JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

Here are some MORE exploratory sketches from my BABES in SPACE story, starring Nauti Girl.

These are some sketches from when I was trying to figure out what Rocket Rabbit looks like. They must be from around 10 years ago. I have some even earlier doodles some place but I can’t lay my hands on them at present. I will post them when they turn up.

Here are some exploratory sketches I did for my short story in the Babes In Space anthology a few years back. These space-faring giantesses were adversaries for Sephilina the Nauti-Girl (AKA: Squid Girl). As I mentioned earlier, I usually spend too much time doing sketches thumbnails, and not enough time actually making finished product and this situation was certainly typical. I have pages and pages of sketches of these gals. I will post the rest later.

When I am doodling away on my self-published comics, I can really disappear up my own creative tail-pipe on the preparations sometimes. I may spend days and days designing a character who only appears in one or two panels, drawing pages and pages of thumbnail sketches, and spending hours and hours thinking up names and back-stories and all that stuff…. none of which shows up in the final book.

Case in point, an airborne adversary for Rocket Rabbit, THRUST MONKEY. He’s a jet-pack powered bad-guy who, by the way, rolls (and flies) with JUMP CHIMP (posted earlier) a rocket-boot sporting fellow flying simian, both of whom are members of the APES OF WRATH, a freelance co-op of hairy marauders, each of whom got way more pencil mileage than was really required.

But on the other hand, playing around with all this stuff is the fun part of doing personal projects. And I get to post the left-overs in my blog.

My WonderCon sales were low this year. As to the socialising, I went to a “costume party” where about 6 people out of 200 actually wore costumes (Rhode and I being 2 of them). So the fun I had at this year’s WonderCon came mostly in making a new book.

Nothing but fun in the Abismo/Nerve Bomb booth!

After spending years using a fiddly time-consuming process on writing, thumb-nailing and inking my self-published comics, I have recently been looking for a looser, faster style. In order to find it, I have been trying to make MINI comics in a few days as opposed to months as has been the case before. The fast turn-around is in order to stop myself from noodling but I have a hard time keeping drawings clean, clear and appealing when working loosely. I haven’t yet found the style I am looking for, but I am liking the exploration.

I first tried this new approach last year when a professional project ended earlier than expected and I had two weeks worth of extra time before COMIC CON 2007. I decided to make a mini-comic, and in order to do that book quickly, I resolved to work about as loosely as I would normally do my professional story-boards, only draw one panel per page, have proportionally more text and no word-balloons. This removed a lot of the fiddly parts of comic-book layouts and the end result felt like a tiny picture book (at 5.25 inches wide and 3.5 inches tall). A lot of the drawing was very rough, yet I found the whole experience very satisfying. Best of all, I managed to get a 36 page comic book done in just under two weeks, a story about the little dog I got when I was 7 years old entitled, JOCK.

Drawing comics on the first day of WonderCon

More recently, I decided to make a comic even faster, in a 3-day weekend. This was partly Inspired by some 24 hour comics that I saw done by Benton Jew and Anson Jew. Rather than working 24 hours in a row, I would work an 8 hour day for 3 consecutive days on the President’s Day long-weekend. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to come up with anything I liked in the 3 days that I had set aside. I had a lot of variations on a few ideas but could not figure out which idea I wanted to do. So at the end of the weekend, I abandoned the notion of having something new done in time for WonderCon, which was less than a week away.

Then, on the following Wednesday morning, the ideas I had been toying with the previous weekend clicked into place in my mind and I quickly wrote out a simple little story that I liked a lot; a silly fairy tale about a little girl who lives with a family of bears, entitled THE TINIEST BEAR. With WonderCon beginning only two days away, I knuckled down to see if I could get this idea down on paper in time to sell at the con. In order to do this, I once again decided to work very loosely and at an even smaller size. The finished book was 2.75 inches tall and 4.25 inches wide. These dimensions meant that I could print a whole 16 page mini comic on one sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper (front and back) meaning that I could afford to do it all on my slow-printing ink-jet printer at home.

As it was, I needed 3 days to get it done and I took my laptop and Cintiq in to WonderCon on Friday to do last minute drawing at my booth. I worked on the drawings that same night and printed the pages out on Saturday morning, doing the page trimming and stapling at the Con itself, where the tiny books finally went on sale, as fresh as any comic book could possibly be. I have been “down to the wire” many times but never before to the point that I am actually working on the book at the show where I sold it!

Derek reads a freshly stapled Mini Comic

I was pretty happy with the story that I had written, and overall I had fun with the “3 day comic” approach. However, in order to get the artwork done in that time-frame, the drawings were very scribbly, which meant that customers weren’t immediately taken in by the artwork when they picked up the book and flipped through it. However, those few who took the time to actually READ the story usually bought it. Maybe next time, I’ll set aside more time for a polishing pass… I would still stick to the 3 days for writing and blocking-out the book and then have another 3 days to finesse the drawings add some tones and make the end result a little more palatable for the customers. It would still be satisfying to get something out under a week.

As to THE TINIEST BEAR, I plan to expand it to the proper length for a story book (24 pages, or maybe 32) and republish it myself, maybe even a colour version for this year’s Comic Con… and perhaps even submit it to a publisher as a proposal for a children’s book. I have more ideas for stories about the little girl and her bear posse… On the other hand, perhaps I might devote the time I have left this year to do other things instead… I have some comics stories that I would love to get cleaned up and put into a new comics book…

THE TINIEST BEAR; a scribbly-scratchy Mini comic

we shall see…

This Friday, Saturday and Sunday I’ll be sharing a booth with Rhode Montijo at WonderCon. And maybe I’ll even have something new to sell (fingers crossed now). So please come by and see us, either at the show itself or at the After-Party on Saturday evening, which will be held nearby at good ole Maverix Studios.

I started drawing this silly doodle, of HAN SOLO and his co-pilot CHEWBACCA the Wookie, while sitting at my booth at Comic-Con.

It made my pal Rhode laugh so much that I knew I would have to give this drawing to him when I finished it.

Then I put it aside for a while and then forgot about it altogether, until I found it recently, tidied it up a bit and finally gave it to Rhode for his birthday.

My Nephew JACK was 6 years old when he drew this pin-up of Rocket Rabbit, which he gave me while I visited his family in Maryland last year. It beats the hell out of any drawing I did at a similar age, and I can make the comparison because I still have a few of the pictures I drew when I was very little, although the paper they were drawn on is now brown with age.

Sometimes, people who don’t draw ask me “When did you start drawing?” In answer, I usually ask “When did you stop?” because every child draws. I just happen to be one of those who never stopped.

I believe that in MOST cases, the amount of time a child spends drawing, and more importantly enjoying drawing, is the key to artistic ability, rather than innate talent. Whether a child enjoys drawing enough to stay with it is not necessarily tied to their ability, at least in the beginning.

When looking at drawings by a group of 4 and 5 year olds, it is hard to predict which of the kids will become artists in future, and which will become accountants. In fact, the weaker drawings may actually be drawn by the kids who DO become artists later in life.

At around age 8 or 9, the difference in artistic ability becomes more obvious. This is when many children become frustrated at not being able to make their drawings look “real” and abandon drawing. Those who enjoy it, despite the frustration, keep drawing and the extra time spent scribbling makes a difference that you can see.

There are powerful reasons for children to move away from expressing themselves with pictures at that age. Consider that when we learn to read we move from picture books, to picture books with some words, then to novels with spot illustrations, and finally to books that are all text with no pictures at all. Thus, we are culturally conditioned to associate pictures with childhood and immaturity. Children are very concerned with “growing up” and so abandoning drawing can be a self conscious attempt to leave “childish” things behind.

The fact that our education system doesn’t place much importance on visual skills beyond kindergarten is another reason that many children give up drawing. At a similar age, we are being awarded prizes for academic and athletic achievement, so improvement in those areas (and overcoming the frustrations of your limitations) is rewarded. In my experience that was not the case with drawing, where the rewards were all purely personal.

On the other hand, the fact that drawing skill was not rewarded, or even acknowledged by “the system” was a large part of its appeal to me as a child. Making pictures was the only thing that gave me pleasure that wasn’t contingent on the opinions of team members, class mates or teachers. After about the age of 10, none of my other classmates drew, so it wasn’t a question of competing or being compared to anyone else. Drawing was something that I could do on my own, free from the judgements of others.

These days I draw to earn a living, rather than solely to amuse myself, as was the case when I was growing up. Sometimes it is hard to summon up that spirit of pure joy that drawing gave me as a child because my drawings are now tied to budgets and schedules, and bills, and generally bogged down in other mundane things… yes, even including the judgements of others that I was blissfully spared as a kid… But I think that my best work comes on those days when I can somehow find that childish attitude and pour it into a picture.