Anatomy

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This is the work process that I went through. The initial reference was this:



But as you can see I didn't trace it or follow it too much, actually. I just wanted to reference a real space to avoid specific issues of depth perception that would reduce the effect of feeling like you're actually in the back seat, I didn't want to fake a higher skill level than I actually have.

Generally, tracing an image is in my opinion bad form. However there are exceptions. The next shame image I am going to do is going to be a full-fledged trace of a photograph. I will discuss why it's not alright generally and why exactly I did it when that image is done and on the blog.

Using an image just as visual reference however, is as important as the artist feels it is for the viewer to directly recognize the minutia of a scene as apparent, fitting objects. Had I not used a photo of an actual taxi as reference and just went from imagination, I'd have probably completely forgotten about the voicebox, that is I think even a stronger visual confirmation of 'this is a taxi' than the running meter. However as you can see I wasn't shackled to reality here and I enlarged and simplified the meter and put it in a place where it would contrast white against darkness so as to drive the point home. Hopefully not many viewers has problems realizing this is a taxi, and the character we're going to be following is in the back seat of it.

Here I am trying to diffuse certain problems in the first small shame image where some viewers did not realize the thoughts were coming from a viewer on the street and not the sitting man himself. On the street it's difficult to implicate the viewer simply by having a vantage that befits the normal height of a human being (as I did in small shame part one) because viewers are used to these vantage points in movies all of the time and they certainly not always mean 'you are looking from the first person'. In the taxi situation however, almost all movies and comics and other visual media that employ this shot convey that the protagonist is in the back seat. So here I hope I've been more candid about what I'm going for than in the past image.

On A you can see how I space and sketch things out. Recently I've sorta abandoned working with broader, freehand brushes when setting up a scene. I have come to dislike the ambiguity of where a final line will be when you have a fat thick brush stroke that means 'here is an edge, somewhere'. There are too many potential final lines in a big fat sketch stroke, and it seems to affect my spatial relations between my various objects too much. And perhaps even worse, it seemed I had began to ink with too fat lines on the computer as compared to my hand-inked work to try to follow these ambiguous sketches, which I didn't enjoy. So I've sorta 'devolved' into working with straight, thin but strong lines for setting up a scene.

On B you can see what effect A has, with the two layers overlaid. I made various mistakes about judging the eye level of the driver and position of the steering wheel that I had to fudge around with. I'd prefer if in the future I didn't make these sort of errors, they just waste time and diffuse the clarity of the piece. On other parts of the image the inking remains very close to the sketch version, which is for my intents, a good thing.

On C we have the final inks, before I put on any gray tones. I debated leaving this piece at this level as there was something appealing about the way forms were dictated by smaller or bigger lines according to how close things were and I knew I would only hurt this effect when I laid on the gray tone. However, as you will see two steps below on the final image, there was an emotional effect that I wanted to convey that was worth the damage to the linework.

On D you can see the first layer of tone and grain. Again I could have stopped here but I felt that the scene was lacking a bit of weight and layer clarity so I added more dark grain in specific places to separate the levels. Note that I removed the insignia of the car brand on the steering wheel. I feel that any benefit the work would enjoy by using brands - in that the viewer will immediately feel this is a realer place because they recognize them - is offset unfavorably by propagating the mentality that brands dictate a realer world. They do not, the whole marketing mechanism in fact rests on the assumption that if the buying public (for the term 'people' does not occur in their lingo) integrate brands into their daily lives on the instinctual level they would be more successful in peddling their shit. There is a lot of semiotic dissonance that occurs for every human being that has to suffer through this process just in daily life, getting from place A to place B while under constant attack by brands and I'd rather not encourage it further, even if it hurts the realism of my work somewhat. The merit of the work will survive and I'll sleep better.

On E, the final image, the emotional effect I had to add is now hopefully apparent. The white glow of a beautiful day is bleeding through the edges of the glass, onto the spectral speech bubble of the driver. I can't exactly explain why this effect was so important but it came to me about midway when working on the inks and it really felt important to include. A strong separation between outside (bright beautiful and promising) and the guilt-ridden thoughts in the inside, conveyed in black and grain, the apologia of the letters in startling contrast, sharp against the forgiving blur.

One fear I have about the final image is that I might have described the car just a bit too much and instead of functioning on the emotional level the image looks a bit like a car commercial. That's ironic given my rant about branding, but I couldn't think of a different way to convey this shame without very very clearly showing a taxi in naturalist detail.

Also, I forgot to add arm hair to the taxi driver. That's probably a bigger hit on the intended realism than anything else.

-Helm
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Small Shames, part the second

When I showed this to my friend Graham Lackey last night he said "I like that these small shames are so small, because they are perfectly relatable, and perhaps seeing a small thing like this given time and care in art airs it in a useful way."

The single-panel page is the perfect format for an examination of a single moment, because its timespan is negotiable. Like a nagging memory that keeps coming back to you in inopportune moments, its importance and interaction with the whole only as severe as your subconsciousness demands. Small shames aren't small because we hide them under the carpet, where they accumulate to something bigger. Their denominator is the same. The phantasmal perfect lives of the perfect people we like to use as an excuse do not exist. Even worse, we like to extrapolate from the comfortable "dude what are you bitching about, there's children dying in the third world and you're worried you ignored a taxi driver?" because against that Spectacular misery ours seems farcical. Then we go on to loathe ourselves for feeling self-loathing.

-Helm


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Small Shames, part the first

This is new. There will probably be a catalogue of similar pictures for the next few weeks.

I have talked before of how I am resolved to rid myself of my social shames and apprehensions. I am trying, but often I find myself failing. I am keeping a recollection of when this happens. What I want to avoid is that familiar effect where you do (or do not do, more often) something and that makes you feel shame, but as time passes you rationalize it and end up finding some lame reason for what you did, you feel at peace with it. I make these now and I make them as well as I can so I will not have this opportunity to ever lie to myself.

When I have a number of them I will have them silk-printed stickers and place them in the heart of what has made me feel these shames in the first place: downtown Athens. It has taught me to hate and fear other people and this will be one thing I can do to have a bit of a proactive revenge. The ultimate goal of such endeavors is to act rightly in the moment and not to just make stupid art after it, though. Self-coaching. I will let you know of how that goes.

Keep reading

-Helm

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Thinking

Here's a really old one.

Status update soon.

-Helm
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Psychocartography

Mandatory check after the jump this time, friends.



Some creative zooming might be required to achieve both a holistic view of this page and its individual parts.

Unlike the spread posted below, this more recent pile of secrets still hurts. Revisiting this in detail to re-letter it reminded me of the acute psychological condition I was in when it was made. There is a honor in remembering it seems but there also is a sadness. Perhaps a couple of years from now the emotions that fed this will be crystallized more into a picture and less into a mirror.

With this page, my backlog has all but been depleted (there's like 3-4 pages I didn't deem good enough to post and a 18-page 24hr comic which I'm not terribly fond of either). This means I have achieved what I set out to do with this blog initially, which is to give a permanent digital home to work that I felt had been perhaps misrepresented in initial publication (this is a fancy way of saying that nobody that would want to see most of these would be able to where they were published).

This blog as an experiment has been very successful. The communication with you readers reinstilled a degree of self-confidence in me and I even put out the Asides Bsides book on that strength. I thank you sincerely for this. Even if we were to be done now, I would still rank this whole endeavour as probably the most important thing I've attempted in the past couple of years.

As I do not want this to be done though, I think it's time for to consider further options. Naturally it is impossible to keep the rate of posting I have on this blog now the well has run dry. I am currently - albeit slowly - making some more short comics. I have at least 3 4-5 page stories I need to tell in this period and I am assembling material for them at a discrete pace (you may detect from how I write here that there is a chance that I might abandon making comics after that. This isn't because I seriously think there will ever come a time when I throw the towel, more that I find it psychologically supportive to think of a future without any hardcoded certainties). The initial plan B was that when I would be done with my past work I would continue to post my new pages as they appear, here. I intend to do so, but I urge readers to not expect updates in the usual rate of once every 3-4 days anymore, as comics take a long time to be made. (Actually, comics can be made quite faster if I were employed to make them, but seeing how I am not, my own conscience sets the pace). I say this because it seems there's about 50 people visiting every day... take the bookmark from your daily folder and put it in your bi-monthly folder, please :)

I put the question to you, kind readers and humans, on the material of future posts. Should I post only when a page is completely and utterly done, or would you also be interested in work-in-progress (along with a hefty amount of comic-theory-ramblings) posts that might make less sense/spoil the end result ? Naturally if I can post WIP-stage work it means I will post more often (while still not at the past pace) but at the expense of the novelty of a finished page.

Also, on the strength of positive reception both here on the blog and for the book I recently put out, I am thinking I want to work making comics as a professional again. I think the Greek market cannot provide for me even barely reasonable compensation for the sort of work I do (at least not through the current channels) so it might be the time that I should start looking for opportunities to be published abroad. How exactly to do this, I am not certain. Any ideas are welcome. I suspect the first thing to do would be to make a bio / portfolio section on this blog with some standout pieces from the archives here and a few words on who I am and what I am willing to do to survive. This only makes sense because I don't expect an editor stumbling on this page to have the time to read the whole blog to tell what I can do, and seeing how I don't post my most recent work on the top of the blog they might be confused further. I'll do this soon.

If it were up to you, which pieces (let's say up to 4 stories) from those on this blog would you select for such a purpose?

Ah, well. I'm feeling a bit sad now. Was it really just 6 months with this blog? It felt longer, it felt busier. Felt like I had more purpose than usual. I'll try to go with this feeling.

- Helm
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Secrets

This came to be about 6 years ago. Here is the relevant background information:

After failing at high-school and repeating my final year, I had to make some choices as to what I wanted to do with myself. Especially now being, what they told me was, an adult. My father was gracious to provide for my going to a private higher learning school to study comic, cartoon & animation, which at the timed seemed pretty much the only thing I would be interested in doing. It was either that or English literature & philosophy, for which with my certain... academic discontent, I certainly would never made the grades for, or some sort of music school. I didn't look into the particulars of the last option because I felt ill-equipped for it at the time, a hunch that probably saved me a lot of frustration.

Anyway, I did go to comic school and the whole experience was mixed. What was not but instead completely wonderful was that I met the wonderful people with whom I put out the Free Your Line fanzine later on. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I belonged to a friendly peer group. This comic was my first serious stab at the medium. It was published in the first issue of Free Your Line. Before this, I read a lot of comics but I didn't actively try to make them, I was one of those kids that just 'drew pretty good'.

At the time I didn't need so much to communicate through the art forms I practiced as I needed to express certain inward movemets. The form of this comic in fact directly follows several personal resolutions I had arrived to to frame my music about the same time. The main premise was a complete abandonment of the common methods of communication and instead a complete focus on self-expression for the purpose private reflection. I make it sound fancy but I think the impulse towards this sort of artistry is a very common one in teen-aged creative but introverted people. At the time, having no education on the history of aesthetics and therefore no clue on how often this theme repeats, I felt what I was doing was novel. It is useful perhaps to say that whereas I have since then gradually but surely taken my comic-making towards traditional storytelling, my music remains very much based on those premises and is really never to change.

Effectively my early music along with my early comic work such as this served as psychoanalysis. I was at the time very maudlin over several issues which I felt I could not discuss with anyone. So I created a monument of secrets both through music and this sort of comic work and I let it reflect on me. There is a very interesting vantage that one can create this way. Art longs for Arete, as the ancient Greeks would say. When one creates art they are expressing an infinitely capacious version of themselves, one not shackled by the psychological ills that might torture them in their life, one that is perfect. And to have this perfect form speak to you is an eventful process. Depending on how this art reflects on the artist I believe it can push him towards greater despair, or the opposite, guide him out of it. I was fortunate in that both music and early comic work lead towards the latter.

I was not interested in publicizing this work and only did it at the time because of two fake reasons and a real one. The first fake one was that my close peers at comic school were impressed and wanted the comics to go in the fanzine. The other was that I opined that even on an academic level "art which doesn't seek to communicate" should be exhibited so as to make it known that such art might exist. Hiding under this bullshit the real reason was that I felt an almost illicit thrill at the idea that something so completely incomprehensible to outsiders, yet so deeply meaningful to me could be read by hundreds of people. This feeling did not come from a sadism I think, towards the reader. It came from the ever-slight possibility that they could somehow peer behind the curtain and notice the real emotion that was in the heart of all of this. It was after all, an attempt at communication.

At the time I rejected the few chances I had to explain anything about this comic and others I made like it. In fact when an acquaintance told me that she found the comic very 'poetic' I expressed a violent distaste and throttled any further attempt at what I felt was an easy and comfortable reading of my work with the harsh tone that belonged to a very anxious and troubled past version of me. I regret that sort of thing because I realize now that most of what this comic is about is plain and evident, if not in plot then certainly in universal emotion to anyone that has ever lost someone, has been unloved and is very anxious for their life to truly begin. Those are the emotions that fueled this comic and it took me a few years to realize that it is not in any fundamental way different from any other comic I had since made, even when I moved towards less capricious forms of storytelling. I am always surprised when people tell me it means something to them though, not so much because I think that is impossible but more because I always thought it would take more effort to get to the bottom of it. I guess it doesn't, I guess the many secrets I put into this to exorcise them, are visible to the kind-hearted.


Most artists are very embarrassed about their early steps. I don't feel that way about this, I like it a lot still. It has helped me with a difficult time and as an artifact of perseverance, I can show it to you.

-Helm
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Midnight Comes, Midnight Goes

This is old, one of my first 'serious comics' actually. First printed in Free Your Line #2, revisited and remade from two pages into one (I much prefer it like this) in late 2006. The theme is similar to the comic I posted below this. The color here is mostly done by hand with ecoline paints. I enjoy coloring by hand more than on the computer and I always mean to return and paint more but I never find the motivation for it.

After this, we shall go even further back in time.


-Helm

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