Avram's journal

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just better at the fine-line cross-hatching thing than at the chunky brush-pen thing. <sigh> Though I am acquiring some aptitude with the brush-pen, it’s just never gonna dance in my hands like in some folks’.



Had another day off today, which I managed to spend remarkably little of doing anything useful or productive. I’m about a third of the way through Mason & Dixon, which is turning out to be very funny (dry and ironic wit, but I like that sort of thing), and it’s an effort not to slip into pseudo-18th-century writing style.

My current project at work seems about finished. I may have some more images to clean up tomorrow, or I may not. Shouldn’t be a problem, though. There are more projects after this one.

After work I plopped myself down in Bryant Park and did some sketching, but nothing particularly good. (The sketch here is a woman sitting next to me on the PATH trip home.) I tried that lovely brushpen I got a few weeks back, and it still dries out real quick, and it doesn’t seem to fill up very well. Shame, because it’s got a great point.

The park closed at 7, so I stopped off at Coliseum Books and found a couple of things I’d been looking for. One was a paperback copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which I’ve had an inexplicable urge to read for the past few weeks. The other was Cartooning the Head & Figure by Jack Hamm, which Carla Speed McNeil recommended. I skimmed through it on the way home, and it looks like one of the best cartooning references I’ve ever seen.

The office was closed yesterday for Good Friday (nice for the employees, not so nice for us freelancers), giving me a chance to visit the American Museum of Natural History on a weekday and sketch birds and bats. (It’s research.)

First I stopped off at Kinokuniya Books to replenish my stocks of 0.5-mm non-photo blue mechanical pencil leads. They had three packs, and since a pack lasts me three or four months, I bought all three, which should do for the year. Now I have the sole supply of these leads in the NYC area! Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! I also picked up yet another brush pen, this one having a small, fine point, like my old Splash pen, but with faster-drying ink.

Then off to the museum. Lots of subway stations have been redecorated in the past decade or so, many with mosaics, and the 81st Street station is my favorite. (My second favorite is the one with all the hat mosaics, which I could’ve sworn was the 28th Street station on the Broadway line. The mosaics they actually seem to have there are pretty cool, but not what I remember. Oh, hey, and I haven’t seen this at the 14th St station on Eighth Avenue. And check out Whitehall Street.) I like getting out at the north end and walking down the length of the platform to the south end, which has an entrance directly into the museum.

The museum trip was a mistake; not nearly as successful as my last visit (almost two years ago!). Not only do my sketches mostly suck — I could probably have been more productive just downloading reference photos off the net — but after very little time there I just lost all my energy and wandered around zombie-like. I sat for a while in the primate section, marveling at the parents who think a museum is a good place for a child still in a stroller. This kid seemed to be pretty freaked out by the primates, and no wonder. That white-handed gibbon is one creepy-looking sumbitch:



Eventually I gave up, left the museum, caffeinated myself to the gills, and headed off to Games Club.

After bugsybanana left, I spent two or three hours at ground, reading A Ring of Swords and occasionally sketching. I’m trying out that new brush pen, and it really rocks. Nice flow, controllable, flexible. And the ink is remarkably well-behaved, not seeping through even the mere 60-lb paper in my sketchpad.




( This second sketch ) reminds me a bit of Jeff Nicholson’s work in Through the Habitrails (one of the most frightening comics ever, a brilliant Kafkaesque nightmare story about having a day job), because I didn’t bother with her mouth. (If you decide to order it from Colonia Press, scroll down the page and go for the first edition. Not only is it cheaper, but it lacks the epilog which actually sort of ruins the ending and was just a set-up for a sequel series that never materialized.)

Went in for comics today, only thing I got was New X-Men #149 (part four of the “Planet X” arc). Have I mentioned how very much I like the new student characters Morrison has introduced over the course of his run on the title?

I stopped in at the uptown branch of Pearl Paint first, to get more pens. My old Pitt S fineline was drying out, and my black Pitt brushpen has a frayed tip. I was also intending to get some gray Tria markers, but the uptown Pearl doesn’t seem to carry those.

Met bugsybanana, womzilla, and drcpunk at Cosmic. (Man, having an LJ client that auto-formats user tags kicks ass.) We went out for Indian food (and were joined by mnemex), then headed over to Neutral Ground to get some boardgaming in. Bugsy played her first game of Puerto Rico.

Then we played Bohnaparte, a very odd and hard-to-find expansion for Bohnanza that turns it into a wargame. Seriously. You play a regular game of Bohnanza (though everyone starts out with a third beanfield), and there’s a board of cards (representing territories) in the middle of the table. As you accumulate money, you can spend it to launch attacks on neighboring territories, using bean cards out of your hand to indicate attack strength. I won, narrowly beating out Womzilla; Bugsy and Mnemex were handicapped by unlucky draws early in the game that quashed their first few attacks. One odd quirk: The number on the card, the one indicating frequency, is used for attack strength, so the most powerful cards (the blue beans, of which there are 20) are the most common. Strategic tip, in the unlikely event you find yourself playing: Get a munitions depot early in the game, and dump blue beans and chili beans into it.

More character designs, along the same lines as yesterday. Corinne, the girl, now has an owl; her little brother Joseph has the raven. (Note to self: Need to Google up some owl photos for reference. And redesign Joseph’s coat.) The gray tones here are Pitt grayscale brush markers.

These are characters for a story that wants to be a physical comic, not a web comic. If I ever get it done, I’ll probably try submitting it to Top Shelf; I’m aiming for a tone not dissimilar to Three Fingers.

( Corinne and Joseph )

And I’ve noticed recently that I seem to be more comfortable drawing sitting up in a sketchbook than at a drawing table. This is probably not a good thing.

Oooh, the Alvin Penstix 0.3mm pen is now my favorite weapon in the never-ending war on blank paper. I lurves that hard plastic tip. Only drawback: the ink isn’t waterproof. I see Alvin makes a waterproof version, but I fear the tip may be different. Something new to check on next time I’m in Manhattan.