On The Schedule.

Last Monday was an important day, as Mondays tend to be. It's all about building up that momentum that will (hopefully) carry me through the week. An important day, made even more so because I was starting the next issue of CHEW, the first of a new story arc and the first chapter of the second third of the book's life. It was crucial that I start the week off on the right foot. So on Sunday I mentally prepared for the work day, psyching myself up. Off to bed early, planning to wake around 5:45am and begin the kickassery that surely awaited me when I woke.

Monday's Goal: Layout, pencil, ink and scan Page 1. And pencil (and maybe ink) the cover of the second CHEW Omnivore Edition.

Cut to Monday morning. My wife is down with severe neck pain from God knows what, bleary-eyed from sitting up with our 7-month-old, who has the shits from a mild food allergy. Apparently, he's lactose intolerant, as I am. He's okay, but CRANKY.

So work had to wait. As it does whenever Life kicks The Schedule in the crotch. You see, Life, REAL Life, hates The Schedule. Mine, at least. It's always throwing things in the spokes of my plan. Someone gets sick. Someone dies. An impromptu trip pops up. Someone gets a flat tire and needs a ride. And it tends to be right when I'm getting into the flow of things. Never fails.

So, after taking care of things on the home front, I arrived at the studio 5 hours late. Half of my workday GONE, just like that. GAH. I don't know if other artists experience this, but there can come a point when a blank page can be a bully. For me, my blank pages remind me of time I wasted and of potential unrealized. Fortunately, yesterday was one of the good days. I tore past the doubt and anxiety and got to work.

Five or six hours later, I'd produced the work you (partially) see above.

Actual Work Completed: Page 1 penciled and partially inked. Omnivore Cover penciled.

So I fell short of what I wanted. Sucks, but it happens. Didn't finish the inks on either piece, and I still have to make up the time later. Maybe on a weekend or a late night. Bummer. Still, I left the studio at a reasonable hour, happy with the work and energized.

As I said, Monday was one of the Good days, despite the small bear trap that Life set in my path to achieving the day's goal. I've had many, many bad ones. Days where NOTHING went right. Days where I sat at my desk, fought with a page for hours, then tore it to shreds. Days when I forgot how to draw. Horrible, horrible days.

It happens. All you can do is keep rolling with it, suck it up and work the extra hour later. That's how it is for me, anyway.

A week later, I'm still cranking, and still a few hours behind where I want to be. But what else is new? Below is the above cover, still in progress, but getting closer.




-Rob

On Style.

"How'd you come up with your style?"

I get this question more than anything else. And it's funny because my "style" was a pretty big hindrance to my career up till about 4 or 5 years ago. Don't get me wrong, I got work. But getting editors to really invest in me fully used to be pretty friggin hard. I just figured it was all me. "I must not be good enough." So it's really odd when young artists wanna know how I developed the look of my work.

Of course, I don't have a set formula for this stuff, really. And I certainly don't have the secret to becoming a great artist. It works different for everyone, I think. As it should. I think the key is finding the place where you're most comfortable. And by "place", I mean a visual vocabulary. For me, I'm most at home in a place that's bright, silly and manic with just a hint of darkness under the surface. Unfortunately, it took me something like 10 years to find it. Sorry. There are no shortcuts.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we?



Circa 1991, my first official mini-comic. I was 9 at the time, and I ended up doing dozens of these between then and high school. No focus on "style" or anything. Hell, the thing was done in Bic pen on pink construction paper. Not much to discuss here, really. I just loved comics even then, and my motives for making it were pure. I just wanted to entertain the few friends I let read it. I may even revamp this later, so don't steal it.





Jump to around 10 years later, 2000-ish. A young Rob was just starting college as a Computer Animation major (because how the Hell does one just become a pro comic artist anyway?). I was still dabbling in comics between classes, still trying to draw "serious" comics that "mattered". I'd always been a Marvel kid, and stylistically, I'd always tried to attempt that look.

Except for the fact that I totally sucked at it, as the above images show. This was about the time I was discovering Photoshop (Ooooh, lookit the colors!). I had a decent grasp of what color grabbed the eye, but still had no friggin idea what to do with the program.



Cut to 2001, the above page changed the course of my career, and I suppose, my life. I did this autobiographical comic on a whim, just trying something different. Angsty, right? OH, it gets much, much worse.

I sent this page to an old artist friend of mine along with the page above it (the one with the fire). I think I even did both in the same day. Anyway, I sent them to this older, wiser artist pal, expecting him to tell me how friggin AWESOME the angsty "serious" stuff was. But what'd he say?

"Hey, what was that other thing you sent me? That cartoony thing? That was great. I think that might be your style."

"Really?", I thought. How could he like that page? It was just me messing around. I didn't even break too much of a sweat on the damn thing.

But being the glutton for affirmation that I am, I pursued it, deciding to try a stripped down, elastic style to learn the finer points of storytelling. After all, I sucked at drawing backgrounds. And I hadn't done a whole lot in the way of composing a page. If I wasn't focusing on "the cool shit" (like drawing veins and abs that showed THROUGH clothing), maybe I could learn these rudimentary comicbook principles that had eluded me. What a concept.





Cut to 2002. Simple style, it was. Not a lot of frills, but I was learning. Also, I was pumping out art by the assload. I didn't even remember half of this stuff existed until I found it today. A lot of these were failures, but I still see seeds of things that I still draw from today. Most of my vocabulary for character expression came from this period. Learned a lot about color, too.



More 2002. Young Rob was full of angst, hormones, philosophy and loneliness. I'm posting this because it shows some pretty neat experimentation with transition, storytelling and page layout. Also, I was getting better with Photoshop.





2003. I was doing a weekly strip for my college paper, getting the hang of this nifty simple look. As I got the visual language down, I started experimenting with texture, adding more detail to the art and testing Photoshop's capabilities.

All autobiographical, by the way. The bottom one was a cathartic documentary of how I was let go from my job at Office Depot. Upon seeing the strip in print, my old manager sent a letter of warning to the University's Dean. I stand by my decision, since the rival Office Depot found it hilariously accurate.



2004. This shows nothing, other than I still had a hell of a sense of humor.





More 2004. Slowly adding more and more detail. I was getting confident with the simpler style. I was learning a lot about Photoshop, too.








Now 2005-2006 was weird. I'd gotten the rules of the simpler style down, so what'd I do? I started breaking them. I started bending things that shouldn't be bent, twisting shit around, and I loved it. Another really important time for my development. Also started working on line quality and inking after Erik Larsen thumped me during a critique for having shitty line variation. He probably wouldn't even remember it.




2006-2008 was a blur. Having graduated from college, I basically got a real job and barely drew for a good year and a half. Yep. I just stepped away from it and paid some bills. Here are a few pieces I came up with for various projects once I decided to return to comics. By this point, I knew how to navigate a comic page pretty well.




2008-NOW. You know how this story ends.

Anyway, I'm hoping this can be somewhat encouraging to up-and-coming artists unsure of their direction. Everyone has a beginning. Ya just gotta keep pushing. Not everything will be beautiful, (as this post shows, I think) but even the bad stuff is ultimately redeemed by what you learn from it in your new work. So make some ugly-ass art, dreaming of the day when it'll be beautiful.

And you suckas better appreciate me embarrassing myself, just to make your asses feel better...

Best,
Rob!

Pill.

Panel from HERO Comics 2011 Charity Book. Out Today!

-Rob

Peek.

Panel from CHEW 20.

Yep.

My wall of Awesome. And Voltron protects them all.

For those who haven't heard, CHEW won the 2011 Eisner for Best Continuing Series last weekend. And that's pretty stinkin' awesome. Thanks to all you fans, creators and retailers that made this possible. You guys are awesome.

And YES, I know the blog's been pretty damn barren as of late. What can I say? Between having a kid and keeping an (almost) monthly comic schedule, things have been busy. A lot's happened in the last year, and I've sucked at covering all of it. So I've dedicated myself to posting more regularly from here on. Seriously this time. SERIOUSLY.

See ya tomorrow. (seriously).
-Rob!

Process Junkie: Coloring CHEW.

Alright, due to the positive response of my inking process post, I've decided to go forth with this short tutorial, outlining a bit of how I digitally color CHEW.

First, a Disclaimer. I am not a "Tech" guy. I have had several conversations with professional comic colorists, and they pretty much always degrade into me staring blankly at them while they talk about Photoshop Channels or whatever other crap that I have no idea how to use properly. Look, I took ONE Photoshop class in college, and it taught me NOTHING. What I've learned over the past decade of using the program is a cobbled-together mess of "Things I need to know to achieve the look I want." Truthfully, I have scratched just the surface of Photoshop's power, and I know how to do one or two things in it well. But I've dedicated my life to exploiting those one or two things until the day I die.

Step 1: Scanning!


First up, I scan in the finished inks at 1200dpi in B&W Lineart mode. It's crisp and the red graphite I pencil in doesn't show up on the scans. I use studiomate Kody Chamberlain's Epson 15000 scanner, and it's got the best scans I've ever seen. From there, I convert it to GreyScale mode, then CMYK mode, then drop the resolution to 600dpi. I drop the lineart into a pre-made template, then size it down to about 6.875 x 10.187. From there, I'm ready to go.

Step 2: Rough Shadows!


Next up, I'll roughly draw the shadows for the page. This is mostly an informative step, since I have a color assistant, S. Steven Struble to fill in color separations and clean up shadow work according to my guides. Also, I do this because I am ANAL. Several comic friends rib me for not just contracting all my color work away, but hey, doing it myself makes the finished product that much more rewarding to me. Maybe one day, after I have sufficiently worked myself to death, I'll stop coloring.

Anyway, below is the "rough shadow" layer without lineart.


Step 3: Separations!


Thank God for my color assistant, because I hate this stage. Struble goes into the lineart, and basically lays out the foundation that I will be building the rest of the color on top of. For major characters, he works from color guides I provide him with. For everything else, I generally just let him do whatever and change the color choices when I get around to it. Struble's contribution has been totally invaluable to the book's workflow, and we could never keep it coming out at this pace without him.

Step 4: Shadows!


Next, I drop Struble's flats into the lineart. I tweak the color choices, generally leaning toward more subtle colors. Then, I tweak the rough shadows, adding a darker shadow layer for extra depth. It's mostly detail work, really.

Also, I brush over some of the black lineart, turning it into color, for more depth and a fun touch. Note the green bubbles floating around Drunken Colby, as well as the backgrounds in Panels 2-3. Turning the background lineart a different color is an easy way to separate background from foreground. Easy, but I like it.

Step 5: Harmony!


An easy step. I drop in a couple Photoshop filters for color harmony. Generally, I have one Color Layer at low opacity and a Burn layer just to darken things a bit.

Step 6: Gradients!


Another shadow and lighting step. Using the digital airbrush I add gradual lights and darks. One Multiply layer for darks. One Overlay layer for lights.

Step 7: Highlights and Texture!


I drop in a texture layer in Multiply, just for a nice non-uniform feel. I have a crapload of textures, everything from sidewalk cracks to grease stains. All totally invaluable. Again, I lean on the side of using them in a subtle fashion.

Plus, I draw in the Highlights in an Overlay layer. Two depths of lighting: A bright white for brightest points, a grayer white for not-so-bright spots. Again, gives the feeling of a nice depth that probably only I can appreciate. Did I mention that I'm ANAL?

Step 8: Vivid Glow and Effects!


Last step. This is literally polishing the page. I drop in a Vivid Glow onto Panel 1, just to simulate the sunny day feeling I'm wanting. Plus, I also airbrush in some Vivid highlights onto the windows, metallic substances, etc... Just a little extra something. I drop in a red color layer over Colby's red eye, just for a nice glow. Plus, I drop in a Zip dot texture into the background of Panels 4-5, just to busy the space a bit more. From there, I save the file as a Tiff at 600dpi, and I'm done!

And FYI, in the end I generally have no more than 20 Photoshop layers for a standard page.

Here's hoping this wasn't too mind-numbing and at least partially informative. My best advice: Just experiment. Try some stuff and see what you come up with. There's no better substitute for getting your hands dirty.

-Rob