Avram's journal

This weekend was King Con, the $10 comics convention that I can walk to! I caught the awesome Kyle Baker interview on Saturday, followed by the phallotacular Bored to Death panel with Dean Haspiel, Jonathan Ames, and Jeff Newelt. Today’s highlight was a short sample of Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, with Paigey Pumphrey posing. Here are my sketches of the last two poses:

( Another one behind the cut.... )

There’s a sketch of Pumphrey in last year’s King Con writeup as well.

I started out drawing something else entirely, and wound up with this.

The screen tone is a scan, applied in Photoshop. I think it’s been well over a decade since I touched a piece of actual tone film.

I’m tempted to do a whole sex-reversed Cerebus cast. Not sure what I’d do when I got to Lord Julius, though.

(Leaving aside the issue of whether a female version of Cerebus is actually sex-reversed.)

Man, this art stuff is hard.

I want to do a bunch of watercolors of various TV celebrities, and figured I’d start with Jon Hamm as Don Draper, and oof, my skills are rusty. Though actually, I don’t think I’ve ever really drawn a celebrity likeness that satisfied me.

Complicating matters is a new artistic technique I wanted to try out: Shaving bits of color off my Inktense pencils into a palette cup, adding water, and using a dip pen. This works, sorta, but I’m having a hard time getting the color density that I want. Also, my collection of pen nibs has vanished. I picked up some Japanese G-pen nibs at Books Kinokuniya yesterday, and they’re OK, but they only had the Tachikawa nibs in stock. I hear the Zebra nibs are a lot more flexible, and that’s what I need to get a thick, juicy line. (Just realizing now how much my tastes have changed since I was a kid, and I was all about the thin, controlled line.)

Anyway, Jon Hamm has some remarkably thick eyebrows on ’im.

Yeah, looks like coloring over the grayscale markers (Faber-Castell Pitt brush markers) sucks the vibrancy out of the color. I managed to get some of it back by layering on color from the pan watercolors. But I think the best results will come from using the Inktense pencils for establishing the underlying tonal drawing.

©2010 Avram Grumer

I heard about King-Con just a few days ago, through Becky Cloonan’s blog. A comics convention within walking distance of my apartment, how could I not go?

It was a small con, even smaller (I think) than the first MoCCA Art Festival, but the vendors managed to fill up the lower level of the Brooklyn Lyceum. The Act-I-Vate crew had a table, of course, since a lot of them have studio space in the area. I held back from buying a lot of stuff, since money’s tight, and I’ve still got books from MoCCA 2008 that I haven’t gotten around to reading. I limited myself to a (half-price!) copy of Joel Priddy’s new book, The Gift of the Magi.

One nice feature of the dealer space was a row of benches along one wall, which gave me a place to sit down, pull out my sketchbook, and do these:

That guy in the lower right? Neal Adams.

Did some sketching today at the Tea Lounge, which has become one of my regular hangouts. (The one on Union St, not the soon-to-be-closing 7th Ave branch.)

The guy on the left is Howard Bloom. I’ve no idea who the woman on the right is.

Wow, it felt good to do that. It’s like a muscle in my neck has been tense, and now it’s relaxed.

I was digging through a box of still-not-unpacked art supplies, and I found that pocket-sized Winsor-Newton watercolor sketchbook I was so into a couple years back. Flipping through it, I found this doodle, which I apparently hadn’t bothered to scan. I probably drew it while still living in Jersey City.

This page, on the other hand, is from my hand•book sketchbook that I generally carry around with me nowadays. Both these were drawn at Prospect Perk, one of the very many coffee shops to be found in Brooklyn’s North Slope. The woman in the coat was done a few weeks ago; the ink drawing of the seated man a few days ago.

More than a month since I posted any sketches here. Crap.

I watched a video Danny Gregory made, and figured out a bit of what I’d been doing wrong in watercolors. See, those nylon waterbrushes? They kinda suck for scraping paint off the watercolor pans and plopping it onto the palettes. Which means I’d been just pulling color off the pans and painting it right on the paper, which works okay for small regions of pure color, but crappy for mixing or covering large regions.

I picked up one of those Cotman portable brushes on sale at Pearl a while back, and a folding water container at Hudson County Art Supply, and today I tried using the waterbrush just as a clean water source, dripping it down onto the pans and palettes, and using the Cotman to grab color and paint, and mixed up batches of color on my palette, and it worked pretty well. This is a guy who was sitting near at the next table in the coffee shop. I’ve still got a lot of practicing ahead of me, but I can see a way forward. And now I’m psyched to try some watercolor techniques with acrylics.