JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

Due to some unforeseen shenanigans, I am not really in the mood for writing much today. But “the show must go on” so here, at least, is another picture from the book.

These pics show the “looser” approach I used in the last week or two… These more scribbly elephants will be spread throughout the book so hopefully they wont come across as a jarring style-change.

While I wait for the FINAL proof let me tell you a bit about the Elephant book and how it came to be.

My Dad has written LIMERICKS for years and he has always expressed a fondness for elephants. (I remember his office at work had a few elephanty knick knacks about the place, including something I was fascinated by as a child; a cartoony cardboard elephant head mounted on the wall like a trophy). So, his co-workers started clipping news stories for him about elephants, in response to which he amused them by composing LIMERICKS about the elephants in the news.

Over the course of a year or two he amassed quite a few of these and a co-worker (named Ada Cheung) suggested he compile them into a little book. It was also thought that his cartoonist son might do a few illustrations. I am ashamed to tell you how long ago it was that I agreed to do the pictures… it was more than just a few years ago. I have a hard time keeping more than one project in my mind at a time, so the elephant book often took a backseat to my paying work and my comics. Dad often joked that, at the rate I was getting the art done, the book would be a posthumous publication in his case. However, I was able to get about 14 or so done in full colour and then I made a rough mock-up of the book which I sent my Dad for his birthday year before last.

At this point the intention was to self publish. The book is not exactly kid-friendly because so many of the stories deal with Sex and Death; rampaging elephants, crushed zoo-keepers, failed breeding attempts, elephant poaching, artists using Dung in their artwork and so on. I always thought the book to be a bit too idiosyncratic for a big publisher.

Now comes the really amazing part: Early in 2005, Dad was in the Australian country town of Wollombi (where his sister, my Aunty Marg lives) defending his TRIVIA NIGHT TITLE; a BAKER family team are (or were at the time of this story) the reigning TRIVIA NITE CHAMPIONS at the Wollombi pub. While there, Dad met an ACTUAL publisher who offered to publish the Elephant book when he saw the mock-up I had made… And unlike our self-published version, he wanted to do it in full colour!

Here’s me living on the west coast of the USA, supposedly one of the main centers of the media universe, with some connections in at least one branch of “the media”, yet I had Buckley’s chance of getting this thing properly published. So I had resolved to just do a simple version on my own. Meanwhile, my Dad wrangles a book deal on trivia nite at the Wollombi pub!

I love it!!

It took a while to get the contracts sorted out but while that was going on, the editor and I were still working on the book. She expanded it from the 64 pages that Dad and I had envisaged, which required even more illustrations, and I hadn’t yet finished the initial batch I had planned to do. After I finally roughed out the remaining illustrations in pencil, the designer, then used these to layout the book. That layout came in handy when I was finishing the artwork as I knew where the text had to go.

As to the current form of the book; It will be 128 pages in full colour and it is smallish, about 7×6.5 inches. At last count there are about 60 full colour illustrations and a few of those are double page spreads. The text consists of two things; the series of elephant news clippings Dad has saved over the years, and a limerick he has written inspired by each story. It will be published by EXISLE PRESS. The publisher is Gareth St John Thomas, the editor is Anouska Jones, and the designer is Nanette Backhouse.

The book should come out in Australia next April/May so keep yer eyes peeled. It will be entitled “Elephants in the News: Pachyderms in limerick”.

I just saw the proof and it looks super! However my work isn’t over yet; after consulting with the designer I have a few more days to bang out some MORE illustrations to fill some gaps in the layout. It is designed to be a 128 page book which is about 62 page spreads. So far I have illustrations for 42 of those spreads which still leaves quite a few spreads with only text. I am going to try to fill up some of those ART gaps with little spot illustrations, doodles and random stuff. These will be a lot looser than the other illustrations and in some cases I may just slap some colour over preperatory thumbnail sketches I already have.

OK, back to the drawing board!

The Elephant book has quite a few double page spreads and, like this one, they all have some space on the facing page where the text will go. I’ve already posted some of them here, but up till now I’ve cropped them to remove the “dead space” but this one doesn’t work so well without that shadow, so it accurately shows the proportions of what a two-page spread will look like. Maybe after the book comes out I will post some high-res versions of them which people could use as desktop images.

This is one of about 6 illustrations in the book where I used photo textures. The skin on the elephant’s foot is actually from a photo of an elephant, there is some fabric texture in the hunter’s outfit (though it is a bit too subtle to see here) the hunter’s skin texture is from a close-up photo of spotty terracotta and the ground is also from a photograph of cracked mud, though in all cases I had to manipulate and extend the photo material. It was actually pretty fiddly to get it to work.

I had so many pictures to do of pretty much the same subject matter, that I had promised myself at the outset to try as many different techniques as I could, to keep it interesting for me and, hopefully, for the reader. My only regret in that reguard is that I didn’t get to do any analog paintings. I had initially planned to paint a few of the pics in gouache and acrylic but I ran out of time (I am a slow and fiddly painter) but I did at least get to use some painterly textures I made as backdrops for some of the illustrations. There are a couple of illustrations that I did finish analog; in colour pencil. I will post those later.

This is also one of the very few pics in the book that was totally generated digitally. I had drawn a very scratchy thumbnail drawing for the composition but none of it is in the final art. In most other cases the illustration is built around some sort of analog drawing.

This pic illustrates the true story of “Clarissa” an elephant being used for a publicity stunt in downtown Madrid, until she ran away and caused chaos during the morning rush hour.
I have been involved in a mad-dash of my own in the last week; getting all the artwork done and uploaded to the book-designer’s FTP. I am happy to report that I am finally finished with all the artwork for “Elephants in the News”. I should see a proof in a week or two and then the book goes to the printer at the end of November

All in all there are 42 full colour illustrations, 25 of those are full page, 13 are double-page spreads and 4 are partial spreads (going half way past the gutter onto the facing page). As of September 1st 2006, I had 14 full colour illustrations already done but only 5 of these were absolutely ready to go, because the rest had to be modified to fit the new design. The other 28 pics were already roughed out in pencil, which the designer had used to lay out the book. It was handy to have her book layout with me as I worked because I was able to clean up the illustrations knowing where the type was supposed to go.

So… between September 1st-October 25th I did 28 full page colour illustrations (from my roughs) and re-worked 9 of the old illustrations. I think that works out to finishing one illustration every two two days… or maybe even faster.

Now that it is all finished, I am looking forward to getting back to a more regular lifestyle; sleeping, watching TV, doing some bathing once in a while. Also, not eating corn flakes for breakfast and lunch and dinner will be nice…

I should have ALL the illustrations finished today or tomorrow (OK, OK… maybe the next day). In any case I am close to the finish line as far as the illustrations go. Next week there is still a little work to do; reformating some of the older illustrations (extending a few into double page spreads, some cropping and so on) so they work with the new book design that the designer came up with. Her book-design layout looks great, and much more adventurous than I would have ever come up with. If I get all those layout tweaks done quickly I would like to revisit a few of the pics to fix a thing or two.

A cartoonist’s work is never done…

Another pic for my Dad’s book to illustrate a story about the Bangkok police implanting working elephants with tracking devices, to keep them off of the downtown streets:

Lately I have been in lockdown; just sleeping or working on the illustrations, with periodic breaks to eat, when I normally head out of the house to an internet cafe. I can get some change of scenery, food and some emails (and maybe a quick blog post!) done all in one go.

I needed just such a break a few nights ago but it was late in the evening and the cosy internet-cafe I normally go to for such a break was closed. So I took my laptop over to another cafe that I knew was open late. It was crowded inside and the music was loud, so I sat outside in the fresh air to do some emailing and web-surfing on my laptop as I drank my hot chocolate. Late in the evening is a good time to send emails to Australia (where the book production is happening) because the working day has already begun down there. I had just sent an email to the designer of the ELEPHANT book, when some snatch-and-grab/crack-head scooped my laptop and ran off with it, bolting downhill into San Francisco’s charming Tenderloin neighbourhood.

!!!!!

After a brief startled pause, I gave chase, trying to make up the head-start he had on me, sometimes running down the road in the oncoming traffic. I was giving this pursuit everything I had, and there was some great motivation: ALL the artwork for my dear old Dad’s Elephant book was on that laptop!

As I chased the junky, the life of the ELEPHANT BOOK was flashing before my eyes…

After about three blocks running as hard as I could, he wasn’t getting any further away, but I wasn’t getting closer either and I was reaching the limit of my middle aged adrenaline capacity, whereas he had both youth and the perfomance enhancing properties of CRACK on his side. I didn’t think that I could keep up with him for much longer…

Mercifully, I was helped out by some folks in the street, who clearly read the situation when they saw a wiry dude clutching a laptop chased by a red-faced puffy bloke screaming obscenities. They realised that they needed to intervene and spare me a heart attack. Several people on sidewalks along the way tried to grab the thief or trip him up, and a few times he did stumble, giving me the chance to gain on him. Pretty soon there was one hell of a hulla-balloo; random passers by yelling “STOP THAT GUY!” and me yelling stuff I can’t write here.

As he rounded a corner, a group of people who had time to react in advance, tripped the thief up for good and I got the laptop back…

In other good news, one of the guys who tripped up the evil doer absolutely beat the stuffings out of him, after wrenching the laptop out of his fingers. This BADASS Samaritan briefly paused his expert pummelling of the baddie to give me a chance to get in some hits myself (almost like he was graciously offering me the last slice of a tasty desert) but I declined; I was too busy gripping onto the laptop with both hands… and bent double trying to get my breath back. Besides, the (muscular, tattooed, and menacing) dude beating on the baddie was doing a superb job on his own, and I didn’t want to mess up his syncopating rhythm. So the miscreant definately got a form of punishment before he limped away, and he didn’t look in very good condition…

Even though the wretch was tried, convicted and punished in the court of STREET JUSTICE, In hindsight I should have held him and called the cops, because that very same creep is probably going to pull the very same slimy move again… Although after that savage walloping, his getaway speed may not be quite as impressive… I really wasn’t thinking straight. I ALSO ought to have gotten the name of the anonymous avenger who helped me out (a tattooed SUPER HERO in my eyes) so I could buy him dinner, a beer or a monogrammed pair of brass-knuckles or something. He was in the middle of helping some friends move, and they just headed off after shaking my hand. I did get a chance to thank him profusely, between gulps of oxygen, but I really should have got his phone number for a follow up…

But at that point I was already pre-occupied with the thought that I had left my shoulder bag on the table outside the coffee shop 3 blocks away and that it contained my check-book and some other stuff. It occurred to me that if this thief was an experienced operator he would have a partner to scoop my bag when I head off in pursuit. So I ran as fast as I could back to the cafe… When I got there, sure enough, my bag was gone and I figured that I had to call the bank and tell them a check-book had been stolen… but I still counted myself very lucky that I had gotten my laptop back especially when I found out that, remarkably, despite the crack-head’s spectacular sprawling wipe-out, it seems to be working OK…

At that point a guy came up and congratulated me on getting it back. He had seen the snatch from across the street and wanted to hear the story of its recovery. I told him what had happened, and that the only minor bummer was the loss of my bag. He told me that my bag wasn’t stolen; it was now waiting for me in the coffee shop as he had taken it in there for safe-keeping.

I was very lucky to have had so many people help me out that day. Even now, a few days later, I get horror-shudders when I consider what today would be like if I had NOT gotten my laptop back…

GAaAaAaH!

Here is another picture using my new SPLATTER, SCAN and FIDDLE technique:

I am pretty happy with how this one came out, though I may come back to it later and pump up the ZAP effect a little… It may be too subtle at this point? But while I think on that, in the meantime I have plenty more to do in the next few weeks…

I have a bit of a hard time when it comes to painting. I think it is the unpredictability of it… Paint just doesn’t do what I tell it to do. My paintbrush is not so well behaved as my 2B pencil, say. Of course, living with the happy accidents is part of the fun of it, especially if you can fiddle with the stuff in good ole Photoshop and regain a modicum of control.

Recently I was working very hard. As I was riding the train into work early one morning, already feeling beat-down tired before the day had even begun, I tried to put that particular schedule-crunch in perspective… It was not the hardest that I have EVER worked, but certainly the hardest I have worked in many years.

After some reflection, I realised that the hardest I ever worked was on the worst stuff I ever worked on. Namely some really wretched Saturday morning cartoons in the late 1980’s. This shouldn’t have surprised me… It had already occurred to me years ago that it takes just as much hard work to make a bad show as it does to make a great one… but I guess I had forgotten that lesson over time.

When people express their displeasure with a film that they do not like (or a comic book, or what have you) they frequently bad-mouth the people who worked on it, as if only lazy talentless morons could be responsible. In some cases that may indeed be the explanation… but not always. In my experience, the sad reality is that there are a lot of smart, talented people absolutely busting their backs to produce the entertainment that you hate. I know, because I have worked with them when I work on it myself.

Its a bit counter-intuitive, isn’t it? I think the best analogy may be a tug of war; on the projects that don’t turn out so well, everyone is working as hard as they can but the rope is barely moving at all, because all the effort is at cross purposes and towards different directions. When I was working on that stuff, the love of the job itself and the company of my co-workers kept me going, even though I knew the stuff we were working on was ratty… PLUS, it was the best that I could find at the time…

So next time you watch a complete mess unfold on screen, by all means wonder at the strenuous effort taken to go nowhere, but don’t hate the crew.