for a cover for the recently reformed Valiant.

All characters © Valiant Entertainment, Inc.

Page 13: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

50 DRAW! SPRING 2015

DRAW!: The thing I do remember was that was a bad batch of pages. BG: Yeah, as soon as you put ink on the paper, it bled all over the place. [laughs]

DRAW!: The quality of the paper has really declined, espe-cially in the last four or five years. Are you going to be doing everything in Manga Studio soon? BG: I still do everything, for the most part, on the boards. Sometimes it turns into more of a patch-and-paste job, because if the paper’s bad, or the brush is just not working, sometimes I’ll have to draw it two or three times larger than I

normally would and then shrink it down and paste it back in in Photoshop so it will hold up properly. You’re going for a bunch of thin lines, and stuff, and you just can’t do it on the paper that you’ve got anymore.

DRAW!: What paper are you using now, Strathmore? BG: I’m actually having halfway decent luck with some Tinson Bristol that I bought, the Foundation series. It’s the smooth, and that’s only because I was busy trying to find something. I kept buying pads of paper, and two or three pages in, setting the whole pad aside, because I was so frustrated with trying to do any kind of pen work. You almost are forced

into using Microns and things like that. I’ve bought a lot of that stuff too, and I just don’t have the ability to comfortably make that stuff work with a life to it—the Microns and stuff. I really prefer the dip pens. As a matter of fact, most of the pen points I use, I go on eBay and buy vintage pen points from the ’50s and ’60s, pay extra money for them, but at least I know I’m still getting some good quality material on occasion.

DRAW!: I do the same thing, and I know other guys that do the same thing. Jerry Ordway switched over to using this old fountain pen, because he was having a prob-lem with the 102 and 108 actually tearing up the paper. He’d get a little gob of paper at the end of the nib, so he was using the fountain pen, because that would give him the line, but it wouldn’t tear up the paper, and then he’d go in and use the brush. But Terry Beatty does Rex and The Phantom in Manga Studio. BG: There are a lot of guys using Manga Studio right now, and there’s a whole debate about the future of inking going on as well. I know a lot of people, particularly a lot of people trying to break in, are switching to it, and they’re doing the digital inking thing. Honestly, it would take me the rest of my career to figure it out, to get a comfort level with it. After 30-plus years of doing it on the board, I just would not have the connect to be doing it digitally. The eye-hand coordina-tion just wouldn’t be there. Depending on the paper, depending on the pen point, depend-ing on the brush, your instincts will lead you, because that’s what you’ve done for three decades, going, “Okay, I’ve got to go a little heavier with this. I’ve got to watch that stroke, because the brush keeps wanting to split on me.” [laughs]

DRAW!: What kind of dip pens do you like?

The background for this Captain America pinup was imported digitally, but that’s about as far as Butch will go in his process.

All characters © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Page 14: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

72 DRAW! SPRING 2015

The ear is one of the great defining features of a character or personality.

My mom used to say “little children have big ears” in regard to my ability to sometimes hear things I shouldn’t have been privy to. She also used to say I “heard what I wanted to” in regards to me suddenly being hard of hearing when it came to doing chores and cleaning up my room or piles of loose comic books.

We can see how important the ear was to great illustrators like Norman Rockwell and Albert Dorne in helping to define a character type, as well and other features that were often exag-gerated, like the nose, head shape, hands, and feet to get a great character type.

To the caricaturist, the ear is one of the main features that gets exaggerated to push a likeness.

“The Shadow Artist” (above) and “The Gossips” (right), both by Norman Rockwell. Artwork © respective owner.

The hallmark of a handsome head of a male or female are well-defined and well-placed features, including the placement of the ear in its proper place on the head and in its proper proportion. Too far forward or back, too large or too small, and the head will start veering towards caricature. While this might be true, there are well known actors and actresses who are thought of as beautiful or handsome that do have some features one might term “off model.”

Cary Grant is a perfect example of this. Certainly one of the most handsome and iconic leading men of all time, his features were striking and distinct, including his rather smallish ears in comparison to another rugged leading man, Charlton Heston, or Clark Gable, who was known for having rather large ears.

Page 15: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

DRAW! SPRING 2015 73

ANATOMY OF AN EARThe ear’s anatomy is actually quite com-plicated with many tapering and shell-like segments and cartilage. This is of course all designed to capture sound, and unlike many animals, the human ear is much smaller in proportion to the head, and for most people has little movement, though some are able to “wiggle their ears” via the Auriculares muscles.

The ear perches on the back of the zygo-matic arch. The amount the ear is tilted back (angulation) varies from individual to individual, but the average tilt is about 20º (see the cyan lines on the male and female heads at right).

If we take Clark Gable’s ears (center) and put them on Cary Grant (left), well, it just doesn’t work, does it?Photographs © respective owner(s).

The ear breaks down into four main segments:• Helix• Antihelix• Lobe • Concha or cymba cavity, the deepest depression, which

leads directly to the external auditory canal.

Sometimes the earlobes are attached and sometimes not. This little detail can also be played up to express a type of character and define their personality and look.

Women’s ears tend to be smaller than men’s, and the zygo-matic arch on a female skull is much less pronounced than on a male. Their ears are also more delicate in general. I am stressing this here for the sake of drawing the ideal types of features and relationships. Almost no one has all the ideal features, and no one except identical twins has the same features as anyone else.

HELIX

HELIX CANAL

ANTIHELIX

ANTERIORNOTCH

CONCHA

LOBE

Page 16: DRAW! Comic Books - #30

78 DRAW! SPRING 2015

UNDER REVIEWTWO-FER: OF PEN NIBS & WALLET/SKETCHBOOKS

Welcome back, all and sundry, to the corner between the pages of DRAW! where the Commandant of Col-Erase, El Capitan of Eberhard-Faber, the

person who puts the prestidigitation back in Presto! Correc-tion Pens, returns! It is I, Jamar Nicholas, your Crusty Critic, back again to give you the what-for and why-izzit on art sup-plies, tools tricks, and (unfortunately, as the job entails some-

I’ve missed you all. During my absence I have traveled the world and back—literally, as I got to visit Tokyo last year and will be returning again, about which I will do a Crusty

features reviews of two separate products: one is a blast from the past, the other a signal from the future. Let’s get started, shall we?

THE “CRUSTY CRITIQUE” SYSTEMThese product reviews will be judged under my trusty beret

ESTERBROOK RADIO PEN #914 First off, a tip of the beret to my new friend Brandon McKinney, a collector and history buff of the Esterbrook line of pen nibs

Most cartoonists worth their salt know the legacy of the

the company was sold to a pencil company. Some say that whatever Sparky didn’t use is sitting in a Raiders of the Lost

Peanuts

Arkin the wild.

-don’s Etsy store, where he sells classic stock of Esterbrook nibs, and even though this Crusty Critic doesn’t use nibs in my daily practice, I jumped at the chance to buy these, which were affordable, and worth delving into the great history lesson.

DOES IT WORK?

traits of Schulz, it is a nicely balanced nib, which works a little

HOW MUCH DID IT COST?

toss in some freebie nibs, the transaction highlighted by his personalized labeling in an elegant hand-written script, show-casing the descriptions of the new nibs in my Crusty Clutches which added a great touch of class.

DRAW! #30We focus the radar on Daredevil artist CHRIS SAMNEE (Agents ofAtlas, Batman, Avengers, Captain America) with a how-to inter-view, comics veteran JACKSON GUICE (Captain America, Super-man, Ruse, Thor) talks about his creative process and his new seriesWinter World, columnist JERRY ORDWAY shows his workingprocess, plus more Comic Art Bootcamp by BRET BLEVINS and ed-itor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95(Digital Edition) $3.95

http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1182

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW,CLICK THE LINK TO ORDER THIS

ISSUE IN PRINT OR DIGITAL FORMAT!