In Which Chrissy Makes a Halloween Pumpkin

So I made a pumpkin for Halloween. People seemed to like it, so I'll show you how I made it!

After painting on a design with India ink (above, left) I eviscerated the pumpkin with an ordinary utility knife (left). This wasn't so easy, and some specialized jigsaw-type blade probably would have facilitated the process. In the end, however, the utility knife did what I needed it to do... unlike this blog editor. It's like, I get it perfect in the editor, then I view my actual blog and the formatting is completely different and horrible. I'm sure it looks different and worse on different browsers and screen sizes, too, but what am I supposed to do. This is why I like to work with my hands and actual artifacts. Bear with me; the content is worthwhile.



I didn't hack out all the pumpkin's features. Instead, I opted to carve some details in relief so the light would shine through them in varying intensities.
 
I hoped to purchase some linoleum cutters for this purpose, but I couldn't find them at the hardware store, nor did I feel like trekking all the way to Dick Blick in Philly, where I know they carry sets of cutters at jacked up art supply store prices. Linoleum cutters, by the way, are those speedball pens with interchangeable curved blades used to carve out designs for linoleum stamps. I had a hard time describing them to the Ace Hardware employee, so try a Google Image search if you're confused.

Anyway, I ended up removing the erasers from some pencils and cutting the metal tips into curved blades. I then used the ghetto lino cutters to scrape away at my pumpkin (right).

The lino cutters couldn't get into the real fine details, so I used kebab sticks to pierce clean holes in the eyes and scratch at various other spots (below, left). Those kebab sticks did double duty later on (below, right). Those staked gourds might look a little precarious, but it's all an illusion.


I'm a gruesome guy, you know. I love that old "Tales from the Crypt" gore and decay and don't see much of it around these days. In the interest of being repulsive, I carved small pockets into the pumpkin's sides, using a potato peeler, and inserted pimento olives to act as bloody, gangrenous boils.



Because the larger pumpkin would be eating tiny gourds, I constructed arms for him so he could lift the unfortunate midgets into his mouth. To do this, I bent a wire coat hanger into an arm shape, pushed it into the pumpkin's side and covered it with paper mache (above, right), which I later painted orange to match his skin. This paper mache is an approximate 50/50 mix of white flour and water. Were this a permanent project, I would worry about mold and such. But it's a Jack O'Lantern.

I surrounded the main pumpkin with smaller gourds and apples which I either carved with an X-acto knife or painted with India Ink. Ignoring the possibility of fire hazard (ehh...I had an extinguisher nearby), I placed the display in a bed of autumn leaves and lit everything up. 



Check out the gummy worms, the tiny gourd inside the pumpkin's mouth and the antique colored twinkle lights. Twinkle lights, by the way, were used on Christmas Trees before electric light strands came out. Talk about a fire hazard!

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the Christmas music.

Be True to Your School

Just wrote several giant, not-so-positive paragraphs "critiquing" art school, but in an effort to make my blog less text heavy, I posted the rant as a note on Bibliowhining's Facebook page. Check it out! I hope you "like" it.

On a lighter note, last week I went to Moo Tattoo in Philadelphia, becoming the client of this excellent artist. He does comics, too. Appreciating his style and always seeking to better my own craft, I asked him various questions about what kind of white out to use, etc., and also how to do lettering nicely without typing it out on the computer.

Despite the popularity of my beloved “Ames Lettering Guide” tutorial, there has to be a better way. It’s tedious to position the ruler and draw all those perfectly-spaced lines every time, but I really prefer the warm, hand-done look to typed letters. An alternative, I learned, is to use a light desk and place a piece of ruled or graph paper between the desk and the Bristol board so the lines show through. I knew about using light desks for tracing before, but never thought of this useful application. So simple, just like every other helpful tip I’ve received here and there from editors and various other comic and storytelling connoisseurs who’ve passed through my life at one time or another.

Remember, folks: tattoos may be expensive, but not as expensive as art school! And certainly less painful than sitting through those damn critiques.

Being a little on the thrifty side, I thought I’d try making a ghetto light desk myself, just for the purposes of lettering. Looking around my small apartment, I found the ingredients:

• A gooseneck lamp I got from the Syracuse University move-out trash last year.

• A TCBY plastic advertising sign taken from the trash way back when I worked at TCBY.

• Four volumes of “The Complete Peanuts” by Charles Schulz, published by Fantagraphics Books. Most certainly NOT trash! I may have gotten some of them half off with my intern discount.

Check it out: if I place my gooseneck lamp so the light shines up, it will illuminate the TCBY sign "desk." The two Peanuts collections are placed to elevate the "desk."

See?

Now a sheet of notebook paper or graph paper...

...And a sheet of Bristol board over that. See? The ruled lines show through the Brisol board!

Now I can letter with ease. And there you have it! Works for what I need it for. Obviously the TCBY logo is too distracting for this to work as a proper light desk, but for lettering alone it does a'ight.

IS THIS THE END OF THE AMES LETTERING GUIDE? Naw... I don't have the heart.

Just Three Colors

Here's a little video of me mixing colors and painting, with a soundtrack by Joe Raposo. I hope you enjoy this awesome music.



Some people like my color palette. I only use three colors, plus white, to mix all the colors I need. Just like in the Sesame Street song. The song makes it sound so easy, and it really is. Nobody needs to spend hundreds of dollars buying a long list of oil paints at the art supply store. Here's my M.O., in case the video was hard to follow (it's fast). I start out with blue, yellow and red and make orange, green and purple. Then I mix the color complements (yellow and purple, red and green and orange and blue) to make colorful grays, which I soften up with a lot of white.



It's easier to paint when everything is in the same color family. It's really easy to put a blue-ish orange against an orange-ish blue to build up shadows, and slap a pure orange or blue next to it to make a small detail pop out. I've done this with all my paintings lately...maybe it's the only way I know how to paint.

I think that's how Wayne Thiebaud does it, too.

I've explained my color mixing strategy before, but I'm not sure how many readers go back 50 entries to read my older stuff.



See you next time, hopefully with portraits.

Six Pack

Here I sit like someone out of the "Stuff White People Like" blog, transcribing stuff into my text editor from my Moleskine notebook. At least it's not a Mac.

Those of you lucky enough to have watched the short, hilarious film from my last entry may have learned that I don't define myself or dictate my happiness through my work, as in the kind of job I have, but through something that will probably never offer me any financial stability -- my hobbies!

I enjoy working in libraries, and I get plenty of satisfaction from helping others with their research and learning bits of trivia in the process, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that my freelancing job, if silly, takes very little of my time while providing me with the financial stability I need to feed myself goulash and tea every day and live in my beautiful, quiet apartment. I briefly felt some shame and guilt in not being able to immediately "work" my Master's Degree, but I'm not alone. The economy is down, and I'm doing what I have to do to make ends meet in the mean time. Actually, I'm doing more than making ends meet. I'm really making mad bank right now, I'm not gonna lie. "Mad bank" for me, as it turns out, is equivalent to like, I'll be up front with you here and could care less if you think this is chump change, $600 a week, but that is way more than I need. I have this amazing power to stretch and save cash, even though I'm one of the last few people around who pays money for (a whole lot of) music. It's magic!

Besides making mad bank, this freelancing gig is also giving me lots of appreciated free time to do a different kind of freelancing -- and that kind of freelancing requires a Moleskine notebook.

Me and the Moleskine have been BFFs since I first discovered it in 2004 as "The notebook used by Van Gogh and xyz important person". Being sort of a modern-day Van Gogh myself, I couldn't resist! Initially, I used the Moleskines to record some of my deepest personal feelings and reflections on my daily happenings. What a waste, right? When people come over to visit and flip through the Moleskine library on my desk, expecting brilliant nuggets of wit, scripts and raw artwork, I silently hope that they'll lose interest before making their way to the older, more emo volumes of yore. I was just a 20-year old kid back then. I didn't know any better.

Now we're in the bronze age of Moleskine. These notebooks are where all my comic scripts are born, and where I sketch people on trains and other public places to inform future, more "serious" drawings. The only thing the Moleskine doesn't do so well is absorb ink. Sure, there's the watercolor notebook, but that's just too precious! I want a notebook that lets me sketch people in pencil, just like in the sketchbook, but also allows me to ink over my drawings with a dip pen. So I'm going to make one!

How To Make a Low-Rent Moleskine Notebook

The first thing I did was cut all the pages for my notebook. I'm using bristol board to fulfill my need for a "cartooning" sketchbook. You can use any type of paper you please, but be aware that thicker paper is more difficult to work with. I used a ruler to measure, then marked off the dimensions of my paper according to the original Moleskine size -- their pages are 7"x5.5". It's a good size. These papers must be folded in half, though, so I'm marking off 11" x 7" pages which will later be folded in half. I absentmindedly marked my dimensions backwards in this visual aid, as I now see. Darn it. I should tell you now that I figured out a lot of this stuff from Michael Shannon's Moleskine tutorial, but mine isn't as fancy as his.

Next, I used an x-acto knife on a hard, unvaluable surface to cut out all of my pages according to the guidelines I drew above. Depending on how thick you want your notebook, you can cut out as many pages as you like, as long as it's a multiple of six. I wanted my notebook to be three signatures thick, so I cut out 18 pages.

SEE THE REST OF THE TUTORIAL UNDER THE CUT!

What I'm doing in this picture is something called "folding". It is important to fold the sheets you cut out so that you'll have a nice Moleskine-sized book rather than a bunch of sheets of paper stapled together. I "kissed corners," as my first grade teacher explained folding to me, and used a pencil to make my folds sharp. I did this with each and every one of my sheets of paper.

Here's where my blog title comes from. I have "packed six" of the folded sheets of paper together, like so, to make a signature. Of course I've done some sloppy cutting and whatnot, but the most important thing is to align all the spines and make sure the bottom of the stack is flush. It's okay if the top and side edges are a bit crooked, or cattywompus (sp?) as Dr. Lavender likes to say.

I made three signatures in all, each with six of my folded papers.

Who knew that that binder clip would ever see the light of day again? I collected all my signatures together, making sure that the spines and bottoms were even, clipped them, and marked the spine for where they will be sewn later. All the needle holes have to be in the same place for the book's signatures to be even in the finished book.

Then I separated the signatures again. To make holes for the sewing needle, I folded the spine over the edge of my CD case. You can use the edge of any unvaluable surface. I used a pin to poke holes in the markings I made earlier. I did this for all three of the signatures, one signature at a time. Again, make sure that the spine and bottoms of each page are even as you do this.

Check it out! Here are my three signatures with their perfectly placed holes.

And now for the sewing supplies. Needles, thread, and wax.

I waxed a couple inches of the needle side of the thread, since I didn't double the thread like when I sew fabric. Don't double up the thread. The wax will hold it in place (or should, it slipped a few times for me). Thread a long strand, you can cut it later.

Sewing the first signature now. I left a little bit of thread (about 2 inches) hanging out where I started. I just threaded the holes I already punched.

In this pic, I'm marrying the first signature to the second signature. When I finished threading the holes in the first signature, I entered the thread into the first hole of the second signature, then went back and forth between rethreading the first holes and threading the second signature's holes for the first time, to "marry" the two together. Then I "married" the second signature with the third, last signature using the same back-and-forth threading. Isn't this complicated to explain. Does it make sense to you? There was also bloodshed and I'd recommend a thimble if you're using thick paper.

Here's what your spine will look like when you've threaded all the signatures together.

Paste gauze onto your new spine, and cut away excess gauze. I know that my cutting techniques are the best you've ever seen.

When the glue dries, trace your little Moleskine innards onto another sheet of paper, which will ultimately be the inside cover. Trace the spine, too so you'll know where to fold and glue. You'll notice that I've drawn an extra panel on the right there, with some tabs. I like and use the Moleskine pocket, so I made a pocket for my low-rent Moleskine.

Cut out and fold like so...

Now glue the spine of your signature pack onto the spine of the inside cover. Also, glue the tabs down to make a pocket. I sandwiched a ribbon between the signature spine and inside cover spine to make a little notebook.

Isn't this fun? I then traced and cut out the outside cover onto a piece of cardboard, a material of which I have an abundance. You can use something a little more classy if you wish. Just make sure it's sturdy enough to meet your needs, and will hold glue well. To finish, I glued the whole outside surface of that "inside cover" page, and glued all over the cardboard and married them together. To make sure the glue held well, I closed the book and pressed it between my two CD cases. Or dictionaries or whatever are fine.

Now I have a ghetto moleskine!

Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing

I spent a few hours this week being "creepy", watching and drawing folks at the Thorden Park community swimming pool. I love it when the weather gets nice enough that I can do this -- in some ways, it is superior to being in a figure drawing class...

For one thing, there are kids. Even when kids are just lying there sunbathing, they're never boring. They never stay in one spot for long, so I really have to rush my drawings, knowing that time is limited. Their complete lack of self-consciousness is also a plus. One kid passed me by, noticed I was drawing people, and shouted, "SHE'S AN ARTIST!" In the past, I've also had kids come up to me and ask if they could draw with me, like I was a peer. Kids are great.


Also, there is more diversity, both in body types and in ethnic groups. I don't draw people because I'm too cheap to buy a subscription to Playgirl; I'm more interested in learning to draw a variety of "types" than how attractive a model is. I haven't seen an obese person sign up for figure drawing classes, and in fact most of the models are slim, non-muscular milquetoast collegiate types OR senior citizens. This was my experience; yours may vary. At this community swimming pool, I can have my pick of the dozens of models, and can choose the most interesting or "useful" characters.

"Professional models" aren't very natural in their posing. Many just sit there, or recline. Even when they try to be natural, it's hard to imagine the gestures people use in their day to day lives, and model them. I need these gestures when drawing comics, if I want to create a believable cast of human characters.

The only drawback is that people are always moving around, so it's challenging and at times
barely possible to capture the gestures I want. Forget about adding detail.

So Chrissy, why don't you take a picture? It'll last longer!
If I wanted to impress everyone with my Michelangelo-like drawing skills, I could do that, but I would learn much less from the experience. Drawing from moving models, I have to adapt myself to capture as much information as I can in what is sometimes only a few seconds. These are moving little kids! My skills develop more rapidly when I'm under pressure like that. I can't fall into the trap of favoring and concentrating on one part of the person, e.g. the face. I have to quickly decide what information will be useful, and give equal time to all of it or I get nothing. This way, the anatomy becomes more intuitive and, when drawing figures in a comic later, I have an easier time drawing a variety of poses off the top of my head. I also refer to these life drawings quite a bit when drawing comics.
God bless you, thanks for reading!
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