The artist deliberates

Reader and friend JesusGun said:

What if Nietzsche, except of philoshoper, was an artist too, and would have done a self-portrait? How would this self-portrait would be like?

Do I ink or do I let it be?


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Iphigenia's Sacrifice

This is the final image. I hope Casey likes it and if they want it they can leave me a message. If somebody else wants it, they can leave me a message too. Simple like that, sometimes.

I'll probably forego inking the ZX dragon one, I'd rather get to the second round of ideas. That'll be monday.

I killed two markers to get this one done, I must go and buy new equipment!
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If you wonder why I ink

Work in progress, of course. Click for bigger.

I get a real zen effect from inking, especially over tight pencils that don't leave much to improvisation. There's still artistic choices to make but they're few and far apart, mostly it's minute decisions about how to represent a texture or a surface and most of that's down to practice and subconscious whim. I can let my mind wonder and sort stuff out (and there's been some stuff to sort out the past week) while my hands keep active. It's good therapy. I've missed inking by hand.


I won't be erasing the pencil work beneath this after I'm done inking. It's very rarely that I let both hang together but for this piece I think it'll suit it. Usually I prefer to clean erase the final inks so that I can look at my professional and sharply inked result and pat myself on the back. But as I said there's been stuff I had to sort out in my mind the last few days and I think it's fitting that I let everything show this time. Art should reflect the emotional context around its creation. A sacrifice's not exactly something to be neat about anyway, right?

Look at the marble stone surface, that textural embellishment, one could say, is meaningless and for a comic artist that must give priority to storytelling structure and composition foremost, perhaps even superfluous (as it it might distract the eye from the relevant action). Resting in an uneasy place between fine art pretension and nitty-gritty comic craftsmanship, that sort of inking flourish has come to define my approach. It's a representation of my inner workings I suspect, every time I try to simplify my linework I feel empty inside. Every time I try to go the extra step and do proper chiaroscuro I feel inadequate and as if I'll never finish a single drawing, ever. Sometimes friends and readers comment on all the little crosshatching stuff that's going on in my drawings and remark to the effect that they'd never have the patience to do that themselves. At those times all I can think about is some other people I'm aware of who do more with simple black and white than I could ever hope to. There's degrees of patience, guys.

Some people are blessed with great determination. I've met artists who have been honing their draftsmanship with the drive of a single-cell organism. For as long as they remember being alive, they've been drawing. There's seventeen year olds on deviantart that can represent reality in their drawings ten times better than I ever could hope to. Going around on the internet browsing fine art sites is a humbling experience for most people hovering in that middle space between confident abstraction and full-on rendering mastery.

Comic artists often excuse their shortcomings by saying they focus on storytelling and/or characterization and perhaps that's true some of the time. For me, if I were to be frank, I never had the patience to be a fine artist. I've never spent more than twenty hours on a single piece of art (more like ten hours on average) and I can't see myself changing in the future. I didn't choose comics as a medium because they serve my strengths, comics chose me because it's the only thing I was capable of doing with my talents, peculiarities and temperament.

Sure, I can spend a year making a comic (I just did. It took about 900 hours of work, that's about three solid hours of drawing per day) but it's a variable loop: Idea, rough pencils, tighter pencils, inking, lettering, attachment to the storyline, go at the beginning and repeat until done. It suits me because I'm never stuck doing the exact same thing for longer than 10 hours or so. I record music in the same way, I'll compose rough segments, put down some guitar tracks, then do some drum sequencing, then some orchestration and keyboard work, then some guitars again, then some vocals, then add or change a compositional part, then pester other members to do their vocals or bass lines or whatnot, it's never a grind.

As I grow older and thankfully advance in my effort to accept myself for what I am, I'm more and more okay with that I'll never be a real fine artist and that I'll need to keep rotating my efforts in my various areas of interest if I want to get things done. I'm frankly not exactly sure how that'll pan out in my professional life, but at least in my own head I feel more and more comfortable being a jack of all trades and master of none. Society constantly pressures for specialization. An artist I knew once said 'specialization is for ants'. Perhaps that's too harsh but I'll take from that that specialization doesn't have to be for everyone.

What do you do, reader? How does it reflect on your attention span? Does it fulfill your desires or have you come to terms it never will completely? Do you spend more than ten hours a day toiling at a particular thing regularly? How's that like? Which are the zen aspects of your craft or work and which are the brain-hurty ones?
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You told me what to draw!

And I drew it.

The two ideas are "I request an alternate cover to ZX, in the style of pulpy fantasy novel covers and Frazetta in general, wherein ZX is battling a dragon." by Mr. Sterling and "Iphigenia being sacrificed" by Casey.

Click and click again for bigger and better.

These are just pencils though, you have to decide which of the two I should ink this week!

Also! Also! Please, kind readers, do not read too much into the selection of the first two comments for drawing. It will not be a recurring effect. I kinda started the ZX dragon one the moment I got my first comment because I was scared that I wouldn't get any more and then the Iphigenia idea was too good to pass up so I started that the day after. Next time I'll be more patient.

But you people kept posting wonderful ideas and I kinda want to draw them all. So! I will (kinda). I'll do pencil sketches, at least, for a couple of more ideas from your first suggestion thread. Then, when we have the second suggestion thread, I'll get results from that and pencil more and post all the penciled ideas together to choose which one to ink. The idea is to make a repository of pencil sketches so there's always more to ink if I feel like it and I'm never out of wonderful reader-submitted ideas.

So, make your choice for this week, if you have further ideas-for-pencil-sketches, never hesitate. I keep a little notebook with the best ones, I won't forget.

It was refreshing to do more labored pencil work, I must say. It's been a while. Doing the ZX pencils was completely different to this because there was practically no shading, just contours and space definition. I did all the shading in the inks, digitally, but here I can't afford to mess around I'll need to know where my lights are well before I put ink to paper, there's no undo.

For the Iphigenia picture, I tried to capture her self-sacrifice, the reticence of the priest and the stoic resolution of her father, Agamemnon, in the distance.

For the ZX versus the dragon picture I was mainly going for a good composition and trying to think where I'll put the pulp-fantasy wordage in the top left corner. The unfinished pencil parts in the background is just cloud shapes that I was pretty certain I could do straight in ink.





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This summer you get to tell me what to draw.

Have you ever seen some arrogant artist work and thought "Well. . . that's nice, I wonder what'd come of it if I were telling him what to draw, though." ? Well, here's your chance.

For the past year I made a comic that was and is intensely personal to me. I didn't rely on much external direction. I knew why I was doing what I was doing and I carried my plan to completion. The book will be published eventually and I won't have to worry about it anymore. That chapter is then, done.

But during this process I've felt that the communicational and inter-personal aspect of craft (and not art) making was neglected and that aspect was and I intend it to still be, a large part of this blog. I did my thing up in my wizard tower (more like my small bedroom but you get my point) and the rest of the world turned. Now I want to engage with you readers in more of a dialogue.

What I am going to do is open the forum for suggestions. I want to get back to inking by hand this summer just to keep my chops up so I want to produce one large-scale a4 black and white drawing each week. I do not want to start another ambitious project, so this is my vacation. You get to make suggestions in the comments of what you'd like to see drawn and if they strike me as evocative, I'll take them on. I'll be posting progress reports (pencil work, then preliminary ink work, then finalized inks) during this time and I'll be taking suggestions and feedback and discussing my progress with the instigator (and everyone else) as I go (to the degree that there is interest, of course). I'll do this for the next 3 months, - actual vacation time excluded, of course.

Below the jump are format for idea suggestions and assorted notes for how it'll work.


1. Suggestions can be as impressionistic or descriptive as you want. From 'the feeling one gets after a great time with friends, as one sees them get in their car and go, leaving one alone' to 'a kick-ass dragon eating villagers' to 'a peculiarly sinister telephone' to 'the loneliest tree'. Write me an one-liner, write me a paragraph, write me a book, whatever you want.

2. You may supply as many ideas as you want but,

3. I can only work on one idea a week (unless the piece is small in which case we'll start again mid-week). If I didn't pick yours it's either because it didn't resonate or because something else came along that did more so. Feel free to repost it next week but don't take offense if I don't explain why I didn't pick your idea.

4. The image must be self-contained. Though implicit storytelling is not just allowed but recommended, no sequential stuff, i.e. I won't draw your comic :P

5. The end result will be posted here. If you want a print-friendly version you may ask for it and I'll e-mail you a sizable, well-adjusted scan of the picture for you to print out. If you're feeling generous you may tip me as you wish.

If you want the actual original piece of paper you could pay-pal me the shipping costs plus any small patronage you desire and I'll mail it to you. If the instigator of the idea doesn't want the image, anyone else may request it.

6. As I hope is clear by the above, there are no strings attached. The one with the idea owes me nothing and I owe them nothing in return. I might take you up on your idea, I might not. You might like what I come up with, you might not. You could request the finished piece but you could not. This is just a community-building endeavor, not a professional partnership of any type.


So, here we go. Post ideas in the comment-space. If you know a friend that would enjoy telling an artist what to draw, inform them of this little experiment.
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Futurity and Human Depressions

Click on image (or here) to time-travel to a Primitive Future.



In the case you like looking at lines up-close click here.

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SotC fanart finished :: You can buy it if you like

The size is A4 (21 x 29.7 cm or 8.27 x 11.69 inches), it's inked on the paper with a 0.1 pigment marker (it was enjoyable to return to non-digital inking for it). It has a blemish on the top left part which has been whited out (you can thank black thing stepping on it with his dirty pawsies for that). If you buy it I can write a dedication on it besides my signature. The reciever's parcel will include the original and a level-corrected photocopy. The price for it is What Though Wilt + Postal Expenses. Reader Sergio below wills 5 dollars+postal and to him it shall go in the case of no further interest. The reader and friend little percussionist derrida retorts with a striking left hook of 10 euros. Sergio strikes back with a savage one-two of 11 euros! Man, being a human e-bay is kinda fun. Sergio, little percussionist derrida throws the glove at you (isn't it a little late for that?) by exclaiming "we shan't go 1 euro to 1 euro here, I bid 15!". Oh these post-modernists!

I'll close the 'auction' as it were in a couple of days. Closed and sold :)

It's a beautiful day today outside in Greece.

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