story
The Comic
Monday, June 30, 2008 | Skip to Comments
Last year, I started work on a little comic book story and, like many things I seem to do, I never finished it. I have six of eight pages inked and some preliminary lettering finished as well. It’s a little sci-fi story about an astronaut that gets separated from his ship and has to figure out how to get back.
I experiment a lot. I’ve never hit upon a working method that I’ve ever totally comfortable with so I’ve continued to try new things rather than sticking with a single style. The experiment with this comic was that I inked it using Adobe Illustrator. I thought that it would allow me to work faster than I was able to all those years ago when I was inking with a brush. I figured that it would also allow me to more easily correct mistakes (by either undoing a brushstroke or tweaking the anchor points on the vector path). I was wrong.
This project became a nightmare. Inking with Illustrator is a painfully slow process for me. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to ink quickly with the program — I just never figured out how. I used a Wacom tablet to create my brushstrokes and, on tight curves, Illustrator had a tendency to create weird, super-fat brush marks that required individual tweaking to fix. This really slowed me down.
I kept thinking that the process would get easier that more I worked with Illustrator but it never did. After six pages, I just couldn’t face inking with the program anymore and gave up. I also knew that finishing the comic any other way at that point wouldn’t work — there’s no way I could mimic that inking style. It’s just too clean. I love the effect, but the process is unbearable.
Now that I have Adobe Illustrator CS3, I’ve been tempted to go back and see if I couldn’t finish this story. Maybe the brush tool has been improved. I’ve very please with the pages I’ve finished so far and I’d really love to see this thing through. Maybe I’ll find some time this summer to work on it. I have no idea what to do with it when it’s done though.
Tags: art, comic book, Illustration, story
The Photographer’s Lament
Tuesday, November 14, 2006 | Skip to Comments
I looked deeply into her eyes and slowly lowered her onto the bed. Our lips met in a passionate kiss. “Oh, Boris!” She moaned. Our fingers fumbled with buttons and clasps as fabric yielded to warm, soft flesh. We held each other close, our naked bodies intertwined. “Boris, my love, I feel like I have known you my entire life. My body is yours!”
“Just a minute,” I said. “I want to capture this moment forever!” I disengaged myself from my bewildered lover’s embrace, arose from the bed and pulled the Polaroid camera from the nightstand. She smiled coyly, bit her lip and vamped for the lens. “You look beautiful. Wait, just hold that pose while I check the light.” I fumbled through my bag and retrieved my light meter. “Hmm. Let me open the curtains.” As I reached the window, I casually mentioned that the Polaroid was a vintage 1968 Land Camera with a 114mm lens and an electronic shutter. As I rattled off the specs, I decided that the night light streaming in from the window was a bit too harsh. I thought briefly about setting up a soft box but decided that it would be easier to just use a couple of a-clamps from my bag to quickly cover the window with a white sheet and defuse the light. I then moved all the dirty laundry away from the bed so I wouldn’t have to Photoshop it out of the photo later. Perfect. “All right, my love, let’s —”
Fuck. She was asleep.
Tags: fiction, funny, photography, story