Comic stuff continued

Steve Purcell is an artist I'm rediscovering.

Way back in junior high, I loved the Sam & Max game, so I went out and bought the only Sam & Max TPB at a no-longer-there bookstore in the Carlsbad mall. (Turns out it's out-of-print now and extremely valuable!) I was first drawn to the humor and the cartoonish violence, but now I realize Purcell is also an all-around tremendous artist. His pencils and layouts are stuffed with detail, his inks are some of the slickest I've ever seen, and he can paint too. (In fact, I got two signed prints of Sam & Max that I'm going to shop for frames for today.) I hear he's working for Pixar now, which is appropriate. I wish he'd do more comic stuff; he is doing a little comic for the upcoming Sam & Max game, but it's not very long.

Bill Watterson: I have his Sunday Pages book which features photo-duplications of a number of his Sunday strips. This is particularly fascinating because you can see exactly how he works. You can see the ink strokes, the white-out, even a bit of the pencils. Not a whole lot more to say. He's good.

Stan Sakai of Usagi Yojimbo: his is a style I'm inclined to attempt.

It looks like he forgoes a brush altogether in favor of a technical pen. Consistent line weights throughout. His story-telling is so clear, though. And he draws wonderful backgrounds, another element I need to study further. I suck at backgrounds that aren't grassy fields.

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I'm using (almost exclusively) a Winsor Newton Series 7 #3 brush for my current comic. I'm using a Micron pen (#5) for gun details to give them a more mechanical look, but the brush works for everything else. I bought some Zip-a-Tone at Art Supply Warehouse that I'm very eager to finally try out, but I'm not sure if I should on the comic or not. It's actually easier just to add tones in via computer, and then it's very easy to take them off again, so I probably won't end up using the Zip. Perhaps an opportunity will arise on some splash pages or "pin-ups," if you will.